Baby Activities

Nicole has been having a few developmental milestones lately to report. First, I've been encouraging her that if she wants to be picked up she needs to reach her arms out - it's going pretty well. Especially when I just stand there and look at her until she does it. I also say "up" each time I pick her up and look forward to "up" being an early word in her vocabulary. This might backfire on me i realize if she learns it and then is pleased when her commands get results she'll probably keep repeating it to death.

She also reaches for things in general and has a firm grasp that her hands are her own. She plays with toys and can grab items dangling above her, even if they're swaying.

We're also playing "indian" with her - bopping our hand on her mouth when she talks so she makes the "ba-ba-ba" sound. This amuses her as much as us and is an effective way to get her to stop whining/crying as the sound is so darn funny. She has not yet learned to say "ahhh" on command, even when i try to show her how by "ahh-ing" myself.

I'm not sure how, but she's selectively ticklish. When I change her I can tickle her rib cage and she'll giggle but other times she seems to care less... I think I'm hitting the same spot, but maybe not.

She's also big into Peek-A-Boo with this lightweight piece of material I have and playing airplane. She doesn't mind a little thrill when we "take off" or if we tilt her to one side like she's falling and quickly bring her back vertical- she smiles and at times outright laughs at the activity. Jim had her rolling the other night when we put up the tree.

She's wearing an adorable outfit today (flowery onesie, white pants & a knit pink sweater with embroidered roses) and like all days I dress her up pretty i hope for 2 things: 1) someone at daycare will comment on how cute she looks and 2) she doesn't poop through her clothes and wears them all day. I'll admit I'm quite possessive over picking out her outfits in the morning and wrinkle my nose when others do it, even if it's a combination I've put on her before. I'm getting to be a control freak!

Per Megan's Request

We can't have an open house until January because of how busy our schedule is with the holidays and because rooms aren't painted/finished and we want to make a great impression on our guests.

HOWEVER, you asked, so here are some photos of the place!

Great Room (as taken from the breezeway)

Nicole's curtains


Nic-knack's closet

Dining Room (can you see the subtle stripes?)

Dining Room with China Cabinet

Our new bedroom furniture (imagine the mattress)

The dresser in our master bedroom

Life Happenings

• My mother-in-law is finishing up the paint in the dining room today and we’ll have the furniture moved in there tonight! Does anyone know where I can get the plastic/metal frames that you set plates/bowls in to display them in a china cabinet? I don’t just want to lean them against the back mirrors…
• Vendors: The hardwood floor people should be at our house fixing nail pops as I type! The window people are coming to replace 2 windows that have a seal leak in the living room this afternoon. The TV repair guy needs to be called back out as we have an HD input issue that Time Warner diagnosed for us and Jim confirmed. Our new walkway up to the front door will be replaced with a prettier, curvier walk next week. The drywall folks are coming tomorrow to replace the ceiling in the basement stairs – it needed to be cut to gain access to the squeaky kitchen stairway. The countertop people, who are going to redo 2 parts of counter seams I'm still not happy with, are coming at the end of the week. All these things = so great that my MIL is home all day to greet them!
• We had a walk-thru on the “old” house yesterday. We are very eager to hear the comments from the prospective buyers. I'm about ready to go off royally on my realtor who I feel has done very little but Jim’s keeping me cool…. For now.
• The lot next door to our “new” house just sold. A Courtland (same model as the model house) will be built to a couple who may or may not have children. We wish it was one more down and not RIGHT next door as we’re enjoying the extra space but they didn’t ask our opinion. :) Another lot in the neighborhood sold and will break ground mid-December which seems like odd timing to me, but what do I know? This makes for 9 total houses in the neighborhood sold so far.
• The lot behind us has been officially deemed “unbuildable”- more reason for us to take it over!!

Weekend of 11/23/07

It’s amazing how long weekends always end with a Monday morning yawn and a “I need another day off” escaping within the first five minutes of being awake.

Even though I got out of work at 4:00 on Wednesday, I burned up the extra hour at Target and Hancock’s buying stuff to make the bathroom curtains. That night, after dinner and Nicole’s bedtime, Jim and I went back out to Home Depot to buy more house supplies so we could have a productive Thanksgiving Thursday.

