Snow Day!

We've gotten so much snow over the past few days that church was cancelled today.....YAY!!! To celebrate our snow day we had chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast and then got all bundled up to play in the snow. When it snowed a little bit a month or so ago it was only 5 degrees outside and Reese freaked when we took her outside to play in it. Today it was significantly warmer and she had so much fun playing in the snow. She found walking through the deep snow to difficult so she took to just crawling around in it which was hilarious. She made a few snow angels and tried to throw some snowballs but couldn't with her mittens on. Jaeger ran around in the snow for a little bit, but then got tired of the cold and hid underneath the park bench where there wasn't any snow. Nate and I had a snowball fight and while Reese thought it was funny for Mommy to throw snowballs at Daddy, she got quite upset when Mommy was running down the street as Daddy chucked snowballs. All in all it was a fun day and I was glad that she had fun playing in the snow today.

The Best Thing Since Post-Its

Generally speaking, when Nate changes operating systems on the computer I either don't care or grumble just a little bit about how I have to get used to something new. When Nate upgraded us to Windows 7 I had absolutely no emotions, that was until I found my new favorite feature the sticky note. I can't believe I lived this long without computer sticky notes, for those of you who don't know they're basically post its for the desktop and they're ingenius. You don't have to save them, they just stay where you put them until you delete them. There are a bunch of different colors so I color code different topics, for example I have a bunch of green ones right now that pertain to the trip I'm planning to Ireland. Nate doesn't get my fascination with the sticky notes and I think the shear volume of them that I have may be beginning to irritate him so I've started stacking them so that they take up less room, but he just doesn't understand how convenient they are. Previously when I would be planning a trip I'd have to open a word document or the notepad to jot down the different dates, prices, hotels, etc. that I found, but now I just put it on the post it and there it is for me to remember. When someone emails me something important I generally forget after I've closed the email, but now I jot it down on a post it (in pink because that's the closest to red and thus the most urgent post it color there is) and when I get on the computer I can see it and remember. Eventually I'll be able to sway Nate to the magical world of sticky notes, but for now I'm content that he merely rolls his eyes when he sees the new pile of them on the desktop...though it's possible that he's rolling his eyes not at the sticky notes but at the new trip he sees coming together in sticky note form everytime he logs on. Which brings up the point, when will he learn that three day weekends were not meant to be wasted sitting around our house?

What Might Have Been

When I was in college my friends and I would always come up with stories of what each others future would be like, needless to say none of them were very pleasant. One friend was going to be morbidly obese and never leave her house but would also be a very successful writer. Another was going to be the manager at McDonalds, she was a business major, and would be constantly trying to hook up with guys that went through the drive thru line. My story was that I would be a career Albertsons employee that at the age of 40 would still be hitting on the new college student employees.
Fortunately for me, my friends misjudged my future and now I'm a married stay at home mom that lives in Europe. I think the real problem here was that they misjudged what my future would have been had I not gotten married. This morning as I was lying in bed I realized what would have been, or perhaps what could have been. If I had not taken the road I had, I would've been a "dog lady", think "cat lady" but with dogs instead of cats. Along with Max we're watching our friends' dog Luna so when Nate got up this morning he took the dogs out to pee and then brought them in and threw them onto the bed with me. As they cuddled up with me I began to wonder how many more dogs I could have curl up in bed with me before I would deem it to be too many. This thought alone brought my epiphany of my life as a dog lady. Sure it would've started out with one dog, but soon I would've bought another so they could play together while I was at work. After that I would've started taking in strays and soon I would've been working from home and taking care of hundreds of dogs. The best part is that no one would've realized I was crazy until the number of dogs surpassed 10, when you tell someone you have a cat an alarm goes off in their head but if you say you have a dog no one thinks twice.
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As I was writing this my friends arrived to retrieve their son and their dog, I'm back to only having one dog. I guess we'll never know what might have been.

My Future Car Jacker

We're watching Max for a couple days while his parents take a nice little solo trip. I really like it when Max comes over because as a general rule he and Reese play very nicely together and I get to have some time to work on my own things while they entertain each other. Today after lunch he and Reese were taking turns pushing each other around in the car. Reese was in the car first and he pushed her around and then she actually got out of the car on her own and let him get in for a chance. She was pushing him down the hall when I started to hear Max cry, when I turned the corner I saw her trying to weasel her way into the car after her first attempt to pull him out of the car had failed. I rushed to get the camera because it was far too entertaining to let slip by, but I missed getting pics of the first part where she was trying to force herself in to the carseat. Once she saw me taking pictures and realized that I wasn't going to drag Max out of the car she started crying with him in an attempt to paint him as the villian in the story. Once she realized I wasn't going to drag Max out of the car and he wasn't going to get out on his own she decided to play the martyr and pull herself out of the car on her stomach.

She's Getting So Big!

I was looking through Reese's baby photos last night for a project I'm working on and I couldn't get over how big my little girl has gotten. When we went to her 18 month check-up in November the doctor said she was in the 20th percentile for weight and the 80th for height. He also said that she was "a smarty-pants" which I already knew but it was nice to hear someone who isn't completely biased say it.

Reese loves animals, no love isn't quite strong enough, she ADORES animals. Whenever we see an animal of any kind she wants to run over and pet it and hug it and kiss it and just generally make it love her as much as she loves it. Her favorite book is her animal book, which I must read 50 times a day, and she knows all the noises that the animals make....or at least she knows all the ones that I know, I have no clue what to tell her a chameleon says. Cats don't say meow, they sound more like the name of the Chinese leader Mao but in a really sweet voice. Dogs say wooh wooh wooh, ducks say quack and pigs make a very similar noise but is slightly different in it's own way. Donkeys say hee-aw, horses laugh, when she sees the spider on the page she hits it...because that's what we do to spiders, she knows dolphins and cows and tigers and sheep and snakes and many others that I'm forgetting but they're all very very cute and she's willing to tell you what any animal says if you just ask.

