Scuba Dog

DH sent this to me. We have had a Chi for almost 10 years now. They have distinctive personalities, and can be fun to dress up sometimes, but I never would have imagined this! I love it!!



Mondex, a five-year-old chihuahua, dressed as a scuba diver, poses during a dog show at a mall in the Filipino capital Manila. Mondex bagged first place during the fashion show category.

The Food That Nourishes us (Part 1)

When I was pregnant with Liam, there were some common questions I would get from people. There were the general ones that most pregnant women get like when are you due? Is it a boy or girl? Are you ready? Then the more personal one I got was if I was going to breastfeed. I didn't mind this question, but I had heard that breastfeeding is hard, and that it doesn't always work out. Since he was my first baby, I didn't have any idea if it would work out or not, so I always just said: I'd like to, if it works out.

When Liam was born he was one month early. He latched on OK, but he would fall asleep within minutes, sometimes seconds, of eating. I was told this is pretty normal for babies to sleep a lot after they are born, but Preemies sleep even more! So the doctors and nurses were fairly concerned about him not eating. I tried giving him formula through a tube to simulate breastfeeding, I even tried a bottle. Each person came in with their own advice, and I would listen and try their way, then time would pass so quickly and the next shift would arrive and they would have different advice that I would try. Some were more concerned than others, and after a while I just didn't know what to think! Liam cried a lot and so did I. The Doctor was so concerned that he ordered for Liam to have his blood levels tested through the night, and also had us stay an extra day to make sure he started to eat. One of the nurses brought me a pump which helped a little. One thing that I didn't know is that it can take 4-5 days for your milk to come in. Before that there is a small amount of colostrum that is really high in calories and has all sorts of antibodies to help your baby stay healthy.

After we went home he started to be less sleepy, and more hungry. It took a couple of weeks for him to gain back what he lost from his birth weight. While on my maternity leave, I mostly nursed him except if we went somewhere, or if Mike wanted to feed him. Ever since he got the hang of eating, he has had a HUGE appetite and he more than doubled his weight by the time he was 3 months! After starting work, I pumped for him, and he has gradually started to prefer the bottle. Partly I think it's just easier for him to eat, and partly he is at an age that he is more aware of things going on around him, he gets distracted easily. I am constantly amazed by what my body is capable of doing. First it grew this little person inside, and now it continues to grow this amazing BIG person outside!

The Food That Nourishes Us (Part 2)

So speaking of food that is growing this amazing person, I do try to make a conscience effort to eat well. Now, I'm not perfect, I do sneak some sweets in here and there, but I want to make sure that I eat healthy to keep him healthy. When he starts to eat solid foods, we would like him to enjoy foods from all over the world. I'm not sure if the food I eat helps him get "a taste" for certain foods, but if it does then he will certainly love spicy foods! Several weeks ago we saw this movie called 'Bend It Like Beckham' and they shared a recipe for Aloo Gobi. The first time Mike made it he put the entire chili (seeds and all) in. I had a few bites, but it was so hot, I wasn't able to really enjoy it. Sunday night he made it a second time, but didn't put the seeds in this time. It was VERY GOOD! Here is the recipe for those of you out there that like to try new recipes.

Aloo Gobi
Ingredients :
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 large yellow onion, minced
1 bunch cilantro, stems chopped and leaves reserved
1 head cauliflower, chopped into large pieces ( not florets )
3 large or 4 medium waxy skinned potatoes like Yukon Gold
although russet potatoes will work, peeled and cut into medium-ish pieces
2 14oz cans of diced tomatoes. Drain the tomatoes and reserve the juice
2 serrano chilies chopped ( remove some seeds and ribs for less heat )
1 ½ Tbsp chopped garlic
1 ½ Tbsp grated fresh ginger root
1 Tbsp dried cumin seeds
2 tsp turmeric
1 ½ - 2 tsp salt
¾ tsp paprika
2 tsp garam masala

