French Guest

This week we have decided to purge. It's felt SOOOOO good. So far we've been selling movies and books on Amazon, and other household things that I don't want anymore (mostly home decor and baby stuff) on ksl classifieds online. It's been awesome to get more freedom AND a small amount of cash with it.

Also, I decided to buy myself one of these thanks to an awesome deal on a blog I read and some Christmas money from my very generous in-laws (and some I've been saving as well). I have been experimenting with it the last couple of nights and I am SOOOO excited that they just announced that they have developed some fusible interfacing that allows the Silhouette to cut fabric too!! Ohhhh baby. The more I play with it, the more ideas I have for it! I can't believe the precision too. I was able to cut out very ornate shapes that would fit inside a 1"x1" square. Seriously, this thing is awesome.

I'm realizing that I haven't shown any progress made on our house since being put back together, and I think that's because I'm waiting for everything to be really "done" (whenever that will be), but I now have a wall next to our kitchen table that I'm trying to decide what to do with. I know I definitely want something white there, to lighten things up, and maybe I'll hang some plates, but I had a fun idea to cut out some white vinyl (that came with my Silhouette) to put there. My initial idea was to put the word "eat" somewhere and have plates hanging. I realized it would be really easy for me to test what it would look like by just cutting out paper first, and I could even do mock plates! Well, when I was cutting out the plates, I cut out concentric circles (just to test it, right?) and I couldn't help but think they looked like eyeballs. Several sheets of paper later, we now have a guest in our home.

We are calling him "Jacque Français" and The Frog got a real kick out of him this morning.

Notice the "eat" too. I think it's kind of cute, but Jay is not a fan. Oh well, at least our wall won't be empty until I can find something else. :)

PS I'm in the process of recovering our bench cushions. I'm totally aware of how bad they look with the green walls :D

Forgotten Pics

I forgot about these pictures from last week.This reminds me that Peach looked just as adorable yesterday as she did last Sunday (this picture) at church thanks to amazing hand-me-downs. I didn't get a shot of them yesterday, but here's a sampling of last Sunday :) The Frog wears the same cuteness every week and I can't help but take a picture when they look like they coordinate. Would it be too much to get them matching Easter outfits? Wouldn't The Frog look great in a pink tie?
This picture was taken just after I caught The Frog standing for a long time with this cord up against his ear while he nodded and said "yeah. uh-huh. ohhhhh. yep!"

5 Month Peach!

I haven't been very good about highlighting Peach's month "birthdays", but today she is officially 5 months old! This has been a big month for her. :) She only eats every 4 hours now (as opposed to every 2.5-3), started eating solids (baby rice, butternut squash and carrots so far), can roll from tummy to back, sucks on her toes, will occasionally giggle, can withstand her exersaucer and Bumbo, loves splashing in the bath and is exceptionally cute! She's also been whacked on the head by a hammer, had big brother boogers in her eye, and teeth marks on her forehead. (Don't worry, she gets lots of sloppy, wet kisses too...)

Can't wait for the months to come!

10000 days

Today is my 10,000th day of life. Want to find out when yours is? Go here. Use the second box :)

To celebrate, I made Creme Brulee.

Peach's First Exersaucer Experience

I had forgotten that I took these last week. After getting over the initial shock of it allI think she enjoyed herself. Or decided those monkeys looked tasty.

Kid Conversations

I've been having a lot of these lately, but haven't been keeping track. I want to do better with that.

Yesterday, I was eating some leftover pumpkin waffles as a mid-morning snack, and The Frog was playing with his dinosaurs on the kitchen table bench and every-so-often would come over to snag a bite. Then he says to me:

The Frog: mama, can the dinosaur have a bite?

Me: Well, pretend dinosaurs eat pretend food. Maybe we should go find some pretend food for your dinosaur.

The Frog: Mom, dinosaurs eat bugs.

Me: They do? Okay, well, let's see if we can go find it some bugs to eat.

The Frog: I have some bugs in my pocket.

Then today he was going through a cupboard while I made dinner and he was going through the vitamins.

The Frog: (to himself) This one's for mommy, this one's for daddy, and this one's for me! (to me, showing me his gummy vitamins) Mommy, can I have one?

Me: No, you already had one today and we only get one vitamin a day.

