kaylee loves santa

last year...

this year...

(it is appropriate to laugh. we certainly did.)

merry belated christmas everyone!

birthday pics

this is a cheater post. :) my friend B blogged this morning about the kiddos and the AWESOME outfits she made them for their bday party, so you should go check out her blog to see a few pics. :)

http://www.ravennagirls.com/2011/11/21/things/

mo'o's colors

my parents brought this book, called Mo'o's Colors, back from hawaii awhile back. it has hawaian words in it, including the hawaian words for dif colors. but we skip that part and just say red, orange, etc. lately however, it has been one of kaylee's favorite books, but not necessarily for the colors... for the ladybugs. there is a ladybug on every page and she loves to point to them. I was trying to get a video of that, but as usual the camera and ethan were both very distracting. I think she's also a little confused why I'm not reading the text when she turns the page. but it's still cute none-the-less!

playing with dad

would you like excuses for why I haven't blogged in awhile? no, probably not, nobody cares. I don't have any good ones anyways. instead, here's a video of the kiddos playing w/ blake a couple weeks ago (oct 30 according to the file info).

pumpkins pt 2

so why did we go pumpkin picking you ask?

besides that upcoming halloween holiday, we went because it was jackie's birthday! well, it wasn't really, her bday was back in Sept. but we had scheduling difficulties and Jackie and Dave got married last year at Craven Farm, so we went there to get our pumpkins and celebrate all thing Jackie.

Here's the group of girls: Jackie, Brianne, Kaylee, Danielle, me, Debe, and Kimbre.

 

Ethan loves to be tipped upside down. Brianne was kind enough to indulge him.

repeatedly.

just hanging out with our pumpkins.

brianne was awesome enough to push the wheelbarrow full of pumpkins and kids around. I thought that was nice of her, until I took a turn. It was REALLY nice of her; that thing was darn heavy and hard to push.

blake came too!

they had this spot where everyone was taking cute family pictures. so we tried. but they mostly turned out like this:

since it was jackie's bday celebration, two pics of jackie and kaylee to close :)

happy halloween!

pumpkin picking pt 1

do you know what good bloggers / facebook users do? they post pictures of their children picking pumpkins. well, first they take those pictures, and then they post them. fortunately for the world, danielle took pics of my kids pumpkin-ing, and I'm actually going to post a few. probably won't get to posting any on facebook, but at least I'm getting some of them here!

(w/ danielle)

(w/ dave)

hmm, nap time is apparently over and I only got through the first 200 pics danielle took. whelp, I guess this is part 1 of 2 then.

quick updates

several people have mentioned that I haven't posted lately. sorry about that, but I'm rather amused that you all noticed!

so, I have a to-do list a million miles long today, but here's a quick update:

• we moved! hurrah. everything is unpacked except the garage and our room. our room because we got the great idea of redoing the closet. in retrospect this may have been a mistake. oh well, we're still plugging along; I just installed another drawer. we also have the issue that our battery powered drill doesn't have the greatest battery. so we did 5 drawers last night and then it was pooped. so were we, so off to bed we went. but i generally drill something every morning, charge the drill all day long, and then blake and I do more drilling and all the two-person stuff in the evening, with more charging all night long.
• we got an offer on our old place! but, it was low and we weren't able to meet in the middle. oh well, our agent says it's still good that we got an offer and not to lower our price quite yet. so we'll see. keep telling all your millionaire friends that they want to over-offer on the best 2 bedroom townhome in redmond!
• kaylee thinks it's time to wake up now. it's not.
• kaylee has 7 teeth. I have been saying tooth #6 (on the top) has been on its way for awhile now but it has just finally broken through. I didn't know teeth could come through that slowly. I think tooth #7 (on the bottom) thought if it went fast enough it might claim the 6th spot because I didn't know she was working on that one, but yesterday I noticed them both! so I guess they tied or something.
• ethan still has 12 teeth to the best of my knowledge (well, I know he hasn't lost any at least, but I'm not putting my fingers in there to see if there are any new ones).
• kaylee has decided to go back to sleep. how nice.
• ethan also has lots of bumps and bruises. he loves walking, walking fast, and crawling really fast. he also giggles a ton while he does these things, and sometimes that results in a little tumble.
• kaylee is also walking now. but only for special occasions! she can walk 10 or so steps to one of us, but unlike ethan who once he discovered he could walk was determined to try it out everywhere, she still uses crawling as her main mode of transportation. but she can do it, so that's fun. video forthcoming, I need to charge the camera.
• I can't find the charger for the still camera. thus the lack of pictures. still looking for that.
• today is greta's birthday. isn't that a funny thought? I don't know why I just thought of that. I just looked at the date on the computer screen and though, oh, that's greta's birthday. also, happy post birthday to annemarie (2 days ago)!
• my cousin's having a boy! what fun!

