Monday, March 28, 2011

Laundry room: before

This morning at 7:15, two scruffy looking dudes rang the doorbell to the house, wanting to come inside to rip out the walls to my laundry room.

Normally, something like this would bother me, but today it made me happy! FINALLY- I'm going to have a laundry room with the washer and dryer on the SAME wall, no mold, and no leaking water.

Here are some before pictures:
The normal state of things. As you can see, there is the dryer on the left wall.
The washer is to my right in this picture. The door to my left is going away.

The washer, stuck behind the brick stairs.

It was hard to get a good picture of this, but there are the leaking pipes,
complete with mold crawling up the wall.

Some mold and water damage on the other side of the washer.

The brick stairs. Notice the nasty floor- this happens because water leaks from the pipes
and then comes up through the floor, so it's never completely dry.
The project is supposed to be done April 15th. We're getting a new washer and dryer, new floors, cabinets, a closet where the washer currently sits and the brick stairs covered with something that looks better than brick. I cannot wait!

*Jade is 11 months old today- that post will come soon!

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Just one of those days...

This morning, Jade and I loaded up and headed to MOPS. It was a good meeting. The theme was "our favorite things" and all of the leaders buy some of their favorite things to give as prizes to the group. Everyone won 2 different "bigger" items and they gave out a TON of smaller items. Enough to fill up a plastic sack. Coupons to different local businesses, a magic eraser, clorox pens, tide stain stuff, silly straws, etc etc. It was a lot of fun.

When I picked Jade up, they said she hadn't been fussy at all, so that was a really good thing to hear. I'm not feeling great today, so knowing that Jade is having a good day makes things easier on me.

Then we got home. There should have been a sign on the door.


At least I would have had a warning. 

At first, I didn't know what was wrong. There was some vomit on the floor in the dining room (the first room I walk into) and Zoe looked a bit... lethargic. But that's happened before. But then I continued walking through the house. And the smell hit me. I walked into the bedroom upstairs. Belle's bed was covered in some sort of brown... substance. I am not sure from which end of the dog this substance emerged from. 

Belle was curled up on Zoe's bed (because why would she stay on hers after spewing substance everywhere?) looking like Zoe's partner in crime. That is when I knew that this was not just a little problem. 

I then followed the smell into the room we have dubbed "the rocketship room". And there it was. 

While Jade and I were enjoying ourselves at MOPS, the dogs were also enjoying themselves. 

On a tube of Desitin. 

The diaper rash cream. 

That contains 30% zinc. 


Uh oh. 

I called the vet. They instructed me to call poison control. I then talked to poison control for 20 minutes. While feeding my child lunch and putting her down for a nap. Jade was quite confused as to why I didn't put the phone down while I was reading her story. 

It was determined that the dogs would be ok. I'm sure that should have made me happy. At the time, it did not. 

With Jade asleep and Pepcid shoved down each of my dog's throats and all access to food and water blocked, there was only one thing left to do. 

Clean up the house. 

I counted 15 piles. Yes, you read that correctly. Fifteen. 

Just one of those days...


Saturday, March 19, 2011

Busy week!

Sorry for the absence of posts this week! We were blessed with beautiful weather this week and Jade and I spent most of our awake time outside. She is really enjoying her swing from Grandmama and Grandpapa and the walker wagon Chuck and I gave her for Christmas.

After she's been going to sleep at night, Chuck and I have been painting our sunroom. It's gonna look great, but I'm ready for it to be done! 


Spending some time in the swing.

Playing with Belle

Hydrating after a walk with mama

The way my nights have looked recently

More hydrating! It's crazy how thirsty she is after
we go on walks. She's not doing any work!

Monday, March 14, 2011

Jade's first 5k

Friday morning, Chuck and I loaded a very confused and slightly unhappy Jade into the car and headed to the base, where we ran a St Patrick's Day 5k put on by the fitness center.

We wanted to leave the camera in the car, so I tried to snap a picture right after we got her in the stroller, but this is what I got. She was crying and trying to pull her hat off. And you can't actually see any of that because of the weather shield. But with a start time of 0700 and us getting there at uh... 0700, I didn't have time to take the weather shield off and take another picture. Such is life.


But she did great during the race. Chuck and I took turns pushing her and she didn't fuss at all until the end. So then we got her out of the stroller and took more pictures :)



Chuck and I both had fun. And Jade tolerated our craziness fairly well, so that's good :) We definitely plan to run more of the races on base. They have one a month I believe. Chuck hadn't run in 6 months, so he was out of shape enough to run with me. That won't last though, which is ok. I don't want to be married to a slow dude ;)

Chuck and Jade finished right at 25 minutes and I came in about 30 seconds behind them because I had stopped to tie my shoe and couldn't catch up (with my husband who hadn't ran in 6 months... talk about making me feel out of shape!).

Later that day, we went to the pediatrician for Jade's weight check. Everything looked great... she had gained almost a pound in a month. She is now 15 lbs 5 ozs, 26.5 inches tall and head circumference is 17.5. Both height and weight are right below the chart and head is the 50%. She's gonna be smart!

