Sweet Yet Sour

Pregnancy Update

Sunday, March 14th, 2010 | Updates | 2 Comments

Here we are at the beginning of the 37th week of my pregnancy.  That means at most I have 3 more weeks until my son enters the world.

12 days.  12 wonderful days – that’s how many consecutive days since the beginning of December I have not been sick.  Otherwise I have been battling a cold or stomach virus each week.  Apparently for this pregnancy my immune system completely shut down.  As I sit here with my trusty box of tissues with lotion and my Mentholatum, I can only hope that it will come back up after the baby is born.  During my 12 days of not being sick I was able to visit with friends and have my baby shower – so I should probably be grateful.  I sincerely wish that I was one of those wonderful people who never complains and is always perky, despite being sick, but unfortunately for Mike – I’m not.  I’ve been sick, grumpy and unable to sleep for the past few months and he’s been such a great husband throughout.

I’m at the point in the pregnancy where sleep is generally a problem anyway.  The baby is so large and heavy at this point that turning over is something that requires a forklift and a major pillow shift.  I sleep on one side for a little, until the bottom hip begins to hurt, and then I have to turn over, move the pillows that are under the baby belly and behind my back and start the whole process again.  I generally have to pee at least 4 times a night, and with this latest cold, I wake up to cough or sneeze fairly often.  This latest cold did bring some relief to Mike however – I lost my voice on Wednesday and didn’t really start to get it back until Saturday- so he has been spared some complaining…

I’m also at the point in the pregnancy where I go in to see my midwife every week.  Don’t worry – I’m not one of those “Do It Naturally At Home with a Midwife” kind of gals. My midwife is a certified Nurse Midwife, so when the time comes, I meet her at the hospital, she hangs around, but not annoyingly so, and then if something goes wrong there are nurses and doctors around to help.  It worked out great with her for Anna and I’m glad that I have her support again for this second pregnancy.  I can clearly remember a conversation I had with her last time that went like this, “Dorrie, the breathing isn’t working is it?”, “No, Jayne, it isn’t.” to which she replied, “Epidurals are our friends.”  Damn that was good advice!

At last week’s appointment the midwife did some checking and announced that I was making progress, but we weren’t going to have the baby this weekend.  This all has to do with the state of my cervix, the status of which I am going to spare the details of – it’s the internet after all.  I have lately been having lots of contractions and with the lack of sleep was pretty much hoping to go into her office and come out a few hours later with a baby.  There comes a point in my pregnancies where I get to a “I’m done with this crap” point and I am so there…

On the homefront I have been nesting a little.  The baby’s room is as decorated as I can get it right now – we’re doing a farm animals theme with red as our main color.  I got so nesty this past week I scrubbed a few baseboards, and even picked up all of the dog poop in the yard – although what contact the baby will have with the backyard is beyond me.

We’ve also been trying our best to prepare Anna for what is about to happen.  We talk a lot about the baby and how when the baby comes she will go her Aunt’s and Mama will go to the doctor.  If you ask her what babies do Anna says, “Cry”.  She visits the baby’s room a lot, mostly to find her old toys and say, “It’s mine!” and we have been reading her a book about being a big sister.  This will be a bumpy road for her coming up, but I’m hoping that all this prep will make it a little less of a shock.

Hormones willing my next post will be a post of pictures of my son and how the whole birth thing went down.  But if I get bored in the meantime, I’ll post some pictures of the cutie/soon-to-be big sister.

Family Update

Monday, January 11th, 2010 | Anna, Updates | 3 Comments

Yay! Our first family update of 2010!

As always, let’s start with the cutie.  Currently, the cutie is sick and cranky.  Wednesday night Anna woke up crying 6 times, probably due to the fever of 102 that she had.  Thursday I took her to the doctor where they said her throat looked red and icky – a strep test came back negative but we are waiting for more detailed lab results.  They sent me home with an antibiotic prescription and instructions to keep her medicated with ibuprofen and Tylenol.  Due to her sore throat Anna is enjoying a diet of yogurt and other soft foods while we wait out whatever this is that she has acquired.

