A girl and her Bubby

The grandparents are off to dance the night away and we're having a quiet night inside.  Somehow, this seems backwards! 

They'll have a great time, though, and we could use some extra sleep in preparation for tomorrow and the horror of daylight savings time.  No matter which way it switches, we always lose.  The kids are up way early, their routines are messed up, etc.  It especially gets me during the "fall back" time of year, because everyone is all excited about their extra hour of sleep and I know it's going to be more like an hour less of sleep around here.  Not that I really mind - it's all totally worth it - but I suspect daylight savings and I will be mortal enemies until sometime around our kids' teenage years!

Early Saturday morning

At the very beginning of the weekend, while everyone else is sleeping, we were...

...jumping in our new jammies

...reading piles of books

...designing some elaborate game involving both diggers and the dollhouse

...and struggling to stay quiet until was a normal adult time to wake up! For awhile, we had a great deal going that involved one of us "getting up" with Mateo at the crack of dawn on the weekends but then going back to sleep on the couch or in his bed while he played. Unfortunately, this isn't working very well anymore, due to little sister wanting to get in on the early morning act. However, it is awfully cute to see them playing together so happily in their jammies, even through bleary eyes.

Biblioteca

We have an ongoing battle with the library.  Namely, Mateo loves it and Natalia hates it.  Or, rather, she may not hate it, but it causes her to turn into a wild, whining, clingy kid who wants to throw books and shriek and get in her brother's personal space and just generally be difficult.  I'm not sure what to do about it, because I can't give her a timeout in the stroller without a tantrum ensuing, which is obviously not cool in the library. 

However, trying to appease her never works no matter what I do.  She's been like this since she was a baby, so I think that she is just not a library kid, or, at least, not for now.  She loves books, but I think she gets overwhelmed and then just goes wild.

Mateo, on the other hand, wants to check out every picture book they have and would prefer that I read each and every one to him first.  The books he wants are getting increasingly longer, and therefore increasingly aggravating his sister. 

I love the library as a post-nap activity, because we can walk there (at least until winter comes) and because it's generally fun for Mateo and I...but not for Tali.  What to do?  I keep thinking it will get better and I hesitate to leave her home with Sacha, who is usually napping after work, because I want to expose her to libraries and books and reading and all that stuff.  But, we all keep ending up frustrated because we're leaving too early (Mateo), too late (Talia), or are just about to pull out our hair in frustration.  

Now that I'm writing this, I'm realizing that Tali gets overwhelmed very easily in general - social situations, at the store, at the library, etc, and maybe it's just too much for her right now.  I wish I could just sit her down with some age appropriate books and let her explore them, but she won't sit still for long enough.  When you include the walk there and back, which she does seem to enjoy, I think the overall experience just barely tips the scales toward positive, so I guess I'll just keep trying. 

It's funny how these issues crop up that I would never have anticipated before we have kids, and yet have become something to seriously ponder when deciding how to spend time with the kids now that they are here.

In other news, we had my mom here all week and Sacha's parents are coming this weekend, so we're all excited about so much grandparent time.  I made potato leek soup for dinner and I'm hoping it will go over well.  It's actually not very wintery - it was somewhat sunny and warm today despite it being November - but a wintery soup still sounds like the thing for a November Friday night.  Happy weekend!

Done, done, and done!

I am extremely happy to report that our little home construction project is finished!  And, equally happy that we LOVE the results.  The closet is perfect.  It will be great for holding a lot of stuff, but doesn't take up the room in a way that feels crowded.  The new lighting in there is perfect. 

Since we had the electrician out anyway, we had him put in a new ceiling fan/light combo thing in our living room, which has never had an overhead light.  I'm typing underneath it right now and it still feels very weird to have light coming from overhead!  Also, we had the light switch in our bedroom moved so that it's by the door.  Before, it was across the room, so you had to walk through the dark room and around the bed to turn on the light. 

It's funny how such a minor change can make such a big difference in our quality of life.  We've gone from wishing we could move right now to wanting to extend our stay in this house, because we just love it so much now.  We will probably still sell and move in the next couple of years, but at least we'll get that time to enjoy the improvements.  

I actually think it will be really hard for me to leave this house, even if we leave for some other place that we love and has more amenities.   I mean, we've been here since we moved to Oregon in 2004.  We've conceived our babies in this house and brought them home here.  They both learned to crawl and walk and eat and take baths and do everything here.  There are a lot of things we'll look forward to having in a new house (must have list includes two bathrooms, a fireplace, and a big garden outside), but I'm sure I'll be in tears leaving this one anyway.  I'm not so good at change!  Anyway, that's all for another day.  For now, we're going to enjoy what we have. 

The last part of the plan for the front room is to build some benches with Apa, possibly this weekend, and then the room will be completely finished.  Here are some photos.  Wahoo!

Took this at night without the flash so you can get a sense of the nice light in the room.  It feels very warm and homey in there.

Inside the closet, which we have yet to really move into.

Here's the closet door, which our contractor just had laying around, and which is an exact match with our other doors, just by pure coincidence!

