Random update

I don't really have much to report, but I'll post some catch up pictures anyway.  

For the last couple months, another first grade mom and i have been working on a quilt for the school's fund raising auction.  We had the kids all color a quilt block, and then we sewed them together and had it professionally quilted.  The quilter was either inspired by our great design, or took pity on us and did a great custom job, going around all the hand prints and adding hearts here and there.  It looks so nice!  Now all we have to do is bind it, and hope it sells for a lot.  Here's Parker's square.  I'll show a pic of the whole semi-completed quilt in another post.

Buddy the fish is doing well (knock on wood).  We've upgraded his tank to one that is lighted, heated, filtered and planted.  Bob has him trained to eat from a syringe.  After some tummy issues, we had to switch his food to tiny pellets, but they sink, so you have to give them to him one by one or he misses them and the foul up the tank.  We also have to soak them first, so the dropper makes them easier to handle.  Buddy gets very aggressive and bites the dropper if you put it in the water...I'm pretty sure we could get him to 'jump' up for his food if we wanted to, but that doesn't seem very nice. 

It's warming up here.  I noticed today that the Angel Trump that we had in the garage for the winter has a couple big flowers on it.  This was a big surprise since I've only seen it bloom late in the summer.  The Myer lemon tree (far right) has lots of blooms too.  Hopefully we'll have lemons this year.

Toothless

 

Breaking news.  Parker just pulled out another tooth.  She's missing 2 on the bottom now.  This one was somewhat less dramatic, but we still had a few days of it hanging out, but still too tender to pull.  She's getting so grown up!!

In other news, we are implementing allowance this week.  She's getting half of what it costs to buy a stuffed Webkinz Hamster....let the overpopulation begin.

I nearly forgot

Hope everyone had a Happy Goforth Day!!

Parker-Built (updated)

One of Parker's quirks is her love of empty boxes.  Usually when something comes in the mail, or we eat all of a cereal, I try to quickly break down the box, or hide it in the garage before she makes plans for it.
 On Saturday, she spied a couple boxes that I hadn't hid yet, and immediately made big plans for them to be homes for her stuffed hamsters.

Step 1 is covering them.  She roped Bob into helping her.  His quirk is that he loves wrapping gifts.  They're a great match.

The completed home.  A cozy home with a patio and outhouse.  Notice the hamster is wearing a scarf that Parker finger-knit for him.  

 

Another Hamster room.  Notice the baby bottle water bottle and the tart pan hamster wheel.

Happy birthday Dr Suess 2nd try

 

Oh, the places she'll go.

Happy Dr suess's birthday

This was suppose to be a picture of Parker in a dr. seuss hat. Guess there are some bugs that need to be worked out in the Blogger phone to web app.

And we wonder why she has reflux

SNOMG make it stop!

We're iced/snowed in again today...no school.  There was rain/sleet at about 5am followed by snow that will continue until noon they say.  They snow amounts are much less the predicted though, which is good and bad....it'll be gone sooner, but there's nothing to sled on.  Not that Parker would last long in 14 degrees and 25mph winds.  Brrrrrr.  

Some random pictures for your amusement:  

Buddy's fish tank setup - We settled on the name Buddy.  His color really shows up will with the camera flash...he's really not quite that brilliant in person.  He seems to love having plants, so I got him lots.  I cleaned/rearranged his tank yesterday and he had a busy day checking it all out.  Note to Paula - he won't eat the Betta burgers (pellets), they're too big for him.  He's medium on the fish flakes too unless we really crumble them up, but as of yesterday, he's been enjoying freeze dried bloodworms. 

Good snow day activity:  Making each Valentine's Day card by hand.  I do have a few packages of the little preprinted kind (shhh, don't tell), but I'm not getting those out until we've milked this for all the time killing it's worth.

My first double layer cake - made for Bob's birthday.  The cake part is a Devil's Food mix...I had no room for error so I used a mix, but I made the chocolate ganache frosting from scratch.  I'm not excited about trapped indoors with this big yummy cake today.

Snow Fun

Once again, last night at bedtime we were expecting an inch or so of snow.  We got 6 or 7.  I'm sure it's quite a blessing for a lot of folks who have had kids stuck in the house since Monday.  Parker's had a blast sledding and building her snowman.

Gigi is still stuck here.  Luckily she brought a ton of craft project with her, like Harvey here.  You see a bunny too, right?

Warming up under the electric blanket after being outside

 

Snowman on top of the mailbox

Ok, now we have a snow picture

Ice pics

My sister request that I post snow pics, so here are some.  Although actually, there isn't really much snow.  Our issue is the inch of ice that's covering most of the roadways and the parking lots.
This is the ice on the patio.  The driveway looks the same, but our neighborhood roads are mainly dry.

Parker's keeping herself amused with unlimited computer. I just saw on the news website that her school is closed again tomorrow.  If this means summer will be shorter, I'm ok with it. 

Claudette is cross stitching.  She's stuck here until the roads are a little safer.

Bob is on a conference call.  He's such a professional that he dresses up just to talk on the phone.