As it turns out, Anna is obsessed with Christmas lights – absolutely loves them! Requests for “Christmas lights” come from the back seat of my car every time we go anywhere – day or night.  So, last weekend we took her to Zoolights, which is the Denver Zoo all lit up with lights in the shapes of animals.  Since it’s night time there weren’t many animals to see, but the elephants and giraffes were inside and were the highlight of the trip.  We got a good picture of one of the few moments Anna would stand still while we were there:

Anna at Zoolights

Pretty soon all of the Christmas lights will be gone and Anna will be very disappointed.  It’s hard to explain to her about something that will happen “tomorrow”, let alone not for another 11 months.

Recently Anna found in my drawer some old mascara and cover up.  I think I was blissfully folding laundry in another room while she decided to do some make-uping of her own…

Anna's first make-up attempt

She knew that the things she had found went around your eyes, so she aimed there, and fortunately didn’t poke herself in the eye with mascara.  We’ll work on proper application tips later.

Anna was also recently introduced to lollipops when her cousin brought some over.  They were kind of huge and I got a great shot of Anna looking like a rocker with a microphone while she tried desperately to keep the whole thing in her mouth:

Lollipop girl

As for me, I’m pregnant, large, running around after a toddler and just generally exhausted.

Under the Big Top

If you only look briefly at this picture you might say – “Oh look, the circus came to town! Oh, no wait…”  Some jerk maternity clothes designer thought it would be HILARIOUS to design pajama pants for pregnant ladies that make you look and feel like you are the Big Top! Not only that, but they are flannel! Oh so sexy!  I have no idea where the top is for these pajama bottoms, having borrowed almost all of my maternity wardrobe from my sister, but I wouldn’t wear the top anyway, because then I would really feel like I needed some popcorn and cotton candy to complete the outfit.  Unfortunately, these are the only comfortable pajama pants I have right now.

I attempted to resolve this situation by heading to my local “Super” Target only to discover that the maternity section consists of 4.5 racks stocked with either fancy short dresses or camisoles.  Apparently Target thinks that pregnant women are either going to parties or laying around waiting for our breakfast in bed to be delivered… Screw you Target!

Anyway, the kid is kicking a lot and has earned himself the nickname “Pele”.  He seems to be healthy and growing well – although I have an ultrasound check in a few weeks to make sure his kidneys are okay due to a size difference in the two of them in the last ultrasound.

As for Mike, he returned yesterday from the “Big Beers Belgians and Barley Wines Festival” that he attended in Vail with his friend Nate.  Sadly, neither of them took any prizes home from the homebrewing competition, in which they both had beers entered, but it does seem like they had a good time anyway.

Mike is looking forward to having another “brew day” – the initial brewing of a beer takes an entire day – soon.  I got him a gift certificate to his favorite brewing supply store for Christmas and I’m sure he’ll come up with some new and fun recipe to delight all those around him who drink beer.

Mike is also getting over a nasty chest cold, that has been hanging around for several weeks now.  This hasn’t stopped him from going to hockey though and his weekly racquetball league starts up this Thursday.  Perhaps all that chasing after a ball will kick the chest cold out this week…  Wish him luck.

And that’s all the news that I can type while Anna is still waking up.  I’m off to bring her some milk and some antibiotics and start our day.  Take care everyone!

Family Update

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 | Anna, Updates | 4 Comments

I’ve been neglecting the family updates, so hopefully I can catch up today! First, my apologies, I don’t have a lot of new pictures of Anna because my camera is broken.  Or rather, my camera has been dropped so many times that it seems to have affected the focus on the right side of picture.  I need to get it repaired but there has been so much going on here I haven’t had time to do anything about it.

Here’s one I took of Anna recently that doesn’t show the out of focus bit too badly:

Anna trying on clothes

Anna is in a “let’s try on clothes” phase, so here she decided to put on a romper over the outfit she was already wearing.  She’s so cute she makes it look good…

We’ve stopped counting the words that Anna knows; once we reached 50 we just stopped – her vocabulary is huge.  She’s saying two words sentences a lot, like “Bye bye truck” and “More milk” and the other day there was “Teeth owie”.  It is lovely to have a little communicator!  Mike has trained Anna to raise her arms and say, “Me!” when he asks, “Who’s the cutest?” and I’ve been teaching her to say, “Excuse me” when she burps or farts.  This works some of the time, but mostly Anna farts or burps, smiles wide and then says, “Excuse me.”  I think Mike has been teaching her that as well!