She loves to watch movies, there were a few weeks were it seemed like someone was always sick so she got to watch a lot more tv than usual and she is utterly addicted to Finding Nemo, which she has been addicted to since birth, and Bolt. She'll go over to the movies and pull out either "neno" or "bowl" and ask you to watch it over and over and over. The has a Nemo tablesetting and when she uses it she spends the whole meal showing you that Nemo is on her fork or her plate and so on and so forth. Nate was making pancakes the other day and Reese was in there helping so he asked her to get him a bowl from the cupboard...she ran into the living room shouting "BOWL!!!!" and brought the movie Bolt to him.

She loves to read and will bring you books over and over and over again, but she also loves to play with all of her toys. She'll drag her blocks out and build a tower or make me something to eat in her new kitchen, she's always doing something different and it's exciting to see her imagination growing and to watch her learn to play by herself. One of her favorite things is her car, she'll come grab my leg and drag me to the playroom and then get in her car and wait for me to push her around the house. One time we made Jaeger ride with her so now she always wants Jaeger to ride with her and if Jaeger runs away then we chase her. She loves to play outside, but the weather hasn't been nice enough recently, when it is nice she likes to go to the park and swing and use the slide. I wish we had a larger park in our town but luckily the little slide keeps her entertained at this point. She also loves to play with a ball, one of her favorite things we do is go bowling and if we enter the bowling alley for another reason she'll just start shouting "BALL BALL" and pointing at all the bowling balls. We go to a playgroup on base twice a month and when they play she always wants to get a basketball and carry it around and throw it and chase it, it makes me very proud.

Reese started going to nursery a few weeks ago and it didn't surprise me how quickly she took to going to class and playing with the other kids. I went with her a few weeks and then the first week she was alone they said she cried for less than a minute when she realized I was gone and then went off playing with the other kids. She's very social so she doesn't have any problems getting in there and playing with other children and she tends to be alright about sharing unless it's with her friend Max. Max is basically Reese's best friend, they play all the time and their personalities are perfectly suited because Reese is bossy and Max is laid back. They'll play with the car and Max will take a turn pushing Reese around and then Reese will get out for Max's turn and go do something else instead of pushing him around. Luckily once she's reminded to share with Max and to take turns then she does, she just forgets that she's supposed to share with him.

When Reese goes to bed at night we read a book, her favorite is the grover book "The Monster at the End of this Book", a classic if you don't have it, then she tells me "tuw-tle" which means she wants to turn her turtle constellation light on and then she gets in bed and folds her arms really tight together for prayer. She's an excellent sleeper and goes to bed everynight at 8pm with generally no fuss, however if you try to put her to bed even 15 mins early she will regulate on you and of course she has to have Emmy, puppy and gloworm to go to bed and if one of them is missing then she waits until you find it.

Reese hates most fruits and all vegetables, I'm not sure when this began but all the sudden she refuses to eat anything that is green besides grapes. The only fruits she'll eat right now are applesauce, but never an apple itself, grapes and raisins. Her favorite thing is cookies, any variety accepted. She calls them "cook" so if you accidentally ask her if she wants to cook something in her kitchen or if I ask her if she wants to help me cook she immediately thinks she's getting a cookie. We took her off soy milk recently and she's doing really well on the lactose free milk which is quite exciting, no more walking out of a store covered in poop for me! Every morning I ask her if she wants milk or water and generally she tells me "nyuk", which is how she says milk but sounds exactly like that noise the three stooges made, but sometimes she'll want "wa."

I'm trying to think of anything else that I've missed. She loves to play hide and seek, she finally started going down the stairs on her stomach instead of trying to walk down them, we tossed the sippies out a few months ago, she needs a clip in her hair so that she doesn't look like a shaggy dog but refuses to keep it in....hmmmm....oh, and when I'm in the shower she likes to empty her drawers and hide her clothes from me. I think those are the highlights, clearly there's so much more seeing as she's constantly saying the most hilarious things, but that'll have to do for now.

Proud of Me

I'm so proud of myself right now that I'm practically beaming :) Nate and I have been converting the office into a playroom to store all of Reese's toys in, so when we were at Ikea I saw this fabric that I thought would be really cute to make curtains out of to put in that room. Now I did look to see if they sold curtains in this fabric or anything else that I liked because in these types of situations I'm not much of a do it yourselfer, but alas they did not so I decide that this was something I could manage to do. I got home and measured the window and found out that I wouldn't have enough material for two panels so I would have to wait until I went back to Ikea to get another thing of this fabric.....boooooo....then I decided instead of doing that I would just get some white fabric to add to the bottom and then I would make some loops at the top as well. So I took all my fabric over to my friends place to use her machine and basically have her oversee my operation but I ended up doing all the sewing and cutting myself, she helped iron some hems but other than that it was all me and I'm very excited about that fact. I was so proud of my little creation that I couldn't wait to get it home and hang it, but first I had to go get these little hook clips because this room doesn't have a regular curtain rod. It's this weird thing where you hook these clips to the curtain and then you slide the clips into this runner at the top, in all of the other rooms we just took these down and hung rods but I wasn't interested in going to all that trouble so I figured I'd find a way around all that. I ended up just pinning the little clips to my loops and voila it looks fantastic. Now all that's left to do to make the room complete is frame and hang the prints I bought so as soon as that's done I'll post pics of how wonderful this room looks.

Also, I thought I'd post a pic of my new BFF...his name is Mario and he likes to hang out with me while Reese naps and while Nate's working on his homework. He just arrived on Tuesday but already I can feel a true friendship emerging between the two of us.