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Tuesday, 03 November 2009

  • Treasure Hunter Extraordinaire

    As some of you know, I have taken a work-from-home job proof-reading textbooks for a small publishing company in Indiana. I received my first assignment in the mail today, a 473 page sociology textbook. My job? Check for spelling, grammar, and style consistency (also check the APA documentation for errors). I spent a couple of hours on it tonight, because Derek was working late (he didn't get home till 9:45pm!!!) and discovered that while reading textbooks to study for a test or answer homework questions is boring... reading them for typos is great fun! (Yes, I'm a nerd... if you weren't already aware of this, who are you and why are you reading my blog?)

    I described it the other night like a treasure hunt, and I'm gonna stand by that analogy. I told Derek that I'm glad I'm finding things to correct, because if I wasn't, I don't think I'd be enjoying myself as much :)

    In other news, I am within 50 pages (probably less) of finishing my fourth book. I wrote approximately 7 pages today and I am looking forward to finishing the book and getting to work on editing both books 3 and 4 and then starting work on my synopses for all 4 books. I have made the decision to actively start looking for an agent. (scary stuff) Seriously, it terrifies me, thinking about the possibility of 120 rejection letters...

    In less (but only slightly) scary news, being the mom of the cutest one year old on the planet is by far my favorite job. What Leiana is up to these days:
    She is eating table food (favorites include: mac and cheese, pizza, hot dogs, bananas, pears, peaches, cheese, scrambled eggs, cinnamon french toast, and french fries), drinking whole milk, and starting to have more inflection and variation to her babbling. She now consistently calls me "mommom," says "ah-duh" when she's finished eating and refers to Derek as "da-dee!" (she very much loves her Daddy). Whenever she hears/sees a dog she smiles, crouches down slightly and says, "oof oof." She also loves playing games. She is walking very steadily and likes to "stomp" around when she gets excited or is extremely happy about something. She "dances," which looks a lot like bouncing, when she hears upbeat music. She loves watching the intro song for "Hannah Montana" (yea, we really enjoy that show). She is still crazy about books and loves being read to as well as sitting and reading quietly to herself. She thinks being outside is the greatest thing ever and would probably live outside if I let her - the only thing that would make being outside even better in her eyes would be if I let her run around out there without shoes and socks. Bath time is, as ever, another favorite of hers. She is very independent, but also very sweet and snuggly. She will give you a hug if you ask for one, but she won't linger over it, as if she is saying, "I love you dearly, but I have other things to do... bye." She's our little explorer, and she's started getting pretty adept at climbing things, especially stairs. I think she is fascinated by stairs because we don't have many in/around our house. She loves to climb up the stairs on playgrounds... but she is not so sure about slides, she likes them if I take her down with me, but she won't attempt to go down them by herself.

    Leiana is a fantastic sleeper. Daylight savings has thrown us off a bit, but now she goes to bed at 7pm, gets her diaper changed and a couple of ounces of warm milk at 9-10 and then sleeps until 7-9 in the morning. She usually takes one 2-hour nap a day, although since DSL she's been getting up earlier (she was going to bed at 8pm and getting up around 9-10) and taking two 1-2-hour naps. We'll see if we get back to normal or not.

    Sorry I don't have any pictures to go with this post. Good night!

Tuesday, 27 October 2009

  • Growing

    I can't even believe how grown up my baby girl has gotten. I still think of her as being tiny, but then I look back at October 2008 pictures like this...



    and compare them to new October 2009 pictures like this:



    These two just melt my heart, I love them so much!

Thursday, 22 October 2009

  • The past year in pictures

    I'm stealing this idea from a friend whose little boy turned 1 today (Happy Birthday, Anderson!) We were almost in the hospital at the same time! They were coming in as we were leaving.

    October 20, 2008
    Look how tiny she was!



    Several days old



    1 month old



    2 months old
     


    3 months old



    4 months old




    5 months old (as a bonus, there's a shot of my brother and his fiancee! (she wasn't his fiancee then, but she is as of this past Sunday!)



    6 months old



    7 months old (remember her size relative to Pooh-Bear)



    8 months old




    9 months old



    10 months old



    11 months old



    And look at her now: 1 year old!




     


Tuesday, 20 October 2009

  • Currently
    Teach Me While My Heart Is Tender
    How Can I Glorify God
    see related

    One (continued)

    Happy Birthday to my sweet Leiana Arwen! I love you, little one.

    I can't believe my baby is one year old today! How did this happen? Derek and I had fun decorating last night and I will post pictures of the decor and the birthday girl later. Derek was warning me that if I decorate like this every year it will become expected, but I don't care. My parents were really great about making sure that there was always something about waking up on your birthday that set it apart and made it special, made it "feel" like it was your birthday, and I have no problem doing the same for my kids. I am also taking care to get video of important things today for family who can't be here to witness it themselves.

    Such as:
    Leiana's first glimpse of the purple and white streamers criss-crossing the family room. She kept looking up and trying to walk at the same time, it was cute, she kept falling over.
    Leiana's first interaction with the balloons in the family room. That was fun. They have continued to be a source of fun times today.
    A little bit of video of her and Hannah playing together. We had a mini-playdate with Hannah and Kristen this morning. We had been trying to get together last week, but L's runny nose preempted those plans.


