Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Asa's Talking Skills

-Asa was standing on a little step stool next our bed. He said "Ready, set, go" and then fell off the stool. I think he was trying to jump or step off and failed to succeed. And I laughed!
-Pizza is the word for anything coming out of the oven.
-"Hold you" means "I want you to hold me."
-Asa loves holding hands with people while he sucks his thumb. He has been holding Judah's hand lately.
-Today at the doctor's office Asa was working on a puzzle. He started singing the clean up song. He also sings the ABC's and "Deep & Wide."

Sunday, December 28, 2008

UPDATE!

Again, I am so very behind. I don't even remember what has been happening recently. The Stonebrakers came to visit the weekend before Christmas. Melinda (my sis), Zoe (niece) and I went to a Holiday Gift Fair and the grocery store on Saturday morning. Zoe insisted that Price Chopper was not a grocery store. That is, until we went inside. We could not explain to her that there are grocery stores other than Fareway. Saturday evening we watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation which Ryan had purchased from the Wal-Mart for us. Mel and I had never before seen the non-TV version of this movie. We had missed a lot of really good parts. Just kidding. Sunday was Lea's first birthday. Mel dressed her in the nice Christmas dress James' mom bought for Asa before he was born. (We didn't know if he was a boy or girl.) The girls and kids went to church. The boys were heathens and went to the KC Chiefs game. Ryan is a sports editor at a newspaper in Iowa and had requested press passes. Instead of sitting in the -12 wind chills, they sat in a press box and ate lots of free food! Meanwhile, Zoe was making a new friend, Melinda was in Sunday School by herself making new friends as I was in the nursery with Asa, Lea, Judah and several other babies. Mel and I did get to go to the regular service together. It was a great Christmas service with the traditional Christmas hymns sung in a non-traditional style. I loved it! After church we took Lea to Burger King for her birthday. Zoe brought her friend Emma. I am good friends with Emma's parents, so it wasn't totally random. We chose BK because of the play land. Asa especially enjoyed crawling around in his limited area.
Just to let you know exactly how cold it was, Asa knocked over my soda in the van and a little spilled on the floor right by the door. When I opened the door at home, the soda was frozen. That's right, frozen. I couldn't believe the coldness!
Anyhow, we didn't do a whole lot Sunday afternoon. I took Emma home and wrapped presents. When the guys got home, we started making dinner. After dinner Lea got her Happy Birthday Pumpkin Pie. She loved it:

Then she opened her present with a little help:

One of my favorite things about having my sister in town is when we just sit around, drinking coffee and eating random snacks and play games. So much fun! And we did that some more Sunday night.
Oh, in the night Sunday, James and I woke up to a funny sound. Someone was in the shower and Lea was crying. As it turns out, Lea got sick and had thrown up on Melinda. Lea ended up throwing up several times. They still left Monday morning, but later than planned. After they left, I had a lot of laundry to catch up on and did my best to kill the germs left in our house.

Tuesday I went over to a friend's house to stay with her daughter while she was at work. The only inconvenience was that I kind of needed to be home packing for Christmas in Iowa. The weather Tuesday wasn't the greatest. We were watching the forecast and it looked like it would be worse for travel on Wednesday. We decided to drive up to Iowa Tuesday night after James got home from work. Our original plan was to head up on Wednesday morning. James and I got home about the same time and started packing. Our van was full of stuff that was just thrown in. We took both dirty laundry and unfolded laundry with us. I'm glad we were just going to visit family since we were so unorganized! The trip was pretty good. It only took about 15 minutes longer than normal. James said that he drove extra fast when the roads were clear since we would probably have to drive slowly later in the trip. We did find some adverse driving conditions took it slow. The boys were very good; we didn't have to stop for them. It helps that the drive was only 4 hours. Much shorter than our previous 19 hour trip to Arizona!

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Finally getting it done...

This was started Tuesday, December 16. I'm not doing so well with this blog thing...

This is going to be random...
Click on the slide-show to the right to see our latest pictures. I uploaded a lot this morning!
Pop quiz: I cleaned the bathroom sink (not the whole bathroom) on Monday. What did James do Tuesday night? The answer is: shave. It always happens the day after I clean the bathroom.
Saturday we were very tired but went to the house of our friends the VanDrunens. They made coffee for us as I requested since it was 11:00 and we had gone to bed around 1:00 the previous night. We had a great time talking, eating Papa Murphy's pizza, drinking coffee and playing Guitar Hero. I was super impressed that they invited us over since Lt. Guy was getting ready to go back to Kosovo the next evening. I've said it many times, but people like this family make living in Lee's Summit awesome!