hmm, kaylee is now awake and chattering to herself. I'd better go get her.

we've moved!

We will finally have internet again on Monday. well, Monday evening. I can not wait! I could have told you I was addicted to the internet before, but I didn't know how bad it was. If nothing else, not being able to work at home has been tricky, and trying to get our townhome on the market w/o internet is another trick. but hopefully it will be on the market later today, so that's pretty crazy!
this whole week has been about getting the townhouse ready to sell and unpacking boxes at the new house. on monday the carpet cleaners came, on tuesday the house cleaners came (uh... it was 12 man-hours of housecleaning, should I admit that? apparently it was dirty or something...), on wednesday the photographer came, thursday we anxiously waited and emailed (on my phone) back and forth with the broker about pricing and other details and read paperwork, and today blake signed the paperwork from work, and I've been approving the pictures and the wording for the flyer. theoretically it will post tonight, and there will be an open house on Sunday!

Wanna see the pictures? wanna see how nice our townhome looks after we move out and pay people to clean it? Click here. That fire in the fireplace is totally photoshoped. and the rooms look so shiny and big, unlike when we had all our crap in there. regardless though, we loved that place and are sad to leave. Anybody who knows anybody looking to buy... send them to our open house. tell them to pay us zillions of dollars to buy our house because it's awesome.

okay, well, I have a few other things I need to do on the internet while I have it (I'm at my parents' right now and kids are napping) so that's all for now! thanks for all your prayers and good thoughts about the car and moving, everything went well. The car got a 45,000 mile checkup, a new battery, a cleaning... another cleaning because apparently it still smelled (again, should I be admitting this?), all for $600. could have been a lot worse and it is very sparkly now. :)

oh! I just got an email saying our listing is now live! crazy!

hmm, and kaylee's awake. so much for the other things I was going to do...

he walks!

We've had quite the time yesterday and today. It started with ethan falling off the couch yesterday afternoon and smashing his head on the side of the table before falling to the floor. he was not happy. I had already called the pediatrician that morning regarding kaylee's diaper rash (it's better almost everywhere but one spot that looked worse and I wasn't sure if I should put the various cremes on that spot, but it looks better this morning so that's good) so calling on ethan's head smash was my second call that day - how embarrassing.

but ethan decided he was feeling better later that night apparently, because look at what he did... (but consider turning your speakers down, because I am "encouraging" directly into the camera's microphone again)

the movers are here and about to wrap up, so I will bullet point the rest of this post before going to our new internet-less house...

- yay ethan! way to go bud!
- our prius freaked out last night and started honking at midnight. our neighbors said they were going to have it towed (hard to tell if they were serious or not, but there's a good chance they were). fortunately it started in the morning (it wouldn't start last night after it's honking episode killed the battery) and is now at the dealer getting fixed (hopefully).
- good ol' ethan woke up in the middle of the night and wouldn't go back to sleep and since we were all concussion concerned we had to be extra nice which is nice, but left us with less sleep.
- to top our morning off, kaylee fell down the stairs. just three, but she didn't like that. as my mom said, we will have to bring our kids in to the doc separately, or they will call cps on us!

that's it! send us good moving and low-car-bill vibes... i'll be MIA for a bit before we get the internet at our new house. (now go watch that video again - yay for ethan walking!)

