notable accomplishment this morning:

entertaining four children under the age of five while simultaneously feeding one six-month-old a bottle with one hand and another six-month-old mashed carrots with the other hand.

could i be a mother of six? perhaps. if i suddenly became ambidextrous. and wealthy enough to pay someone to clean my house.

Toddler heaven

Today we did just about everything on Abigail's list of happies:

• ate exciting strawberry-based concoctions for breakfast (strawberry shortcake), lunch (strawberries and corn), and dinner (waffles with whipped cream and strawberries)
• played in the sandbox for an hour (at a visiting teachee's house)
• made a "house" out of the freezer box
• played in the little toddler pool for an hour
• dug around in the garden and watered the plants/Abigail
• had a splishy-splashy bath
• read stories with Daddy before bed

It was a good day.

quicker post

I just have to post this before I forget:

Abigail and I were reading Hop on Pop (which has got to be one of my all-time least favorites, but hey, she was sitting still for half an hour of reading time, so I kept going), and we got to the page that said "We are all tall" and "we are all tall" with a picture of tall people and short people.

Abigail pointed to the tall people and said "Daddy!" and then to the short ones and said "Abigail!"

I thought that was very cute. (For those of you who don't know, Neil is 6'5", so he is indeed very tall).

She also got very excited when we went to Applebees to pick up a gift card (for our bishop who spent an afternoon drilling holes in our lawn) and informed me: "Dinnertime! Abigail high chair!"

She was not so pleased to leave, and was utterly unconvinced by my feeble protestations of "It can't be dinnertime--Daddy's not here." If a two-year-old can roll her eyes, she did it...

quick post

Last night we had our another vegetable-up-the-nose episode, but fortunately corn can be removed more easily with tweezers than peas. Thank goodness. We were up to our elbows in strawberries while Abigail finished up her dinner, and we thought we were going to have a merry jaunt to the ER. I sincerely hope she stops this "what else can I stick up my nose" phase soon, since the corn was apparently much more painful than the macaroni and cheese she experimented with last week.

Abigail also thinks that whipping cream is named "granma," thanks to my mother's serving her liberal helpings of aforesaid whipping cream on top of strawberries with a generous side of cake for lunch yesterday (this from the woman who ensured that we didn't know what Twinkies were until the age of 12). This morning she asked for "saw-berries and granma" for breakfast, and clapped her hands with glee when I relented and topped off the berries with a big dollop of cream.

Speaking of strawberries, I'm mostly done processing the 55 lbs (give or take what we ate for lunch yesterday) that we picked yesterday. I made 9 batches of jam and there are 10 quart freezer bags full of berries, so I think we'll freeze about half of what's left and then eat the rest this week. Yum.

Well...I have fifteen minutes before it's time to wake Abigail up and go do some power-of-attorney things for people we know in Utah who are applying for housing out here, and since I've spent her nap thus far in making 3 batches of jam, catching up on thank-you notes, and FINALLY uploading and ordering 298 photos from snapfish, I think I'm going to go have a brief rest. I must say, I don't think I felt half so exhausted all the time when I was pregnant with Abigail, but I guess there was a lot less to do then...my goal for the next couple of weeks (before I begin teaching) is to take it (somewhat more) easy, since I've really felt drained lately, especially when I realize that classes start in less than two weeks and I'll have the baby two weeks (or so) after they end. Wheeeeeee!

Holiday weekend

It's always the super fun times that I never blog much about, since we're too busy enjoying ourselves, but suffice it to say that we had a great weekend with my family. We were able to go to the temple in Chicago on Saturday, and then my parents and sisters came back down and stayed with us until Monday. We had a fun "barbeque" last night (indoors because of excessive rain) where we all introduced to Abigail's method of eating watermelon: pull out all the seeds and eat them first, eat the actual red fruit, then move on to eating the green part of the rind until it's taken away from her, etc. Today we picked strawberries and then used Mom and Dad's Sam's Club membership to buy a chest freezer, so Neil and I have officially ended our spending spree for the summer (at least I certainly hope so!) But it was a really great weekend--lots of time to talk and laugh together and eat yummy food.

Plant pictures

Sick day--notice the hot pink cheeks?




Loading up her bunny in the stroller




I love the straggly night hair (the little imp scampered out of bed at 10 pm because she was "hungwy" as a direct result of utterly refusing to partake of dinner). I don't know why, but I think her floppy little mop is so adorable like this!

Notice the corner of the fence peeking around?

View from the front door

Closeup of the huge hostas and one of the weird shrubs that was savagely hacked up last fall after our offer on the house was accepted, but before we'd actually signed the paperwork--nobody knows who did it, since the house was vacant...we're still undecided as to whether the shrubs stay or go.

Mission accomplished!

It's 12:14 a.m. and I should be in bed so I won't be dead when I work out tomorrow, but I am so ecstatically pleased to announce that Neil and I have jointly accomplished the following today:

• finished the fence!!!
• planted all the go-in-seedling-pots-then-transplant-later flower seeds and spread the rest of the mulch on the "big" flowers and shrubs, aka the ones that weren't seeds, which were planted yesterday
• edged and weed-wacked the lawn (which doesn't sound like much of a project until I clarify that "edging" should really be called "cutting strips of overgrown sod from the sidewalk." It took me about an hour and a half to do it all and then clean up the mess)
• finished painting--the last coat!!!!--the dining room, living room, and foyer
• watered all the new plantings
• planted another few rows of beans
• cut Neil's hair

A rather short list when I realize that it took about seven hours to accomplish, but this is a real epoch--we are DONE with the vast majority of our huge enormous projects. And hopefully from now on out we won't feel like we're working three jobs: our "real" daytime occupations, the Abigail-safe projects we do from the time Neil gets home until the time Abigail goes to bed, and the "we're exhausted but Abigail is asleep" shift of things like painting and other goopy and generally toddler-unfriendly chores.

Calling all Austen-ites!

As Katrina said, it's hard to resist a quiz like this:

Take the Quiz here!

Fun fun!

Plants!!!!

Today I am absolutely ecstatically happy. Why, you ask?

Well, for one thing, Abigail is keeping down food. But sadly, lackluster mother that I am, I am more excited about the fact that I BOUGHT PLANTS TODAY!!!!!! Yayyyyy!!!