First pet

(ack!  I meant to post this before we went skiing.  I guess I goofed up scheduling it after the tooth-losing.  Right now we have a new square tank for him, but it sure does get cloudy fast. How often does the cloudiness usually happen?  I thought Betas were low maintenance.  Hmph. )

Another first.
Meet our new family member, Crystal (far left, in the vase).  He's a point of purchase Beta Fish that we got at the Science Store at Parker's school. Actually, Parker is still deciding on his name-  she's between Petunia, Crystal and Freddy.  She really wants a girl name, but the fancy Betas are boys, so we might just give him a girl name and try not to say it too loudly around him.
Up until now, I had been against any pets.  My motto was "nothing that sheds or poops" except sometimes I changed that last word. I had hoped to start Parker out caring for something more low stakes...like sea monkeys or sourdough starter, but he was too cute and I just couldn't resist.  
When we told Bob what kind he was (Beta), he said "shouldn't we wait for the final release?"  haha, computer geek humor.

In case you're wondering....

...here's an update on us.  Bob and I went skiing to Steamboat Springs CO earlier this week.  It was super nice, but the last 2 days were super super cold there.  Tuesday we skied in sub-zero temps, and it was 20 below yesterday when we left.
Miraculously our flight wasn't canceled with all the weather drama in the rest of the country, so we made it back, just delayed a bit.
But then, we had to make it back from the airport with the roads covered in ice.  Luckily, we rode with Bob's boss, who has a big 4wheel drive truck, and grew up in Iowa, but it was still pretty dicey.  There is literally a thick thick layer of ice on every paved surface, and we saw very little sand/salt.  I guess they're saving it all to coat the path to the Cowboy's stadium?

Ski pic.  I'm honestly not sure if this is from this year, or 2 years ago.  Ski pictures all look the same unless you get a new outfit.  We had 3 great days of skiing...there was a ton of snow and 2 of the days were sunny and beautiful, although cold. 

Parker is on day 3 of no school.  Her district shuts down fairly quickly, but even the Dallas isd is closed for the 3rd day, which has never happened before.  She doesn't seem too terribly stir crazy....her Gigi has been her entertaining her.  She was very happy to see us and the gifts we brought her.  All along she's been asking "how awesome is my present?". 

Breaking news

Parker has finally lost her first tooth!  It has been very loose since before Christmas.  For the last couple weeks at nearly every meal, she'd forget about it and bite into her food and chomp her tooth and scream and have to spit out her bite.  Fun times. 
This morning when her alarm when off, she sat up and felt that it was basically hanging out of her mouth and cried "I can't go to school like this!!"...she was OVER IT.  So she grabbed it and turned it one way, then the other and it came out. I'm sure she was basically unteachable at school today, she was so excited.
So tonight the tooth fairy comes.  Luckily I'm going up to school right now, so I'll have a chance to see what the going rate is these days for a first tooth. 

Doing chores

snowy day!

Last night when I went up to check on Parker, she was all snuggled up underneath all her covers - VERY strange for her.  Normally her donkey feet would have kicked everything off.  I told Bob about it and he said "yes, she was very concerned about the cold front coming in". 

She was right to be concerned.  The temps have been dropping and dropping and this morning's rain finally turned to snow around noon.  It didn't take long at all to cover the ground - big thick wet flakes.

After I took this picture, Parker's friend made a snowball too, and it took me nearly too long to figure out who they were going to throw them at.....I got out of the way just in time. 

She files, she files

I'm interrupting Christmas pictures to post this because it's too cute and I'm afraid I'll forget about it before I share it.  

When we remodeled the kitchen/laundry room, I redesigned the laundry room cabinets to include 2 file drawers.  I have a file cabinet in another room, but I really wanted a drawer for mail and and the top things that seem to pile up on my desk.  So far it's working pretty well.  The bottom drawer is mine, and the top is for Parker's papers that accumulate.  Stuff from school, artwork, etc etc.  I put file folders in there and had starting adding to it when she discovered it and has taken it over.  She sorted everything into categories that made sense to her, and had me make labels and the best part, she actually FILES THINGS.  I'll pull stuff out of her folder from school and remind her "you need to file your stuff" and SHE DOES!  How great is that? 

So if you're keeping score on which side of the family she takes after, put a point my mom's column. 

Back to school outfit

 

 Here's Parker's back to school outfit for today, she put a lot of thought into it, and how she could get the most mileage out of what she got for Christmas.  It looks wackier in person.  

She's wearing: a bejeweled headband, Hello Kitty shirt (old), ruffly vest, ruffly skirt, leggings underneath, tall black boots that look like fireman galoshes on her skinny legs, her latest Color Me book bag which is adorned with a bejeweled glow-in-the-dark hand sanitizer holder.  I think I got it all. 

Christmas Morning

I'm going to attempt to get caught up on posting pictures and blogging.  I have quite a backlog, but my pictures are in several different cameras and phones so it's tough to get them all downloaded at once.

We went to Bob's folks house for Christmas this year.  Parker actually went 3 days earlier to spend some extra time with her Gigi and Papa and her cousin Peyton.  That worked out REALLY well for me...it's amazing how much (holiday errand-wise) you can accomplish without 'help'. 

By all reports, they had a great time.  Gigi got them matching hats, and Christmas morning, they set their alarms on their itouches so they didn't oversleep, put on their hats and came out to check out the gifts that santa had left. 

Parker is showing off her 'Mazing Hamster dressed like Santa.  A very specific request that was on her Christmas list.  She also got an Easy Bake Oven, a woven bracelet kit, Bendaroos, puzzles, a cheapie lap desk she had her eye on forever,a new art set, a new bathrobe and more stuff I can't remember.  The biggest hit of all may be the new robe (not pictured)....she wears it as often as possible, like Fred Sanford.

More pics coming soon.....

Silent night

Is it bad manners to take pictures in church?