Tagged

Sorry Emma, this took me a while.

1. What was the best thing you cooked last week?
Hate to admit it, but fried chicken

2. If money, time and babysitting were no object, where would you go and with who?
To Hong Kong with my James, Louis and my family.

3. When was the last time you cried?
In October, when I would cry often from those dang post birth hormones

4. Five things you were doing 10 years ago?
- Riding a bike while wearing a skirt every day
- Eating lots of seafood
- Sleeping on a floor mat
- Sweating a lot
- Being a missionary in Taiwan

5. Five things you were doing 5 years ago?
- Getting engaged
- Working with farmers at a coop
- Applying to grad schools
- Getting ready to move to Boston
- Getting annoyed with a particular roommate

6. Five things you were doing 1 year ago?
- Finding out we were having a baby
- Traveling to Hawaii
- Getting to manage my first project
- Teaching seminary
- Repainting the kitchen

7. Seven of your favorite hobbies:
- photography
- reading
- gardening
- biking (used to be at least)
- cooking
- piano
- knitting

8. Five favorite foods:
- Chocolate chip cookies
- My grannie’s home made chicken noodles
- Curry
- Veal Marsala
- Strawberries

9. Five places you've been:(five of my favorites)
- West coast of Australia
- Hong Kong
- Taiwan
- New Zealand
- Prince Edward Island

10. Five favorite memories (in no particular order):
- Saving one of our puppies from a stream and everyone calling me brave (I probably liked the props afterwards more than the experience)
- Our trip to Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia- so relaxing
- Having Louis- it really was an awesome experience, even though it is so cliché to include it
- Skipping school to sled down Hatcher’s Pass on a mattress covered in plastic
- James and I’s week in Kauai

Poop Expert

I haven't posted in a while, because every minute I'm on the computer has been pretty much spent working. The deadline for my draft report was on Tuesday, and since then I've slowly been coming out of out of the thick fog of the project.

The project is actually pretty cool, its getting a project ready for a bond offering. The project deals with large scale dairy farms and using their waste streams to generate methane, which is scrubbed and cleaned to natural gas and then sold straight into the pipeline. But to be honest, I basically have become our firm's cow poop expert. I have tried to come up with an appropriate title for myself, but so far the best that I have come up with has been Bovine Waste Engineer. Too generic. I want something catchy, original. Any suggestions?

The other little job I've been doing is teaching some beginning students piano. I thought I would like it just fine, but I actually really LOVE it! I love figuring out how each othe the little girls (I only have girl students right now) learn, how to best teach them, etc. I never thought I would like teaching little kids, but one on one I really love it.

Mad Skilz

Louis is really getting into rolling and moving lately. Its fun to watch him navigate around his very colorful floor mobile.

And this picture is because I finally think I captured how wide and big his eyes are. I love this shot.

The Comb Over

The comb over is a slowly dying hairstyle generally reserved for gentlemen of the older generation. Until just recently, it was alive and well in our house.

Louis was born with a nice, healthy head of thick, black hair. Though a lot of his original hair fell out within the first months of his life, some of it decided to stick around. Unfortunately, the survivors congregated in three general areas; the two sides of his head, and in the middle back. These hairs not only stuck around, but grew at an incredible rate. By the time we took this picture, the sides would fall below his earlobes. I would try to brush them behind his ears, but more often than not, they would end up straying to the top of his head and across to the other side; a perfect comb over.

I didn't want to give him a haircut at four months (he's just too little and I wanted it to be long and wild), but after several comments from friends and family including my Dad, our good friend MB and even our 70 year old neighbor Bob, we decided that yes, they must go.

The first cut went rather smoothly.

But like so many things in our house nowadays, the end result was crying.

Here's a close up of the before.....

And the short, sleek and of course extremely attractive after.

The Best Night EVER

From the title of this blog, you might think I'm referring to some fancy date that James and I went on, or maybe Louis slept through the night for the first time. But no, the best night EVER is thanks to our new mattress that arrived on Saturday. Granted, its only a COSTCO sale matress, not some fancy posturpedic or sleep number bed, but compared to what we had before, it is heaven.

James and I have never slept in a very good bed. When we first got married, we knew we were going to move to Boston in seven months. It didn't make much sense to buy a brand new bed just to haul it across country. We borrowed a bed from a friend of mine. The bed had been her grandmother's bed- for many years. That probably tells you enough about that bed. It compressed to about an inch when we were both laying on it.

At the time, I didn't notice it that much. We were newlyweds and the bad bed was the least of our 'sleeping in the same bed' concerns. James is a terrible twitcher when he falls asleep. I'd be just about to nod off into peaceful dreams and when his whole body would twitch violently and the whole bed would shake. I'd think it was an earthquake and jump up, ready to stand in the door frame or bolt under the kitchen table. His even gave me a bloddy nose once, when his arm twitched so violently it smacked me clean across the face. Also, James had the habit of trying to position himself smack in the center of the bed, with arms and legs stretched and splayed to the four corners, not unlike a starfish. This of course left very little room for me and I would generally wake curled into a ball in his armpit or some other less than optimal space.

To be fair, I'm sure James had plenty of adjustments sleeping with me. I used to love the room insanely hot when I slept and was definately a pillow and blanket hog. With all these barriers to a good night's sleep, a waffer like mattress was not our biggest concern.

When we moved to Boston, we came out for my graduate school with no job, little furniture and no bed. After a month of sleeping on our air mattresses (one of which would deflate every night by morning time), we decided to break down and buy a bed. Problem was, we had a really tight cash flow, so we headed to the every trusty Craigslist. There we found a decent bed for a steal, about $150. It was an OK bed. Definately an improvement over the last one. Plus, we had worked out most of the 'sleeping' issues and had been coming from air mattresses, so it felt like a fluffy cloud to us.

Fast forward three and a half years to the present. Our Craigslist bed slowly and steadily gave out on us. Its once straight top now resembled our shallow soup bowls. James even gave up sleeping with a pillow because he just rested his head on the high edge of the bed while his body rested in the lower bowl portion. We rolled together frequently. If we brought Louis to bed with us, he would also roll gently down to the middle of the bed, long before he had the physical capacity to roll over.

So yesterday we finally broke down and bought a new bed, a real bed. It is high and firm and so not bowl like that we both commented we were afraid of rolling off of the bed without the raised edge of our old bed. And not surprisingly, last night's sleep was AWESOME.

Even Louis finds it comfortable for his afternoon naps.