I know, I know....

I know that antibiotics have their place. I know they're important and useful. I just wish they didn't hurt my daughter's bum so much!!!! She gets ear infections like her mommy and daddy did and none of the antibiotics work well for her except Omnicef. That's not true. Amoxicillin works for her too but she gets red spots all over her body!!!!!! But the Omnicef gives her baaaaaaaaad diarrhea! Her little bum explodes in a red rash. So I'm changing her poor bottom and she's crying and cringing and I keep repeating, "I know, I know". So what does she start saying through her gasps? "I know, I know!" Poor girl!

Oh brother!

You wanna know why I find Halloween intimidating? Why I can never think of a good costume? It's because THIS is my competition! :) Check out my funny brother's costume! Happy Halloween! :)

My Halloween Memories!

When I was a teenager, we would rent old movies like Abbott and Costello. My Mom would make yummy Pumpkin Soup and Dad would order pizza because he doesn't like Pumpkin Soup! I would sit on the front porch in the chilly Utah air and make teenagers who are too old for trick-or-treat sing for their candy. I remember taking my little brother and sister around the neighborhood. I would hang signs on the door telling them to go away after we had exhausted our bags and bags of candy! I always wanted to be a clown when I was in elementary school. I'm apparently not one of those people who are scared of clowns-but I'm apparently not that creative with costumes. We have years of pictures of me in the clown suit over and over and over.

Funny how I don't remember much trick-or-treating myself. It was always more fun to watch Sam and Gracie do it!

Now, I like to make Pumpkin Soup myself. I like to carve pumpkins with my sweetie and hand out candy to the ten kids who come to our house :) and this year I'll take my own little girl to a few neighbors' houses even though she's totally freaked out by the whole concept! :) I'll make pumpkin bars (yes, I'll post the recipe, Jen!) and I'll tell my mind to calm down...it has way too much to think about right now!

Halloween Preview

I found an old friend on Facebook today. My little sister convinced me to join last winter. A fellow blogger recently asked "what's the big deal with facebook?" The big deal is that I have wondered where and how this person has been ever since I lost contact with her eight years ago! She switched schools after living across the hall from me freshman year. And it turns out she lives in the Twin Cities as well! I love that!

I've been trying to resist showing her costume. I think she looks so cute!

Phew!

I'm feeling so relieved! The Primary program is over (for 12 months anyway)! And it went fabulously! All of the moving parts went well and everyone pretty well knew what they were supposed to do. The first song had a flute solo and she seemed nervous but did very well. We had some solos and groups that were great. So many kids had their parts memorized and one of our Valiant 11 boys had memorized Doctrine & Covenants section 4 for his part. It was awesome! I was so impressed with these kids.

A year ago, I really was feeling the need to get back into singing. I really wanted to take voice lessons but we really didn't have the extra money to spend on a "hobby". A month later, I got this calling to work with the kids in music. I was so nervous. I had never done anything like this before. However, I have discovered this was an absolute answer to prayers! I have been able to learn new songs, practice singing for hours every week, learn more patience with kids, and gain a bigger testimony of the music of this gospel. I'm so grateful I've had this opportunity!

It's nice for it to be over, but I'm so glad it went so well. During the song, "Listen, Listen", we had a boy play it on the piano and we sang it a cappella and then in a round. Our president heard the family behind her say, "whoa! that was awesome" when we were done! Yay Primary!

A few of my favorite things...

1. When M gives me a hug and pats my back because that's what I do to her.
2. kettle corn
3. crunchy leaves-I LOVE that M loves playing with the leaves!
4. pumpkin chocolate chip bars! (this afternoon's activity!)
5. knowing that the primary program will be over in four hours!!!!!

newly sharpened pencils and pumpkins

My next "Fall" movie is "You've Got Mail". I love that movie! I haven't seen it in a while and I just saw my favorite part-"I would buy you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils!" It also makes me want to visit New York again! I haven't been since I was in the 9th grade. However, before I visit there again, we are bound and determined to go to Washington, DC. Someday soon we are going to go! Who knows when, but we're determined!

We went and got pumpkins today! It wasn't exactly a pumpkin patch but M didn't know and we still had fun! They had sheep and goats and chickens to visit with. M and I ran through a haystack maze and we got three lovely pumpkins to carve next week!

MY wishlist for M

I have Christmas on the brain! I'm already planning gifts for others and trying to figure out what we're going to do for miss M! She's at the age where EVERYthing is fun! We could get her anything and she'd love it! I've already gotten her a few things including this:







I have wanted to get her a stroller for her dolls for a while now.






I think she's old enough to have a lot of fun with one of these-or the farm or the nativity or the zoo! :)






When she visits me at work, she LOVES to play at the tables we have for our clients.














And I would LOVE to get her something like this!



Who knows what we'll end up doing but these are the ideas floating around in my brain so far!

Another flashback

M and one of her very first friends! When she had just started smiling, she would lay in her crib and watch the animals go round on her mobile and talk to them. It was the cutest thing ever!

