Thanksgiving and on to Christmas

Maybe I should let him cry for a few minutes more often! He went back to sleep pretty quickly. Anyway, that post was a bit abbreviated about Thanksgiving - we really had a great time with family and amazing food (as always, Mom!) and of course, Legos. And Joshua did great on the way down - he slept pretty much the whole first two hours, and then was awake for awhile and only grumpy for about 20 minutes before he fell asleep for the last hour or so. We had such a good time and didn't want to leave!

So now...this week we've been faced with preparing for the owner coming on Monday to see the property (meaning pressure-wash the buildings, pull out all the dead plants and bushes, trim all the hedges, clean all of the stairwells so they are free of cobwebs, and a billion other things that Nathan has done/needs to do) and get to know us in our apartment (meaning a HUGE overhaul on the condition of our apartment). Along with the owner, the 2nd in command of our company (so our boss' boss) is coming too. He is really really strict about policies and procedures - he actually sent us a letter in the mail (using 41 cents, I might add) to tell us that an envelope we'd sent the company was 7 cents short on postage, so the company had to pay it, and that it was NOT acceptable, and the money adds up, etc. Seems like a phone call about 7 cents would have been better than a 41 cent letter. Anyway, since our home is our office, we don't have anywhere to sit and chat with them other than our home. So far I've done a lot of organizing of the desk area, a very extensive dusting of everything in the living room, and I'm trying to get all of our Christmas stuff up - it's getting pretty festive in here. So let's talk about Christmas - it'll be a busy enough weekend - I need to take a mental break from it right now!

I love Christmas, and I love decorating for Christmas. Eventually we'll get a real tree (I LOVE having a real Christmas tree), but we don't have room this year. We had one small two foot tree that I've had for years, and we have that up, but we decided to get a 4 foot fake tree to put on the table in the corner of our living room. We've got lights on it, an angel on it, and a grand total of 8 ornaments. We have about 7 billion ornaments, so the process of choosing which get to go on it this year will be challenging. For the last two years, we've used Nathan's parents' old fake tree, which worked just fine, but we don't have room for it, either. Anyway, I'm enjoying getting stuff set up for Christmas. Actually Christmas decorations got me to start putting holes in the wall (gasp!), so hopefully I'll keep up with that. I don't really want to still have naked walls for our stressful guests on Monday.

Since Nathan's parents are going to Texas for Christmas (it would have been our year to be with them if we switch back and forth), we're going up to my parents' again, which is so great because they get to see Joshua again so soon! And we get to see them, of course. Another reason why a fake tree is good, since we'll be up there for almost a week.

We have a little chalkboard with "___ days til Christmas!" on it, and today I wrote 25! Tomorrow we start our advent calendars, and I'm very excited. We have a really cool log cabin one that we got last year and we need to unpack it today so it is ready to go for the start of advent tomorrow!

Ok well this is getting me all motivated to go unpack more Christmas stuff and do more decorating, so I think I'll do just that.

Thank you, other bloggers, for all the posting you're doing - it makes me happy to be updated on everyone's lives. Oh and I added a little poll on the side after being inspired by Tracy!

Thanksgiving

I was telling myself, "Ok I'll wait until Kris posts, and then I'll post..." but then Kris posted and Tracy posted and I still didn't post! Well now I'm back to the blogging world. It's been a crazy week, but first I'd like to write about how much fun Thanksgiving was.
We drove up to Brier on Tuesday night, and we stayed until Friday evening. It was so much fun! The drive up was rough because Joshua cried for about 2 hours. He got a tooth the next morning, so we're thinking probably that was the problem.
Mom set up a playroom in their new house, and I had no idea how excited I would be to see it. I spent a LOT of time in the playroom while we were there - mostly playing Legos. It had been a very very long time. Here are a couple of photos. Nathan did much of the work on the space shuttle, and I did much of the work on the platform. At first, Nathan tried finding the exact right pieces, but then gave up and we just found pieces that would fit when we couldn't find the right ones.



Wednesday night, Nathan and I went out on a date to Olive Garden while Mom babysat Joshua. Unfortunately we didn't get a lot of good pictures of the two of them together, but they had a great time. It was so nice for us to get to go out, and I think Grandma really loved her time with the baby!

Joshua was definitely not a big fan of going to sleep at night with all the exciting things going on - we had a hard time getting him to sleep before 9:30 when he usually goes to bed at 7:30 or so! He was a happy baby in the morning, though! And he got to spend some good times with Grandpa in the morning, too.


Here is the beautiful table before everyone showed up!


He had a great time eating with everyone else with his brand new Thanksgiving bib.

And here are some cousins that he had a whole lot of fun with!!

