Month: November 2010

I have been so busy with work and household/family obligations that my hobbies have been shoved to the side – this includes photography and blogging, knitting and reading for pleasure. I am a firm believer that I should carve out a few minutes a day to enjoy these hobbies, they don’t need to be ambitious or serious. However, I’ve been going down the ambitious path – starting War and Peace 17 times, or knitting projects that involve careful counting of stitches and referencing charts. This leads to no progress and pretty much no pleasure. I haven’t been able to finish a knitting project in a long, long time – so this week I decided that I needed to do a project with 100% chance of finishing. So I hauled out the chunky yarn and basically knit a circle. Then I took a photo of it. And for kicks, I read a book this week too. Eating Animals by Jonathon Safarn Foer. It did make me think that I should become a vegetarian. But I haven’t become one yet. Maybe after Thanksgiving.

Most of my friends are solidly in the late first or early second decade of their marriages, so I don’t often get the opportunity to go on wedding dress shopping expeditions. Actually, to tell the truth, even when I was going to 4-5 weddings a year, I never did go wedding dress shopping with any of my girl friends. I barely went wedding dress shopping for my own wedding ;). Looking back, if there was one thing I would have changed about my wedding, it would have been to splurge a little more on the dress.

It was nice to take an afternoon off this week and help my recently engaged friend Darcy try on some wedding dresses. This is my favorite one – the one I would have picked if I was getting married again, but it wasn’t Darcy’s #1 choice, so I don’t feel like I’m doing to big reveal on my little blog. (Also, Darcy said it was OK to post).

The agony of defeat. Vince was out the first round.

I figured out how to correct for white balance in camera. Look, indoor pictures that don’t look yellow!

We met with Vince’s third grade teacher this week for a regular parent/teacher conference. I very much like his teacher, very business-like and a little on the stricter side than his previous teachers, which for a wiggle-body like Vince is a good thing. He loves to be with people and loves to learn and be in the classroom. His big stumbling block is that he still reverses a lot of his letters and numbers (the big culprits are “5”, “6”, “k”, “b” and “d”). I did not know that this was happening, but they had started pulling him out of class twice a week for 15-30 minutes to work one-on-one with a reading specialist.

I have known for a while that his handwriting/spelling was atrocious and homework was pretty much unreadable, but I kind of brushed it off thinking that the kids will be typing and using spell-check soon enough, but I kind of forgotten there are *years* between when you learn the letters and when you can hand in a typed-five-standard-paragraph papers.

So I have been sitting down with him more to work on homework together. I am mainly the neatness police, trying to keep the letters more or less going in the same direction and not too squished or too spaced and to make all the reversed letters going the right way. Vince complained I was too picky. He doesn’t know that I could have easily been at least 3 times pickier than I was being! My inner-third-grader can be a perfectionist.

On another note, I had to look up prime factorization this week to make sure I was helping Vince do it right Sheez.

Keppra. We do not like you. Edda is just like a little noodle when she’s on this medication, a more unsteady walker – like a drunk college student, only shorter, wearing fuzzy cartoon print pajamas and not puking at 2 am on a dark street. She has been doing the most amazing acrobatics to keep herself on her feet, each time she looks like she’s about to careen into something, she catches herself and re-rights herself without falling. I guess at least she’s working out those ab muscles.

And, we haven’t noticed any decrease in the occurrences of her seizures. So we are getting all of the side effects and none of the benefit. Grrrr…

Vince learned how to use a pocketknife last night.  It just about killed me to hand over a brand-new-extra-sharp Swiss Army knife and just watch him go after a bar of soap with said sharp knife.  Vince is kind of fearless with a knife.  It took a lot of willpower for me to let him finish carving out his bear from soap.  I know this is just a taste of the fear I will feel when he learns to drive (only 8 more years!  halfway there!).

We did have a chance to move to wood and the assignment was to turn the square profile into a round profile.  Unfortunately, Maxi found the stick and chewed it up before any home whittling was done and maybe it’s just as well.

I have been watching this over and over again.

Notice chewed-through leash on cute dog.

Maxi is a handful – it’s a little louder around the house (she likes to bark more than Ruby ever did). I will not lie, I do not like standing out in the front yard in my pajamas in the cold and dark waiting for a dog to pee. Before Maxi, Jeremy and I would alternate nights we would take care of Edda. It guaranteed you at least a good night’s sleep every other night – if you wanted to display your selflessness and get some extra credit in the marriage luuuuvvv bank, you could do a double shift (two nights in a row). Now that we have a puppy, each night you get to pick between Maxi duty or Edda duty and no one is getting any sleep. Then grouchy-ness set in from both sides and it is no good! No good! You need at least one fully-rested person to be the one who tells the jokes, makes funny comments and purposely wear mismatched socks as a means of rebelling against the corporate tyranny/political morass/general-life-unfairness so the days don’t slide into one complaint after another.

Edda just loves the dog park. Makes me think that we need to adopt 17 dogs and get more land and just have animals around to nuzzle up to Edda. Not only did Edda commune with the animals, she even did some self-imposed physical therapy and spent some time slowly making her way up the hill at the park (can you see the white speck in the photo below? Edda likes to exit, whenever we are in a room, she always walks towards the nearest exit, so really, she’s just trying to find the exit door of the park.) Now if we could only get the dogs to stop peeing on the wheelchair/stroller when we are not paying attention.

I tried to convince Jeremy that going to Costco at noon on Sunday was not a good idea. However, he was determined.

Singing patriotic songs on the way there:

On a bed of nails:

Trying on coats that are standard issue for the folks who work in Antarctica!