I don't know what else I wanted to be in this post, so this is it.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Salt

Asa and I were just eating lunch. I added some salt to my soup by shaking some into my hand and then dumping it into my soup. I didn't want to get too much. Asa asked for some salt so I closed the salt shaker and shook some into his hand. He in turn held his hand over his peanut butter sandwich and turned it over and then rubbed his hands together, just as I had done. If that's not learning by imitation, I don't know what is!

Friday, December 12, 2008

Since We've Been Home

A LOT has happened in the last 10 days. It truly has been a whirlwind. I'll just try to give you the hilights.
Wednesday, December 3: Asa was sleepy. I woke him up a few times during the morning and he fell right back to sleep. I was concerned because he had been sick and I had done some reading about dehydration. I got him an appointment that afternoon and it turned out that he was fine. I guess the trip and sickness really took a toll on him. We missed going to church that night. I was sad to miss seeing friends.
Thursday, December 4: This was the day that I felt like I did a lot of work during the day but the house didn't look any better by the time James got home. I had a bit of a melt-down because I felt my efforts were wasted. Now I see that there are more important things than the clutter in my house after vacation.
Friday, December 5: After James got home from work he got a call from his dad that Grandma Light passed away. I knew right away that he had to go back to Arizona for the funeral but I didn't know how that was going to happen. After dinner we went to see Christmas in the Park at Longview Lake. If you're from Iowa, think Jolly Holiday Lights. We drove around and looked at the light displays, and it was free! The boys sat in the front with us. The best part was free chocolate at the end.
Saturday, December 6: I had an open house for Tastefully Simple at someone else's house. She was having a "One Stop Christmas Shop" with a lot of different vendors. I was up late Friday and early Saturday preparing food and materials for the day. It wasn't the best day for sales, but I met some interesting people and had a pretty good time. The boys enjoyed their time with Daddy. Asa ate a lot while I was gone. I guess he was hungry since he hadn't had much to eat all week!
In the evening there was a party that we went to. I think I have mentioned our friend Dawn from church. She came and stayed with the boys when I went to the ER with mastitis. She has offered several times to watch Asa and Judah and always seems to love taking care of them. Her husband Guy has been in Kosovo with the military for a while and was home on leave. It was great to spend time at their house and get to know him better. It's funny how you can see someone's personality through their family. I felt like I knew Guy because of things I had heard and the lives his wife and kids lived. It was really a great evening!
Sunday, December 7: Of course, we went to church. What else would we do on a Sunday. The nice thing was that we are doing something different during Advent. Instead of having several adult Sunday school classes, we are all meeting together. They have chairs set up in little circles and we are encouraged to sit with people we don't know very well. The lesson is discussion oriented so we get to know the people in our circle as we discuss and answer the questions. It's really a lot of fun. I will admit that we are friends with everyone that sat in our circle. I sat next to a friend when I went in because I needed to nurse Judah and didn't want to plop down by a stranger for this delicate task! After church we went to Culver's with some friends and then home for nap/cleaning time. The boys took naps while James and I cleaned in preparation for our Christmas tree. After nap time, we went out to cut down our tree.

We even got to ride on a hay rack. Which was called a wagon. I felt like a city slicker because we were making a big deal of this hay ride over to find our Christmas tree.

We got home and James set up the tree while I fed Judah. I was signed up to be a driver for the Women's Ministries Christmas Tour of Homes. I probably would have skipped if I wasn't going to be a driver since we had just gotten our tree. I've had more fun on similar outings in the past, but I did get some really good food! And a yummy cold coffee drink. Mmmmmm.
Monday, December 8: James went to work and worked extra hard to get caught up before being gone another three days this week. He is flying out to Phoenix Tuesday after work. In the evening we had two meetings at church. James went to one, I went to the other. After the meetings we went home to pack James up and decorate the Christmas tree. Packing took longer than normal. I say packing but really James picked out his clothes and I packed them on Tuesday to save his time. He tried on his suit to make sure it looked OK, so that took a while. By the time we were decorating the tree, it was pretty late. We ended up having fun and getting into the Christmas spirit. And the tree looks great. It's always so much fun to get out the ornaments and remember hanging them on the tree as a child.
Tuesday, December 9: I spent the day getting things ready for James' trip to Arizona. I had to be careful to pack according to airline regulations since he wasn't going to pay $20 to check a bag. It also snowed pretty steadily all day. I had to leave extra early since I didn't know what the roads would be like. It seems like they don't do much plowing when the snow falls. They just wait for it to melt off the streets. It's really pretty annoying. We (myself and the babies) picked James up and made it to the airport in plenty of time for him to catch his flight. It was pretty sad telling James goodbye. Asa wanted out of his car seat and wanted James to hold him. I was just sad because we couldn't go with him. Then the interesting part began. Since it was 5:15 when we left the airport, we were going to be driving home is rush hour traffic. And it was snowy. Let's just say that the normal 45 minute trip took over two hours! The boys were crying a lot but I didn't know of a safe place to stop. And if I did stop, I didn't know what to do by myself with two unhappy boys. Amazingly I had an overwhelming sense of peace during the drive. I wasn't stressed out. It was weird. By the time we got home and Asa ate dinner, it was bed time. James made it safely to Phoenix and ate at his favorite fast food joint: Jack in the Box.
Wednesday, December 10: I made puppy chow for the teens and went to church. James and his sister drove up to Winslow from Phoenix for their grandmother's visitation. James said it was pretty quiet and he was able to talk with some people he hadn't seen in a long time.
Thursday, December 11: This was the day of grandma's funeral. I heard that James did a great job on the eulogy. I was very sad that I couldn't be there with the rest of the family. Meanwhile back in LS I went over to Justin & Amy's house for dinner. Justin is our youth pastor. They have a son a year older than Asa and one 4 weeks younger than Judah. Asa had fun playing with his friend "Baybub."
Friday, December 12: Today I am blogging.... And cleaning up the house since James gets home tonight. At 7:00 I am going to the youth Christmas party. The boys are going to Brad & Janelle's house. I am pretty excited to see James!

