Author: Doris

Since we came back from New Jersey, we have spent a lot of time to tidy the house, cleaning up our accumulative junk in the house. Rena and I have moved around for several times. Each time, we almost had an identical but different set of stuffs for our daily usage. Boy, all the stuffs we have is simply a lot. I have made several trips to Goodwill already.

The biggest one is all our papers over the years. I spent almost 5 full days to go over all of them in the study and in our master bedroom. Right, study, master bedroom and garage all are in good order. The biggest one left is the basement. There are more stuffs there.

I hope that we can finish it up before heading to the west coast for our spring & summer there.

I found this in Vince’s backpack a few days ago.

Vincent is my friend. He is very funny. He is very special and he is kind.

I was thwarted today by clever Edda. Sunday afternoons are usually a down time for us. Nothing scheduled, nothing urgent (except for the laundry, house repairs and grocery shopping), so I though it would be a great time for Edda and me to go swimming. I’ve been encouraged by memories of Edda’s love of swimming while we were in tropical Singapore and other parents who’ve had fantastic luck swimming with their daughters, I thought I’d give it a go.

After lunch, I tried for an hour to convince Edda to take a nap – no luck. Then, I spent 30 minutes trying not to talk myself out of going swimming because it’s still winter outside. Finally, I get Edda dressed in a swim diaper, a swim suit and finally a wet suit and street clothes, then I put her on Jeremy’s lap while I go change into my own lovely swimsuit. Five minutes after I put her on Jeremy’s lap, this happens:

Yup. Slept for an hour and a half. Too late to go now! Oh well. So much for that good idea.

I did not know until this past Wednesday that the Super Bowl is this Sunday. I live in a sports vacuum here – no ESPN, no (I don’t even know any other source of sports news). I didn’t know who was playing in the Super Bowl until yesterday, when I found out that one of the teams is the Pittsburg Steelers because of this NY Times article. Apparently, Steeler’s fans love a certain bright yellow towel called the “Terrible Towel” – they wave it around at games, they take it with them to the Great Wall of China and the top of Mt. Everest – perhaps they take it with them on their honeymoons. These people are crazy! It’s just a yellow towel.

However, according to the NY Times article, the proceeds of the towel go to a school which serves close to 1000 disabled children and adults in Pennsylvania and since it’s inception has raised over $2.5 million dollars for the school. So I bought myself a couple of towels and now I’m a Steelers fan. What can I say? I’m easily bought. I also have no idea who the other team is. Maybe they are vaccinating kids in Africa with their hot dog proceeds. That would make it harder for me to decide who to root for.

Here’s a photo of Ruby on the couch at 9 am! 9 am! It used to be she never, never was allowed on the couch. Then she figured out that she could sleep on the couch when we weren’t at home. Then she figured out that she could sleep on the couch when we were upstairs asleep. Now, since she turned 8 and leapfrogged over Jeremy as the senior member of the household, all heck has broken loose and she’s sleeping on the couch whenever she feels like it…

Edda’s mouthing is very intense. She mouths all the time. ALL THE TIME. It doesn’t drive her crazy as much as it drives me crazy!

The first year that Edda mouthed, we used arm splints, but for the past few years we have given up on using them because:

1. Edda does the famous kung-fu moves to whip that arm brace off.

2. It restricts her arm movement too much. After we used it for a year, we noticed that Edda’s right arm was losing muscle mass compared to that of her non-splinted left arm.

So we’ve let her mouth for YEARS now, so wet, so chapped, so gross! We’ve tried mittens and socks – all hard for me to put on and easy for Edda to take off. Finally, this week (I don’t know why I didn’t think about this before), I put Edda’s hand in a small, soft fleece drawstring bag. Easy to put on and easy to cinch down – cuts down on the slobber and Edda’s face looks better – there is still some chapping because there is still a little mouthing of the other hand and a little chewing on the fleece bag, but it’s much, much better than before.

Tonight we had Swedish meatballs for dinner via IKEA.

No pictures mom!

As I went to bed last night, I could hear the ping, ping, ping of frozen rain/sleet against the window of the bedroom. This morning, I put on my boots and navigated my way across icy sidewalks to get to the bus stop because there was no way that I would make it to the Metro in one piece on my trusty BMX bike.

The kids, of course, had a third day in a row of no school. Obama made fun of DC today – apparently Chicago schools haven’t been closed due to weather since 1999.

Jeremy just got home from 2 days in Indiana. He attended a conference at Purdue. Go Boilermakers! (Had to look that one up.)

We’ve been keeping warm at home. Vince and Edda had a scheduled day off of school on Monday and today (Tuesday), the snow was coming down, so a snow day today. I trudged off to work both days, leaving Yvonne at home to watch the kids. After both Jeremy and I came home, we went out to play in the snow, kind of. We don’t have proper boots for Edda, so we put her feet into some old rain boots which I think were a little too small. Not an ideal situation.

Vince recorded a fart sound on one of Edda’s talkers and has been sneaking up on all unsuspecting parties and making them fart. What is with little boys and farting sounds?