Productive was the right word – as the dining room furniture was to be delivered on Friday I worked hard to paint the room in preparation. I got a sage color beneath the chair rail and a light foam green on top. I painted stripes on the top half (same hue, different sheen) which took FOREVER to tape. We didn’t get it finished before having to leave for Grandma’s for dinner though.

Thanksgiving dinner was great as always. Whole family gathered to celebrate. Nicole and Ryann behaved incredibly well and Nicole went to sleep at 9:00 in Aunt Mary’s arms. I took the opportunity to take an “all-grandma” picture with her as this was the first time that every grandma she has was present together. I also caught a shot of her sitting – she can prop herself up for a few seconds (20?) before toppling, but is quite happy while she’s vertical. She can stay up longer if she puts her hands in front of her, but that doesn’t really count as sitting on “her own”. She’s close though!

Friday, Jim woke up at 4:30am to go shopping. Yes, I said JIM woke up on a vacation day at 4:30AM to SHOP. Who is this man!? What did he want? 1) 2G memory card for the camera for $6.99 (sold out), 2) Size 3 Pampers for $10.99 from Meijer (plus coupon made them about 55% off!), 3) painting supplies (ran out of tape the night before!), 4) tools 5) 80G External hard-drive to back up our computer (got it for $55!).

Vickie and I worked diligently on finishing the paint but didn’t make it before the furniture folks came. I didn’t realize that our taste in furniture is dark wood and BIG. I think we got the biggest furniture they sell. It’s huge and took those two delivery guys all they had to get the pieces upstairs to our bedroom. I’d say I love it but we’re not in it yet – still don’t have a mattress for the bed or the touch-up paint in the living room done, so the furniture taunts us as NONE of it is in use but is so nice to look at!

We left on Saturday to head back to Spencerville for Jim’s dad’s side’s Thanksgiving. Good food, good company. Nicole slept from 9pm to 8am without getting up once! HOORAY! Long evening and next day of visiting family and friends. We were disappointed to hear that Dale W’s youngest (5 mo old) was diagnosed with Downs and Kevin C’s 5th kid was diagnosed with Autism. Makes me ever-grateful that my daughter is as healthy and happy as she is.

We came home Sunday and immediately started cooking and cleaning to impress Mike C. who came to dinner. We had a nice time but it was cut way too short by Nicole who wanted to maintain her bedtime schedule and go to sleep at 8. I put up the tree after she fell asleep but ran out of lights to put on it which seems to happen every year (how the heck…?). Tonight I aim to get the rest of the lights and ornaments on the tree and finish the touch-ups in the dining room so the furniture can go in. hopefully we’re turning the corner as far as getting fully settled into the new house!

On to another work week…

Deep Breath... Now Keep On Going!

I think it’s about time I file a “Missing Blogger Report” on myself. Things have been busy at home and work and haven’t allowed for even a spare 2 minutes to write or comment lately. Busy = good as I’m actually being somewhat productive.

Some updates:
1) Nicole’s sleeping is really coming along. She now goes through the night and when she wakes up it’s for less than 7 minutes normally and though she whines (mostly not crying) she gets herself back to sleep on her own without our intervention. We set up the monitor in both of our rooms but were chided as novices by Jim’s co-workers- “Monitors are for day, when the kid’s napping, not for night when they should put themselves back to sleep and you shouldn’t care if they’re awake” was the gist. Ah well. Note that I’m still getting up around 2 most nights to check on her (make sure she’s still breathing- will this concern ever disappear?). Still, it’s over 6 hours of sleep- I’ll take it. It’s funny, when Nicole sleeps we put her down long-ways in the bed. When she wakes up and whines she spins and we find her perpendicular in the bed the next morning.
*update: Last night she slept from 8:30 - 6:15 with only one 4 minute wake-up! Maybe we've made it through sleep training in 1 week!!!! *fingers crossed*

2) As you might have noticed from the past blog’s comments, we did attend a new church this weekend. Though small, they were some of the most polite and welcoming folks we’ve met in a long time. Nicole chatted, often loudly, through the service but people didn’t mind a bit. We’re going to go to another Methodist church in the area (making our Methodist“interview” process 3-fold) as well as 1 or 2 other non-Methodist churches just for good measure. Hopefully we’ll settle into a new place by the end of the year.