Mike is working hard, both at work and at home.  He recently built a sieve for my compost and then modified it temporarily so that he could use it to clean the Trex sawdust out of our mulch.  The carpenter who built our deck, nice man though he was, left us with all of the clean up.  Which meant much hauling of scrap to the trash, one trip to a local dump, and a lot of sawdust cleaning…  Mike continues with hockey again this season and if anyone wants to go watch him play, he’s playing tonight at 10 p.m.  Anna and I will be asleep, but will be rooting him on in spirit anyway.

Here’s our big news though: I’m “in the family way”, but in a nauseous, “Pass the Saltines and ginger ale” kind of a way.  I hate that phrase, “in the family way”, as well as “knocked up” and “preggo”.  So, I think I’ll just go with saying, I’m pregnant! Anna’s brother or sister is due April 4th – which is one day before Anna’s 2 year birthday, so I’m hoping that this baby comes early too – I would hate to be in the hospital for Anna’s birthday!  We’re only at 12 weeks now so hold off on the “What is it?” questions, since we won’t know until 20 weeks.  I’m just beginning my second favorite portion of pregnancy (after the totally nauseous peeing constantly phase I’m in now); the “She just looks fat” phase – before it really starts to look like I’m pregnant and not just packing on the extra pie and ice cream.  Oh, ice cream! Damn that sounds good – I have to go get some now!

This Week in Pictures

Sunday, August 16th, 2009 | Anna, Updates | 2 Comments

It’s been a busy week, and while I haven’t gotten pictures of it all, I do have some photos to share.

We went to Belleview Park twice in the past week. It’s pretty awesome; there’s a train, petting farm and a place to wade in a shallow stream.  Anna really liked the wading part:

Wading with Daddy

Of course the one time that Mike gets a decent picture of me, while we were all on the train, Anna wasn’t looking at the camera.  That is always how that works out!

Pretty Good

Sunday we went to visit Piper Joy and her proud parents.  Here is Nate with the recently fed and generally sleepy Piper:

Nate and Piper

While we visited with the new family, Anna hung out in Piper’s swing, which she is way too big for:

In Piper's Swing

This week Mike’s best friend Alex, his wife Dana and their daughter Nadia came to visit.  Dana got a good picture of the boys and their little girls while they watched Sesame Street:

Daddies' Girls

Alex discovered the joys of hanging out on our deck with his coffee:

Coffee on the deck

And Anna discovered one of Nadia’s bears, which was way too big for her:

Anna and the bear

Saturday morning Mike and Anna hung out the computer eating cereal, while Anna drew up plans for something:

At the computer

The highlight of the week has been Anna’s teething.  She has been “bonus fussy” (that’s what her doctor called it) – waking up several times a night, crying at the drop of a hat, not napping, not eating and just in general showing us that teething is no fun at all.  She’s tired, which is why I was able to get this lovely picture of her, which I plan on using to bribe her with when she’s 14…

Toasted

Family Update – The old people

Friday, August 7th, 2009 | Updates | 3 Comments

Seriously, I feel old. How sad is it that at 35 my back aches when I get up in the morning some days?

Not that we’re as cute as Anna, but I have do have updates on Mike and I anyway.

Mike has just returned yesterday from salmon fishing in Canada with my father and uncle.  My uncle has a home on Vancouver Island, British Columbia where he and my aunt stay during the summer.  Every year there is a salmon fishing tournament in the small town near where they live.  For years my father, grandfather and uncle have participated in the tournament and several years ago Mike and my brother-in-law were invited to join in the tradition.  Mike and my dad flew to Victoria on Friday and the tournament ran all weekend.  It apparently involves being out on the ocean by 6 a.m.!  I don’t think they caught too many salmon, but they did see whales (Orcas and Grays) and seem to have had a nice time.  I’m sure Mike will be posting some of the beautiful pictures he took on his website soon.

Mike has recently gotten into the website hosting/writing business.  He’s creating a website for our friend Angie, who teaches violin out of her home and is enjoying using new technologies to do so.  If you know anyone who needs a website hosted, please let him know!