The ceiling fan!  Not only do we love it, but Mateo is obsessed with the remote control.  He pretty much wants the fan going during all hours of the day.  He actually asked me to write a thank you note to myself and Mommy for the fan.  I just about died from the cuteness while trying not to laugh.

18 weeks

This is belated, but here's the lady herself at 18 weeks, this past Sunday.  Big ultrasound on Monday afternoon.  Whoo!  Can't wait to see the baby.  Obviously, all we care about is a healthy baby, but it will be fun to (hopefully) get confirmation of the little one's sex!  Anybody have any guesses?

Voting

Well, I have to say that I was a lot more excited on the last election day than I was today. We voted via mail a week ago, then got our ballots back because we forgot to put on postage (which is totally lame, by the way. I don't think ballots should need postage) and then put the proper stamps on and mailed them off again. It's looking like a bad night for our side, which is a bummer....but, then, these things always go in cycles.

We spent the day doing nothing much political, you know, unless you count trying to destroy the institution of marriage, raising children in an immoral environment, and who knows whatever other sins we might have inadvertently committed. I know I've said this before, but I'll just say it again anyway. We had a totally normal day. Mateo went to preschool, Talia and I had a playdate, we patronized local businesses in a variety of ways, the kids took naps, we walked to our local library and then to a coffee shop, and then had dinner as a family before I went off to my grandma's 92nd birthday dinner. We are so traditional, it's not even funny, and yet somehow we're soooo subversive. Bleck.

It freaks me out to see conservatives winning elections all over the country who think that we are fraying the fabric of our country by our very existence, by our wish to be married, by our choice to have children.

I know, I know, that this election isn't really about us at all - it's about the economy and fear and people's reactions to the current administration - but it still feels threatening to see some extreme right-wingers just sail into office with their conservative fiscal views AND their social views still very much intact.

Back in our normal but not so normal life, we're almost finished with our big house project and should have all the electricity rewired in our front room and living room tomorrow. I took before photos and am excited to post the after ones when it's finally all finished.

And, I took a few photos today at the library and at the coffee shop, where Sacha met us after work. We always have an interesting time in the library, because Mateo would stay there for an hour and Talia just goes into her getting-into-everything mode. We got some beginning readers for a change, so we'll see if he's interested in them. Here's the boy with his nose in a book, the girl taking a brief break from rearranging all the books she could reach, and the beautifully pregnant wife joining us for a treat.

If we represent the gay agenda, then I guess the country should be quaking in its boots.

Sights and sounds

Taking Mateo to the doctor for his yearly check-ups has become so routine that it's not something I even think about.  I might wonder a bit about his height and weight, but that's about it.  Imagine my surprise when we went to the doctor this morning and he failed both his vision test (couldn't read the chart at all with his right eye) and his hearing test.  He claimed that he couldn't hear any of the beeping.  Anyone who knew us when he was first born might remember that he initially failed his hospital hearing test, leading us to contemplate learning sign language and repeatedly making loud noises in an attempt to get him to startle (poor kid, he can hear just fine, as we found out at the follow-up testing when he was about a month old).

Anyway, it was very unclear whether he just didn't get what he was supposed to be hearing or if he genuinely didn't hear anything, but, in any case, we now have exams scheduled with the eye and ear doctors.  I'm pretty sure we're going to come out of the eye appointment with glasses, which I know was probably inevitable, given that nearly everyone on my side of the family wears them and that I'm blind as a bat (I can't even see the big E on the chart on my own).  And, hopefully the hearing test was just a fluke.  The audiology appointment scheduler said I couldn't bring any other kids to the appointment, so maybe Tali running around the exam room saying "I wanna go home!" repeatedly was detrimental to his concentration today.

In any case, he ended up with three shots, which he took very well overall.  He hasn't had a shot since his second birthday, so this was a whole new experience.  Luckily, we took some Halloween candy along to give right after the shots.  Boy, we've come a long way since the little guy got to nurse after something like that!

As for height and weight stats, they didn't do any!  The nurse got so distracted by the whole seeing and hearing thing that she just never weighed or measured him, and just re-entered the data from when we went in last week to get a little wart on his toe checked out.  He's around 33 or 34 pounds and about 39 or 40 inches tall.  

Then, later, my mom came over and played with the kids and went grocery shopping for us.  Thanks, Mom!  And, the electrician finally came to finish our front room project and start putting a light in our main living room.  Very exciting.  There was some major banging and crashing up in the attic as he rewired stuff, so we're hoping to see some actual lights go in tomorrow.

After Grammy left for the store, Te Te fell asleep on the couch while I was doing my workout, which has become his habit on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays lately.  It is the sweetest thing and I love that I can still watch him sleep sometimes.  Reminds me of when he was a baby.  He's been doing and growing so much lately that he is just zonked by naptime.  I'm counting my blessings that we have a four-year-old who still naps!

Finally, after a fun playdate with friends down the street, Mateo and Apa went out for their annual birthday dinner.  We thought we'd make it a tradition to take a photo before they went out, so here they are.  I couldn't choose between these three, so I chose them all!