3) Work has been BUSY. Being out of the office has not allowed me to get many projects done and I’m REALLY behind on a few. Megan’s helping me out quite a bit but even she’s inundated.

4) We ordered furniture! A LOT of furniture. Thank God for financing!! Our new master bedroom set, dining room set, and jewelry chest should be arriving on Friday. The entertainment center is on special order and hopefully will be here by Christmas. Jim has talked me into buying a new flat panel plasma for our bedroom wall and we might be hitting a black Friday sale EARLY (6am?) to get a good deal on one at Sears.

5) Things with Jim’s parents are still going well. Vickie makes dinner every night and has gotten
into a cleaning routine that includes bathrooms, dusting, swiffering, etc. We are getting spoiled! Hopefully we’re showing our appreciation well enough. Another month though seems like a long time.

6) Jim’s taking tomorrow off to take Doug to the doctor but claims he has too much to do and won’t let me add to his list. Booooo!

7) Oh, and the nice lady from the wedding we went to called to get together. Remember her, she's the one who gave me her phone number! Anyway, I was pumped she called and laughed when her suggestion of things we could do was take the kids for a walk (her daughter Lindsay is just a week older than Nicole if I remember correctly). So cute! So stay-at-home mom!

Taking off work to work

I took yesterday off to work on the current house and to get Nic to her 4 mo. doctor’s appointment. Somehow I didn’t even get to start working (painting) until 12:45 and I only got 1 thing done! AUGH.

Nicole Updates:

• Nicole’s head is in the 25%ile
• She is 25 inches long which makes her in the 50th percentile for length
• She’s grown to a whopping 16lbs. 3 oz which means she’s in the 93rd percentile

Sleeping through the night is NOT going well and we have some new marching orders from the pediatrician to try. Last night was a L-O-N-G night of trying to comply with directions of not feeding her mid-night which we ultimately altered at 4:15am with the excuse of “breaking her in”. Hopefully tonight will go better.

I did get to paint her bathroom though – it’s a periwinkle color and looks quite nice. I need to make some curtains for the room and hope to accomplish this (*gasp* on my own without mother’s supervision!?!?) this week.

Buster

Some good things happened this weekend including my parents-in-law treating us to Kabuto (hibachi grill) for our anniversary and Nicole being SO well behaved throughout the meal. You should have seen her eyes light up at the fireballs the chef was creating! Class on Saturday went well and I now have 18 midterms to grade.

What didn’t go so well was Buster, Greg’s pug of 6½ years. Buster is diabetic and is constantly “starved” as he’s on a strict diet to control his sugar levels. He’s gotten creative about getting food through his diabetic tenure so it wasn’t a complete surprise when my dad found an empty bag of gummy bears when he came in from mowing the lawn. Buster spent several hours getting sick and then having what we later found out were seizures. Greg, Mom and Dad stuck with him and tried to comfort him throughout, but it got to the point that he had to go to the emergency vet clinic.

His sugar levels were over 1000, which is astronomical for an 18lb. dog, and his fever was at 107 degrees. The hospital got his sugar down to 500 and his fever to normal but the medicine needed to stop the seizures put him into a diabetic coma. When he started dehydrating they administered some additional medicine to help and it was more than his body could take. Buster passed away around 3:00 on Sunday morning.

It’s been a very emotional end of the weekend. It’s especially hard as the whole ordeal started and finished in about 12 hours total so there was not a whole lot of time to mentally or emotionally prepare for what transpired. We (Greg, Dad, Mike, Jim and I (Mom was too upset to go)) buried Buster in Mike’s woods and put a very pretty stone to mark the spot.

Though I'm crying as I write this, Buster was an incredibly special, loving, and fun dog, we all recognize that life will go on and we get to hold strong to all the memories he made with us.

