Park From The Past

I was in kindergarten when my parents moved home from Brazil, and that year I also went to kindy in Salem. So sometimes when I was a kid and visiting my grandma (who lived down on High Street in South Salem), we used to come to this very park to play.

It used to be a crooked house with crooked flooring if I recall correctly. But of course that's probably a health hazard or something now, so it's not quite like that anymore.
I took Nora to the to Bush's Pasture Park today, and parked across from the playground, so we had to cross the grounds that used to be the pasture. Of course, Nora had to run up and down and all over the grass, and of course: chase birds.
The cool house that used to be there has been rebuilt and repainted, but it's the crooked house, with a nice ramp, which Nora had a bunch of fun running up and down.
And just so you understand this outfit: We went to Lowe's first before the park, and Nora dumped the entire contents of her sippy cup onto her new shorts and shirt, which were QUITE perfect for a photoshoot/play time at the park, and these were the only pants/shirt I had in her diaper bag. Striped shirt/flower power pants.

But rather than not go to the park, or worse, not take pictures, we went anyway and decided that all the funny looks from the other Mommies at the park meant they were just jealous that we were that avante garde, or perhaps they just figured I let Nora dress herself this morning...

Who knows.

If We Build It...

Brian and I have been in this house over a year now, and we've had a few things that needed fixing, and a garage and shop FULL of crap that doesn't fit in the house...

I'm quite proud that we've downsized a LOT of stuff from moving from Denver. We used to fill a VERY large truck, and a good half of Jeff & Judy's barn with our stuff.

But since we moved into our small house with the small mortgage, we also needed a smaller amount of stuff.

So we've been crowded in for a while, and several times now I've asked Brian if we could do this or that, or fix this or that, or how about getting to the lawn mower now that it's spring and the grass is growing? And his answer was pretty consistent:

"I could if I had a shop workbench built."

So yesterday we started unloading everything out of the shop space, and this morning the garage was emptied, and this afternoon Hannah came over and watched Nora, who gleefully ran around the yard and sometimes came to see us, all while keeping her away from saws and thumping herself in the head with the 3/4" plywood because she wasn't watching where she was going...

And many hours later, Brian has his work bench, and for some reason, perhaps the loss of all those piles of lumber, and getting rid of a few extra items to Goodwill, the trash and other places...but we can actually walk through both the shop and the garage, and it's not NEARLY as crowded as it once was!

We're both bone tired, but it was worth it! Like Brian said, if he'd been asked Friday if he'd have his workbench built by the end of THIS weekend, he never would have said yes!

Cool Picture of the Day

Nora and her cousins went out to the barn so they could feed the horses and Nora could check out the whole adventure.

The best thing about going to Jeff & Judy's Pizza Night Thing (PNT) was when I put her in the car and I said "we're going to Uncle Jeff & Aunt Judy's, and Miriam and Hannah's house too..." and she settled right in, and ran to Hannah when she saw her in the house.

It's so neat to have her near family where she knows them, and is old enough to remember them and trust them and have fun with them!

Fun day!

Cherry Blossoms!

Nora and I met our friend Patti and her boys Sullivan and Keaton at the park in front of the state Capitol today, and we got LOTS of gorgeous pictures...

She posted nice pictures of Nora for me, and I'll post a few of hers that I got too, along with some beautiful pictures of the capitol grounds.

GORGEOUS Day!

Nora's Spring Day

El Tigre

If my cat only knew what I did to one of his species today, he would not be sitting in my lap, gazing into my eyes with the Look of Love that cats only give on that rare occasion that they realize where their food comes from.

Today was my first lab for my second anatomy class. It's the second in a series I have to take this year before applying for the nursing program next year.

So in our lab, we dove right in and started studying muscle groups, in this case on a cat.

I wisely chose my lab partner this time, not a gal who told me last quarter that she has a phobia about cats (guess who ends up doing all the work in THAT relationship?). Instead I got a young Mom named Scarlett, who is a bit of a drama queen but likes to slice and dice as much as I do, so if nothing else, our fingers got in the way of each other's scalpels a few times, without any blood being shed.

I will spare you the gory details, but I will say this: I wasn't sure about whether or not to eat breakfast beforehand, in case I'd see it again...but I did, and it was a good idea.

Plus, I got to choose the cat from the pile of cats they brought in double bagged and ready to work on. I chose an orange kitty because I have not owned an orange cat myself, and let's face it, it would just be weird to go home to the same color cat at night.

My chances for nightmares tonight is plenty as it is.

So Scarlett immediately named him Tigger. And of course we did the required meowing and stuff while we took off connective tissue and fat to try and expose the muscles we were supposed to be studying.

Then I asked where the cats came from -- presuming the local shelters or Humane Society (wouldn't THAT be ironic?) -- but it turns out there are cat farms in Mexico where cats are actually bred for the specific purpose of providing us college kids a lab carcass to study.

So of course, we had to change his name to El Tigre, you know, to be more culturally sensitive to his roots.

