Dancing Queen [18 months]

 

 

Miss Em is 18 months! How blessed we are to have such a smart, lively, funny girl in our lives. We should call her goldilocks because look at those blond curls! Maybe we have a future in shampoo ads. 

 

Dance class is in our near future because girlfriend loves to get down!  If she hears a few beats, she'll stop whatever she's doing and start bouncing around.  Makes my heart so happy.

 

She's making new sounds daily. She can tell you when she needs to be changed and just went in the potty for the second night in a row! Her words are currently limited to please, ball, help, more, hello/yellow, and hi, but I can tell she's just on the brink of talking up a storm.

 

She just started in the Toddler 2 room with her teachers Ms. Linda, who watched Big E when he was a baby, and Miss Carissa, who watched him in the school age room.  It's really nice to feel such a sense of family at our day care. Her best buddy is Sutton.  He likes to dance too.

 

These pictures were the hardest to get.  She cannot seem to stay still for as long as it takes for a flash to go off on my camera. 

 

Em loves her stuffed animals - especially her pink sock monkey.  She loves her big dog Padre even more. He gets daily hugs from his little sis.  And then there's her other big brother...

Em loves Big E SO much! She wants to do everything he is doing and vice versa.  These two are my heart and soul.  I am glad they will always have each other.

I love my babies.

Rainy Monday Run

After consuming more food than one person should this weekend, I was determined to run a bit of it off this morning.  I woke up to drizzling rain and decided to go for it. It was the maiden voyage for my new Petzl Tikkina 2 Headlamp.  Surprisingly I felt less like a freight train than I thought I would with that light on my forehead.  It helped me dodge potholes and puddles, but the best part was knowing that cars could actually see me (always a good thing).  I didn't get as soaked as I thought I would, and as an added bonus: you run faster in the rain!  Two 10-minute miles in the books!

Freight train comin'!

My weight has been all over the place lately.  We're talking 4 pound fluctuation up, down, and back up.  This week my goal is to get it back down for good. I read a doc about not eating back your workout calories, so I am going to try that.  It makes sense really, and it abandons the notion that "I worked out, now I can eat what I want".  I am also going to lay off the wine this week and see if it helps (duh).

My Halloweenies

Halloween was such a fun day this year! It started off with a work lunch party, which included a scavenger hunt around downtown to come up with our own spooky story.  However we got a little sidetracked with a Tigger/Astronaut dance-off in the street (Tigger totally took this one.)

Our spooky story isn't much to repeat, but it did end with us tying up our building security guards.  Isn't it a bit worrisome that the only two security guards in our building agree to being tied up together by a bunch of characters on Halloween?  You just can't say no to Tigger.

I left work early to go to Big E's "book character party" at school (when was the last time you read a book about ninjas?)  It was cute to see him interact with his classmates.  I had a breakthrough realization about why he is so wound up and talking nonstop when he comes home from school.  I watched him in his class all tensed up while half of the other first graders are talking at him in full volume.  Like his mom and dad, he's not a large group type of person, so I could see it building up in him and then when he gets home he must let it all out.  I'll try to be more understanding now when he talks my ear off. I couldn't resist asking the three girls at his table if he was a nice boy, and they all answered with an easy YES!  [sidenote: parent-teacher conferences were last week. E is reading at the level he should be, is excelling in math, and his teacher said he was a excellent kid and a role model for the other students! So proud.]

Ok, back to the Halloween recap. Next it was time to go home and get everyone cleaned up and dressed for trick-or-treating.  Here is a shot of my Captain America and little zebra.

Miss Zebra only lasted about four houses before retiring to her stroller with a sucker.  The Captain forged on for an hour or so longer. 

Why no, that is not our neighborhood you see in the photo.  Yes, we are those people who drive to your nice neighborhood with sidewalks and streetlights and friendly homeowners who give handfuls of candy.We get busted each year by a mom of one of E's classmates who will inevitably say "I didn't realize you lived so close to us!"  Um yeah we don't. Thanks for the candy!

And finally, I thought it would be fun to see the kids side-by-side at the same age in their zebra costume (five years apart).  Aren't they cute?  And also a good reminder for mama to not gain those 25 lbs back!

Happy Halloween 2012!

Monday morning injury & a fence

To the driver who ran a Monday morning jogger off the road and didn't slow down after she fell: I hope you do a lot of good deeds today to make up for that!  Otherwise Karma's a sneaky b*tch.

Ugh. Yeah, so that's one way to start the week off.  The worst part was running the mile back home. This is where you earn your running badges, people.

Guess it's time to purchase that headlamp so I can see the side of the road when it's dark out. It's a good look, right?  I bought this blinky thing but it's not nearly as bright as I'd hoped.  The battery may be about dead, but not sure it's worth buying new button cells for it. Oh wells. I'll be looking like a coal miner on my upcoming runs!

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This weekend we started our first farm project for the new house: a fence! If you want to build in the country, you gotta keep the cows out! 

Isn't it purty? Of course the hubs did most of the hard labor, but I helped hold the hole driller and wire the fence to the posts.  See the diagonal post in the middle?  Hubs just marched down to the creek and cut down a tree for that.  Love it! 

The land should be officially divided in late November, then it's time to start digging a hole!  We are planning on officially listing our house with a Realtor in January with an aggressive price and hopefully the timing will work out well for us. Big leaps of faith!

will run for wine

My toe numbness has disappeared for the time being.  After staying off of it for a week, it started to feel better. I met with a podiatrist and he said it was an inflamed nerve and to ice it after running. He also gave me some anti-inflammatory pills (which I haven't taken yet). "Inflamed nerve" sounds much better than the "damaged nerve" term I had in my head.  I've been on a few 3-mile runs since then and thankfully no issues so far!

I have been hovering around 173-174 for a month or more now (see - I told you this was my happy weight), and I'm ready to get down to the 160s.  That means...

• Healthy salads for lunch this week
• Run or 30 Day Shred each day
• Water, water, water!
• No wine.  Ha just kidding!  I'll run an extra couple miles for my wine!

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It's been a beautiful fall so far. Last weekend we tricked the kids into thinking we were going to a pumpkin patch and instead stopped by a winery. Ok, so we went to the pumpkin patch too. Gotta have something for everyone! I really love my little family.

dinosaurs & money

I finally got a video of Em acting out her favorite song!




And this is what happens when I turn on the video function on my phone and give it to big E. I'm thinking he needs his own podcast series.

fireside chats

This girl is going to be trouble, I can tell.