I feel a little silly being so excited about plants, but I really really love gardening. The summer that I spent working at the Timpanogos temple must have turned on a gene I got from my green-thumb mother (or all that forced labor in the garden finally kicked in. Mom, remember when I got second-degree sunburns on my ears when you were making us dig the hole for the pond in Ohio? Oh well. My own fault for not knowing enough to put sunscreen on my ears, I guess, but I honestly didn't know skin could blister and swell so much...yuck). Anyway, this morning I had a very indulgent little spree, and came home with the car so loaded down that I couldn't shut the liftgate and I had mulch bags piled on the roof (and yes, this was Neil-sanctioned, so there will be no Bailey Family Battle tonight over our depleted funds).

One thing I was very excited about was the fact that I actually found plants I could afford--I went to Menards first and the azaleas, upon which I had absolutely set my heart, were 26.99 each. Not too bad if you have a "real" job, but a bit much on a student income, especially since I wanted three of them and I needed to spend less than $50 for all my plants. Plus they only had six and they were all pink, and I'm not really a pink flower kind of gal, at least in large quantities.

So I went to Walmart, that mecca of price undercutting, and found azaleas for...drumroll please...$2. Hurray! Granted, they were small, but they will grow, and the extra year or so of growth that they'll have to do to catch up to the 26.99 ones is well worth it in my mind.

In addition to azaleas, I got the following:

• bleeding heart (3 buckets)
• Dusty Miller (12 plants)
• impatiens (18 plants)
• marigolds (6 plants)
• verbena (12 plants)
• coleus (12 plants)--and I have to rave about coleus here. I LOVE it. So colorful and fun! And it gets huge!

And I got seeds for the following perennials so that I can enjoy them in years to come:

• Hollyhocks
• Painted daisies
• Dianthus
• Delphimiums
• Columbine
• Oriental poppies

I also want to get gladiolus bulbs, ornamental grasses, and asiatic lilies, mostly because Neil loves them (and I do too, but he really loves the lilies and gladiolus and I want to keep him happy with the flower riots that are about to take place) but I haven't decided where I want them other than along the fence, so I will wait until the fence is totally finished and the ground is back to normal, per Neil's request.

And a big thank-you goes here to my wonderful grandparents, whose Mother's Day gift to me enabled me to buy the flowers my heart has been longing for! Thank you again!!

If you're wondering how I managed to fill my car with just flowers, it's because I also came home with 4 Adirondack resin chairs ($5 cheaper at Walmart than Menards!), a BBQ grill and cover, 3 bags of mulch, and another of fertilizer. Exciting. A bit stressful on the spending end, but it's also nice to know that these are all things we've been budgeting for over the past 8 months and now we can finally buy them, relax, and enjoy some of the fruits of all our labors, mostly in the form of sipping lemonade in our newly fenced yard. Hurrah! And the enormous 18 x 10 flower bed that someone saw fit to create between the sidewalk and the garage will finally have something in it other than the Hostas That Ate The World (I kid you not, one of those beasts is 4 feet in diameter, which is going to be a project in itself) and a lone crabapple tree.

Sick day

Neil and I have often been grateful over the past two years for Abigail's stoicism--she rarely cries, doesn't make much fuss, is quite adaptable, etc. However, my sweet child, there are limits.

She came into my room this morning asking for milk. After I poured her a cup, I went into her room to make her bed and found puddles of vomit/last night's pasta all over her bed and splashed on the walls. Pretty exciting. From the relative dryness and varying locations of the puddles, I think she must have thrown up at least three times during the night. Her face and hair were caked in it (which I didn't see earlier because I didn't have my contacts in), but she had apparently wiggled around her bed trying to find a clean spot to sleep for most of the night. Poor little baby. We will be having a little chat about appropriate times to come get Mommy and Daddy up...

The unfortunate part of Abigail's getting ill on this particular day is that I had a non-reschedulable doctor's appointment, and it was the day for glucose tolerance testing; you know, the one where they make you drink the nasty syrupy drink and then draw your blood an hour later to screen for gestational diabetes. Neil left this morning at 6:30 to play raquetball before work, so I had to call him and ask him to come home, since I couldn't reschedule my appointment or obviously take Abigail to the planned babysitter's house. Thankfully, I am blessed with a sweet and patient husband who did not complain about losing four hours out of his workday or having to clean the carseat up which Abigail threw up in on the way home (we drove to campus to pick him up). Or clean the walls, since I had only had time to bathe Abigail and wash all her bedding. What a good man.

So far she seems to be feeling a bit better; we'll see how the rest of the day goes. I now have ginger ale on hand, so hopefully that will settle her tummy a bit and she can nap comfortably.

A letter from Abigail

Tonight I kept Mommy busy. I decided after we finished the dishes that I had not had enough tomato paste for the day, so I opened the fridge and fed myself some ketchup. When Mommy found me, she laughed and laughed, then she gave me a spoon full of ketchup and laughed some more. Mommy likes ketchup almost as much as I do.

Then Mommy and I went outside to help Daddy. He was building this:


but I still managed to squeeze out and run away. Mommy had to chase me a lot. So then she decided that the concrete had cured and we could fill the dirt back in the holes. She gave me a shovel, but I preferred to use my hands.

I got bored pretty quickly, so I made another break for freedom.

Daddy was building a gate for the fence in the garage so Mommy and I started weeding. I helped Mommy for a little while, then I decided to go see what Daddy was doing. I found that I could combine the best of both worlds and use needle-nosed pliers to pull the heads off of clover flowers.

Mommy was a little nervous about my flower-chopping tools, so she decided it was time to play with sidewalk chalk instead. She traced me, but I decided it was more fun for me to trace her...

...and Daddy...

...and myself.

After an hour and a half when the sun started to go down, Mommy said it was time for a bath. I had been coloring myself with the chalk, so I agreed. We went inside and turned the bathtub lots of interesting shades. I decided it was time for Mommy to go to bed, since she fell asleep reading to me this afternoon and I had to take the book away and cover her up with my blankie, so I turned off the lights in the bathroom while she was brushing my hair and told her it was "night," reclaimed my blankie, and took myself off to bed.

Happies

This is my third post in about ten minutes, but I had to post about my "happies" over the last few days, because there have been many, even though I probably won't be able to remember them all, but I keep thinking "Oh! I need to record that so I can look back at it on a not-so-good day."