    One of the cutest things today so far (that I didn't get on video camera) was Leiana giving little Hannah a hug. Hannah is 7.5 months old and just sitting up and Leiana decided that she was great fun and started patting her back softly. This is generally a precursor to a hug, which I was telling Kristen about, and sure enough, a minute or two later, Leiana laid her head on Hannah's back (her version of hugs lately). It was adorable. I missed getting this on tape, :( bummer.

    That's all I've got for now, I'll chronicle the rest of the b-day events later (cake, presents, etc) :)

    P.S. The pumpkin pie was even better after a day in the refrigerator!


    Birthday continued:

    We had a long, busy, fun-filled day. Jocelyn came over in the afternoon and we played outside for a while. This was fun because in the morning I got to see my little girl looking SO grown up and big compared to Hannah, and then later I was reminded of how little she still is in comparison with Jocelyn :) it was fun. They also had fun playing with L's b-day balloons together.

    Jocelyn left around 4:15 and then Gma and Gpa-pa Schmidt came over for presents and cake. Leiana was a little confused about what she was supposed to do with the presents, and at first seemed perfectly content to just focus on the first present she opened. However, after a little bit she got the hang of it and got very excited about unwrapping things and pulling them out.

    She got: two outdoor play balls, bubbles, a doll (her first dolly) and blanket, a new outfit, and a winter jacket and snow pants. She really enjoyed all her new stuff... and was very excited about the wrapping paper and the boxes.

    Then we had cake. This was fun. I made Leiana a Funfetti birthday cake with white butter cream icing and decorated it with purple gel and put a 1 candle on it. Apparently this is the "wrong" cake to make for a first birthday... but it went with my purple and white theme (about as coordinated as I get), so I don't care. I like funfetti cake.

    I helped Leiana blow out her candle and then cut her a piece of cake and put it on her high chair tray. She knew exactly what to do with it. She grabbed it with both hands and stuffed it (fairly successfully) into her mouth! :) It was hilarious and adorable.

    Today (10-21) she had her 1 year well-baby doctor check up. She had to get her finger pricked and some blood drawn :( she did NOT like that. I think she was more upset about being made to sit still with her hand unable to move than she was about the finger prick. Then she had to get 3 shots :( she was one super unhappy baby at the end of the visit. We came home and she took a nice long nap and now seems to be over the trauma of this morning. We played out on the newly finished deck with her new balls and the bubbles, and now we are inside and she is playing with her new doll and watching the garbage truck picking up our trash. :)

    Leiana is now: 19 lbs 4 oz (17th percentile)
    She is: 28.5 inches long (24th percentile)


    That's all I have for now. Hope your week is going well, dear reader. Leiana says to tell everyone "thank you" for the birthday wishes! :)

Monday, 19 October 2009

  • Autumn is my favorite time of year

    and really, what's not to like? Cool days, sunshine and rain, beautiful colorful nature to look at, awesome upcoming holidays and family time, my birthday, my daughter's birthday (tomorrow!!!! AH!), (actually, pretty much my entire family's birthdays occur in the Fall), and, let's face it, Autumn has the best smells and foods. Pumpkin pie, chocolate chip cookies, apple pie, cinnamon spice, apple cider, hot chocolate, maple syrup, gingerbread, pumpkin bread, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes.

    Speaking of which, last night, I attempted my first totally from scratch pumpkin pie. Yes, I started with a whole pumpkin (two of them, actually, it ended up that the first one I chose wasn't big enough) and dug out the inside. This may shock some of you who know me well enough to know that I've always maintained that I hate pumpkin pie. Well, I do. However, a couple of years back, when Derek and I were still living in Indiana and I was teaching at King's, a good friend of mine made pumpkin pie from scratch and I had a piece, because she worked so hard on it and I didn't want to hurt her feelings and discovered that while I really don't like pumpkin pie from a CAN, I really like pumpkin pie from SCRATCH! Ever since then, I've been itching to try my hand at it myself, but been daunted by the enormity and just the general unknown-ness of the task. Well, yesterday was gray, a little drizzly and somewhere around 45 degrees outside, (I was actually quite chilly walking to my car through the church parking lot after church without my jacket on) so I thought it was the perfect Fall-ish day to be ambitious with Autumn-type food :)

    In the end (I do have pictures, will post them later), using this recipe I had a very nice looking pie: a from scratch crust that I'm a fan of (amazingly enough, since I'm usually not a big fan of pie crust either), and maple whipped cream (yum!), a yummalicious pumpkin pie on top of a pecan/gingersnap secondary crust layer and all together it was a very yummy experience. One I would even consider offering to a guest. Derek was a fan. :)

    Now, I need a real food processor, because the only beef I had with the pie was that my tiny food processor does its very best, but the pie filling still had a few (very few) tiny lumps in it. But for a first try, it still tastes quite good.

    I took your advice, Anna, and ate something yummy :)


    EDIT:
    For those of you not on facebook, something else super exciting happened yesterday :) My brother got engaged!!!!! :) Congrats to them both!