I made those last couple of descriptions pretty short cuz my dear little baby is crying in his crib, so I gotta go get him. He had a fairly good nap, though, and a very good one this morning. Ok I'll post again soon!

...like a baby

We used to take so many pictures of our fat little baby sleeping, but now - I would NEVER risk taking a picture of him sleeping because I am so grateful when he sleeps! Sorry for the massive amounts of pictures - this post took way too long because when you insert photos into a post, you can only do so many at a time...and then they get into a way weird order...so I had to go back and put them in the right order and that was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be and I accidentally deleted a couple pictures I didn't mean to, but that's ok.

no question

The cutest baby ever born.

new things

Joshua is learning so much every day. Today he played "where's the baby" (our form of peek-a-boo) in a different way than he has before. Months ago we were excited when he would pull the blanket off on his own when we played with him, but for the first time today, he was putting it over his face on his own AND taking it off. It was so so funny - hope to get a video of that! I went and bought new videos Tuesday night, so we'll be making more soon.

Another fun thing he is doing is clapping when he's happy. He started doing that on his own and we've been encouraging him by saying Yaaaay! every time he does it. He seems to be pretty stuck on mamamamama as his babble of choice lately...not making too many other sounds, but I don't really mind. Every time Nathan comes home for lunch or from work or from something in the evening, I'll say dadadadadada! and Joshua gets a big smile on his face and sometimes turns to wherever dada may be coming from. He loves it when dada comes home!

Joshy's been a little grumpy the last couple of days because the half a banana he had a couple days ago made his digestive system pretty uncomfortable, so no more bananas for awhile. He tried some turkey the other day and loves it! I wasn't sure what he'd think of it, since it is so different from the veggies and fruits he's used to, but he was very very interested in it and would have eaten more, but I was worried it might upset his stomach if he had too much right at first. I think the turkey was fine and that it was the bananas that upset him, but we'll see how he does the next couple of days with no bananas and a little more turkey. We chose turkey first so he'd be ready to go for Thanksgiving!

It's hard to know which things are genetic, but yesterday afternoon, I learned a painful lesson about one more trait that is genetic. Since Joshua has been so unhappy with all the blue and green and red (darn red) clothes he has, I decided after surveying the laundry yesterday, that the new pink onesies and burp cloths he has are a welcome addition to his fashionable clothing collection. *sigh* I bought a bunch of used clothes at a consignment store, but unfortunately the little red jogging suit that I put in with all the laundry had, in fact, never been washed before. Probably the tags that I cut off of it should have given that away. Nathan even asked me if it was ok to wash it, and I reassured him it would be fine. Ah well. At least it wasn't his blue baseball uniform that I turned purple or anything...now THAT would certainly be upsetting (ahem).

In other news, I've been pretty busy with stuff other than being at home lately - on Saturday night I chaperoned a stake youth dance. It was certainly a blast. Actually it wasn't bad at all, cuz Sarah was there to keep me company and we got to know each other more and bonded over our shared fears of first aid and health class. I'm glad she was there - we mostly sat behind the refreshments table the whole time, and unfortunately ate the refreshments the whole time. My favorite part of the night was something one of the teenage guys said. There were little paper cups in the chex mix, candy, pretzels etc. to aid in scooping out stuff onto plates, rather than just putting their grimy fingers in the food, and Sarah was explaining that to this guy. He looked quite insulted and reassured us with this fabulous statement: "Yo! I wash my hands every DAY!" I felt a whole lot better. I'm sure if ALL the kids there washed their hands every day (or maybe every other day...we don't have to be greedy here), we wouldn't need those paper cups. Man...that was good.

So that was Saturday night, and then I was at church again Sunday night for the Young Women in Excellence program where all the girls were talking about projects or experiences they'd done in each of the Young Women's values. That was fun - they did a good job. I'd made a pumpkin cake of sorts...it took forever to bake and the pecans on top were quite crispy, so it didn't end up working out as well as it was supposed to, but Nathan likes it and was glad when I brought most of it home.

Then Tuesday night I went to Relief Society Enrichment and got to hang out with a whole bunch of ladies from church, eat some good food, and learn how to make creme brulee and red velvet cupcakes. Delicious!

So Joshua and Nathan have been spending a lot of time together lately. Last night Nathan got to go to the gym, though, so that was good - as I well know, it's hard to spend every evening at home, so I'm glad he got to go work out.

My boss is coming in a few hours, which I'm not super excited about - have to get my monthly performance report. Oh well. Good times.

I think there was more I was going to write about, but now I can't remember. Joshua has been sleeping a long time - probably typing this will prompt him to start crying and wake up, though. ... ... wow - nope!