Anyway, in no particular order, here are the happy moments from the last few days/things I am grateful for:

1) Abigail getting down from her table during breakfast while I was finishing the dishes, tugging insistently at my pants until I knelt down to her level, giving me a sticky kiss and a beaming smile, and then running back to finish her breakfast

2) Finding surprise strawberry plants on the side of our house (bearing only one strawberry, but still! It was tasty, and we will cultivate them for next year. We didn't know about them earlier because the space between houses is pretty narrow and our neighbors have been mowing the whole thing right up until our house, so this was the first time we beat them to the mowing. Sadly, they'd mowed over the majority of the plants, but now we will have to weed them out and put something around them to mark the plants for the future)

3) Going to pick up fence panels, seeing that the price had dropped since we purchased them, and getting an $80 rebate on the difference

4) Finishing an editing project and realizing I made a nice little sum in the process

5) Stopping to sit at a picnic table on my way back from brushing my teeth before bed while we were camping--I just sat there and watched the stars and enjoyed the quiet and solitude.

6) Seeing all the dying weeds and greening grass on our lawn and realizing that the weed-and-feed worked! Hurray!

7) Watching tiny little lettuce, cantaloupe, zucchini, and squash plants unfold up out of the ground

8) Neil sending me to relax on the couch for two hours to elevate my throbbing ankles while he made brownies for a party

9) Asking "Who read the lesson this week?" during our Sunday School class and getting affirmative responses (suuuuch a victory. You have no idea! Hopefully our new email reminder system will work well).

10) Hot chocolate in the early morning while camping

11) Neil's repeated "Wow, this is soooo good!!" comments about the granola I spent most of a very busy morning making (and Abigail's pronounced liking for "cee-yol wit razins!")

12) The following:

• Spray and Wash
• facial cleanser
• Lubriderm lotion
• Aloe vera
• Rechargeable batteries
• Play-doh
• Flowering shrubs
• Cold water
• Library books

How about you? What's making you happy this week?

sorry, the captions on these pictures are all messed up, but I don't have the patience to fix them now

pictures

All tuckered out on Daddy's shoulder

Distracting Abigail with the camera while we waited for Neil to return from the car with snacks

Feeding the horses on the farm at Historic Prophetstown, which was attached to the campground

She was not a big fan of the chilly morning when she climbed out of the tent

My two "scrufflies" reading scriptures together

Snuggled up in her sleeping bag

Consuming a healthful repast of Sun Chips and pineapple upside-down cake with her buddy Elise

Helping Mommy feed the twins

sunday evening

I haven't posted in awhile, mostly because we've been so busy, so I won't even try to catch up on everything we've been doing. Suffice it to say that the fence is almost completely done--we have three panels/gates to put up tomorrow, we went camping on Friday, I finished editing a thesis for somebody (yay for editing $$!), we babysat on Sat. and went to going-away parties for friends the last two nights.

It's been pretty busy.

Many of you have already heard this story, but for those who haven't (and for posterity), here's a choice Abigail story from the weekend:

Neil and I had a slight misunderstanding while we were camping about the placement of the cooler. I asked him to not leave it in the tent to avoid critters trying to come in; he thought I said to put it in the tent. Anyway, I didn't notice it in there when we read scriptures with Abigail before she went to bed, since it was completely dark and we were reading by flashlight, but I did hear her running around for quite awhile before she went to sleep. When Neil and I finally went in, I saw the cooler open and a carton of eggs on the floor. My egg-loving toddler had opened the cooler, gotten out the eggs, cracked one all over the floor, and tried to clean up the mess before she got back into her sleeping bag. We were pretty irritated about all the mess, but also had to restrain our hysterical laughter at the sheer funniness of it all while we cleaned it all up. (And fortunately we didn't have any night-time visitors!!)

Fencing!

Time for my usual Abigail-is-napping post, and the cool news of the day is this:

WE ARE STARTING THE FENCE! Yay! Neil is outside right now with the bishop digging holes in the ground (the bishop has a tractor hole-digger thing, so we are blissfully happy about not having to spend the next two months digging the holes by hand). Neil and I are hoping to cement the posts in the ground tonight, since we traded babysitting with another family for this evening, so we're really hoping to get a good start on that while we have some Abigail-free hours to throw cement around. And I am almost done with my course website, so that makes me happy!

Today the three of us went to the university's spring faculty and staff celebration day. We had a free lunch which included BBQ sandwiches, one of our favorites. It was nice to spend lunchtime with Neil--we don't get to do that too often. We skipped out on the rest of the activities so we could get back home in time for Abigail's nap, so we'll have to catch those some other year.

Happy birthday, Elise!

Tomorrow is my sister Elise's birthday, so I am writing a blog post entirely about/dedicated to her and how cool she is.

One of my favorite things about Elise is that she is always, always, always happy. Yes, she gets grumpy sometimes, but she is just about the happiest-go-lucky person I know. Whenever I think of her, I think of her laughing.

When Elise was little, we would pretend to tickle her just to see her reaction. As soon as our tickling fingers entered the air a foot above her stomach, she would begin laughing hysterically, and she wouldn't stop until we finally moved our hands away, even if we never touched her.

Elise is really good at just going with the flow of things. She has this huge enormous group of friends, and I love how they don't feel a need to pair off or be exclusive or worry about who is best friends with who that week--she tends to gather happy people around her. She doesn't worry about what she's wearing; in fact, if you look at our most recent family picture, every one else is dressed up and Elise is wearing a T-shirt she got at a Solo and Ensemble competition. We like to tease her about that one. :-)

Speaking of Solo and Ensemble, Elise is an amazing violinist. She started out with one of those teeny tiny violins and made horrible cat-screeching noises on it, then suddenly one day when I came home from college she was playing all of my classical favorites. She gives violin lessons too, and I love listening to how patient she is with her students (for the one lesson that I sat in on).

Other cool things about Elise: she has this awesome crazy curly hair. When she was little she looked EXACTLY like Shirley Temple, to the point where older people would stop her in the mall and say "Oh, hello Shirley!" and she would stick her little fists on her hips and say "I'm not Shirley!" It always embarrassed my mom, but we girls thought it was funny. We could also pull her curls out from her head about eight inches and let them spring back to lie flat on her head--it was pretty cool. But anyway, her hair is still so much fun, and I love to mess it up so it looks like a lion's mane around her face. Plus, she has the cutest little freckles all over her nose to match the lone peaches and cream complexion in our olive-skinned family (although Ruth is on the edge of each).

One thing for which I greatly value Elise is that she pretty much saved Abigail's life. Neil and I were away for the evening watching Rosalind's musical, and Abigail managed to choke on a butter packet corner, and Elise had sufficient presence of mind to remember how to do the baby Heimlech thing while Abigail was choking and turning exciting colors. For that, I truly owe her.

