Forrest-Inspiration

My little bro and his wife came to town last weekend. While they were here they went to the beach, and invited anyone to come along who wanted (we wanted). Despite a dismal forecast, it was the most pleasant beach weather I've seen in a long long time. Perfect and sunny and beautiful.





You can see the rest of our pictures here:

Forrest-inspired Hug Point Trip

Knee Surgery + 5 Weeks =

Finally! Backpacking!

Last time we went backpacking Jared said he wouldn't go with me again unless I got my knee fixed. See, my knee does this thing, occasionally, where I'll be walking along just fine, and then suddenly and without warning, something shifts and I can no longer bend my knee or bear weight on it without excruciating pain. Then later in the day or the next morning or a couple days later it will shift back and everything will be fine again. Very mysterious.

Now, walking around normally, this is no big deal; I can go home and rest it until it goes away. But of course, this doesn't usually happen when I'm walking around normally, it happens most times when I'm doing something active. Like, say, backpacking. And in fact, we were once backpacking in Joshua Tree National Park when it happened, 4 miles in. Joshua Tree is, may I remind you, a desert, and so having a finite amount of water and an undetermined amount of time before we get more was a little nerve-racking. We had to stop and make camp in the wash right there, I took as much ibuprofen as I had in my first aid kit, and hoped it would "sleep off." I was able to gingerly walk in the morning and hike out (if you can do anything "gingerly" with a 40 lb pack on your back).

Anyway, that was the trip Jared said he wasn't doing it again until I got it fixed. The problem was, no one knew what was wrong with it. Pokes and prods by my favorite orthopedic surgeon plus MRIs at various angles showed nothing. And so no one was quite sure how to "fix" what ain't broke. But I had a standing offer from the doc to go in there and take a look anytime. 5 years later, finding myself a) desperate to be able to recreate the way I used to, b) not pregnant, and c) not breastfeeding, I decided my window of opportunity was now, and called up my old doc to schedule "the procedure."

Bless his heart, Dr. Weintraub found a floating piece of cartilage in my knee that didn't belong. It was not the kind of thing that an MRI would pick up, and since it was literally floating, unattached to anything, it would explain how the pain would move around and be totally unpredictable. I guess it could just get wedged into various parts of my knee joint - and then feel kinda like somebody's jabbing fork between my bones.

So anyway, now it's gone (yippee!), and though my knee is far from better a mere 5 weeks later, I was able to go on my first little backpacking trip, without worrying about my joint freezing up on me at random.

Since we were going with Jared's sister and her husband and their 2 month old baby - and bringing our own toddler who is, just this year, really too big to realistically pack in in a carrier - we were looking for a short, easy hike. Where to go?!

A few years ago, just after we got our GPS, we decided to do some adventuring by picking a spot on the map and seeing if we could find it. I once found a tiny blue smudge on a map that looked like a mountain lake and thought it would be fun to see if we could get there. After much twisting and turning on dirt forest service roads we got about as close as we figured we could by car, and bushwhacked the rest of the way there. Indeed, we found not only a beautiful, shallow, warm, idyllic, natural mountain lake, but a trail, just north of where we'd been bushwhacking, that would have saved us a lot of time and scrapes on our ankles (and arms, this being Oregon, after all). There was also a firepit and good campsite on the north side of the lake, and I remarked on our way back that this would be the perfect place to bring friends or family members who were a little leery of backpacking, because it was such a short, easy hike to a secluded beautiful place.
So we decided to try and find it again. Of course, we couldn't remember a thing about it. Not what it was called, not how we got there. We couldn't even agree on which National Forest it was in. So we almost had to give up. Then Jared had the brilliant idea of getting out the old GPS and seeing if we marked any points on it. And after searching through our marked waypoints, converting the coordinates and finding a map I could plug them into (did you know you can plug GPS coordinates into Google Maps? Works flawlessly. Awesome. Took me ages to figure that out.), we found our spot.
And so with in-laws and kids in tow we headed up there on Saturday morning to see if it was still there.

And so it was....The rest of the pics...

2009 Cripple Creek Backpacking Trip

Fourth of July

We spent our Fourth in Sunriver with my family...

in a cabin on the Deschutes River

Seville was afraid of the fireworks Uncle Jason was setting off, and needed Daddy to cover her ears...

All the women in the family wore pigtails on the Fourth of July to the firework show (Seville liked the far-away ones)

The rest of our photo album is below.