Aside from the smell, and the general grossness most of you can imagine, it really was a neat experience. We learned about all his back, arm and leg muscles, and then we bagged him back up, and put him away. He'll be back out next week for us to study his abdominals.

So this week and next it's the muscle groups on cats and humans I have to study. I need to know more than a hundred, which have incredibly ridiculous names like Xiphihumeralis and Serratus ventralis.

Good times...

Little Miss

Miss Nora just got over her hatred of hats, and wears them more often and for longer every time we try them on. Today she woke up from her nap and I put this hat on her that Teri bought her so long ago that her little head didn't even fit in it she was so small!

It's a hat that says "Life is good" on the front...

Monday I took her to the doctor for her last shots until kindergarten. She was weighed, measured, and had lots of skeptical looks at the doctor who tried valiantly, if not fruitlessly, to look in her ears and listen to her heart.

She's 35 inches tall, nearly 24 lbs., and her little melon head is 19 cm.

That makes her as tall as the average 2 1/2 year-old, and is slightly below average (44th percentile) for both weight and head measurement. Overall, a healthy checkup!

Life is good!

Na Na Na...The Girl Gets "NO"

So yesterday after driving all morning, Nora fell asleep around Vancouver, Washington and we kept driving on through towards home.

My mom met us at our house to get a few hours with Nora. After unloading the car and getting most of our stuff put away, we settled in for a little lunch and rest. Brian had already emptied a can of Diet Coke, and it was on the coffee table.

Nora, of course, decides to go for it. Now we've said "No" to her plenty of times, but this time I said "No" and she stopped reaching for it for a few seconds, then did it again, this time saying "Na na na" to herself (without actually touching it!).

She did it a couple more times before we just moved the can out of the way.

Then this morning, she did it again. She reached for something she knows is a no-no and said the same thing.

She gets it!

She Understands...

We spent the past week at Oma and Opa's house up in Mount Vernon, and on Saturday morning, we went to Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Stephanie's house up in Bellingham for brunch and a few hours to try and terrorize them into realizing how cute kids are, and don't they want to get one of their own??? LOL

OK, no pressure...
But in the midst of all Nora's pathological cuteness, she was sitting on the floor after playing ball with Aunt Stephanie, and Aunt Stephanie tossed the ball in her direction, and Nora watched it come to her, seemingly from the sky.

Aunt Stephanie joked: "That's where balls come from -- the sky," not thinking that Nora would really get it. But all of the sudden, Nora looked skyward with a VERY quizzical look on her face.

She got it.
We had a fun brunch and lots of play time. Jeremy has some African spears on his walls and we joked about how childproofed the place was, you know, considering the pointy spears at child's eye-level and all. :)

Nora had a blast with both of them, and knows them by name and sight now. Thank you Jer and Steph!

Zoo Day With Oma and Opa!

Rough Start, But a Big Fat Thanks and Some Awesome Pictures...

Yesterday afternoon Nora and I headed over to my friend Kim's house for lunch, who lives just BLOCKS from the zoo on Seattle's Phinney Ridge.

It was wonderful to catch up with her and see her kids and husband Pat. I knew both of them in college, went to their wedding, and wow, was it cool to see both her kids, and let Nora terrorize the house. We didn't break ANYTHING! Although Nora did manage to spill or spread as much stuff around as possible to remind them of the joy of their older kids. Their daughter Cathy showed Nora her Barbie dolls, and they played with balls and found lots of fun stuffed animals upstairs.

We drove up to see Oma and Opa after that, with Nora just barely squeezing in a 20 minute nap on the way.

She needed the sleep too, since earlier in the day, we had had a rough start.

Well, for starters, it began around 5 a.m. when Nora woke up, and the next hour of me saying a gentle "shhhhhhhhhhh" trying to get her to sleep for at LEAST another hour.

Then it was a hellacious morning of her suddenly deciding that MOMMY WAS THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD, and EVERYONE ELSE CAN JUST STEP OFF.

You know, that time when if you leave the sight of their little eyeballs, the melt down into a complete and total screaming panic?

Yeah, that was my morning pre-coffee, from about 7:15-8:21 a.m., when I finally looked at the car clock and we were on the road to Seattle.

(A special THANKS to cousins Erik, her 13-year-old cousin who gave up his room this weekend AND saved the morning with diaper garbage bag delivery and putting up with Nora...then John Michael, her nearly 18-year-old cousin who COMPLETELY pitched in and handled Nora, despite her complete freak-out while I loaded the car!).

So, my 8:21 a.m. departure meant that we had PLENTY of time to stop in to Starbucks (thank you to the gods who invented Drive-Thrus...), and then Nora and I headed up to Seattle, swinging into the Woodland Park Zoo.

Woodland Park Zoo is a fabulous zoo, probably at least in the top 10 in the country. I hadn't been there in 10 years or more, and wow, have there been changes!

I didn't see a LOT of the zoo, but we did the loop down by the lions and elephants. A lot of stuff has been filled in, and near the African Savanna look-out which used to be a "Outback" part of the zoo (so far South and East that not a lot of people even made it that far) there was a beautiful peacock sitting right at the gold star with the dedication from radio station KZOK (102.5) for Jimi Hendrix, a Seattle native.