And lastly, a list of cool things about Elise:

• She always lets me borrow her sparkly sequined flip-flops when I visit
• Her room is the biggest mess to the point where it's amusing
• She can quote pretty much any movie starring Orlando Bloom
• She always fights with Neil over whether he's allowed to talk during aforesaid Orlando Bloom movies
• She comes home early from hanging out with her friends when I visit so that we can do cool stuff together
• She wears tights under her holey jeans so she can be both modest and fashionable (that really cracked me up!)
• She's an amazingly talented actress
• She says these hilarious things all the time, like "What country is Queen Latifah queen of?" or "I'm not as think as you dumb I am"
• She sent me a picture of herself pretending to eat a dead deer leg that my parents were butchering (it sounds realllly weird, I know, but it was funny)
• When I was about sixteen, I had her and Rosalind trained to fall over in a heap whenever I said "crumble," no matter where we were (like at church, which I got yelled at for)
• She always tells me stories starting with "When you used to be mean to me all the time..."
• Her room is covered with posters of LOTR characters (are those yours or Mary Beth's?)
• She thinks my kid is cute
• She always has really nifty earrings
• She makes these weird demands that somehow get carried out, i.e. requesting that we go get her Chinese food so she can sit at home and watch a movie while the rest of us go out for Indian food
• She has the most infectious laugh--my stomach always hurts from laughing when we go home from a weekend with my parents
• She never takes off her eye makeup before she goes to bed so that she looks like a raccoon monster in the morning
• She excels in the make-others-do-for-me thing as epitomized by Mom's "____, will you run down to the freezer/storage room and get _____" or Ruth's "Neil, will you hot me some water?" My favorite example of Elise doing this is when she lay in a chair calling weakly "Neil? Neil?" and coughing feebly in an imitation of me until he responded "Yes, loves?" then laughed maniacally at having fooled him.
• And lastly, she is past mistress in the art of making what Neil calls "that noise you all make," which mostly closely resembles "ugrrarrhh!"

I love you, stinky! Happy birthday! I am looking forward to seeing you next weekend! :-)

Wrong side of the bed

I think I'm having one of those cranky days, so hopefully a little rest while Abigail naps will sort me out. I was pretty worn out yesterday, as was Neil, so we decided to take a night off from projects and relax a bit more. So it was nice to relax, but I went to bed feeling grumpy and lazy and woke up feeling grumpy and lazy. I also have a few "to-do" things looming that I'm not super looking forward to--I have to redesign my course website for my tech writing class, since the department switched to a new codebase and I can't just clone the one I used last semester. Actually, it's not that bad because I already did most of it this morning, but I also have to figure out how to translate a twice-weekly 16 week course into an daily 8 week course, and that is making me grumpy (mostly because the website went down again and I can't just get it over with). I also contracted with someone to edit their master's thesis, which is a good opportunity, but I don't get it until Wednesday so it's just looming and I can't start it.

Can you tell I'm not very patient? Oh well.

Today Abigail and I biked to our playgroup at the church with Andrea and Elise (about 7 miles roundtrip). It was nice to get in a workout simultaneously with traveling to playgroup, but I felt really dizzy from the heat and exercise by the time we got home, probably because I still haven't figured out how to attach a waterbottle to the bike (and I can't strap it on behind because of Abigail's seat). But it was nice to have a bike ride, especially since Abigail has been pleading for "bikes!" every time we go out to the garage, and it was even nicer to bike past the gas station advertising gas for $3.18 and rejoice in the fact that I was not burning gas!

Monday again

In the weeks after Abigail was born, I learned to dread Mondays as the day that Neil would leave me to go back to work and I would be left at home, a pathetic shadow of my former confident and unflappable self, who most definitely should not be entrusted with a weeks-old baby.

Since then, I've made a deliberate effort to make sure that Mondays are days that I look forward to so that I can cheerfully kiss Neil and send him off to school without pleading for him to stay "just five more minutes!" It's kind of silly, I guess, but I like looking forward to the beginning of the week and sort of extending the weekend feeling.

So what have I done, you ask? Well, I've simply moved all my "favorite" tasks for the whole week to Monday. I love to go shopping, but I can't afford to go buy clothes or house toys all the time, so Abigail and I always go to the grocery store bright and early on Monday mornings. I generally make at least one meal during the week that is really exciting (aka new or with interesting ingredients) so that it's even more fun to shop. Today we bought capers and several kinds of olives for bucatini puttenesca, which sounded exotic and fun. We'll let you know how it turns out. I also like to go to the bank on Mondays, since depositing money is always a good-mood-maker!

We always wash our sheets on Mondays (or "sheeps" as Abigail calls them), since I absolutely adore the feeling of crisp clean sheets. I would wash them every two days if I didn't feel that was a bit excessive in terms of water and detergent usage (not to mention the dryer!) And I love walking into a clean bathroom, so that's on my Monday list as well, as are vacuuming, washing out the drip pans under the stove burners, and dusting. (My not-so-favorite tasks like mopping and cleaning out the 'fridge come later in the week).

Mowing the lawn is another Monday task: for some reason I really like mowing lawns (maybe the fact that it combines exercise and thinking time), and I like having the lawn look like someone cares about it as we begin the week. It's nice to come home and not see the waving field of dandelions!

And my very favorite part of Mondays: they're a "gym day," along with Wednesday and Friday, so I kick off the day at 5:40 a.m. and spend an hour at the gym before returning home at 7:10. Getting up early makes me pretty tired around lunchtime, but it's worth it to have exercised, cleaned the bathrooms, changed the sheets, fed everyone and cleaned up breakfast, and be out the door to the grocery store by 9 am. To me, nothing beats that feeling of driving home at 7 am with the windows down so I can hear the birds singing and feel the sun's warmth starting to seep into my skin. I feel so energized when I get home, not just because of the endorphins from my workout, but because I got an early and productive start to the day. It's sort of akin to my collegiate habit of getting up at 5 am so that I could get in a good three hours of studying before classes started, but I admit that I much prefer going the exercise route. It's nice not to have homework...

Happy Mother's Day!

Yesterday Neil gave me the most wonderful Mother's Day gift that any wife of a busy doctoral student could ask for: an entire day of "man-hours." He worked from 7 am until 11:30 pm (with a brief break in there to attend a graduation celebration for one of our friends) and I am just blown away by how much he/we accomplished (although Abigail felt presumably felt so ignored yesterday that she utterly refused to leave us to go to nursery today, a definite first. We are planning to take her to the playground tonight after dinner to reward her for her extreme patience yesterday).