Sunriver

Playing Make-Believe

So one of Seville's favorite things to do lately is pretend we're all somebody else. She pretends to be friends or cousins sometimes (in which case I pretend to be their Mommy), but mostly we pretend we're each other. So at least once a day she'll announce that she is Daddy or she is Mommy and then Daddy and Mommy get assigned parts - one of us has to be the other one and one of us gets to be Seville. It's pretty fun. And she is actually very obedient when I say things like, "Mommy, are you getting in the car fast?" "Yes, Seville!" she'll say, speedily getting into the car. Only it's more like, "Yes, Seviiwe!"

The other day, after Seville took a bath, Jared came into the living room to find her doing this...


"I'm Mommy! I'm on the computer!" she announced.

Seriously, is this what she thinks of me? Leading up to my recent concert with Cantico, I was on my computer it seemed all day every day (I was managing web-sales and other stuff for the concert, as well as singing in it), so after I heard about her little "imitation" of me, I vowed to stay off my computer unless she was asleep, for a while. So far it seems to be working, and the impression she has of me as an ever-computing Mom is fading into the background. Now when she pretends to be me, she says, "I'm Mommy! I'm driving!" (is that even better? hm.)

Little Peeps

Nope. Not the marshmallow kind.

We have real actual chicks! I've wanted chickens for some time now, but we just finally got ourselves together enough to do it. We got baby chicks on Wednesday, and Seville is totally enamored of them (as am I. I mean, really, who wouldn't be?)

They're really unbearably cute. They are so soft and fuzzy and weigh about as much as a paperclip and do nothing but peep and poop all day. Believe it or not, the constant pooping is a commodity I was looking forward to. I want the fertilizer. But obviously I'll be even more excited about eggs, when they come. It will be a while yet.

In the meantime, we need to find names for them (which means we can't eat them, as I understand it. You can't eat something that has a name.). Our neighbor, who has long teased us about our cat's name (Richard Parker - after the tiger in "The Life of Pi" - we always use both the first and last name, as in the book) says he fully expects sophisticated first and last names for the chickens as well. We'll see.

New York City - Auntie x11

My sister, who lives in Manhattan, just had a baby. She's sooooo cute and tiny! Dutiful aunt that I am trying to be, I went out to visit her. I didn't bring a camera because Delta charges for every bag (even your first one! jerks!), and so I was trying to cram the trip into a carry-on. (My sister gave me a hard time all weekend about how I looked like a tourist with all my multi-purpose clothes and shoes - there is apparently no worse insult in Manhattan. Like how in Germany the worst thing you can do is call someone a pig-dog. oooooooh.)

Anyway, there are a total of two pictures of me in New York, both taken from my brother-in-law's cell phone, so the quality is great, as you'd imagine. This one is in some fancy hotel where we asked if we could change a diaper...

And this one holding the baby in the Theater District before bidding my sister and her hubby farewell for the evening. (They went to a Broadway show, while I took the baby back home via subway and bus and took care of her until they got back.)

I didn't really do anything New York-ish while I was there. It would have been more or less the same if we'd been in some po-dunk town in Iowa (sorry, Iowans). But Manhattan is definitely its own thing. We were running errands one day and I went to pick something up at the drugstore. I'm crossing the street to the Walgreens when I look up and realize I'm on Times Square. Everyone around me is dressed up, hustling and bustling, taking pictures, full of energy. Meanwhile I'm here just buying diapers. Funny.

Kids' Questionnaire

This little questionnaire has been floating around my extended family for a few weeks. You can get pretty hilarious answers from kids when you ask them questions about their mom. Anyway we finally took the time to ask Seville the questions. She's a little young for this, and we skipped some of them, but some of what she said was pretty cute. Jared did the asking, while I was sitting there:


1. What is something Mommy always says to you?

“Um.... [gasp!]... that’s MY chair!!!” [she made me get out of her chair before we continued]

2. What makes Mommy happy?

“I make mommy happy.”

3. What makes Mommy sad?

“The bunny makes mommy sad.” [there was this Easter Bunny in the room we had been playing with. I think she was just searching for something to say, since obviously I'm NEVER sad.]

4. How does Mommy make you laugh?

“...um... yeah..”

[Asked again, in different ways]

“...um... the bunny... [laugh]... um... tickle me on my tummy.”

6. How old is mommy?

Uh.. 2

7. How tall is mommy?

Seville addressing Daddy: “Um... you make mommy taller and taller.”

Daddy: “Oh really?”

Seville addressing Mommy: “Mommy... do you... daddy makes you taller and taller?”

8. What is your mommy's favorite thing to do?

“She likes to do me if I will be gone in the toilet.”