Mike continues to play roller hockey Tuesday nights with his team, “The Mad Hatters”.  They have a pretty small team with few subs, so he comes home pretty tired, especially from those late 9 or 10 p.m. games.

Mike works for a small software company and with the recession they are seeing some hard times.  There were rumors of a competitor buying the company, but the deal fell through.  In order to balance the budget and make themselves profitable there have been some cutbacks.  Several people that we know and liked (it’s a small company of only about 40 employees) were laid off and salaries across the board have been reduced.  Since we’re living on one income this will mean some budget cutting on our part as well, but we’ll make it work somehow.

I have of course been concentrating on Anna and keeping her busy, happy and off the furniture.

I’m still going to my bookclub meetings once a month. We’re reading, “An Artist of the Floating World”, by Kazuo Ishiguro this month.  I’d tell you how it was but my sister has the only copy that the library owns, so I’m waiting for her to finish it before I can check it out.

I am also part of a fledgling effort to start a chapter of the League of Women Voters (LWV) to our county.  The LWV is a non-partisian group that originally sprung from the suffragist movement.  The purpose of the organization now is to encourage participation in goverment.  The LWV never endorses or opposes political candidates but does provide forums for candidate debate as well as issue debate.  My mother was heavily involved in the LWV when I was a child and so it seems only right that I should join in the movement to bring the LWV to the county in which I live.

Although I would love to be working from home, I haven’t had the time or opportunity to do so for several months.  There was a time when I did some work for Mike’s company, but there has been no work from them for several months.  It would be lovely to have the extra income as well as the mental challenge, but Anna keeps me busy enough.

Recently I have been trying to get better about leaving Anna, especially now that she’s getting bigger.  Twice now I have dropped her off at a local “drop-in” daycare place, where my sister often takes my nephew, for an hour at a time just to see how it goes.  And this week while Mike was gone Anna went to our friend’s Steve and Angie’s for a few hours while I got some things done.  It’s hard, Anna cries a lot, but I know that I need to do it for her sake as well as mine.

Otherwise, we’ve just been hanging out, watching Anna grow and change, watching Cash sleep (that’s certainly his favorite activity) and now enjoying our new deck.  Right now I’m dreaming of sitting on the deck with some wine in the evening and watching the humming birds buzz the feeder…

Another Family Update – Anna’s Chapter

Monday, August 3rd, 2009 | Anna, Updates | 2 Comments

It’s time once again for a family update.  I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I like them because I can cram a lot of information about all of us in and then feel pretty satisfied with myself.

As usual, let’s start with the cutie:

Anna will be 16 months on Wednesday.  She’s buzzing around really well with this new walking thing and is scraping up her knees far less than she did a few weeks ago.  I’ve enrolled her in “Tumble Tots” classes at our rec center every Wednesday, which is just what she needs.  It’s basically a padded room where the kids can play, jump on a trampoline, even go on a balance beam.  She loves it and there are plenty of other kids in the class to play with, including three sets of girl twins. Although I did catch her trying to do a somersault like we do in class off of the ottoman the other day!

Anna talks a lot and understands us quite well, but she chooses not to obey a good portion of the time as well; typical toddler!  Favorite phrases include: “walk park” as in, “we’re walking to the park now mama!”, and “more cheese”.  Oh, and “No!” – that’s certainly my favorite as well!

A few weeks ago we took Anna to the small airport not too far away where there is a restaurant that looks out onto the runways.  She did this for all of lunch:

Airplane Viewing

We went to a park nearby a few weekends ago for the neighborhood picnic.  Anna loves to go through the tunnels, but it’s even better when Daddy chases her:

In the tunnel

Oh and can I just say, this outfit that Anna is wearing, was made by my mom for me when I was Anna’s age.  How cool is it that Anna looks good in the 1974 outfit?

70's style

Last week we went to a nearby farming museum where we got to see lots of farm animals.  Like these dirty, smelly sheep:

Smelly Sheep

Granted, the museum was free (whohoo!) and Anna and her friend David had a good time:

Sheep Staring

That is, until David and Anna were sitting on a bench and David tried to kiss Anna.  She was a good girl and took off:

I'm outta here!