Anyway, yesterday these exciting things happened around our house: Neil wrestled bravely with the tiller for three hours and tilled (from sod) a 20x20 section of ground, which we then spent a few hours planting with green beans, lettuce, 3 kinds of tomatoes, 2 kinds of peppers, squash, zucchini, and cantaloupe (we will plant sugar snap peas later as the weather cools a bit, since we didn't get the garden in early enough for the cool weather this spring). He also spent two hours working with an expert welder in one of the other wards (we owe he (him?) and his wife an ENORMOUS debt for this!!!! Thank you guys!!!) to fix the driver's side door of the Jeep, which has been refusing to shut due to weakening hinges and general cracks. Now it's absolutely lovely and we no longer have to enter from the passenger side, which has been our little adventure over the last three weeks!), then another hour when we got home on rewiring all the little electrical things and motors in the door which control locks, alarms, windows, etc. And lastly, we put another coat of paint on the living room, dining room, and back wall of the kitchen--one more and we should be done! Hurray!

Thank you, Neil, for all the time, effort, and love that you put into everything yesterday--it means so much to me! And thank you to my little Abigail, who truly made me feel loved today--if you were going to pick one day to wrap your arms around my neck so tightly that I couldn't breathe and refuse to go play with your friends because you wanted so much to stay with me, even to the extent that you somehow climbed out over the child gate blocking the nursery door when I tried to put you inside, I am glad that it was Mother's Day.

And as always, love to you, Mom. :-) I know I call you just about every day to ask inane questions about random things, but the more I get into this mothering and life thing in general, the more I see you as the Fount of Wisdom. Thank you for always making me feel special and valued, and thank you for being one of my best friends as well as my mom.

"When the day is done..."

...speaking of which, I admit I love Peter, Paul and Mary. Good times on the lawn mower.

In any case, it's about ten after midnight, but hurray! We got so much stuff done today! We kicked off the day with a pancake and sausage breakfast, which was fabulous because Neil has had to leave before Abigail or I have been up the last two mornings. Then Neil studied for an hour or so while Abigail and I read books and cleaned up a bit, then we dropped Neil off at his lab while Abigail and I went to the library. We met up with him again for lunch later (I LOVE the fact that the library is only a ten minute (or so) walk from his lab), which Abigail really loved. The university is infested by squirrels and chipmunks, and she thinks they are about the coolest things ever.

For our "date night" we had one of the most romantic openers ever--we shoveled manure into trash cans so we could take it home and dump it on our garden. Hurray for friends with horses! Then we bought a bunch of tomato and pepper plants, painted the living room and foyer, and figured out where everything was going to go in the garden. (The backstory behind that is that I had spent about two hours this afternoon figuring it all out, then realized at the very end that I'd misread measurements in feet as inches, so I was planning this beautiful garden with rows spaced one and a half inches apart. You think that somewhere in the process of acquiring a master's degree in English I would have learned to read things carefully, but no, apparently not. You would also think that I would realize that the circumference of the plants would be more than the space between rows, but again...you'd be wrong. I didn't. I was just amazed at how compactly I was fitting everything in and told myself that Neil would be very pleased with my methodical and carefully drawn-to-scale maps of the garden. Of course, Neil laughed and laughed when he realized what was going on, but not quite as much as he did when he realized that I had counted all of the seeds in the packets so that I knew exactly how much space (in inches) we needed to plant all the seeds. In case you are interested, a 4 oz packet of beans contains 342 beans. It took me a very long time to count them all. What a waste of perfectly good Abigail-is-asleep time!)

So it's late and we're leaving in 7 hours to go pick up the tiller, but it is fabulous because ALL WE HAVE TO DO TOMORROW IS YARD WORK AND PAINTING. NO HOMEWORK. Yes yes yes yes yes! (And I finished an article last night and sent it back for review to the editor of the collection--nice to have that done! No more guilt!) And I got the sweetest Mother's Day card from my grandparents, and Abigail and I had a blast looking at the enclosed pictures, so it has just been the loveliest of days!

Gratitude journal

At the beginning of our sophomore year at BYU, Jen and I found a huge sheet of brown wrapping paper somewhere which we tacked up onto our kitchen wall. We tied a marker or two alongside it and joyfully dubbed the whole thing the "Thankful Wall." It was greeted with great glee by our other roommates, and the six of us, along with assorted friends, boyfriends, and hangers-on (I love that--it makes it sound like we were cool enough to have an entourage, but it was really probably Lindy's cheerleading squad) promptly began filling the thing up. When I moved out at the end of the semester (to get married to Neil!) I was honestly sad to leave the Thankful Wall, since seeing it always made me think of something else I was grateful for and reminded me of all the blessings in my life that I'd already written up.

In any event, yesterday was a fairly loathsome day, so loathsome that instead of blogging about it I decided to take the "uglies" and find something to be grateful for about them. So here goes!

Yesterday (today at 7:48 am) I am grateful for/that:

• Neil got up before sunrise to fertilize/weed kill the lawn
• Abigail loves our house so much that she strongly requested--nay, demanded--to return there throughout the duration of our walk
• the twins and Abigail managed overlapping naps for a good twenty minutes
• I am literate
• we have sufficient children's books so that I could read aloud for two hours without reading the same one twice
• we have lots of toys that make exciting noises when thrown on the floor
• our ladder is tall enough (when the person standing on it is 6'5") so that we could tape the vaulted ceiling in the living room in preparation for painting tonight
• I have sufficient joint mobility to make scrubbing the floors and weeding flowerbeds not excessively difficult
• I've gained "only" 11 pounds in the last 27 weeks of pregnancy (this is hard to be positive about!)
• Abigail stayed in a fairly localized area of the house while I followed her reading scriptures aloud after breakfast
• my child will almost always eat a "pea butter dam sambits" after refusing all other food
• I have a goodly supply of "Spray and Wash" and a working washer/dryer
• we had drywall mud on hand when the nail hole filler went missing
• Abigail loves babies and wishes excessively to help with all aspects of tending them
• the fact that the floor was freshly mopped made it easier to clean up the chocolate milk spilled all over it (and the walls) when I was babysitting
• that I have a child who is adventurous and pushes the limits of her world in order to find out of what exciting things she is capable
• that the children inadvertently having a "picnic" on Abigail's very very very special blankie did not object too strenuously when she snatched it away and ran out of the room
• I have sufficient sewing skills to fix the baby doll stroller sling thing (the fabric part the doll sits in) before the crying got too loud
• we never run out of water
• the most surprising thing I found while cleaning the refrigerator was Abigail's dolly's missing bottle
• and lastly, that I have a child who will unabashedly throw her arms around my neck and kiss me two minutes after I have completely lost control and screamed "Nooooo!" like a banshee (that was the low point of the day, but fortunately it only lasted for about ten seconds, which is pretty good for a low point)