teeth!

kaylee has 5 teeth now, with number 6 almost breaking through.

ethan has 12. I think I am done counting his teeth, and they are all hidden in the back now, and take some dangerous exploration to discover!

for anybody keeping track of when their teeth break through, pretend I wrote this post a week or so ago. also, why are you keeping track of when my kids' teeth break through?

painting - day 3 & poor kaylee

As you saw, we did the bulk of painting on day 2 (sunday). which was good, because we had no babysitter on monday! so, when the babies woke up at 6:something am, Blake took them for a run, and I went over to do another coat of paint on the stripes. remember how I said the yellow paint was so thin? I did a coat on the yellow stripes, a coat on the green stripes, another coat on the yellow stripes, a coat on the red stripes, and then another coat on the yellow stripes. I also did other little touch-ups where we'd dripped paint or something. the yellow and green thick stripes were the critical ones, because we planned to stripe over top of them later, and that needed 4 hours of drying time before we could do that. so then I came home, and we packed the rest of the garage while the babies napped. when they woke up we fed them lunch, and then it had been 4 hours, so blake headed over to re-coat the blue stripes and paint the stripes w/in a stripe, plus one red one we forgot to paint the day before (it was yellow stripe next to yellow stripe - couldn't just not have a stripe in btwn there!).

caleb, jackie, and dave were going for a bike ride around then and met up at our townhouse since it's right near the trail, so we hung out for a few minutes, and then the kiddos and I played. then blake came home, babies napped, we packed, babies woke up, jackie and dave stopped by for a few minutes on the way back from their bike ride, and after they left, kaylee had a melt down. she just screamed, and screamed, and screamed. we tried all the things she loved, and she was so upset. it was very sad, and very stressful because she was acting like she was in pain, not like she was just tired or cranky or something. we gave her tylenol, put her in the carrier (which she hated instead of loving like usual), gave her a bath, changed her diaper a couple times (she has a diaper rash), let her play w/ this electronic cat which she both loves and is afraid of, we tried all sorts of things. then she decided she was happy again, and we had a picnic dinner outside on the trail... just sitting there wondering what had set her off.

came back home, and blake started putting the kiddos to bed, while I switched back into paint clothes to do the final round. I did a coat on all the new stripes and was starting to remove some tape before starting on another coat when blake called. kaylee had had another "episode" and he'd gotten her to sleep afterward, but it made him call the consulting nurse. who was concerned about her diaper rash and said we had to go into urgent care that night. even though she was already asleep! so since I had the carseat-car, I came home, we gathered all of kaylee's favorite things up, and then we woke her up. blake and I both wanted to take her, but he wanted to take her so much I let him. he said she was just fine waiting in urgent care, very happy watching the fish.

she is fine, but we now have instructions to not use wipes while changing her diaper (wash her in the sink or a bath instead), and to use three different cremes when changing her diaper, and no baby powder. they think her diaper rash is some sort of infection, and they wanted us to come in that night because if the infection spread it could get bad really fast, so they wanted to see it.

ethan is just a happy little camper, and kaylee's been a happy camper since. so all is well. apparently this painting project will be a four day project, but hopefully we'll finish up tonight after blake comes home from work.

anyway, here are some pictures of the almost-final room that blake took after adding the stripes w/in stripes.

originally we were going to paint a dark blue horizontal stripe btwn the light blue and yellow. but when i took the tape off, I decided I actually preferred it white. this was awesome, because it meant we eliminated a step! it's slightly a bummer though, because if we'd planned on that from the beginning, I would have taped more carefully, and prob used a slightly wider tape. but oh well, it is not worth buying white paint and fixing.

this concludes this splurt of posts about painting. hopefully soon I'll have something say about moving!

painting - day 2

okay, so we should start this post with how awesome our friends and family are. I mean, my parents babysat all day saturday for us. and also on saturday, blake's parents called to ask if they could babysit for us so we could pack and such. and we said no, not today, dana's parents beat you to it. but you could bring us lunch, and you could babysit tomorrow! so blake's parents brought us lunch on saturday and babysat for us on sunday so we could begin day 2 of painting.

