So glad we cleaned our carpets last weekend...

...so that Kari would have fresh carpet to throw up all over. Greg called last night from the airport after returning home from another business trip (welcome home, my love!), and all I could think to say in my half-asleep, exhausted stupor was,"Kari threw up." Apparently it was just a one day thing because she's feeling better today.

We are all very happy to have Daddy home, and right now we're watching the snow fall outside our windows. Kari's been anxiously awaiting the first snowfall, and while I don't believe it will stick, I'm happy that she's getting to see her "winter snow." It's not always a guaranteed happening here in Gresham, OR.

Gingerbread

My Grandma Arnold makes her own gingerbread houses every year, and last year she made one with Kari when they were here visiting. I decided to attempt it this year with her recipe and direction. It was a lot of work, but here's the finished product. Thanks for all the help, Grandma. The kids loved it.

Kari did great and was really into it. Joel made things a little more complicated. I don't think gingerbread house making is an ideal activity for a 22 month old. There are several things in this whole process that I will do differently next year. :) This was my practice year.

Greg, Kari turned the little ones around because she wanted you to see the backs and how the one on the left looks like a face.

It's Christmas time!

And now I can "legally" listen to Christmas music in our home! (Greg caught me breaking that house-rule a couple weeks ago.)

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we went and got our tree. It was a perfect day for it--cold and dry.

Family Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving with the "Miller" family (Greg's mom's side of the family). I guess we only took pictures of the kids. You can see all of us adults in the background of the first one. We enjoyed some good food and had some time to catch up with family we don't get to see very often. Thanks to all who worked so hard to put it all together!

Thanksgiving

Here are the things Kari was thankful for on one particular morning this last week. We really do have so much to be thankful for, and I'm sure if we wrote them all down, there wouldn't be enough room on the page.

Have a very happy Thanksgiving!

A Treat

The kids had fun making edible play-doh last night with Grandma, but we didn't call it play-doh because Joel already has a problem with eating regular play-doh. Grandma called it her "special peanut butter dough." It's yummy stuff, not exactly healthy, but yummy. :)

Here's the recipe if you want to try it:
1/2 c. peanut butter
1/2 c. powdered sugar
1/4 c. honey
You may need more powdered sugar/less honey, depending on your peanut butter. It should be the consistency of play-doh. It gets more firm when you refrigerate it.

Bunks

We picked up a wonderful set of bunk beds with mattresses (for a great deal!) off Craigslist this weekend and got them all put together for Kari to sleep in the top bunk that night. Very exciting stuff.

Recitation and Play-Doh

2 Corinthians 1:3-4
"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble, with the comfort we ourselves have received from God."

This is the latest verse Kari's been working on. It was one from Sunday school and was a little too long, but she wanted to do it, and with quite a bit of effort, she did! She's been asking me to tape her saying her verses again, and today's play-doh time seemed like a good time.
I love it when Kari makes Joel laugh. They can get so silly!

A Chunk of Our Weekend

We spent a large portion of our weekend painting Kari's room. She and Joel will be sharing a room once the baby comes, and since her room was pretty much ALL pink, we had to make some changes. It went from pink to blue (Thanks for the paint sample, Karina. It's just the color I wanted.) The room is going to be a work in progress for the next couple months. We're going to get bunk beds, and Joel's bedding is the same design as Kari's but with green, blue, and white stripes. Gotta love having IKEA in town!

In the middle of our paint job.

Kari loves the "new" room and is very excited to have Joel in there with her. I'm not sure she realizes she won't be able to shut him out, once he moves in. It won't be for another month or two, but Kari doesn't take well to changes (wonder where she got that from?) , so the more preparation, the better. I'm just glad that for right now she's looking forward to sharing with her little brother. She spent a couple nights in Joel's room while we were painting, and they had fun together--didn't get enough sleep, but they had fun.

Bits of our weekend

The last photo (bottom right) is to document the first windstorm and power outage of the season . They're eating yogurt by candlelight. The power went out at 6:45am in the middle of my shower Monday morning, and immediately the screaming began. They'd been awake for a while and had a light on, so the pitch black kind of freaked them out. Of course, I had to go searching for the flashlights and batteries and found that I wasn't prepared for the windy season yet. I need to buy batteries. Luckily, we have lots of candles. We made a fire in our woodstove and had a nice, cozy hour and a half without power.

Beloved Doggie

This is Joel's "doggie," his small, soft blanket with a dog head, and this week I had to repair the doggie for the first time. I went in to get Joel out of his crib after his nap, and he held it up and said,"Doggie broke." Sure enough, the doggie's head was split open, stuffing coming out, the ear falling off. While I was repairing the damage, I decided to give him a new nose, since the original one was half gone. I wonder how many times I'm going to have to mend the doggie. Will it be like my cousin Denee's "Brown Bear," worn and patched all over with a many times repaired nose? Or maybe it'll be like my blanket that literally disintegrated after many years of love. All that was left was the patches and binding.

Joel loves this doggie. For the last several days he's been repeating, "Doggie fixed, all clean!" Now that the binky is gone (and yes, we are totally done with the binky and sleeping better, too!), the doggie is even more loved. He can keep it for as long as he wants, as far as I'm concerned. I won't take it away.


It makes a good hat, too.

It's getting better

There's been no crying at nap time the last couple days. Two nights ago Joel slept all night long, and last night he woke up crying once but went back to sleep without the need for any rocking with dad. Yeah!

Binky-free

We've been thinking we probably should take Joel's pacifier away before our next baby arrives, but there just hasn't seemed to be a good time. He's been down to having it just at nap times and bed time for a while now. Well, for the past couple weeks he's been waking up in the night (sometimes several times a night) crying because his binky has fallen out of the crib. Since we wanted to go back to sleep, we'd go in, find it, and give it back to him. This was starting to get a little old, and since we weren't getting a full night's sleep anyway, we decided to make the binky disappear. We implemented the "cold-turkey" method. It's been almost a week, and we're still not getting a full night's sleep. The first night he cried for an hour before going to sleep, and then he woke up at 3am crying for his binky. We went in several times during the next 3 HOURS, each time reminding him the binky was gone and trying to settle him down. He was so pitiful. I felt awful! He pleaded with me through his tears, "P'ease, Mommy, p'ease binky!" At 5:45am Greg got him out of his crib and rocked him until he fell asleep--not a fun night.

In the last week, there's only been one night where he's slept all night long. All the other nights we've had to deal with the crying for the binky. He seems to forget that it's gone. When we go in after listening to him cry for an extended period of time, he says, "Binky fall," and we have to explain again that no, it didn't fall and there's no more binky. We tried to replace it with other things--little pillows, a monkey, a teddy bear, Elmo--but none of them are quite enough, I guess. Crying it out doesn't work very well for him, never has. We're hoping it gets better soon and he adjusts to life without the binky. However, as one experienced mother told me today, "When you're a parent, there's always something!" So, we'll hope this one passes soon, and then we'll wait for the next little trial. :)