Fortunately, that is all I can remember. I am now off to go roust Abigail out of bed (lately she likes to lie there and watch the sunlight--she also likes to wait until I come in so that we can snuggle for a few minutes) and rejoice in the fact that I have already exercised today and we don't have to scramble to go on a walk or bike ride before it gets too hot. Hurrah!

so. tired.

but the to-do list is done for today.

highlight of the day: the garage door somehow self-locking (the manual self-lock bolt that you have to physically draw across the door) when abigail and i were trying to get in after weeding flowerbeds (no keys to the house, of course, since i had the garage door opener).

we eventually got it up about a foot and wiggled under. good thing i am six months pregnant rather than nine. abigail thought it was a pretty exciting way to enter the house.

Keeping sanity

One of my friends asked me awhile ago how I kept everything going, and it made me think about how I do it. Since I don't have too much to blog about today, I decided to write about that.

Have you ever seen the movie About a Boy? It's been a really long time since I saw it and I don't remember much other than one principle which has stuck with me: the idea of dividing your day into units of time. The main character, played by Hugh Grant, describes how he spends his "units," and it's pretty amusing, but I don't remember anything other than that (and the fact that he doesn't have to work because he inherited the royalties from some obnoxiously popular Christmas song his dad wrote, so he spends all his "units" doing things like having scalp massages).

Anyway, the point of all this is that the way I stay sane is by using this units of time idea. It's quite effective, especially when you break things down into fifteen-minute chunks. For instance, I find it daunting to say "I will read to Abigail every day," because then I worry about how much I should read to her, and what we should read, and how long she'll sit still, and where to fit in into the day, etc. But if I say "I will read to Abigail for fifteen minutes every day" then it's something that has a beginning and ending point that I can handle (and if it stretches to half an hour or forty-five minutes, as it often does, so be it). Same thing goes for cleaning: I stole an idea from www.flylady.net and divided my house into zones, so Monday-Friday I spend fifteen minutes "deep-cleaning" in a specific zone (although generally more). I change zones every week, so my whole house gets thoroughly cleaned in a month. This way I can do my deep-cleaning and be done with it, rather than feeling guilty all day for randomly stopping when I got tired. Plus I have an actual list of what I want to clean instead of just thinking "I must clean the kitchen!" Of course, I still have all my regular cleaning, laundry, and grocery-type things to do on other days, but I just have assigned days for those different things (i.e. Monday for washing sheets and going to the grocery store, Tuesday for vacuuming and dusting, Wednesday for mopping floors, Thursday for cleaning bathrooms, Friday for vacuuming and laundry again, Saturday for having fun! Although I admit I try to do as much as I can on Monday so I don't have to do much on the other days...)

For instance, here are my kitchen cleaning things (in small font so you can skip over them if need be!):
1. Empty and clean refrigerator
2. Clean microwave
3. Clean stove/oven
4. Wash canisters/decorative objects
5. Straighten drawers & cupboards
6. Wipe down walls
7. Wash inside and outside of sliding door
8. Clean fan/vent or hood fan/vent
9. Scrub cabinet fronts
10. Remove and clean light fixtures
11. Clean out underneath sink
12. Wipe down floor mat
13. Thoroughly clean appliances
14. Disinfectant on countertops
15. Clean blinds
16. Wash trash can
17. Wipe down baseboards
18. Clean sliding door tracks
19. Vacuum pantry
20. Reorganize pantry
21. Check supplies of basic ingredients

On days like today, where I have nowhere to be, I cringe from the idea of Spending. All. Day. At. Home. I don't know why; I just like to be somewhere doing something constructive. So I look at the day in terms of fifteen minute chunks: we will spend two units eating breakfast and reading scriptures, 3 going for a walk, 2 in weeding flowerbeds, 2 in reading stories, 3 in cleaning the kitchen (me) and play-doh and crayons (Abigail), 2 in making rolls, 1 in making needed phone calls, etc. And voila! The morning has passed productively and happily--we got to spend about an hour and a half outside, did some cleaning inside, and had some quality time together reading stories and making rolls to take to a homeless shelter.

It's pretty structured, I know, but it makes it so that I feel like I can more easily achieve a balance between meeting Abigail's developmental and emotional needs, taking care of our family (in terms of keeping the house clean, our clothes clean, the yard under control, and the food bought/prepared), getting everything done for my classes and teaching, and meeting my own needs for down time without feeling guilty for not doing something in one of the other three categories.

And my Abigail notes today:

• she asked for her "sunny hat" ( sun hat) while we were getting ready to go on our walk. How cute is that?
• she discovered worms. In fact, I managed to occupy her while I pulled out an eight foot by 3 inch wide strip of grass from the flowerbed today (at last! this marks the official conquering of the untended-for-three-years-before-we-bought-the-house flowerbeds!) by the simple expedient of piling all the worms in front of her. She would watch in fascination as they wiggled back in the ground, then demand "More nurms! More nurms!"

Diaper woes

Tonight our project was measuring and staking out the fence post locations. As Abigail came out of the back door of the house at the beginning of our adventure, she inadvertently knocked over an elevated tray full of potting soil. It spilled all over her, and we had a lot of tears until the dirt was brushed off. Unfortunately, her misery seemed to stick with her, and the cheerful mood she'd been in just five minutes before degenerated into a moping whining sort of one for the next three hours, when we began getting her ready for bed.

We took off her diaper to discover that about two tablespoons of potting soil had fallen inside her diaper and had glued themselves to her little backside. The poor kid had dirt so ingrained that we had to hose her off in the kitchen sink.

I shouldn't be laughing about it, but it was pretty funny. But I also felt pretty bad for her, especially since we kept saying "Abigail, stop crying! Come over here! What's wrong?"

Next time I'll know to check her diaper for traces of her very own seed garden.

good things

This is happiness: lying down on your child's bed (hurray for big girl beds!!!) as she wakes up from a nap so that the first thing she sees is your face, and being met with the most enormous smile you could possibly imagine as a little voice says "Hi, my mommy" and little arms reach out to pat your face. Then you start to get up to give her some space, and little arms hold you back and gently push you back down, giving you an equal share of pillow, and the two of you lie there and smile at each other, absolutely content.

