Monday, February 27, 2012

5th tooth!

Salem got her 5th tooth today! Maybe that's why she woke up at 3:45 a. m. and didn't really want to go back to sleep. She has turned into such a poor sleeper. Sometimes, she will sleep through the night, but she will wake up very, very early. Think 4:15, for the day. She will be ready for a nap by 10:30, but I need a nap, too! So I have to put both girls down at the same time. So that is a struggle, since she will get very, very whiny.

I need to go wrap Adora's birthday presents!

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Adora's names for the new baby

As I was putting Salem to bed tonight, Jake decided to type a list of Adora's name choices for the new baby. She sat and told him names and specified whether they were boy names, girl names, or neutral names. Here is her list:

BOY Names
Peanut
Shoop
Eich (this is pronounced "H", but she wouldn't allow it to be spelled that way)
Jay
Preston
Teeth
Towickio

Girl Names
Angel
Love Baby
Love Everyone
Olivia
Tastes like Chicken
Ice Cream
Peg
Sweet Baby

Neutral Names
Gabe
Epley
Twickly
Eeo

No Facebook

So, I gave up Facebook for Lent. Then I discovered I have to share my kids' cuteness somewhere. So I guess I should do it on the blog!

Adora wrote a prayer today. It goes something like this:

"Our Father,
Hail Mary,
Jesus loves me,
I love God.
I love Daddy."

It was really sweet. Salem still has only four teeth. She now has a black eye, too. She bumped her eyebrow into something in the kitchen, and it swelled up almost immediately.

I am pregnant! My official due date is 09/01/12, but I am estimating 09/10/12. Just because my babies like to come late.

We have been contacted by Lutheran Disaster Response. They are supposed to give us a list of the supplies we need to fix our house, then we buy the supplies, and then they fix it! That would be so awesome, and I hope it works out. We definitely need more room before this new baby comes.

Also, our house in WF almost sold, after almost 6 months on the market. The buyers backed out at the last minute. I guess you can do that almost scott-free in Texas. It was soooo disappointing. We are having another open house today, so we are praying for a miracle that someone will see it today and put an offer on it before our contract with our realtor expires toward the beginning of next month. If the contract expires, we are definitely not renewing it. We will either go with another realtor or put it up for lease or put it for sale or lease. If we do for sale or lease, then if it leases, we have to give the realtor $500, so that is one reason we may not do that.

Salem says thank you all the time now. She is much more polite than most kids even older than her. She also says "thank you" while signing please, to mean please. She says excuse me when she burps or passes gas.

Adora is getting harder and harder to handle. She whines nearly nonstop and throws huge fits when she doesn't get her way. I am going to talk to her pediatrician about it, but I doubt she will have any miracle cure. Her fourth birthday is coming up 03/01, and I am taking her on the train to Williston, ND, about two hours away (we will go 03/03, Saturday). We will sit in the observation car and go to the dining car for a snack (hopefully it will be open). Jake and Salem will meet us in Williston and take us to lunch, and then, hopefully, we will all go see The Lorax. I think she'll love this trip--I hope so. She is expecting a party, but we don't really know a lot of kids here, so we thought we'd do this Williston thing instead. She will have a ton of presents to open, so hopefully that will take the sting out of not having a party. I am also thinking of inviting a friend over to play and have cake and ice cream on her actual birthday.

Jacob and Adora are outside shoveling snow right now. We got our first big snowstorm of the winter last night. There are several inches of snow out there. Jake got the snowblower working, but he still has to do a lot of shoveling, too. After about an hour of whining, Adora finally got dressed to go outside, so she is out there helping him and playing in the snow. It looks really beautiful. The snow covers up all the lawns that are scraped bare from people gutting their houses after the flood.

Speaking of the flood, the valley is still somewhat of a disaster zone. Lots of people have FEMA trailers in their yards. They are living in them because their houses aren't liveable yet. They have started demolishing homes. They demolished one that is just one block away from us and one that backed up to the river. That's all I've noticed so far, but I don't have very good awareness of where all the houses used to be. There are flood lines and untouched homes everywhere as you get closer to the river. People are waiting to see if the government will buy their homes from them, and they don't want to put a lot of effort and money into fixing it up if it is going to get turned into a greenway. I don't blame them. There aren't enough contractors around to do the work anyway. We contacted a contractor almost two months ago to give us an estimate on our basement, and they still haven't gotten it to us.

I need to upload some pictures, so maybe next time I will have some of those to post.