Please keep Greg and my mom especially in your thoughts as they were the primary care-givers to Buster and are taking this the hardest. Buster was more than a pet, he was family, and he’ll be greatly missed.

Treading Water

Life’s been coming at me pretty fast lately. While there’s a lot of stuff going on in other people’s life I feel like a bad friend to people as I’ve put my life and my stuff first. I haven’t talked to Lisa or Sarah in weeks and I’ve missed all of the previously scheduled monthly dinners with Tom. The holidays approaching so quickly are not helping matters either as I have no shopping done or even ideas of what to get, even for my own kid!

What’s occupying my thoughts:
1. have three sets of items to grade for school and I'm done with 1¾ of it. Class is in less than 24 hours.

2. I haven’t even posted the slides for tomorrow’s class yet

3. The parents in law have helped out a bunch around the house but there’s so much they can’t physically do that Jim and I don’t have time to do either so it all remains with no Open House in sight

4. We haven’t taken the time to church-visit for Nicole. We need to pick a new church so this kid can get baptized.

5. Last night Jim and I used our whirlpool tub for the first time. No so happy about my figure with no bubbles to hide it. While I'm now under my pre-baby weight, I am certainly not flat-stomached in the slightest. Not that I’ve made time to sit-ups or anything to fix it… While Jim looks good all of the time (see below for evidence), he HAS the time to maintain what he’s already got and I need to start from scratch. But still, it’s probably not fair that what he has to look at in a wife isn’t somewhat comparable to what he’s offering physically as a husband.

6. We have several rooms with white walls. Hopefully I can be a painting fiend next Tuesday on my off day.

7. Our 30-day walk-through on the house was this morning at 7:30. There were about 32 items on the list, most small, nearly all cosmetic.

8. Our babysitter had a small stroke 2 weeks ago and is having outpatient surgery to remove some cancer from her rectum. While we love the job that she does with Nicole, we have had the necessary conversations of “what if we have to move Nicole some place else”- not fun to have to consider but fortunately hasn’t been a problem

9. We’re working on a new nighttime routine with Nicole to get her to sleep through the night. So far we’ve got down the 7:45 bath, sometimes a book, and a 8:00 feeding. Last two nights we’ve tried formula at this last feeding to see if it’ll “stick” with her longer. This also lets me have the opportunity to collect for her at the end of the day and hopefully build up a supply. So far she’s still getting up somewhere between 12:30 and 1:15am and then again at 3:30. Last night at 1:14am we let her cry it out for an hour; she fell asleep for 10 min and woke up again. By then I felt bad as I knew she was probably hungry so I gave in and fed her. Not sure if that negated any progress with the crying it out stuff or not…?? She did wake up again at 4 anyway wanting to sleep with us.

10. We’ve offered to let Doug and Vickie stay with us through December. They haven’t made a decision yet and are worried about imposing. None of the four of us particularly like their back-up plan though.

11. Nicole’s curtains will be done TONIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

12. The old house is still not sold, but does have a prospect!

12. I'm also worried about some of my friends and the personal struggles they’re going through. Problem is that they’re lives are upset at the same time I'm worried about 1-12 in my own life. As a result I feel like I'm not giving any of the above enough attention which makes me feel guilty.


I did get a nice message from Anjali the other day (another person I’ve been neglecting! Grrrr!)- she lives in NC and a radio station has gone to playing Christmas music 24X7 already. What glory!! I was just excited that Wal-Mart has already gone Christmas, but an entire radio station!? Fabulous! Still not switching over my work playlist though…

My two favorite people

Nic-knack enjoying some Monday evening bath time.

The hubby, hard at work on making the propane tank "prettier".

Yeah, I'm a lucky woman. :)

Weekend of 11-2-07

Friday night was the third night in a row that Nic wanted to go to bed around 8:15 which I am now happy to indulge. I'm appreciating that her need for sleep trumps my keeping her up for the sake of seeing her. Further, it allowed me to go to bed at 8:45pm which I really really needed. When Jim came upstairs around 9:30 (probably to see where the heck I was) I woke up and remembered that I had to read the chapters I was to teach the next morning. “Do it tomorrow morning, you don’t want to re-wake your mind,” Jim advised. And so I did and consequently got up at 5:30am on a Saturday morning. What’s wrong with me!?!?

