Morning Read-Aloud
Aug 29th, 2011 by ECM
Hair…or Not
Aug 27th, 2011 by ECM
When your baby sister is basically bald, you need to make up for it by double hair accessorizing.
Playing With Toys
Aug 26th, 2011 by ECM
It’s such a fun stage!
Mornings at Our House
Aug 25th, 2011 by ECM
Tommy’s personal two-woman fan club
sisters just hangin’ out in the kitchen
Richard Scarry is best enjoyed together
Say, “I love Susie!”
hot afternoon, voices clamoring for the hose, suits on, toddler waddling after her big brother, water…
…early bath before dinner…
Theology, Tommy-Style
Aug 23rd, 2011 by ECM
So we’re starting to memorize the gospel of Mark. We’ve been working on 1:6-7:
Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.”
Derek spent a while last week explaining what “worthy” means and what John is saying about Jesus in this passage. We reviewed the passage today…
Emily: So what does John the Baptist means when he says he’s not worthy?
Tommy: He can’t bend down to untie Jesus’ sandals. He can’t bend because of the belt around his waist.
A New Hutch
Aug 23rd, 2011 by ECM
One of my biggest frustrations this month has been that we’ve downsized a room and are now trying to find a way to distribute our office stuff between the family room and our room. When you have an office that just serves as a guest room in a pinch, you can have messy plastic file cabinets and baskets overflowing with papers and just shut the door and not care. But I want our family room to be tidy and welcoming–and I don’t want the kids getting into all our random computer stuff/files/cords/etc! So I’d been looking around for more than just another book shelf for this “office” side of the family room, and last week, I found this ikea piece for a “mere” $450 and this Crate and Barrel one that I liked better for “just” $1300…and decided that I wasn’t going to be able to do the hutch/bureau thing after all. Then Kristen called and sensibly reminded me to check craigslist. Because golly, we prefer cheap used stuff–it makes us less furious with the kids when they inevitably trash it. After a couple days of checking, I found this in our price range. And the lady delivered it yesterday for just an extra $10.
The only think I’m not super excited about is the glass doors–I know they’ll be covered with fingerprints nonstop, and my well organized bins of school and art supplies look pretty messy from the side, but all in all, I’m pretty happy. My cookbooks have room to spread, I can get my magazine basket off the floor and out of reach, the record player has a new home (we repurposed its old stand to use in our bedroom), the records are safe behind a door that we can safety latch shut so that Tommy isn’t pulling out Keith Green and Jerry Vale and strewing them about the house, the random office stuff is organized and hidden from view in the drawers, and the bottom drawer serves as a home for our plethora of coloring books and crayons. Tommy’s oversized coloring books even fit nearly out of sight underneath! I ran out of kitchen drawers for my placemats, so they’re hanging out above the records, and I even have a nice little mantle for some of our family pictures (I think the tall ones will be moving once we hang pictures on the wall above).
So until my mom comes to help make the final push, I’m going to concentrate on this one little spot of organization and choose not to focus on the chaos surrounding it!
New (School) Year’s Resolutions
Aug 22nd, 2011 by ECM
Classes at Pepperdine officially start this week. Since we’re on an academic calendar, we decided to make our new year’s resolutions at the beginning of the school year. Mine are a bit enormous, in keeping with the size of our new state!
1) Type up all my college notes and throw away the notebooks–Adrielle totally inspired me to get our boxes of college notes into digital format. They bought a scanner to do theirs, but Derek pointed out that typing up my notes would serve three purposes: 1) Give me something to do before I have friends, 2) Give me a bit of intellectual stimulation while I’m at home all day with no friends, and 3) Get rid of some of the clutter crowding our garage. I’ve been intending to reread my college notes ever since graduation, because it’s amazing how much better you understand things after four years of quality education. This is my chance. I’ll post updates! (So far I’ve gotten through Sept. 6, 2000 of Dr. Calvert’s Western Civ.)
2) Be more creative in how I serve vegetables to the family. (I know this resolution is neither specific nor measurable, but our attempt to do this specifically through a CSA turned into a real burden with a new baby, so I’m going to be vague and give myself grace to serve microwaved frozen green beans on nights when three kids overwhelm me!) Hopefully I’ll find some good cookbooks at the library…when I find the library…
3) Write a book on children’s literature. This one was not my idea. Derek and I have talked and blogged so much about our philosophy of children’s literature that he thinks I’m well on my way to writing a book about it. Another thing for me to do before I make friends, you know, because I obviously need to fill all that free time in my life right now.
4) Train for a 5k (me) and triathlon (Derek). Last time I tried to do this, I got pregnant about four weeks into the training plan and had to quit due to extreme morning sickness. Not sure how much I’ll be able to exercise vigorously while nursing (it really affected my milk supply the first two times), but we’re giving ourselves until next spring or summer to turn into fit Californians. Plus the only place we can fit the treadmill is in our bedroom, so we’ll have no excuse!
5) Take a photography class to learn how to use my camera (the one I’ve had for over three years). This is kindof a dual goal because I’ve actually set up a series of rewards for every 5 lbs of the 40+ lbs of baby weight I need to lose. A photography class is my 10 lb reward, and after that is a new lens. (A trip to England is my ultimate reward. I think Derek said yes because he knows the chances of me getting back to pre-Tommy weight are slim to none. But a girl needs to dream, right?)
Susanna at Four Months
Aug 19th, 2011 by ECM
She’s four months old (but zero years, as Tommy clarifies whenever I tell anyone her age)!
It’s been a pretty rough past month for Susie. She hates her carseat with a passion. She cries whenever she’s in it, and she won’t sleep in it or transfer from sleeping into it. I’m actually thinking of moving her out of her carrier early and into a convertible (ironic, because she weighs so much less than the others that she could stay in it size-wise for a lot longer).
Her preference for being on her tummy is marked–she sleeps there, likes to be carried with pressure there, and spends much of her awake time there.
Her sleeping schedule has been pretty messed up with the move, but I think she’s settling into two 3 hour naps and about 11 hours of sleep overnight. She generally only eats at 6:30 am, 11:30 am, 4:30 pm, and a dream feed around 10:30 pm. I try to nurse her before she goes down at 7ish, but she’s often too sleepy. Stress has seriously been messing with my milk supply, and we’ve had to resort to using up the rest of my freezer stash and trying a couple bottles of formula on particularly hungry days. I’ve been working really hard this week to get my production back up, so hopefully I can start saving up some extra again soon.
Size-wise, she’s mainly in 3-6 months, especially now that we’re back to cloth diapers. She’s still in the smallest setting of her cloths and in size 1 disposables.
Susanna is starting to play with things! Her feet are fun, dresses are fun, and so are hanging toys (when her siblings don’t take them away). She likes swinging for limited periods of time, gazing up at the mirror above our swing. She loves practicing standing, and she really loves taking “airplane rides” (though her super drool makes it less pleasant for us!). She’s been interested in looking at books with the big kids, too. If I put her down on the quilt and one of them is around, she’s happy. If they leave her, she’s in the depths of despair. She can scoot herself forward on her tummy now, so if I’m not careful, I’ll find her off the front of her play quilt, exhaustedly burrowing her face in the carpet.
This month’s photo shoot was hard. I tried Av settings at first, and that was just an exercise in frustration as she moved constantly, and I messed myself up more trying to adapt for it. Back to auto for me until I’ve had some more practice with static objects!