African Alphabet

In my search to please our resident Elmo fanatic, I now look up you tube videos with Elmo/muppets in them. This is my favorite. Stay tuned for our favorite Elmo video!

waiting

this was last week. she wanted to look out the window so she brought her stool over and put it on top of a box! and i am the bad mommy who let her and ran to get the camera! :)

hunny bunny

This is why we were almost late to church on Sunday! She didn't want to get dressed!

more surfing

A fun new blog I discovered today. I will visit here again, I'm sure!

Sunday dinner at the ranch

So, it's really funny to me that I introduced Becca and Sarah to Mac computers. Because last night, I learned two new things from Becca. They've obviously surpassed my knowledge! If you press F11, all of the windows you have open, hide and you can them back by pressing F11 again! So cool! We had Becca and Grandpa Holman over for dinner last night. It was lovely. We helped with homework and sewed on buttons and visited. M was ESPECIALLY helpful with homework as you can see!

Been Busy

Inspired by one of the Moms from Sugar & Spice, I embarked on my first sewing project in a year. It was a labor of love, let me tell you. I learned a few things too. Next time I will just use interfacing like she did, the batting was a bit thick, and I will do the closures differently, it made the straps hard to attach. I didn't whip it up in an hour like her, but I did do it in an evening and a short morning! :)

an oldie but a goodie

This is your daily dose of M for Sunday because it's a year old but still one of my very favorites of M and her Daddy.

Someone had fun at the babysitter's on Tuesday...

...funny thing, the nail polish was gone by Friday. (I hope there's nothing toxic because I'm pretty sure it's all in her belly! But hey, I never died and I still bite my finger nails!)

Noodles at Home

I had a mac and cheese craving. But for the real stuff, not from the box. We usually have a lunch with Grandma Jan at Noodles and Company every few weeks but she's in Holland. So I made my own! I made a white sauce, added cheese and served it over macaroni. The verdict? Yum!!! My customer approved! She had four, count them, four bowls! (And that was after eating two bunches of grapes!)
I LOVE how she eats grapes-right off the vine! -my little Greek goddess!

Dose #4

...where it all started!

Dose #3

Steppin' out in Mommy's shoes!

Right now...

My chid is eating the hot dog out of the bun (translation: she's taking bites of the hot dog while the bun is still surrounding it but not eating the bun) She's goofy like that. I'm reshaping a hanger into a crown to makes into a headress for a halloween costume for someone for next week. We also got a cheap wand and wings at Target today. Hopefully one of us will look cute for the Halloween party next week! :)

Dose #2

This is one of my current faves. I love her face on this one.

Your Daily Dose of M

Last Sunday I couldn't resist taking a picture of my cute girl-new shoes from Grandma, her spiffy dress and bows made by Mom, she was so cute!

ps-I made the BOWS, not the dress! :)

Owie!!!

We met friends at the mall this morning. Our girls played in the kids' area and then we had a short lunch. It was lovely. I made a few stops on our way out. I must have pushed M too far though. As we're walking through Kohl's to the parking lot, she starts crying, "owie!" at the top of her lungs over and over. I inspect and I don't see any owies. hmmmm... so I keep going. I get a few looks and get to my car feeling like a bad mommy when really my kid just wanted out of her stroller, had no owies and I was really trying to rectify the situation the fastest way possible!!

M-sick

Grandma Jan is going to Holland for three weeks! We are so excited for her! Since we know she's going to miss M more than the rest of us combined, we're going to provide her with her daily dose of M's cuteness. Hopefully that way she won't get too homesick, or M-sick. :)
M is looking all SMRT in her HP glasses!
"I am so smart! SMRT!"

My Little Friend

I love this girl. She's funny and smart and cute. I just love her.

She's a Lean, Mean, Funeral Potato-Eatin' Machine

...okay, that sounded more slick in my head. I made funeral potatoes the other night. Friends at work made fun of the fact that I call them funeral potatoes. Cheesy hashbrowns for the rest of you. M LOOOOOOOVES them! Tonight we had the leftovers and she ate as much as Daddy! She kept asking for more and cried when we said they were all gone. She just kept shoveling them in! She does not like help eating-she's very independent with her eating but she didn't even mind if I gave her bites-the sooner it got into her mouth, the better! She's too funny!

Really good language skills...really bad sign...

So should I be proud if I drive by Taco Bell and the little one in the backseat starts crowing, "burger, burger!" ???? I'm more worried! There was no good smelling food in the car, we hardly ever go to Taco Bell, she just knows that a drive thru means food and usually burgers. So she's smart but I'm a bad mommy!!!

My sister

I called my family the other day on the way home from work. I do that a lot. I'm in my car. I'm thinking about them. I want to talk to them. I call. I happened to get my Dad who put me on hold to start a 3-way phone call with my sister who had also called....at the same time. See, she's in college now at BYUI. And she has discovered that she shouldn't have teased me for calling on my way home from work all the time. Because now she calls on her way to and from class. She now knows how I feel. :) The best part of our conversation was when I said I had to go and my Dad chuckled and said, "I hate to admit it but I don't know which daughter said that." I loved it and it made me warm and fuzzy inside.