Gosh I hope she does that until she’s 21!

Yesterday I took Anna and Cash to the fenced in baseball field at the high school near us so Cash could get a run.  Instead, he just stood and Anna ran around:

Anna runs, Cash stands

After a while I just put the leash back on Cash.  Anna is learning the word “Come”, so she tried to get him to go with her, with little success:

Come Cash

Now that the deck is done I got out the baby pool and let Anna splash around in it for a while.  I didn’t put her in her swimming suit because Anna has no fat and gets cold easily, so I just let her go in the pool in what she was wearing.  She really loved playing in the pool, but in this picture she seems to be making a drink order to the pool boy:

Pina colada please!

Stroller Pictures and Cash Update

Monday, May 25th, 2009 | Updates | 1 Comment

I’ve finally had time to offload the pictures that Mike took of the stroller after last Sunday’s “incident“.  As you can see, it was worth putting it into the trash.  Secretly, I thought the stroller, which was loaned to me by my sister, was really ugly, so I wasn’t too terribly sad to see it go.   But I still would rather not have had such a thing happen.

Stroller after the wreck

As for Cash, the vet says that he’s mostly fine.  His cuts on his hind legs seem to be healing, although they do bleed every once in a while.  The vet left them alone, saying that his body was taking care of them just fine.  As for his neck, it seems to have either been wrenched by dragging the stroller for a 1/4 of a mile at 40 mph or the abrupt stop after it hit the pole.   The vet stretched his neck this way and that and decided that he was a little resistant to her stretching it up.  We now have doggie Ibuprofin for him if he seems sore.  He takes this buried in cheese of course…

Anna Update

Friday, May 15th, 2009 | Anna, Updates | 3 Comments

I have been remiss about updates on Anna of late, so I hope to make up for that with this post.  As I type this Anna is in the next room refusing to nap.  I sort of expected this, since I’m trying for the first time to transition her out of fleece sleep wear with feet and into pjs.  Change always is difficult with babies, and I expect it will take a few days to get her used to the new sleep duds. In the meantime, she’s talking loudly to her teddy bears about something very important…

First, the updates on her health – both her weight and the thing on the bridge of her nose.  I say “the thing” because we’re still not sure what “it” is exactly.  When we got the results back from the MRI in December we were told it was a “probably” dermoid cyst and to see the plastic surgeon at Children’s to have it removed.  At the end of April we finally went to see the plastic surgeon and now we’re more confused…  After reviewing the MRI the plastic surgeon said that he thinks the bump is not a dermoid cyst, but a vascular malformation.  Further, he’s not willing to take it out unless we REALLY want it out. He thinks it will bleed a lot unless he does this really gory way of taking it out, the details of which I will save you from.  Suffice to say Anna would have a curvy scar on the top of her head. So we have been advised to simply watch the bump, see if it gets larger and we can review again later whether we want it removed.  At this point it’s apparently not necessary to do anything, and that’s fine.

Last week we had our monthly weight check with Anna’s doctor.  Anna had an ear infection the week before which required a late night trip to an after hours pediatric care place, so the doctor was more focused on her ear than her weight.  When I asked about Anna’s weight, the doctor, who was not the same doctor we saw at Anna’s 12 month check (there are two doctors in the office), said that she had not gained much.  But, she said that Anna is “on her own weight curve” and was much more relaxed about the whole thing.  She wants us to come back in a month and do another weight check and in the meantime continue on with the fatty diet.  More butter and cream please!  “If” Anna’s weight continues not to be okay there is the chance that they will want to do blood tests to see if her kidneys and electrolytes are okay, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…

Anna is not walking yet, but I expect that to come very soon.  Several times in the past few days she has been taking a few (two or three) steps on her own before plopping down to crawl.  She does love to walk holding onto our hands and with her walker toys.