Teaching went well – the projects that the students gave were all around really really impressive. Some of the package designs they came up with were mistaken as REAL products by my mother-in-law when I brought them home they were that clever and well-done.

That afternoon Vickie, Nic-knack and I attended an estate auction up the street. There have been several times that I’ve consciously thought “I really like the location of our new house”- the first was when we ran late to Mom’s and I was thanking God that she now only lives 4 minutes away, the second was when I took the time to notice all the beautiful trees changing color and how lucky I am to pass the hundreds I do each day to and from home, and this weekend, that I had something cool and different to do and it was walking distance from my house (the neighbors are auctioneers and hold the events in their yard). Vickie and Doug apparently attended auctions all the time, but I didn’t and was interested in the process.

First, let me state that this stuff all looks like JUNK. Not knowing the first thing about antiquing, no thing stood out as a money-making opportunity (where you could resell a piece for 5X what you paid for it), and the literally dozens of blankets and throws they sold for $47 look to me as more of a hassle to get home than a “this could make a cool quilt if I cut them up” like the woman who bought them might have been thinking. Anyway, what was interesting was that they would take a big box and just start rapidly putting more and more into it and the auctioneer is working the audience for the price on the whole box. It’s not a place to pick what you want per se, but hope that what you want lands in that box for you to bid on. What do you do with all the other crap in the box (like the metal bedpan or the scratched Christmas ornaments) you didn’t want?? Vickie advised that the number one reason to attend these things is to resell the stuff at a flea market later- but who wants to give up a whole day buying and then another whole day selling?!

That evening we took Nicole to my mom’s and we went to a wedding- standard wedding fare. I did get literally burst on (as in the guy broke the lock off the door trying to get in) while pumping in the linen closet at the reception hall.

Sunday everyone left for Spencerville and Nic and I got treated to lunch with Sarah and Alex. That child is A-D-O-R-A-B-L-E. So much energy and he loved Nicole’s doll baby. He even gave me a kiss good-bye too! Oh, and Sarah was a cute pregnant lady though it’s too soon to visually tell she’s prego.

Bowling sucked – we lost 4/4 though I bowled well – 168, 139, 147 (I think)- all scores over my 122 average. Movin’ on up!

Back to the work-week. Blahhhhhhhhhhh….

Whaz Up

Few life updates:

1) Three weekends in a row- 3 attended weddings! Whew! The Cetti’s commented that we go to more weddings than anyone they know and “shouldn’t you be out of the wedding phase yet?” Apparently not! The one tomorrow night is the last one we know about though as I don’t know any more engaged people!
2) Jim’s parents are now staying with us through December 2 (at our new house).
3) I think Nicole might be getting some tooth buds… she’s drooling more and biting more- including things I wish she wouldn’t if you catch my drift
4) Nic is also gone through a growth spurt I think – she’s now as long as a standard pillow!
5) Remember how I said Vickie (MIL) and Nicole were getting along better? I was wrong.
6) The nursery décor will be done this weekend *fingers crossed* with the work I’ve done this week. The bumpers Sarah’s quilting will be the finishing touch - I’ll post pictures if so!
7) Thanks to a full day and a half off work, Jim and his mom have the old house cleaned out and ready to sit vacant, but in showable condition. Pictures to follow…
8) I'm in third place for the league for my individual bowling in the women’s series category!
9) I feel itchy to order new furniture – I got a tour of a neighbor’s house on Halloween and they are fully moved in and it looks like a real house. Rooms are painted, no boxes, even decorative pillows are out on the beds. I want furniture.
10) My 3 year wedding anniversary is next week. This is our “leather” anniversary – perhaps some FURNITURE is in order?
11) Jim looked up how much our neighbors paid for their house (public record) which might be tacky, but we’re tacky so oh well. Yeah, don’t see where the extra $130,000 they spent over what we did makes their house any better… they do have a deck and a finished basement, but we will too eventually and for a heck of a lot less than $130K