That is happiness.

A few laughs

Chuckle-worthy Abigail moments this morning:

1) She refused to wear a bib today, so I took off her shirt for lunch. When she finished her food, I turned around from the sink to find her experimentally spitting down onto her chest. I asked "What are you doing?" to which she replied calmly "bubbles."

2) Clearing her bed of the "unworthy" stuffed animals before her nap. She was distressed at the idea of sharing her space with the blue elephant--apparently only her dolly and bunny are allowed.

3) I went in this morning to find her in bed placing a baby's teething ring around her dolly's wrist. After a few minutes, she gravely said "Now Ab-ee-dal turn," placing it on her own wrist, then waited a few seconds more and said "Dummy turn" and put it on her bunny rabbit (despite the fact that she can now say "bunny," the rabbit persists under the moniker of Dummy).

Today I am excited about the fact that last night we finally got dandelion killer for the lawn (actually, this is the third batch we've bought; but Neil decided later he didn't like the first two and returned them both, so hopefully this one will stick) and Neil is planning to commence the dandelion massacre on Thursday morning. Apparently it has to be done when the dew is still on the grass. Thanks to my quality time with the mower last night, the dandelion crop is briefly reduced to stubble; I am so looking forward to having actual grass in a year (or two or three). I am also excited about the fact that Neil has no homework! yay! no homework! He is still studying for his qualifiers next fall, but he's planning to do two hours of that a day, so we will still have free time and then Saturdays totally free (that's the plan). Yippee--I have a husband again! I am also excited about the fact that his homework-less state allowed him to caulk the kitchen last night while I mowed the lawn.

And finally, a big congrats to our friends Russell and Kristyn, who welcomed their second little boy into the world yesterday!

Gruntlement

My question of today is this: if you can be disgruntled, can you also be gruntled?

A few things for my journal blog today:

1) Neil is the best. Really, he is. Married to an inverterate listmaker, he has resisted my compulsive lists for the past fifty-sixth months (I'm counting the three months before we were married when I made him lists as well. One of which he saved, because he thought it was sweet, but then quickly threw away when he realized that it wasn't an unusual gesture of thoughtfulness on my part, just compulsive behavior that would haunt him forever). Anyway, last week I was feeling very stressed about everything and started to cry spontaneously after putting Abigail to bed. When he asked what was wrong, I somehow managed to sob out that my house was a mess and I never got anything done (translation: I didn't have time to dust the baseboards that day). Instead of laughing at my silliness and telling me everything looked fine, Neil created a spreadsheet of all the weekly tasks that we both need to complete, printed it out, and hung it on the fridge. Moreover, he checked the sheet throughout the week and made a new one last night. I don't know if it helped us to be more effective, but I saw the time he spent on creating it as a serious gesture of love (plus he spent an hour with my last night reviewing our budget and creating a new one for this summer). This is probably meaningless to anyone but me, but I was very touched.

2) I have also been mulling over something the last few days, and I really have no solution or answer to it, but it's on my mind so I'm writing about it. The problem is this: I don't have enough "stuff." When I was a teenager, I obsessed about arranging everything just so in my room--my jewelry cases were arranged in an artful tumble, necklaces were swirled just so on a piece of satin, books were painstakingly jumbled in the "accidental" look that took me hours of contemplation to design, etc. It took me hours to dust everything. Unfortunately, I still obsess about arranging things, space around objects, color schemes, you name it. So when we moved into this lovely nice big house, I just didn't have enough things to fill it, and it's driving me crazy. Fortunately not too crazy, mostly because the rational side of me realizes that there's no way we can afford to fill it the way I'd like to on a student budget (which would also probably entail tossing most of what we have and starting out with a different decorating scheme) but it irks me to walk into a room and see all the empty floor and wall space, rather than focusing with pleasure on a few well-placed pieces with clean crisp lines. Oh well...the "things" will come. In the meantime, I will enjoy my new creamy nubbly linen curtains, which are blowing gently at my bedroom windows with the breeze, something which to me epitomizes springtime luxury. Thank you, Neil, for the curtain indulgence.

Lyrics

There's a John Denver song that describes this morning thus far: "Some Days Are Diamonds, Some Days are Stone."

Here's hoping this day gets "squoozen" into a diamond.

pics

Abigail now sets the table for dinner completely by herself, excepting knives. She's still working on a few things, but she knows each of us get a plate, silverware, and a glass. Napkins to follow.

Neil, uh, "helping" Abigail play (oblivious to the fact that she has wandered off).

Neil with the kids

outings

This Friday we babysat some friends' kids while they competed in an athletic event. Neil and Abigail and I had fun Friday night finally getting some decent Mexican food--we went to this place that was absolutely fabulous! (thank you to my friend Kathleen for recommending it!) I had grilled chicken with roasted vegetables and orange-mango sauce topped with mango salsa; Neil had some kind of marinated roasted pork thing, and Abigail had six fresh tortillas. We also accidentally managed to order the made-at-your-table fresh guacamole, which was quite expensive, but a very tasty little splurge (the waiter asked if we wanted chips, salsa, and guacamole; we didn't realize until later that it was an appetizer). We strolled for a bit around the mall that surrounded the restaurant, and my favorite part of the trip was watching Neil: he kept saying "Don't you feel a little out of place?" as we strolled by the racks of Prada and Armani clothes, and then he decided that the key was to look unimpressed, so he started making all these silly "I am unimpressed and cool" faces to make me laugh. What was even funnier was when Abigail started trying to imitate them...

Then we went back to the hotel and had fun in the pool--fearless little fish-child Abigail kept "swimming" back and forth between Neil and I, which was good for some laughs, then we tried to put a very keyed-up little kid to bed. She ended up singing "Ring Around the Rosy" in her pack-and-play for about two hours while Neil and I lay in bed with all the lights off watching a muted Men in Black; I think I fell asleep before she did.

In the morning we rounded up all the girls and took them downstairs for a fabulous cooked-to-order breakfast--hurray for non-cheapie hotels! Neil and I were both amused by the pitying and surprised looks we got from the other diners at this man and his pregnant wife with their little band of three-year-old, two-year-old, and nine-month-old children.

Abigail amusing story of the day: today as we left church she was walking very slowly and bowleggedly, and kept stopping to grab at her dress. Finally she stopped walking altogether, and as I grabbed her hand to pull her along (we were blocking the traffic flow exiting the chapel) I saw her diaper slide down her legs to rest against her ankles. She looked up at me with a very confused expression and said "Uh-oh diapie." I still have no idea how it fell off, but it was pretty funny.