Preparation :
-Add oil to large wok type pan and heat to medium high heat.
-Add onion and cumin seeds and stir fry until onion is translucent / lightly golden.
-Add chopped cilantro stems, fry for one minute, then add turmeric, paprika and salt.
-Stir fry mixture for a few minutes until the spices have combined with the oil/onion mixture.
-Add the chilies, diced tomatoes, ginger, garlic and about 1/3 cup of reserved tomato juice.
-Stir and cook until the mixture is well combined.
** Remaining instructions will vary depending on temp, vegetable size, and preference....
** If at any point the mixture becomes too dry, add water or more reserved tomato juice
** Stir occasionally to ensure coating, cooking and to prevent burning
-Add potatoes, mix thoroughly, reduce heat slightly, cover and cook for about 10 minutes.
-Add Cauliflower, any needed water/juice, stir well to coat, cover cook for another 10 minutes
-Once potato and cauliflower is cooked through, sprinkle the garam masala and some chopped cilantro leaves over the top of the meal. Remove from heat, allow to stand for 15 minutes before serving

Fun at Ikea

We took Liam to Ikea this weekend. We were looking for furniture for our office and bonus room, and not surprisingly we got carried away in the kids aisle and ended up buying some fun toys for LT. He is still a bit young to play with them right now, but we figure if we find something now that we like we might as well buy it for him, in case they stop carrying it when he's older. I asked Mike what age the toys were for, and he said; "Not sure, but probably 30, since I want to play with them." A lady standing nearby nearly fell over laughing. Anyway, we both love toys that are simple and encourage thought and imagination. Ikea is the perfect place to find toys like this.

I picked out this Bead Roller Coaster.

Mike picked out this COOL trainset with tracks.

Adventures With Liam (Part 1)

So Friday afternoon I spent the day with my friend Susan. We met in High school in our Greek Mythology class. We were more like acquaintances then, but being a new transplant from New Hampshire in the middle of Junior year, I was grateful for anyone who took the time to talk to me. Shortly after graduation, we happened to bump into each other at a local thrift store. We exchanged #'s and our friendship grew from there. It is one of those relationships that can go a long time with no contact, then when we see each other we just pick up where we left off. Anyway, about 6 years ago her husband joined the Air Force and they moved to Texas. I really didn't think I would see her much except for short visits when they returned to see their family. However, about six months ago her husband was assigned to South Korea for a year, and instead of moving the whole family there, they decided that she and their 2 young boys would stay with her family here in Utah.


She and her family invited Liam and me to Thanksgiving Point to the petting zoo. Liam is still a bit young to enjoy it, but it was good to get him out and expose him to new things. They had the cutest animals there. We first saw the goats and lambs, and there was this really adorable baby lamb that actually looked like a baby cow.


Then we saw these beautiful peacocks displaying their gorgeous feathers. At some point the two were turning in unison, as if to put on a show. They shook their back feathers too, and it made a rattling sound.

And here is the long horn sheep...

and the Turkey...

Susan's cute little boy doing a dance who is 3 (almost 4), he calls me Miss April (so endearing).

And her younger son who just turned 1 years old showing me a flower he found.

Cute baby cows that thought Liam's stroller was a tasty snack.

Liam giving the cows the stink eye.

More cute baby cow pictures, cause they were being soo adorable!

Liam saying, I've had enough, take me home!

The End.

Blogging From The Future

One feature this blogspot site offers that I like is you can post any date on your post. I think partly it's the OCD in me, but I like how the different date posts separate the posts out. So if I have several posts I want to post in one day, I can give each post a different day, so it's not all lumped under one day. The other benefit is if you forget to post, or don't have a chance to post on a certain day, you can just date it to the day you want. It kinda reminds me of that hilarious scene from The Office when Dwight gets a fax from his future self.

(BTW this post was actually posted on 4-24-08)

Next Blog>>

I'm fairly new to this blogspot site, and I'm fascinated by the Next Blog>> feature. Every time you click on it, it brings up a random blog from different people ALL over the world. In a handful of clicks you can "meet" 10 different people from 10 different corners of the earth. Just today I 'met' a home schooling mother living in North Pole, Alaska, the next click a liberal Mormon archivist from New Mexico, next a student from Malaysia, next a Nun from who knows where because I couldn't read the language, next a student that is attending a local Collage that I went to, next a crafty person from Norway...

http://hobbyugla.blogspot.com/


You could totally lose track of time 'meeting' all these people from around the world. And even if you can't understand their language, you can see pictures of their family, their friends, their pets, their world.