but the help doesn't stop there. danielle had to be at church super early in the morning because her boss was preaching. so she wrapped up there, and showed up at our house around 10 am. we put the kiddos in their cute bday outfits (made by brianne) and went out to make another attempt at 1 year pics (jcpenney failed us for 1 year pics). brianne joined us a little later, and then jackie and dave showed up too.

after pictures we decided to divide and conquer. blake and dave took the kids to blake's parents' house. brianne went to home depot for more painting supplies (including choosing the accent colors). jackie made a lunch run. danielle and I headed to the house.

why did we head to the house? because we needed to put danielle to work. so she could paint this:

I know.

pretty impressive, eh? she will make me tell you that yes, we did project the image on the wall. but seriously, I could not do that. the projector also kept dying due to some user error issues that took a bit to work out(overheating, timing out, etc etc) and for the first several times we had to re-align the image. jackie walked in about 2 seconds after danielle and I did and she was our master projector-fixer. and while jackie was projector fixing and I was painting another coat of solid yellow on the bottom, danielle just kept painting the mural! it should aslo be noted that jackie also applied the circle decals you see on the wall.

so you think that's pretty darn impressive, eh? well, yes, that is the big awesome feature. but remember how we sent brianne to home depot for accent paint? we sent her on sunday, because the wall decals didn't arrive until saturday, and we wanted to match the colors. the colors for the stripes:

by this time blake and dave had dropped off the babies and packed everything they could in the garage until they ran out of boxes to pack into. so they came over, and brought more chairs to stand on (since the projector and laptop were occupying the ones we'd brought before) and they helped us stripe some more. dave is very thoughtful and excellent at painting stripes. (insert joke here)

and danielle's still working away at that mural. the yellow paint we bought was super runny and thin. I think danielle put at least 10 coats of yellow on there. and you can't see it here, but she brushed everything w/ texture, making her brush strokes look like fur in all the right directions and clumping it all fur-like.

I know, now you're waiting for the last picture where I show you the mural all completed, right? well, I sorta forgot to take that picture. brianne had to leave for a work function after she painted a few stripes, and blake had to leave to go pick up the kids from his parents' so we could get to church on time (we went to an evening service). then jackie and dave had to leave to go to a family dinner, so I walked them downstairs where we ravenously ate some snacks (we sorts skipped lunch in this process) and while we were downstairs danielle was still faithfully working away on that mural. so then, of course, I walked up to snap a picture of it to show blake and brianne (whom we were meeting back at church) and... I guess I just sorta walked in, and said wow. and then walked out w/o taking the picture. so it will come as part of the day 3 painting post. sorry. but here's a pic near the end:

for those of you who are not reading several Seuss books a day: this what the mural is based on:

I love this one, because it's got the boy-girl twin thing going on, but it's also not thing 1 and 2 (which are okay, but just not my favorite). 

so how about that? after church I showed one of danielle and my coworkers the mural pics and she said, "wow, you really have this whole community thing going on." and it's so true. I do. and I really appreciate it all. thanks to all who have helped with painting, packing, babysitting, and all of life's little things. it's great to have you a part of our lives. we love you!

painting - day 1

we are painting the kiddos' room before we move in. it is going to be awesome. I could tell you the vision, but instead I will just let you say "whoa!" as you read these posts, and know that you are laughing.

so, here are some pictures from before we started - just a plain white room.

 (taken from the doorway)

(taken from in the room, looking back at the doorway)

it is basically a 11.5 x 10 ft room, plus a little nook, where blake is sitting. the long wall is parallel to the closet; the cribs will have their long sides against the long wall and will basically take up that whole wall.


now we start to tape (sorry that all the shots w/ the window in them should have been taken w/ the flash):

and we start to paint:

and now the top is looking nice:

and now I will mention that this room will be dr seuss themed. I will also say I was not planning on it being quite as bright as it's turned out, but it's hard to tell from a little bitty paint swatch. so you just laugh, but we're just going w/ it. okay, ready for the bottom?