See, while I love my sister to death, I'm ten years older than her and sometimes I think we're not very alike. She looks more like my Dad, I look more like my Mom. She dated her way through high school, my first kiss was at 23. She got the skinny genes, me, well, yeah. She's bubbly and a social butterfly, it's still just one of my new year's resolutions. Sadly, sometimes wer'e the most alike when one of us bursts into tears at the dinner table and runs from the room, crying. But I love her to death. I love my four sisters-in-law but it's Gracie who I'm thinking of when I'm watching a PG-13 movie worrying that she might watch it. It was totally weird for her to go to college. She's in the real world! She's dating for real now! She could get married and have babies of her own! She better not any time soon though!

We may not always have much besides hormones in common but I love that when we get on the phone, we laugh the same and that our Dad gets teary-eyed for his two girls that live far from home.

Learning Curve

The toddler learning curve continually amazes me. I remember learning a technical term for the type of rapid learning and encoding that toddlers can do that helps them learn language and new skills so quickly and put them in long-term memory with only one exposure. I can't remember what it is though. I'll find out and report back.

Tonight, M gave me butterfly kisses. It's such a small thing but it warms my heart sooooooo much! I taught her a few weeks ago and just randomly she will lean in and flutter her sweet eyelashes and giggle because she knows it's tickling me. I love love love it! This afternoon we were outside and she was sitting on the steps. I was arranging flowers and not paying attention and so she marched over, got in my face and slowly beckoned with her pointer finger, very clearly, come here, just like Mommy. On Sunday, during conference, she was drawing on the chalkboard and picked up the eraser, giggled, showed me the eraser, saying "phone!" and laughed at herself as she pretended the eraser was a phone and got her head all dusty as she talked to "Daddy" on the phone. She literally learns new words everyday and she is so willing to imitate any new word that I show her. She knows the names of most of her foods and is combining two and three words which makes me so proud. :) She gets "ready to go" finds a purse, puts it on her shoulder, and says "bye" to me and leaves the room only to come back giggling a moment later at how she tricked me into thinking she was leaving. She knows how to blow her nose! One morning the tissue got stuck to her nose. I laughed so hard that she tried to replicate for days after that. She's learning to clean up her messes and will bring me the cheerios she's dropped one at a time and wait patiently by the trash can because she knows she's not supposed to open it herself. She demands three books before bed. Sometimes more, but usually three and she knows when she's been jipped! She cuddles close and looks at the pages so intently that I even have to forgive her for destroying my popup book this morning. I love my girl.

Pancakes x 2

Grandpa Bob makes really good pancakes. Really good ones. I don't like pancakes much. I'm a french toast girl. But I like his pancakes. He has a special recipe and insists on making pancakes for the family whenever he visits. M loved 'em! She had three pancakes and that was after having two bowls of cereal and a bowl of applesauce at home beforehand! We got to take the leftover batter home so M and I had pancakes again this morning. And she had three again and was very happy about it. Unfortunately we have to wait another year for Grandpa Bob's yummy pancakes.

Smile

Hope you had a lovely weekend!

My No-Pressure Dinner

Today my grandpa-in-law is visiting with his sweet wife, Ruth. They don't visit very often so we've cleared our weekend (except for my working at the hospital tomorrow) to be with them and we're excited for W and M to spend time with their grandpa and great-grandpa. I need to get a gift for M's cousin to take back though. They've given us so much that we want to give back. Anwyay, tonight we're having a family dinner and Grandpa Bob didn't want to go out so I get to cook! I have no idea if he'll like it but here's the menu:

Wild Rice Chicken Casserole (he likes wild rice)
Sister Schubert's Rolls (if you haven't had them, you have to try them!!)
carrots
salad

apple crisp
vanilla ice cream

Hopefully that will be good. M&I are going down to Grandma's to cook all afternoon! Wish us luck!!

Funny

I just got the email that my request for Eclipse from the library came in. Yeah, they're too late. :)

The Thirteenth Tale

This was a compelling, suspenseful, engrossing book that anyone who loves to read will be wrapped up in. It was exciting, sometimes grotesque, fascinating, surprising, and I really enjoyed it. It was about the true life story of a mysterious author who had kept her life beginnings secret for years. It was full of twists and turns. Some of them predictable, some of them not. In the movie that played in my mind of what I was reading, I kept imagining a Tim Burton-esque, Edward Scissorhands, Series of Unfortunate Events-type setting with dark colors and strange characters. But very interesting!!

My extremely cool, belated birthday present!

I asked for a rice cooker. We cook a lot of rice and I felt like our saucepan was always dirty because of it! I got the mother of all rice cookers from the mother of all mothers! I love it! It's huge! This thing will feed an army!!!

My favorite part is the instructions! :)