Otherwise, Anna has been liking playing outside and especially playing in the dirt.  It’s hard to see here, but she has dirt all over herself, including around her mouth, since she tried eating some dirt:

Covered in dirt

Since it’s summer I’ve been trying to get Anna to wear sunglasses, but she’ll only wear them for a few seconds before taking them off.  I had to be quick to get this photo:

So Cool

Anna has been going through my cabinets and playing with pans and bowls and enjoying all the noise that entails:

Making Noise

And she’s been playing on the little playset we have in the backyard a lot, even getting into it all by herself:

Playset

For my birthday we went to Hudson Gardens and hung out in the grass where Anna played and looked cute:

Playing in the grass

And then Anna helped Mike set up his camera for those tulip shots he took at the gardens:

Photographer's Assistant

Wednesday we got Anna’s new car seat and as soon as I unpacked it she wanted to try it out.  Not necessarily the right way, but still, she’s in it:

Car Seat - first try

Later we went out on our maiden voyage with the new car seat and she seemed to like being up a little higher:

New car seat

Yesterday I was unloading the dishwasher and I had some “help”.  I say “help” because I turned away to put the silverware away and turned back to find the helper had gotten in the dishwasher:

Dishwasher

Mike is always disgusted by the fact that I lick my ice cream bowl.  I swear I haven’t done it in front of Anna, but yesterday I let her play with the mac and cheese bowl after lunch and this happened.  This means she’s definitely related to me:

Bowl licker!

It’s genetic, we can’t help it! My mom is a bowl licker too!

Dallas made us all sick…

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 | Anna, Updates | 2 Comments

Literally.  Dallas made me, Anna and Mike all sick.  Granted, I can’t blame the actual city of Dallas, but still, I have to blame someone.

I am finally beginning to recover from the two viruses we picked up on our trip to Dallas, and so can finally sum up our trip.

Anna did really well on the trip – I’m so proud of her, she missed multiple naps, never got regular meals, spent far too much time in the car seat and did really well sleeping in the play pen in the hotel room.  All this and she was working on getting her first top tooth.  She also did really well getting held and passed around by multiple people she had never seen before.  She was in constant demand by all of the relatives, and was always a good smiley girl.

She snuggled a lot with Mike’s Uncle Dave, who seemed to have a real soft spot for her:

Anna and Uncle Dave

Of course, wouldn’t you know it my camera battery died right after I took these pictures, so I have no pictures of Anna with Aunt Pat (Dave’s wife) and Aunts Evelyn, Barbara and Becky.  Don’t worry, they did plenty of holding her as well, but without my camera, you’ll just have to believe me.

After I got my battery recharged we spent some time with Mike’s dad and his sister Marylou.  Marylou and Anna played a little as well and did some quality snuggling:

Anna and Marylou

Mike’s dad did a little playing with her as well:

Anna and Grandpa Munhall

The most fun that we had while we were in Dallas was at the house of Mike’s friends Heidi and J.J., who have kids of their own.  There were plenty of toys there and it was babyproofed, a nice break from Mike’s parent’s house and our hotel room, which were not.  Anna and the kids even did a little wrestling – Anna won of course:

Anna with Heather and Graham

It was really good to get home and get back to our normal activities.  We got her straight into the bath and she seems happy to be home in this picture:

Anna after her bath

This was taken before she (and Mike and I) all got the cold and the stomach virus.  We didn’t take any pictures of that – be thankful!

She’s starting to feel better these days and so in a constant search for trying new foods that she can feed herself, I gave her a little hummus to try for lunch.  She seemed to like it:

Anna and hummus

We were even feeling well enough on Monday to head to the park with Rhiannon and Brendan.  Anna loves the swing:

Anna in the swing

And then yesterday we were feeling well enough to head downtown for lunch with Mike.  Anna charmed everyone around us at the Cheesecake Factory and then it was back to work:

Anna and Mike's desk

I think if she could tell us what she was thinking it would be something along the lines of, “Isn’t this child labor?”

Anyway, we survived Dallas, the two viruses we got while we were there and now Anna is working on getting lots of teeth.  There’s still not much sleep around here, but we’re home and that’s what counts…

The Munhall Family – An Update

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 | Anna, Updates | No Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my updates – I think it’s about time to get one done.

Anna’s Update:

Anna turned 10 months old last week – I have no idea where the time went!  She’s crawling like a pro, crawling up stairs, is cruising our furniture and is just generally active and happy.  She’s saying “mama” and “dada”, but not necessarily towards the right person and has learned recently to point at things she wants and say “dat” or “dis” (roughly translated to “that” and “this”).

