Blog Interactive

As summer continues, I've been getting more and more lazy with my blogging.  The days are so much fun with a growing toddler that I'm wiped by the time the evening comes around and feeling less than inspired to write.  To that end, I am enlisting your help. Below you will find a few blog titles with either a short synopsis or a picture to go along with it.  Leave a comment on the blog or Facebook letting me know which ones you want to see, and I will write them. I am also accepting 'write in' suggestions from anyone except Stuart :)

A Day at the Pool
Do I really need to explain this one?


Corgan Goes 'Ouch'
I have a child who might possibly be more accident prone than me. This is not a good thing...



A New Toy

Focus on Your Strengths
Stuart and I took a fantastic class called 'Strengths for Couples' and it was really neat to see how our own personal strengths interplay with the other person's strengths.  It's amazing we don't kill each other more...


Foodie Friday: Lemon Shrimp Pasta

Name That Body Part...
This is not nearly as creepy as it sounds.  I finally caught Corgan on tape when she was naming and finding different parts of her body.


Coolest Hairdo Ever!

Look Ma, I Made a Cross
A cute video of Corgan and Lily.  The name will be self-explanatory.


"Done"
This is what you get when you try to stage a video of your toddler. You never get what you want...


What to do with Bangs
I have a parenting dilemma, and am seeking advice.  My friend Molly did this and it worked out well for her.


Messy Kids are NOT Good for OCD
I am convinced that God made me want kids so that I could get over some of my OCD tendencies (yes, this is an official diagnoses, and I really would call it CDO if I could).  Great video of the proof!

Life's Cruel Joke

I am one of the biggest arachnophobes on the planet. Spiders scare the crap out of me.  I hate them, and they are all out to get me.  I had night terrors as a kid and many of them involved me watching my family get eaten alive by giant spiders, or having them swarm into my room via the ceiling duct, or having them crawling relentlessly under my skin, or.... you get the picture.  It didn't help that I grew up in a country that laid claim to a spider which can literally eat half your face off while you sleep without you waking up. That is so messed up! Animals shouldn't be able to do that! Spiders are unnatural beasts from the depths of Hell!

Why did I tell you all of that? Why would I plague your morning/day with thoughts of these disgustingly, heinous creatures? Because my life is now filled with spiders!  Well...one in particular...the most evil of them all...

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The Itsy, Bitsy Spider!!!  Corgan is obsessed with this song!  She even knows the hand movements, and asks us to sing it all the time!  The other night she was crying before she went to bed, because she wanted to keep playing with her Grandma.  What calmed her down? Me singing Itsy, Bitsy Spider!  How messed up!  This is just proof that moms will do anything for their children.

New Video Monitor

A couple of weeks ago we got a new baby monitor for Corgan.  It's a video monitor, which I always said I would never get.  They are 3-4 times more expensive than the audio only monitors, and all you really need is sound, right?  Wrong!!!  I am totally addicted to watching my Little One sleep!  Yes, you only really need sound, but it is so much fun to watch her toss and turn.  She ends up in the cutest positions.  My favorite is when she puts her butt straight up in the air.  :)

We're quickly learning two things about our daughter: 1) she sleeps like me, and 2) she is soooo easy going.  What do I mean?  "She sleeps like me" means that she sleeps like the dead, but tosses and turns more than anyone I know.  I have quite literally slept through a bombing that shook my house, and never even knew it.  This kid would do the same.  She sleeps 7 PM to 7 AM all on her own regardless of what's going on in the house, and no noise from downstairs will wake her up.  Even when our three very loud dogs are having a rough-and-tumble-fest, she peacefully sleeps on.

"She is soooo easy going" means that she actually wakes up about 6:30 AM or so, and quietly plays in her crib until we come get her around 7 or 7:30.  And by quietly, I mean silently.  We always thought she woke up at 7:30 when she fussed.  Oh no.  She has fun playing with her stuffed animals or rolling around in her blanket for about half an hour each morning without a peep.  It is so flippin' cute!

Below is a series of pictures that I took in one two-hour span a couple of nights ago.  Poor Stuart has had to put up with me doing this for the past 6 years, and now we have a daughter that does the same. 

Corgan Gets a Box

Oh, the joys of watching your daughter with her first box.  Corgan was feeling under the weather on Christmas, and she got most of her gifts in bags for her birthday, so when we got her new car seat a few weeks ago, we let her go to town with her first real box! 