Nathan's home for lunch now - adios!

genius

So I mentioned before that during my first "Amanda time" at the cake place, I left my coat and didn't go back to get it for a week. So I went back to have some more Amanda time and some cake. I got my coat and felt silly with the employees looking at me..."oh THERE's the genius who left her coat here all week" and then settled down to some lemon cake and my book. About 40 minutes later, I finally took a look at the bill and pulled out my wallet...except I didn't have my wallet. I've forgotten my wallet before, but at stores where I've just had to leave something at the counter while I get my wallet, or just put it back. It's hard to put back the cake that i've already eaten. My waitress was helping people up at the counter for about a hundred years while I sat there worying about what she'd say. I'd texted Nathan and he called back, so i was planning on just going home and getting my wallet and coming back to pay for it. However, when I told the waitress what happened, she was like, "oh it's fine...it's on me...don't worry about it." I was mildly stunned, but she was very definite about it. Strangely I had a ton of change in my purse - over $3, so she said she'd certainly take that, but to not worry about it. I told her I'd be fine with driving home and getting it - that it'd probably take me 15 minutes. Anyway, she was very kind and I was very grateful. I thanked her a lot and told her if I came back next week and did the same thing, she'd know I was lying. She said if I do the same thing next week, she'll make me drive home and get my wallet. I will go back WITH my wallet and leave her a big tip AND bring my coat home. Then I'm planning to start going somewhere that doesn't cost about a billion dollars per piece of cake, even if the people working there are really nice.

Life

I was driving home from church tonight and I started thinking to myself about the last few years and how I keep thinking of them as transition time. So much "as soon as THIS happens, THEN..." Like once I get married, once I graduate college, once I get a "real" job, once we stop living in dorms, once we have a baby, once we aren't apartment managers anymore...I keep looking at where we're going, and I think I'm forgetting about where we're at. THIS is our life right now. Yeah it is a transition, we probably won't be apartment managing here in Salem forever (what a thought!), but I look around and think of other people as settled, when really they're finishing up school, or not in the "perfect" career, etc. etc. If I just keep thinking about where we'll go next, I'm not going to make the connections here that I'd want to - making close friends, putting time into our home, etc.

I think that a clear demonstration of this whole idea I'm thinking about is that we haven't put things on the walls in our apartment. I mean there are a couple things, but barely anything at all. Not in Joshua's room, not in our bedroom, not anywhere really. For one thing, we have always lived in college dorms before now, where we weren't supposed to put any holes in the wall, so that's part of it. Also, since we haven't lived anywhere where we had stuff up before, we don't have the like "Joshua's room" decorations (we didn't have a Joshua's room at our last apartment), or any specific spot that other pictures go. I think that once we do put that stuff up, it'll feel more like home. It does feel like home now, but the blank walls in our bedroom and Joshua's room especially really get to me. We need some stuff for his room! We have tons of photo frames, but then it's a matter of choosing from the billions of pictures. Well there's another goal I have - get a bunch of pictures developed so that we have them to put in the frames. Put those frames up on the walls and if I want to change the photos, do it later. They don't have to be perfect...any pictures I choose will be just fine if I like looking at them!

It's late. I was really hungry about an hour ago, and Nathan said I should go to bed cuz it's not good to eat right before bed (true), but I told him I can't go to sleep hungry. So for some reason, for the next hour I proceeded to not eat at all, but instead unload and reload the dishwasher, clean up the kitchen, fold and put away the towels in all the various locations they go, fold and put away/hang up the whites, sort the laundry into three more loads for tomorrow morning and put them in piles in front of the washer & dryer, and THEN I heated up two corn muffins and put some butter and honey on them, and had a cup of orange juice. Then I posted on here and now I'm going to go to bed!

Goodnight moon. Goodnight mush.

Another sneak preview

For those of you who check the photo calendar for updates, here's a sneak preview! Hopefully my husband won't mind.

Here is an example of the difference between playing with mommy...

...and playing with daddy. Joshua's face lights up whenever his dada walks into the room!
Here is Joshua modeling one of his new outfits.
And here he is modeling the hat daddy just made for him! Also, he is showing off the pears and oatmeal smeared all over his sleeve.

So I hope you enjoy those pictures. I sure do! I don't think you can see his tooth in any of them, though.