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Thanksgiving Road Trip: part 3

5:49 PM December 1
We left Winslow around 3:30 after a quick snapshot at the famous “Standin’ on the Corner” corner. We just had to take a picture there since it’s the popular tourist place. Asa danced around a little to the music that was playing.
Both boys are currently sleeping. I took a little nap. James has been eating his sunflower seeds and driving. He is a little sad leaving Arizona because he didn’t get to eat some his favorite food from Jack in the Box.

8:29 PM
We made it to the other side of Albuquerque. Our plan was to stop on the west end of town at the Flying J. There was construction and we missed the exit. I was on the phone with James’ mom so we asked his dad where there was another good place to stop. We got gas at a Love’s for $1.69. There wasn’t anywhere there for us to eat. We also missed the turn to get back on I-40 and drove a few blocks through some very questionable neighborhoods. We drove a little further down the interstate and got off to look for a restaurant. We found Carl’s Junior down a couple blocks. We went inside to let the kids stretch but got our food to go. The only problem with this stop was that we couldn’t get back on I-40 there because of construction. We attempted to follow the detour, but I think it was wrong. James pulled out the map and found a route back to the interstate. We were starting to think we would spend all night in Albuquerque. It only ended up being an hour.
About 20 miles from Albuquerque I was giving Judah a bottle and it didn’t agree with him. He threw it all up so we had to stop and clean him up. It went pretty well. It seems like every time we have to pull off there isn’t a decent place to park. I was afraid someone was going to sneak up on us in the dark or something.

That's all I wrote on the way home. I will tell you that the boys did a lot better on the way home. I drove more on the way home also. I guess they feel safer when I am driving! We stopped in Oklahoma City to see the memorial at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. In case you don't remember, on April 19, 1995 a bomb was detonated inside a Ryder truck which was parked in front of the Murrah building. 168 people were killed in the attack, over 800 were injured. 30 children were orphaned. Over 300 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested for planning and carrying out the attack against the United States government. McVeigh received a lethal injection in 2001 and Nichols was sentenced to life in prison. The memorial was dedicated on April 19, 2000. This is engraved over an entryway to the outdoor memorial:
"We come here to remember those who were killed, those who survived and those changed forever. May all who leave here know the impact of violence. May this memorial offer comfort, strength, peace, hope and serenity."
I'll admit that I stopped so James could see the memorial. I was there with my parents in high school. It was around 6:00 AM so it was pretty quiet. I fed Judah and changed a poopy explosion while James looked around. It really wasn't very exciting.
On our way out of OK City, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for some grub. Our waitress was, well let's say she was more awake than we were. She was pretty impressed with our cute kids.
Probably the worst part of the drive home was about 40 minutes from our house. Both boys were screaming and wouldn't stop. We pulled over at a gas station and held both of them. They were happy just being out of their car seats. We decided they would just have to suffer through the remainder of the drive since we were so close to home. They finally fell asleep a few more miles down the road.
Oh, the happiness when we got home. It was so nice to relax in our home! James was a little concerned that our electricity had been turned off since he couldn't get the TV to work and the clock on the microwave was out. I had unplugged a lot of stuff before leaving home to save at least a few pennies. James was relieved that he just needed to plug in a few cords to get things back on. I got a good laugh!
Asa was happy to sleep in his own bed and play with his toys. Judah was happy to be held. I think we will take the long drive again. Just not for a few months!