Week in Review

It was a pretty tame week/weekend for us. Nothing major happened, except for the fact that Annaliese waved bye for the first time, even accompanying it with a "buh", and that Ian successfully poured milk into his bowl of cereal and got his coat on all by himself. We spent our time hanging out in the house and being completely lazy. Which means I have to get a lot accomplished in these next few days before the holiday. I stopped being lazy long enough to make a little something on the sewing machine, but tis the season for secrets, so it won't be revealed until later. On to the pictures:

After church today Ian said he wanted to color when he got home. He drew a picture of Marlena, Noah, and Walter (in Noah's arms). He refused to pose in the picture himself, though.


Ian also enjoyed his first cup of hot cocoa for the season this week. He's had one every day since, though sometimes he just eats the marshmellows out of them.


Annaliese is really displaying her independence at meal time, wanting to feed herself. We started Cheerios this weekend and had bite-sized carrots and bananas, too. She loves to eat!


And she loves to make noise. The xylophone has become one of her favorite toys. Perhaps she'll follow in my footsteps.

Reflection on the weekend

So I didn't accomplish everything I intended to this past weekend, but I do know that without posting that list to my blog, practically nothing would have gotten done on it. It forced me to think about the purpose of everything I was doing; Is this something I can cross off- if not, is it worth not crossing something off? By Sunday night I was pooped and didn't care about crossing things off, but oh, how it helped on Friday night and Saturday. So don't be surprised if you see another lengthy list in future weekends.

Here are some things the list didn't capture:
It snowed here Friday night (about 2 inches) and Ian was jumping up and down with excitement. He asked me if he still had mittens and wanted to know where the parts to the snowman were. Granted, by the time he got outside the next day, it was mostly gone, but he still got to enjoy it for a bit.

On Sunday I went to the quilt show at Lauritzen Gardens. They had some of the smaller quilts interspersed in their chrysanthmum show, and others on display in the adjoining room. The quilts all had to be nature themed. There was one quilt there that was entirely one sheet of fabric, but not a cotton. It had a metallic sheen to it and had the most amazing quilting on it.

My Two Monkeys

Baker's Assistant

Fascination

Forcing Myself to Get it Done! (edit Sun. morning)

I have had a mental to-do list for the last, oh.... 5 weeks. I just keep pushing the list to the next weekend, and when that weekend shows, I do a bit of it, but not enough (insert time on the computer, watching tv, etc), and promise I'll do it after work on Monday, only to push it to the weekend again. Enter me blogging about it, so that hopefully the 5 people or so who read my mundane writings will ask me this weekend how things are going, or will see me on Facebook and force me to get off. So, here's my list for the weekend (red is a must, green is an it'd be nice...)

Friday Night:
Clean the kitchen (sweep, mop , scrub, etc)
Finish freezer meals: 90% finished
Make some baby food peas are done
Find patterns for baby gifts

Saturday:
Pick up Darrin's Christmas present (thank you Craig's list)
Avoid playing with Darrin's Christmas present (yes, he's getting it early)
Meet Meeghan for lunch (YEAH!) I even ran into her again later at the mall :)
Shop at Younkers (send me your Christmas list now)
Shop at Target (I guess I could shop for Christmas here, too)
Install new car seats assembled, but not instlled
Get fabric for baby gifts
Sew fabric baby gifts
Vaccuum, dust
Laundry (UGG!) five loads down, 3 to go...
Clean bathrooms (Double UGG!) 50% done
Book Annaliese's pictures

Sunday:
Play bells at church (YEAH!)
Eat ham balls for lunch with great friends (YUM!)
Go to the Botanical Garden to see the quilt show
Sew!!! (I have really lacked all motivation in this department lately...)
Figure out Christmas lists

Surprise Visitor

I got a phone call today from my Uncle Dan that he was stopping in Omaha for the night and wanted to get together. I don't get to see him much, as he lived in Michigan most of my childhood. Now he drives semi, though. We met up with him and had a great time at supper talking about kids and catching up on family. Ian even got to tour the semi- he turned us down when we asked if he wanted to sleep in it. He was impressed that he was hauling Kit-Kats, as Ian had just had one from his Halloween bucket for a snack after school. I hope Uncle Dan has the chance to stop by again for supper on his way through town.

Happy Halloween

from both my Buzzes- Buzz Lightyear and Buzz the Bumblebee

Fun in the Leaves

I love this time of year. It's perfect weather outside and there's so much to do. Today we tackled the leaves in the yard. Granted the trees are still 50% full of leaves, but it was too nice of a day not to do something outside. It was Annaliese's first time experiencing the leaf pile, and she wasn't very keen on it. Ian, however, had a BLAST. I think I snapped 100 pictures of our time outside. And Ian was so creative out there. It is so neat to see him pretending. Ian may have something against the feeling of slimy stuff on his hands, and so I was worried how he'd be towards the texture of the leaves, but he absolutely loved playing in them. My normally timid boy was no where to be found. Instead he was running full speed into the leaves, chasing Darrin to throw them at him, and allowing himself to be almost completely covered by them. Thank goodness dinner wasn't ready as early as I expected, or we may have had trouble getting Ian inside! Here's just a few of the pictures I shot.

Ian's Jack O'Lantern

Last night we went to the annual pumpkin carving party over at Marlena and Noah's house. After some of Noah's special chili, we headed outside to carve and eat smores. The weather was perfect; there have been some years it has been downright frigid, but this year was great. When I asked Ian what he wanted his pumpkin from Pooley's to look like, he said he wanted it to have a mean face. I asked Ian what that looked like, so he showed me what he wanted.

Ian's Mean Face

In years past, Ian has always been willing to dig into his pumpkin, but lately he doesn't like anything on slimy or slick on his hands, including paint, and now apparently pumpkin goo. After the first initial feel, this was as close as he was willing to get.

So, we took an alternative route, I scraped the insides loose and he would flip the pumpkin and dump it out.

I am most definitely not an artist, but thankfully Noah is really good in that department. After he drew on the mean face, Ian sat down and helped me cut it out.

When we were all finished, he posed with his mean face and his jack.