I'm still sick, which is really annoying, but I'm not exhausted anymore - just coughing and sniffling a lot still. It'll go away and boy will I be glad when it does. Today I got everything on my work to do list (13 things!) done by noon. That made me happy. Now on to other things that I need to get done or want to get done...like posting on my blog! I feel like I don't have a whole lot to say today. I left my pea-coat somewhere...it's quite a mystery as to where I left it. It may have been at the church barbecue on Saturday night...or maybe...::::time lapse of 10 minutes:::: I left it at the cake place I went to on Saturday afternoon!! I remembered that as I was typing, and looked up their number, and called them, and they said it's been there all week! I took my first "Amanda time" (other than the wonderful massage I got a few months ago) since Joshua was born. I went to Konditerei and had cake and hot chocolate and read Perelandra for about 45 minutes. I really enjoyed it. Nathan's parents and Clarissa were over at our apartment, though, so I was sad to leave them, but I'd planned it before I knew they were coming and I knew if I didn't do it, it might not happen again for who knows how long. I think it restored my sanity a bit. Nathan works out at the gym a few times a week, and goes and plays basketball some week nights at the church, and I was realizing that I don't have any time like that, but I didn't want to go work out or play basketball...or really anything active. I just needed some time to sit and relax and have something delicious to eat and read a good book. I've read Perelandra (by C. S. Lewis) probably 3 other times, but I love it very much, and I'm only going to read it during my "Amanda time," which hopefully will happen once a week or so. That'd be nice.

We're working on a schedule for Joshua - the pattern he is roughly falling into is waking up around 5:30 or so to eat in the morning, then sleeping til around 7:30 when Nathan gets up with him and eats his breakfast. Then Nathan brings him in to me and I feed him around 8:15ish. He's awake until about 10 when he takes a two hour (sometimes...when he does it's AMAZING) nap. Then he wakes up and plays until about 12:30 or so. Then I feed him vegetables and oatmeal or rice cereal and a teething biscuit or two (so far that's the only non-liquidy food he won't choke on or immediately throw on the floor). He's in his high chair for awhile, playing with the whisk or measuring spoons, or perhaps one of his own toys while I get dishes loaded/unloaded, make food, eat food, maybe make some of dinner. Then he gets his diaper changed, gets a bath, get into clean clothes, and generally is fairly tired so I breastfeed him briefly and he takes a nap around 2. This nap is tricky because he really resists it. I know he's tired because he'll fall asleep for awhile, but not want to be sleeping in his crib. Then he'll fall asleep for awhile and wake up soon after...but ideally he sleeps for an hour or so. Then he's awake until about 7 when he goes to sleep. He has another solid food meal in there sometime - we've been giving him fruit at first, and vegetables if he is still hungry after his fruit, and oatmeal or rice cereal. Going to bed at 7 is incredible, because just a month or two ago we thought he wasn't tired until 11 so that's when he was going to bed! Craziness.

Well he's been battling this nap for around an hour, so I'm going to go see if I can salvage any of it, or we're going to be stuck with a very sleepy, perhaps grumpy baby until this evening.

Joshua is an amazing baby, though, let me tell you.

Ok have a wonderful day - goodbye for now.

one more important tidbit

I just thought everyone would want to know how the scary butterfly's trip through the dishwasher went. This was awhile ago, so I apologize for not updating you earlier. Right after he emerged from the dishwasher, there was no frightening laughter at all, so I felt a little bad for ruining Joshua's toy. A few hours later, however, when I was putting the butterfly back in the toy bin, it gave a faint cackle, surprising me quite a bit. A couple days later and this butterfly is back to its normal frightening self. So in a way it's good, but I really wouldn't mind if I didn't hear it laughing once or twice all by itself some nights. Joshua does love the little critter, though, so that's good.

P.S.

Some of you may notice the time of this post and connect that I'm posting on my blog instead of being at church. This is true. I'm sitting here in my pjs and hooded sweatshirt, with my hood on, snuffling and trying not to swallow or cough much cuz my sore throat seems to be getting worse. No good. We had a church party last night and it was a lot of fun, but we probably shouldn't have stayed very long. We got home at like 7 or so and I was exhausted! I hate being sick. Ah well. Nathan took Joshua to church which I really appreciate. Joshua didn't notice daylight savings and decided he needed to eat at the regular time and get up at the regular time, which kind of threw us off this morning. I wonder if he'll adjust, or if he's just going to be on this schedule now for awhile.

On a side note - I haven't seen a centipede in years, and I have never seen one inside, so I was quite shocked this morning to see one slithering across our living room rug, next to Joshua's blanket he plays on! Yuck. I'm not sure how well centipedes can swim in toilet pipes, but I'm hoping not very well.

It should be a quiet day today for me - hope it is for everyone else.

Month by month

Here we go - baby Joshua at a few hours old:

Baby Joshua at 1 month:
Joshy at 2 months:
Mr. Baby at 3 months:
Sleepy Joshua at 4 months:
Joshua at 5 months:
My baby at 6 months:

And finally, Joshua the great at 7 months:

one little two little three little joshuas four little...oh just four