I am constantly amazed by the power that the Internet holds. We can meet people in the comfort of our home. This is not to say that you should not have human contact, because that is very important, but just being able to learn about other people on this planet is such a great thing. It can open our eyes to other viewpoints and ideas. And 100's of years from now (if the Internet is still around) our ancestors will also be able to learn about our daily lives.

My ancestors were very good about writing about their lives, and publishing volumes of books with their history. However, I think the younger generations have not been so dedicated to continuing on with the tradition. The Internet provides people an easy way to keep a record of their lives, to allow their family and friends to keep updated, even with our crazy busy schedules that we have.

Green Tip: Bring Your Own Bags To Shop!

Many years ago when I started trying to be more environmentally friendly, I was tired of having piles upon piles of plastic bags around the house. I couldn't stand to just toss them out, and recycling them wasn't always an option, so we used some for waste liners, and some to carry stuff around, but we still just had a TON hanging around, so I came across this website http://clothbag.com/ We LOVE these bags, and get compliments on them all the time. They can hold up to 40 lbs! Where most of our grocery outings we'd come home with at least 10 plastic bags, we could fit the same in 3-4 of these bags. Some grocery stores even offer $ back when you use your own bags.

Recently Wal-Mart introduced their own reusable bag which is made out of plastic bottles. I know Wal-Mart gets a lot of flack about their business practices, but I do have to give them credit in trying to be more environmentally friendly.



Cool things about this bag:

*Only $1

*Estimates show that each reusable bag will eliminate the need for at least 50 plastic disposable bags over its 5 year lifetime. If they sell all two million bags in the first product offering, Wal-Mart will avoid having to produce 100 million disposable plastic bags, which would require the use of 1,185,000 pounds of plastic resin.

*Each of the black reusable bags are made with recycled polyethylene terephthatlate (RPET) plastic generated from approximately four soda or water bottles.

*About the size of a regular paper bag, the reusable bags are expected to hold approximately the same weight as 2-3 regular, disposable plastic bags.

*When the bag wears out, customers can return it to their local Wal-Mart store for recycling.

Did You Know?

* Today, only about 1% of plastic bags are recycled.

* A single sturdy, reusable bag needs only be used 11 times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable plastic bags once.

* When one ton of plastic bags are reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil are saved.

*In New York City alone, one less grocery bag per person per year would reduce waste by five million pounds and save $250,000 in disposal costs.

(*info provided from Wal-Mart)

A Blog I Read

So, I've been reading this blog http://www.dooce.com/ for about a year now. She is very witty and funny, and is able to support her family with her site. Anyway, she changes her masthead once a month, and this month (which is also my name) it looked like this:



(Click on Picture to see it bigger)

I know, I know, I still need to lose like 20 lbs. of my baby fat, but did she have to announce it to the world?

It's Earth Day

I've always had a thing about wasting stuff, and I'm not quite sure where it comes from. I just have a hard time throwing things out. I'm not a hoarder, per se, but I would much rather see an item that is not useful anymore to be reused in some way or recycled, than end up in a landfill. As a kid growing up in New Hampshire, my parents saved money by taking their garbage to the dump on Saturdays instead of paying for the curb side pick up. We generally had 1-2 bags of garbage, and also a bag of things to recycle. The recycle bins were the first thing you saw when we drove into the landfill. I always had fun throwing the glass into the bin and hearing it crash inside. One day that we went, I found this little wooden school desk. It was perfectly in tact and we took it home. My dad sanded it down, and varnished it and we used it (until it was sadly stolen from my brother's garage many years later). I guess someone else out there saw value in it as well. And to think it would still be rotting at the dump had I not found it.

Sadly I think a lot of people in this world, and especially in this country, just have this attitude that the resources on this earth are never ending. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case, and we ALL need to do our best to reduce our global footprint. Many years ago I started to read a lot about the environment, and I started to make some changes in my lifestyle. One if which I started to recycle. Sadly, the town we lived in at the time did not offer a curb side recycling program, so I searched for places that I could bring my recycling to. In my search to be more environmentally friendly, I found out that eating meat is really bad on the environment. From the animal waste that gets piled up and contaminates our water, to all the water and other resources it uses just to get to my plate, I thought that giving up meat would be a really easy way to conserve.