She would climb in, we would close the flap, she would squeal, then she would burst out!  She had soooo much fun!  And of course we were laughing our *bleeps* off.  What a great moment in the journey we call parenthood.

Getting My Sew On...

Corgan and her Gigi.

My Grandmother (Corgan's Gigi) is a seasoned quilter, and has made dozens during her lifetime (maybe more, but I don't know for sure), and she is very generous with giving them to loved ones.  I got my first quilt from her when I was in middle school.  She came to visit us in Saudi for the first time, and she brought me an African-inspired quilt with a pattern she designed herself.  I had just returned from a school trip to Kenya, so she made it go along with the souvenirs I brought back.  I still have it, and will always cherish it as my first grandmother-made quilt.




Since having Corgan, she's given us three more, each marking a special moment in our lives.  One for Corgan's birth, one for her baptism, and one for a housewarming gift.  Along with each of these quilts she had some labels embroidered to mark each quilt.  This past weekend, I finally had enough time to sit down and sew the patches on to two of the quilts.

My new sewing kit that I got for Christmas from my mother-in-law.

The patch for 'Oriental windows' given to us for our housewarming (quilt pictured below).

We keep this quilt in our master bedroom which has Asian-inspired decor.

A close-up of one of the windows on the quilt.

This quilt was given to us for Corgan's baptism.  The little rings you see are actually embroidered rings of flowers.

I have one more patch to sew on to Corgan's birth quilt. I didn't know that sewing these patches on would be so emotional. I know the love and time that she put into making each of these works of art, and being able to add the patches on myself makes me feel like I had a small part in completing them and is quite moving.  I hope Corgan grows up to love these as much as I do.  I also hope my grandmother knows how much I love her for these amazing gifts to my family.

Starting to Work on Stuart's Gift

This past Friday, my Dad and I began work on Stuart's graduation present.  That's right.  This coming August my husband, Stuart, will have completed the six tyear journey for his MBA.  We are sooooo ready for him to be out of school, and I am sooooo proud of him for getting through it.

As a gift, I'm working with different members of our family to clear the 'back 40' in our yard and put in a raised bed garden.  Ever since I've known Stuart he has shared stories with me about his own Dad's vegetable garden, and how much he loved going out to pick the veggies himself.  So for his graduation gift, we're all chipping in and helping him get his own garden started.  Here's the progress so far.

Here is what the back corner looked like when I did my last major yard project.  This is when I should've cleared the trees out.

Here is what the back corner looked like right before Dad and I started worked on the trees.  Not too smart of a plan to wait until they get all their leaves back, but whatever.

After only about an hour, Dad and I had all 5 trees down and cut into some good sized chunks.  It's amazing what you can do with a hack saw.  Please note: these were junk trees busting down our fence.  We were supposed to take them down when we moved in over a year ago, but never got a round to it.

Since our gate is on the other side of the house, Dad and I decided to take down one of the panels in our fence so we could more easily haul out the brush.

The view from the front.  It was weird to basically 'destroy' my fence, but so worth it.  Made pick up way easier, and it wasn't hard to put it all back together.

Dad made my neighbors incredibly nervous when he brought the trailer up on our yard. You can see their brand new sodded yard in the bottom left-hand of the pictures.  No sod squares were harmed in the making of this blog.

How do you fit five trees into only two loads in a trailer? Have you Dad jump up and down on it repeatedly.  Now that was fun to watch :)

Us down at the brush recycling center.  It only took us two load to get everything down there, but we weighed in at 620 lbs of brush total.  We were a little tired after all this.  Trust me.

Here is the back corner as it looks now.  Next steps will be to kill off everything growing back there using a 9% vinegar solutions. We will then install three 8x4ft raised beds, install a white picket fence at the front of it (with gate), and get to growing!  I can't wait!!!

Corgan Misses Lily

I told you that Lily has a friend named Lily.  I work with Lily's parents, and we see Lily all the time at church and school.  Well, Corgan has taken to randomly asking for Lily.  In this wonderfully modern era, pictures are everywhere, so we will search Facebook for pictures of Lily to show Corgan. Either that or we'll go through our own photo files to show her pictures of her BFF.

Sunday, I got an idea :) Hee hee. When Corgan asked for Lily, I turned on my laptop's webcam and started showing her pictures.  Here is the cute results:

...and yes, that is Stuart punking us in the bottom, left-hand corner.