Mommy: “...uh...what was that, will you say that again?”

Seville: “you won’t put me in the toilet.”

Mommy, laughing: “That’s true. I won’t.”

11. What is your mommy really good at?

“Mommy is really really good at to me.”

12. What is your mom not very good at?

“Um... She...She’s not getting the bunny.”

13. What does daddy do for work?

“Um... he drives.”

13. What does mommy do for work?

“She drives too.”

14. What is your mommy's favorite food?

“Um... salad.”

17. What do you and mommy do together?

“Um... we are gonna make things.”

20. How do you know that mommy loves you?

“She loves somebody.”

[Daddy asks the question several ways, trying to get a response, and eventually Seville, understanding that we must want her to say something different, gets creative:]

“She bites me in the morning.”

Easter & Fake Easter

So I got this hat at an estate sale last summer. I thought it was to die for, and it fits Seville, so it was to be her Easter Hat for this year. The rest of her outfit was made to match, including the organza silk shawl.

Here she is enthusiastically running around looking for Easter goodies.

And taking a break to devour a peep.

And swinging, as she is wont to do every time we step foot out of doors.

The funny thing is, none of these pictures is really of Easter. We staged a fake Easter today (which was beautiful) because actual Easter Sunday was a day of torrential rains and cold. After taking Seville's dress off for her nap last week, I couldn't bear to make her wear it again for the hunt afterward, lest she freeze. We used the same easter eggs (she's 2. She doesn't know the difference ;). We even used the same real, dyed eggs. Are those edible after a week? I'm scared)

Here are the rest of our pictures, for those interested:

Seville Thinks Cows suck on Pacifiers

Here is a picture from one of her favorite books.

One day, I was reading to her and she pointed at the bull and said, "it have a fafoo!" ("fafoo" is her word for pacifier.) It took me a second to realize what she was talking about, but I looked at her little face (she was sucking on a pacifier herself), then back at the picture, and laughed and laughed.

Now anytime she sees a cow picture in a book, she thinks it is sucking on a pacifier.

Here, finally are our pics of our trip to Hawaii.

"What?!" your saying. "You went to Hawaii?! When did this happen?"

I know. It was sort of last minute. We'd been saving/planning for a trip to Mexico for a long time - the idea being to use our grandparent's timeshare and Seville's passport (that we got when she was an infant - at expedited prices - for a Spain trip that didn't happen - I didn't want to feel like the passport was a total waste), and to go before she turned 2 so we wouldn't have to buy her a plane ticket. The Mexico thing didn't work out, and like dummies we couldn't get ourselves together during the holidays to plan a trip in time. So we went the week AFTER she turned 2 and had to buy her a ticket anyway. Oh well. Despite the fact that she didn't sleep on either flight (8+ hours on a plane, through naptime one way, into midnight the other!) she was totally sweet and fun. I couldn't have been more delighted to have her along the whole time.

Birthday Photos

Here are the rest of the pics from Seville's birthday - and a couple from Jared's and mine too.

2!

Happy Birthday to the sweetest, most dear thing on the planet, my little Seville!

Birthday flowers from Uncle Bryce.
I put her hair in ponytails for the first time ever. It made me giggle over her cuteness, but made me sad too. It's such a "little girl" thing, which made me see that she is undeniably no longer a baby. I can't believe she's growing up so fast (yeah, no other parent has ever said that before)

Singing the Birthday Song (she actually blew out her own candles. It took her a few tries to get the second one. What does this mean for wishes? Is she hosed?)

Seville does this face now every time you point a camera at her. Oh well.
(hey!... I just realized maybe I should get a camera out every time I need to brush her teeth! there's an idea!)

I made her this blanket for her birthday with my new sewing machine. It's that suuuper sickly soft fuzzy material. I figured she wouldn't let go of it for the next couple of years. She liked lying on it and under it as a plaything until it was time for bed, at which point she promplty rejected all my hard work and loving labor in favor of the old raggety thing from Target that she's had since she was born. Figures.

It's all going so fast, this child thing. I'm lost in amazement, and practically drowning in adoration of her.

I'll post an album of birthday pics soon for the die-hards who want to see it all. Check back.

Holiday Slideshow

Pictures of our holidays, for those who want more.

Happy Christmas

(click image to see large version)

Happy Snowy Sunday!

This is what our day has been like so far! Church was canceled, so
we're just playing in snow and drinking hot chocolate and listening to
Christmas music. Hope you're having fun stuck at home too (if you
are)!