Being conservative with our resources takes some effort, and there is always a balance with effort and convenience. I know that I have been more lax lately because I have fallen out of the habit of being more conscience of it, aka I've been lazy. However, with Earth Day today, and a new reason to care about the future of this planet (my son), I have decided to be more aware of my habits and start to change my habits to be more earth friendly. I also encourage everyone out there to look at their own habits and find new ways to conserve as well. After all we only have this planet to live on, we might as well care for it. Please Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

Townhouse Drama

So, we countered the offer for 185 K, and the people countered back. The amount we ended up agreeing on was not as much as we had hoped for, but the reason their offer was so tempting was they put in their contract that they could close by the end of this month! This would give them less than 2 weeks to close. We are fairly skeptical that they can pull it off, but IF they can, that would save us another months worth of payments on that place. We have been paying for 2 households since mid-August, and who knows how far south the housing market will go this year?! We hear doom and gloom reports about it on a daily basis. Anyway, we will be so relieved to be done with the townhouse in more ways than one.

2nd Offer, Well 3rd Really

The first offer we got on our townhouse was a complete joke, they offered 80K below our asking price which was $229,900 at the time...we didn't even reply back it was so offensive! I guess it seems that people think since the property is empty that we are more desperate than we really are. I mean don't get me wrong, we REALLY want to sell our place. We don't like to make 2 payments every month, but we aren't going to sell so low that we end up losing $, or owing $, we aren't that dumb, or desperate (yet). The thing that was even more frustrating about this offer was the fact that we had decided to drop the price, but we wanted to wait until we saw their offer first. They kept telling our agent that they really liked the property, and they were really serious about it, and they were going to make a serious offer. They dragged it out for 3 weeks! Then they offer 150K, sorry, but in our area you can maybe buy an apartment style condo for that! So we dropped the price to $214,900, and started to get some more action. We got a second offer for $194,000, but we countered and agreed somewhere in the middle, but we aren't expecting this offer to go anywhere since it's contingent upon them selling their house. Anyway, last week we dropped the price again to $209,900, and we got another offer today for $185,000. This offer was based on the fact that another unit in our complex sold last year for this price. BUT, this unit was a foreclosure and the bank basically dumped it! The family that lived there left the place and took all the appliances with them, not to mention they did not have any updates, or the required block fence (all of which ours has)....so in a nutshell I feel that we are asking a fair price for this market, but I just hope that someone comes along and makes a fair offer....SOON!

Trying To Sell In The Real Estate Slump

We decided last year that we wanted to move from our townhouse. We felt it was time to move on. We really wanted our own yard for the dogs to play in, and future kid(s). We bought the TH shortly after we were married, and had enjoyed living there for the most part. We had entertained moving from the TH several times over the years, but when we looked at what else was out there, we decided that for the price, we had a great place. A few years ago we really did want to move on, but gave up after not finding anything we liked better. We decided to remodel the kitchen and baths, allowing us to make it just the way we want. We kinda ended up making it nicer than we should have because this time round we still had a really difficult time finding something we liked better. Finally, after 6 months of looking, we found the house that we LOVE. We went through it, put in an offer, and signed the offer all in the same day.

We moved in mid-August of 2007. It took a few months for us to move most of our stuff out and to get it ready to put on the market. We tried to advertise it on our own, but we got bombarded with agent calls. We figured we might have better luck selling with an agent, so we ended up signing with one in November. We originally priced it at $229,900, but unfortunately the combination of the housing market slump, the holidays, and the winter season, we did not get much action. We then decided to drop the price to $214,900. We did start to get more action, and we have received one offer, but it is contigent upon them selling their home. Last week we decided once again to drop it to $209,900. We are hoping to sell it soon because we have had 2 mortgage payments for nearly 9 months now! Our contract will expire in May with our agent, and we are anxious to move on from him. We have been quite disappointed with his service, and we feel we would be better off dropping our price and selling it on our own, and if that doesn't work, we will be much more experienced in finding an agent we want.

Blogging

So I've been blogging on myspace for almost a year now, then on facebook, and then after our baby was born I added my blogs to his totsite.

http://www.totsites.com/tot/4fayz

Then my blogs tended to be ALL about him, which is not a bad thing since he is such a great part of my life, but I thought, well maybe I need to have a place to blog about other stuff too....so here I am. There will still be a lot of blogs about Liam, I'm sure, but there will be random stuff too.

(Just had to add a picture, he's too cute!)