Friday, March 11, 2011

Praying for Japan

If you haven't heard- which I find hard to believe, but it's possible- japan was hit by a massive tsunami caused by a 8.9 offshore earthquake.

The pictures of the devastation are heart-wrenching. There are no words. So make sure to add those in Japan to your prayers. I simply cannot imagine what they're going through, and how many people have lost loved ones.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Picture post

Don't have much to say, just trying to keep posting a few things. Like I said, I do this mostly for me... so that one day I can look back and have a decent log of what my life was like as a stay at home mama to one baby and two furbabies.

But I snapped a few pictures of Miss Jade the other day that I loved... and I thought you guys (at least the grandparents!) would love them too.

Playing in her room
What happens when I try to take pictures of her discretely

My favorite

Talking to Curious George


Kissing (biting) Curious George

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

To make you smile

I've got 3 (yes, 3) different posts in "draft" form. For some reason these days I don't seem to focus long enough to actually get something written. I think I'm trying to be too interesting. Which lets face it, sometimes my life isn't. I mean, I don't think it's boring... anything but actually. But on paper? Yeah, not so interesting.

Anyways, the other day I stumbled across a blog that had be laughing so hard my side started to hurt. And I just had to share. Short Fat Dictator. Doesn't the title just make you smile?

So yeah, nothing about me. My life is boring, remember? So just go check out her blog if you have an urge to laugh. And I'll try to post something real soon. Promise.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

10 months?!?

How did this happen? How did my baby girl go from this:


to this?


I'm not gonna lie... some of the days have been long. Very long. But the time overall has FLOWN by. The fact that we've booked a photographer for her one year photos.... that I have her one year well-child visit scheduled... that we're dedicating her in the church when she's one-year-old. All of those things seem so surreal, simply because they're not that far away.

This month has been great. Baby girl has finally started sleeping AND her personality is blooming. I feel like I'm getting to know her better every day. Instead of people at Target asking me "why won't your baby smile at me?" (to which my response was always: she doesn't like weird people), they're now saying "what a happy baby!" I must admit, it's a nice change.

She learned how to wave while we were in Nashville and she is doing it all the time now. Not always at the appropriate time, but waving nonetheless and it is so cute. She still claps a lot too, but is still fairly inconsistent with kisses.
The remote control distracted her from the whole sitting still thing...

She gets SUPER excited when Chuck gets home, but still initially does the "shy" face where she tries to hide a bit. We took her first trip to the playground this month. She loves the swings and enjoys crawling through the jungle gym, but still gets distracted by the pine straw and dirt.

She still eats pretty much anything I give her. Breakfast is her favorite meal. She's getting sick of bananas, but loves strawberries, grapes and clementines. She has quite the diverse palate for a 10-month-old. We go back to the doctor on the 11th to have her weight checked.

I expected her to be closer to walking by this point than she is. I've tried to see if she'll walk just holding onto one of my hands, but no go. She just plops down and starts crawling. At this point, I have no clue when she'll walk because she doesn't seem to be that determined to do it. She gets where she needs to go already. She has started walking behind her wagon, which is cool to watch. She gets so excited :)

She still loves to tear up and eat magazines. She has two teeth on bottom and one that's poking through on the top. We think she might be working on another one too.

She babbles a lot these days... but it's all "da da" or "a da". I'm not sure if she's made the connection between "dada" and Chuck yet. I thought she had once, but she says "dada" to everything so I really don't think so. It'll be nice when she figures that out... and starts saying some other things.

She had two babysitters at our house on Monday. They were the first people outside of family (and the neighbor for my quick 30 minute runs) to watch her. I had a doctor's appointment Monday afternoon and Jade did great with the girl from my church. The girl even sent me picture texts so that I would believe her :) Then that night, for our 3rd Kinda-versary, Chuck and I went out to dinner after Jade was asleep. Unfortunately, she woke up while we were gone (those pesky teeth) but the girl (another babysitter) was able to get her back to sleep, which is amazing. So it was a big day... going from '0' babysitters to '2' in one day.

We still go on walks a few times a week with the dogs. I always wear her on my back when we walk the dogs and she loves it. She babbles in my ear the entire time and gets really excited when other dogs walk by. Now that I'm running consistently again, she's in a stroller way more than she ever has been but she's starting to enjoy that a bit too. I finally got her out of the car seat, so she's facing out where she can see more than my huffing and puffing face, which I know she enjoys.

She can drink out of a straw very proficiently, but she still wants me to hold the cup! It seems so long ago that I couldn't get her to take a bottle. She's changing so fast! For snacks, she loves animal crackers and cheerios. I still haven't tried any dairy with her... I've decided to wait until she's closer to a year. No point in rushing anything in my opinion.


Look at those chubby legs!


This has been a great month and I can't wait to see what next month has in store for us :)

Close up :)