Today I also noticed a couple neat things about her language skills--she's doing plurals without any instruction/correction (as in "more apples peez") and never makes a mistake with "my" and "mine," i.e. "Mine! Mine! My keys! Mine!" I know a lot of adults who have yet to master that one, including some students I had last semester...

And lastly, in the interests of expediting matters, she has begun saying things like "Peez tank you milk?" rather than thanking me upon delivery of said milk. Nice.

Pictures

cookie face!

A "big girl" wall decoration we made

The new quilt I made for her (which took me 21 hours! but only cost $36!)

Today Abigail and I bought rechargeable camera batteries, so we can finally put up some pictures! And finally start taking them again...

I had a blissful moment at the library today when I was putting together a puzzle with Abigail. She very carefully searched all over for the exact right spot to put the piece, and when she found it, she very carefully then used one fingertip to firmly press the piece down into place. Very meticulous and painstaking, and so incredibly adorable that I just had to squeeze her. It made me realize how grateful I am that I can have these moments with her and that I'm able to be (mostly) a stay-at-home mom, and how much I appreciate Neil's willingness to support that rather than saying "Why don't you take that full-time position they offered you so that we can have a new car?" Anyway, I am grateful for those moments, since they help to compensate for the not-so-fun ones.

I feel blessed to have a kid who has so readily grasped the principle of sharing and the concept of saying "please" and "thank-you." It's hard to resist giving her anything when she says so sweetly "More milk peez!" and then "Tank you mommy!" And as far as sharing goes, we had a difficult time weeding the flowerbeds last night because Abigail was so concerned with making sure everyone got an equal turn with her "shubbul"--she would dig for a few seconds with the trowel, then say "My shubbul Mommy turn!" and then five seconds later "Mommy, my shubbul Daddy turn!"

what would it cost to replace me?

according to salary.com, about 138K a year.

sweet. if only moms got paid overtime!

Check it out for yourself:

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/RaiseKids/ThePriceOfAMom.aspx?GT1=10019

Natural laws

In regular math, 1+1=2.

In kid math, 1+1=-1.

By this, I'm referring to that crazy phenomenon where you have another child over to play and find yourself blissfully relieved of any entertainment duties for at least half an hour or so. If Abigail and I are alone together, she's essentially my shadow. I either have to set aside whatever I'm doing to play with her, or I have to create mini-tasks for her to do so that she can help me. But if she has a friend over--voila! The two of them disappear into her room and have a blast making what Abigail calls "an mess." This then allows me to do things like fold laundry, dust the furniture, grade papers, wash dishes, etc.--basically anything where I can check on the kids about every ten minutes.

So that's why watching four kids today was much more relaxing than being at home with my one. In fact, it was the least stressful day we've had all week--out of three hours I had a precious forty-five minutes where everyone was either asleep or playing happily in the living room (and since I am blessed with a cut-out window thingy above the kitchen sink that looks into the living room, I could do all kinds of things in the kitchen and still keep an eye on the playing).

On another somewhat related topic, I was thinking today about my naivete before Abigail was born. I envisioned stay-at-home momhood as this blissful realm where I would have an immaculate house where only sunshine lay on the floors, crisp clean sheets, blooming plants, well-rounded meals and snacks, lots of leisure time to play intellectually stimulating games with my carefully groomed child, etc. After all, I reasoned, if I can go to class six hours a day, work for six, homework for eight, and still keep my house running, what on earth will I have to fill my days after I graduate/stop working?

Today while Abigail and I were putting on our shoes I thought of that and laughed. Not that things are too crazy, but it seems like we hardly ever have down time--there's always something we have to do or somewhere we have to go, and this is with one child. If I didn't have enormous lists everywhere over the house, I don't think anything would ever get done. I'm not sure why the days feel so full, since when Abigail goes to bed I always think "What on earth did I do all day?" but then I realize I made three meals, did a few loads of laundry, taught a class, went to the grocery store, read books with Abigail, built block towers, weeded the flowerbeds, etc. I think it's because they're all things that have to be repeated again the next day that I don't view them as huge accomplishments. It was sure nice to finish her quilt, since I can look at it and say "Ah-hah! There is a quantifiable task that is finished and has a lasting material aspect!"

One thing that does frustrate me, however, is that it seems hard to get into a regular schedule, and I've always thrived (thriven?) on schedules. I suppose it's because a lot of the things we do depend on Abigail's moods or the weather, but it would be nice to say "We will get up at this time, be done with breakfast by this time, go on a walk and return by this time, read books for this long, clean until snacktime, etc." And then I look at that and realize that Abigail can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 50 to eat breakfast, can refuse to walk at all, walk backwards, demand to be carried, stop to inspect every dandelion and rock...and that's why my schedules don't work. So I've learned to identify a few key things we want to do every day and take the rest as it comes.

I'm not sure why I'm writing so much about this--maybe because I still don't feel as organized as I would like to be. Hmm.

toddler rewards

I've spent literally all of my free time since Saturday working on a quilt for Abigail--naptimes and the hours after she went to bed until 1 am in the morning. It's been a somewhat unhappy process, since I've sat at the sewing machine until my back ached so badly I literally could not sit up any longer, ripped out four 72-inch seams while cursing my stupidity, etc. This morning I spread out the top part of it (all 216 blocks sewn together) on the floor to pin the batting to it and see if I needed to buy more (hurray! I did not! I had enough left over from the baby blanket I made for her) while Abigail was eating breakfast.

She looked over from her high chair and said "Ooh! Pretty blankie!"

Suddenly it was all worth it.

In unrelated news, here's an Abigail story from FHE: Neil fell asleep while we were singing songs (poor guy was exhausted from studying) and so Abigail and I ended up playing with her doctor toys while we waited for him to wake up. Abigail really wanted to play with Neil too, so I finally gave in and let her after he'd had a bit of a rest. Since he was so sound asleep, he slept through having his blood pressure checked, heart monitored with a stethoscope, band-aid applied, ears examined, shots in the arm, etc. (blasted parallel structure...oh well). Anyway, she took his temperature at the very end, and couldn't get him to open his mouth since he was asleep. Frustrated, she crawled up on the couch by him, bent down by his face, and said "Aaahh! Daddy, say aaaahhh!"

Pretty funny kid--guess she pays a lot of attention when we brush her teeth!