Nora and I then went and had a bite to eat at the Rainforest Cafe, then headed into the Zoonasium I think it's called...it's a little indoor park for kids, VERY perfect for the toddler-5-year-old set who live in the soggy Northwest and need a place to get their little yah yah's out and still be at the zoo.

I've Seen The Bells, Says Nora...But I REALLY Love Opa!

Nora and I got up to Mount Vernon to see her grandparents for a couple of days, and after a long ride in the car, I thought her Oma might be pushing her luck a bit to get Nora back in the car today to go up for Opa's bell choir rehearsal.

...And she wasn't all together thrilled to get into the car, but I handed her a new book from Oma, and that kept her attention for the short ride up there.


She ran down the aisle at church and immediately locked in on the fact that her OPA, who was JUST EATING DINNER with her what seemed like 5 minutes ago, was now at the front of the church directing all these people!

She went right up and stared up at him with her big smile, and thoroughly enjoyed about 10 minutes of all the action before climbing under the tables and causing enough of an interruption that we had to go!

A Seattle Day

Saturday afternoon Nora and I drove up to Gig Harbor to spend the weekend with her Aunt Jill, Uncle John and cousins Erik and John Michael...

So Sunday morning, we all got up to some rather lousy weather, and we headed up to Seattle to spend a little time with Nora at the Children's Museum inside the Seattle Center.

We spent an incredible amount of time with three adults and 2 teenagers following Nora around the children's museum, where There Is So Much To Do...


At one point I really thought she might go completely berserk from all the excitement!

There was a Curious George special display, which meant Nora had ALL sorts of time mimicking the sounds of a monkey...

...And true to Northwest style there was a nice little "trail" complete with logs to climb through, which ended with a really nice little fake campsite.

Truly, a fun day in Seattle on my birthday!

A is for Anatomy

I feel the need to document this little moment in history with a big old shout out:

I GOT AN A!!

Two of them actually (one for my Computer Science class, another for my Anatomy & Physiology class), but the A&P class I worked twice, maybe three times as hard for.

A&P is a 3-quarter series of classes I have to take before I can even APPLY to the nursing program early next year.

You don't get an A, you don't get in. It's really that simple.

The first time I saw the 10-pound, $200 book, I thought my mind would melt from the shear volume of stuff I had to memorize.

I'm one-third of the way through now, and I just saw online that my prof entered my final grade for the class, and it's an A.

YEAH.

Cute Picture of The Day

Nora and I went over to Jeff & Judy's house to see Bestema and her cousin Mike today...and we saw the rest of the family too!

It was one of those days when Nora slept late into the afternoon, and she woke up and got tossed into the carseat, and basically "came to" with an Elmo DVD playing and her juice about half gone, halfway to Bestema's house.

Once there, we saw Bestema and her cousin Mike, who just flew in from Florida. Mom and Mike haven't seen each other since they were LITTLE kids, and it was fun to meet her! She is the daughter of a great-aunt of mine I never met on my grandpa's side of the family.

Nora had a blast at their house as always. She's getting old enough to understand when I say "we're going to see Bestema" who that is, and doesn't fuss in the car at all anymore.

At about 6 p.m., after we'd been there a couple of hours, Nora's Aunt Judy came home from work. Nora remembers Aunt Judy whenever she sees her, and went right to her, whereas with pretty much everyone else she takes a minute to get the idea of who they are in her head again.

It was so cute how snuggly she was with Judy today! Judy even asked if she might be sick, LOL. Well, Nora'd been running around for quite a while, and was feeling pretty cuddly, and she just sat with Judy for the longest time.

Thanks for dinner! And sorry about breaking something again... ;)

It's Raining, It's Pouring, It's Play-Doh Day

It was pouring buckets this morning, and doesn't look like it's going to end until mid-July, so the Play-Doh came out today!

Daddy showed Nora how to use the factory thing that pushes out Play-Doh in all sorts of shapes...

And of course, she had to TASTE it, SEVERAL times, despite our telling her not to...


But all in all, it was really fun, and by the end of the fun, she did stop eating it and just played with it, but tomorrow's diaper changes should be colorful (someone remind me to warn the babysitter when she comes tomorrow! LOL)

Multiple Choice Photo

a) I can't believe I am running a 100.7 fever ON Tylenol and my mother has gotten me to hold still for a photo.

b) I can't believe my Daddy decided that while I am running a 100.7* fever ON Tylenol that tonight was a good night to be trying on all the shoes I own, while my socks are hiked up to the point of making me look like I wear knickers.

c) My mom is CLEARLY a product of the '80s (and her friends too, for that matter) if they think Vans are cool and that I should be wearing them.

d) All of the above

Thank you Patti for the VANS! Despite Nora's appearance in this photo, she tromped around the house looking quite pleased with her new shoes, once she got past staring at the checkerboard pattern and running into things!