Yesterday I went to the card store for Valentine’s cards and had to listen to her say “dat” repeatedly and point at the stuffed animals behind me.  I really was hoping that the “I want that” stage was a long way off!

She recently discovered the cupboard where we keep her plastic bowls and other Tupperware and spends lots of time exploring the detritus.

Cupboard

Sometimes after going through the cupboard she’ll just stay there for snack time…

Floor Snack

She also eats anything that is on the floor, so I’m having to keep it pretty clean or accept that she will just eat whatever she finds.

We go to the park and swing when we can, which she seems to enjoy:

Swing!

This past weekend we had playgroup with two other sets of parents from our childbirth class.  Anna is the oldest of the three kids by a few weeks and although the boys have at least 5 lbs on her she is at least just as tall as them:

Anna, Drew and Timothy

I take a lot of pictures of her and sometimes she gets a little Britney Spears on me:

No more pictures!

Don’t worry – I’ll keep taking pictures of her – it’s not like she can get a restraining order that would stick…

Mike’s Update:

Thank you to all of you with your well wishes upon the death of Mike’s mom – Norma Munhall.  Norma died suddenly following heart surgery, which she had hoped to keep secret from her family, on January 17th.  Norma was a talented quilter, tatter (lace-maker), accomplished violinist and ice-skater, loving mom to Mike and adoring grandmother to Anna.

Following Norma’s death Mike rushed off to Dallas to help his dad sort things out and was there for 5 days.  The lesson that we should all take away from Norma’s death is not only to appreciate your loved ones, but also to save your loved ones a lot of headaches by getting life insurance, writing a will and designating beneficiaries on all your accounts.  Norma failed to do these things and Mike and his dad are having to deal with a lot of mess, expense and an attorney to get things properly sorted.

Having worked for years for attorneys I know that in most states if you die without a will all of your property either goes to the state for them to pay off your debts and allocate, or through probate court to then get distributed to your heirs. Mike and I are considering having a party where we all get together, write wills, make sure we have the whole life insurance thing sorted and then maybe play a round or two of Life…

Next week we will be traveling to Dallas for four days.  There will be a service for Norma (she was cremated) and a mass will be held in her honor.  Norma’s sisters Becky, Barbara, Evelyn and her brother Tom and his wife Pat will be in Dallas, as well as Mike Munhall Sr.’s sister Mary Lou.  They are all quite excited to meet Anna so I’m sure that will be a cheery spot in an otherwise somber occasion.

On the bright side, Mike is enjoying his new hobby that I blame Nate for – home brewing beer.  Our guest bathroom is now home to an “Ale Pail”  of a black ale Mike is brewing and a recently bottled pale ale.  This was all supposed to live in the basement, but it turns out our basement is too cold to maintain the proper beer fermenting temperature.  Superbowl Sunday at our house smelled like the Coors brewery (the only brewery I’ve toured) while Mike cooked up the black ale.  He’s reading up on the subject on the web and by book and seems to be thouroughly enjoying himself.

Mike recently completed a large project at work in a new language he taught himself – Perl.  It was a hefty project and Mike is quite pleased to have it be done and into QA.  I’m proud of him for not only teaching himself a new language, but also putting it to use immediately.  Mike is always a quick and adept learner.

Mike is still playing hockey on Tuesday nights, but I generally don’t hear much about how the games go since he never gets home before 11 p.m. and I’m long gone to bed by then…

Dorrie’s Update:

There’s not much from my end really.  Mostly I’m just Anna’s mom and that’s okay by me – she keeps me pretty busy.

I am doing a little work for Mike’s office testing a new and rather large project completed by some guy, what’s his name? Oh yeah, Mike!  Mike’s boss thought it would be good for me to test Mike’s project since “he’s readily available to you”.  Nice!  It’s a large project and it’s divided between the regular QA person and myself. Every once in a while I send Mike an email about a defect that I’ve found or with a question and have to delete “I love you” at the end of it – it’s habit!

It is lovely to have something other than laundry or cleaning to do during Anna’s naps.  I generally put my headphones on, keep an eye on the lights on the baby monitor and test quite happily for an hour or two a day.  The house is a mess, but I’m making a little extra money and that’s not shabby!