yes indeed-y, a rather bright yellow. I know, really bright. but like I said, we're going with it. and, there's more craziness to come, so you just hold on to those horses and check back tomorrow.

happy birthday darren

Saturday was darren's bday. he's 20 now. that's a little crazy really, that my youngest brother is 20. weird. anyways, back when darren used to celebrate his bday w/ family (now he's all off at college and celebrating in NY) his birthday party (almost) always had one common element year after year: round table pizza.

my parents kindly offered to babysit on saturday so that blake and I could do some packing and painting (more on that later) and when we called to coordinate baby pick-up they said, "why don't you meet us in woodinville and we'll go to round table for darren's birthday." so we did. these pictures are fairly unexciting, but darren, here's for you - we really did go to round table on your birthday w/o you. (unfortunately, the kiddos needed to go to bed, so we didn't go to coldstone's afterwards - sorry. no slip 'n' slide either.)

round table has a salad bar, so we got lots of small chopped things for the kiddos. they weren't super into the bacon, but they were enthusiastic about everything else (peas, peaches, ham, & olives). they probably ate 80+% of the food on that plate, and then blake finished it off for them.

 ethan and daddy

 kaylee was trying to feed me her peas, but then she would eat them herself and just stretch out an empty hand to see what I would do.

whoops, dropped one!

mural room

so I showed you a pic of the mural room before, but when we went to unload a few boxes yesterday I took a bunch more photos and stitched them together (via the "stitch" button in windows live photo gallery - I didn't take the time to do it myself!). it's a little funky looking because it's the whole room, but looking flat... and there's one part that didn't stitch well, but you still get the idea. I didn't include the ceiling in the stitch, but it's painted with clouds and has glow in the dark stars on it too.

pretty cool, eh?

you can click on the photo to see it a little larger.

peek-a-boo

Apologies for the fact that I am laughing right into the camera and it's obnoxious. but the video is pretty cute...

ethan's first step

Ethan just took his first step! just one, but he stood there for awhile, and then while blake and I were both watching him, he took one step with his right foot, stood there for another second, and then sat down and raced (crawling) across the room.

besides the "yay first step"-ness of it all, this is also pretty funny. my friend audria (who has b/g twins 2 months older, both of who have been walking for about 2 months) was saying that they prob just needed to see her kids walk and then they'd start walking. well, we went over there yesterday, after not having seen her for awhile, and what happened? her kids saw mine and started crawling again! hahahaha. but apparently ethan retained a little bit! we'll see if it was an isolated incident or real progress, but it was ethan's first step that didn't result in him on his face on the floor. :)

in other news, we bought a house yesterday. there were lots of back and forths and this last week or two we didn't think we'd close on time, but in the end our lender did pull through and we closed yesterday! more on that later probably. but yay for first steps and new houses!

Ev & Alyssa's wedding

Evan and Alyssa's photographer has shared a few of the pics she took at their wedding on her blog, so I thought I'd share with you! Check 'em out: http://maijakarinphotography.com/blog/alyssa-evan-8611-sneak-peek/

eggs

we met with an allergist on monday and had ethan tested for an egg allergy. sure enough, he's allergic! you could consider that bad news, but I put it in the good news category. if he weren't, then we would have no idea what caused his reaction last week. so I think it's much better to know, avoid eggs, and have epi-pens on hand in case. in fact, I think we got only good news from the allergist. they covered his back in maybe 30 different allergy mixes and poked each one, but ethan was far more curious about what was happening on his back than he was in any sort of pain or distress. anyway, here's what we learned:

• egg allergies are one of the most common in kids
• egg allergies are usually grown out of
• kids with egg allergies often have eczema. the eczema isn't necessarily a reaction to the eggs, it's just a weird correlation. the nurse that walked us back looked at his cheeks and said, "are you here for an egg allergy?" we were like, um, yes, how did you know that, did you read his chart? and he said he could tell by his cheeks. so that was interesting.
• we will get him tested every year. previously we'd heard we wouldn't get him tested until he was 5, which meant 4 more years of no eggs. now at least if he outgrows it at 3 we'll know and start feeding him omelets!
• he's not allergic to anything else (including peanuts which we haven't fed him up to this point). he showed a slight reaction to citrus, so maybe when we have a choice of apple versus orange we'll feed him an apple, but the reaction was much much less than the egg reaction (as in I was like, "where? oh, that counts?") and we've fed him some citrus before, so we're mostly ignoring this. a reaction on an allergy test doesn't necessarily mean the person is allergic anyways.
• there is research on both sides of every allergy topic it seems. foods w/ high egg concentrations like omelets, quiche, french toast etc are obviously out. but the doc said we could try baked goods w/ eggs in them and watch him closely. sometimes exposing him to small concentrations like that will help his system get used to eggs. other times, once a major reaction has happened any small exposure will cause the major reaction too. so we gave him two pieces of bow-tie pasta on monday night and watched him super super carefully. he was 100% fine. we've since given him other pasta / baked goods items w/ eggs in the ingredients and he's fine. so that is FANTASTIC. it means we don't have to be crazy paranoid parents. when we took him to the Child Care Center at church last week they wiped down everything in the room before he came in in case some kid before had had a baked good w/ eggs in it before him in that room. I am very happy to not have to lead that kind of lifestyle.
• the only semi-downside is that the flu shot vaccine has eggs in it. apparently each year's vaccine has different concentrations so we'll wait to see if he can have this year's vaccine or not. while that's a bummer, I never had flu shots when I was a kid so I just don't think it's that horrible. probably blake, kaylee, and I will get our flu shots and hope that ethan doesn't get the flu from someone else. and if he does, well... that's a bummer, but it's only the flu.

So all in all, a very successful appt I would say. We can totally handle this. :)

teeth

ethan has 11 teeth! 4 bottom center, 4 top center, 2 bottom in the back, and 1 top in the back! Since they're harder to see in the back I'm not sure exactly when these last 3 came in. I know he had one of the lower ones prior to his bday, and I know the other lower one he didn't have prior to his bday because it was this giant swollen spot in his mouth but no tooth had come through yet. the top one we just discovered yesterday - who knows how long it's been there! So... at 12 months he had 9 or 10 teeth, and now he has 11.

kaylee has... 4 teeth. :) two top center, two bottom center. she's working hard on getting more, and working her lungs hard telling us about it. :)

white onesie pics

Every month my excellent friend Danielle has come over and taken pics of my kiddos in white onesies against a colored fabric background. We took their final, 12 month photos on their birthdays last week (first try Wednesday, second try thurs... i'm guessing we'll end up using the thursday pics, but sorta funny that we did actually do the photoshoot on both their birthdays). It is sad to see this "tradition" come to a close, but now that they're mobile it has gotten lots harder each month, and it must end sometime (none of you want me to be blogging about their 473rd month pics) so... their 12 month pics will be their last.

to celebrate this little tradition, we took the fabric that we would be using in their 12 month photos and strung them up at their bday party. I got a bunch of $2 white t-shirts and asked people to put on the t-shirts press the camera button (which was set up in timer-mode on a tripod) and smile for their own white-onesie pic. extra thanks to Grandpa (blake's dad) for letting us use his camera when Dave's broke the day before!

anyways, without further ado... the white onesie pics!

danielle and kaylee

my coworker elizabeth and her daughter maggie

 the daw family. this is alyssa's parents and brother and I guess now alyssa's a caulley, so that's all the daws (well, you know, except for all the other daw relatives and whatnot)

uncle brian, aunt kate, cousins ryan, kristin, and tommy!

 dave and caleb!

tracey and uncle mike 

bruno and grandma 

caleb and his ice cream...

my boss' boss kendy and her daughter maddie

 cousin/aunt/uncle etc... mark, riley, mimi, risa, george

grandpa bruce, aunt annemarie, grandma heidi 

gramps, uncle darren, nana

there were lots more people at the party (prob 40+) but those were the fine folks that indulged my white onesie plan. thanks guys! these pics are pretty fun!! :D