The Frog: can I have one of these? (my prenatal vitamins)

Me: No, these vitamins are only for girls.

The Frog: If I was a princess, I could have one of these.

Old pics

I just realized I put these photos on my desktop a long time ago, waiting to put them up here. They're pretty old- from before Christmas! It was snowing and we had excellent snowman making snow, so I had to teach The Frog how it's done :)

Update

I haven't been the best at posting lately (as you may have noticed). We finally have the use of our main floor now, although all our doors are gone (getting painted) which is a bit trying at times. We had a The-Frog-meets-furnace-incident which is luckily fixed now. (2 cold days and $75 later...) We were supposed to get our doors back last Friday, but have now been promised them tomorrow. I'm beginning to loathe that word (tomorrow) lately...

Anyway, Jay and I have been staying up late every night trying to get organized and somewhat clean. There is soooo much dust. EVERYWHERE. It's amazingly thick and noticeable in even the most discrete locations, but I guess this is good because my house will (hopefully) be really thoroughly clean in a few weeks time. This is forcing me to get down and scrub things I usually ignore. However, the things I normally clean regularly are really suffering. (shhh)

On top of this, The Frog has been pretty sick. He now only has a cough and runny nose, which is good, but I'm ready for him to be well so we can spend more time outside. Tomorrow is his last day of antibiotic! :)

For some reason, The Frog has detested sleeping more intensely than usual (my guess is it has something to do with his ear infection?) and so we've had to be a bit more lax about where he sleeps. I had the "brilliant" idea of setting up his little play tent and tube in his room so he could have a new form of indoor entertainment, and he has decided to put up camp there when he sleeps now. I come to find out that Jay was apparently very experimental in his choice of sleep locations until he was about 13. He mentioned to me his closet among others. How odd.

Peach is doing well. Though she's been a bit congested, she's holding up well and still being as cute as ever. I think she's ready to start eating solids, but I'm dreading it because nursing is just sooooo much easier. (and cleaner!) It's funny how wide Peach opens her mouth when any object approaches her face. She also should be wearing size 2 diapers now (as of about a week ago) but her cheap mom refuses to let her wear them during the day until ALL the size 1s are gone. We should finally exhaust them tomorrow :D Also, we tried her out in the exersaucer. She is really excited about it, but looks kind of like a bobbing buoy in it, so we try not to make her spend more than a couple of minutes at a time in there. She has also mastered the tummy-to-back-roll.

Another excuse for not posting is because I've been using my spare moments in the evenings to study Japanese, but I'll do a separate writing log to expound upon that.

I'm starting to think about our 10-year high school reunion for next year. I can't believe it's already been 9 years since I graduated from High School! I was a class officer, so I get the lucky task of planning it, so if any of you out there have any brilliant ideas, I'm all ears. I may try to recruit some of you fellow classmates to help, so watch out if you see my name on your CID in the next week or so :D

Did ballet for the first time this year at an attempt to start my exercise New Year's resolution. (I started a bit late because I've been sick too.) I admit after only 20 minutes, my legs felt like jello and I decided 20 would have to be enough or I may not be able to stand to make breakfast. It felt really good though :)

As you can see, a lot on my plate right now, but for some reason, I'm feeling very energized by it! I think the minor improvements on the house are helping me cope with the inconvenience, and new goals always get me feeling motivated.

Not much picture taking going on around here. I'll try to be better about that.

Japanese Log

Jay also found this great website that helps you learn Japanese on your own, and we decided to buy a lifetime membership to his textbook. If any of you happen to be interested, you can read the first few chapters for free to get a feel for it. ANYWAY he encourages us to keep a Japanese log, so I'm just going to use my blog. If this is uninteresting to you, no worries, I'm planning to entitle all of them as "Japanese Log", so you can just skip over those ones :)

Today he talked about the difference between Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana is sort of like a phonetic alphabet, and Katakana is also, but it is used to spell out foreign words and onomatopoeia, and a couple other uses. Kanji, is like Chinese characters- well, they actually are Chinese characters, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing they do in Chinese, and the all also have several meanings. I've almost memorized all the Hiragana, using the aforementioned smart.fm website, and I'll start Katakana once I have seen every one.

So far, I really like the textbook- very clear, personable and even funny, but I haven't yet seen any of his teaching methods, so more on that later.