Weekly Happenings: Thankfully, this week was rather uneventful. Last week’s knocked out tooth incident was enough for the time being. 😉 I think the only thing that was out of the ordinary was that Paul took Thursday off (he had some use-it-or-lose-it time-off time) and the two of us took Abigail to the zoo. It was tiring (we’re trying to get her used to not wearing the puppy backpack/leash but still stay close to us) but still fun. I would add more, but there really isn’t anything else to add.
The Weekly Weather: The mornings have been really cold (30s) and the afternoons cool (50s-60s). Sunny for the most part (we did have a storm come through on Sunday, but that was about it).
What Paul’s Been Up To: He’s been working from home, which was nice. I was able to leave Abigail at home quite a bit while I ran Joseph to and from school and ran other short errands.
What Sarah’s Been Up To: I went to book club, which was fun as always. I also managed to tweak my back yet again (I seem to do it about once a year, it seems), so a trip to urgent care to get some prescription-strength Ibuprofen, some muscle relaxers, and a steroid shot was what we did today.
What Joseph’s Been Up To: He’s still plugging away at school. Wednesday was a half day (to let the teachers have some extra planning time), so he enjoyed the extra time off.
What Abigail’s Been Up To: She was her normal, cheerful, sassy self this week. One funny thing that happened this morning: she was playing in her room and the light bulb for her light happened to burn out. She told us her light needed new batteries. 🙂
This Week in Pictures:
A six minute breakfast, thanks to my breakfast sandwich maker. I scramble an egg, put it in the sandwich maker, put in an insert to hold a pre-cooked sausage patty, and put on the lid. Then I stick it in the microwave for a minute and a half. There is another insert for it where you would put the English muffin in (for the last thirty seconds of cooking) to get steamed, but I prefer my English muffin toasted, so I toast it while the rest is cooking. Then I just add a slice of cheese when assembling it and Voila!Watching Blue’s Clues while playing with her Blue’s Clues toys…she’s living the life!Sitting on top of the platform for the slide in our back yard. It was a beautiful day, so we made sure to get some outside play in.Zoo time!She started flapping her wings like a butterfly…she’s also wearing the only mask she’ll wear: her vampire one from Halloween. 🙂Looking at the monkeys (I just realized it’s hard to see the monkey…he/she is sitting on the hammock, right up on the edge of the fence…but it does look like just a big ball of fuzz, ha).It’s rare for the jaguar to be right up along the fence, but he was that day!She really liked the bright blue birds in this enclosure.Meal prep for the win! I love it when I can dice up things ahead of time so that when dinner time hits I can just dump it all in and go.
Weekly Happenings: This week was going as regularly scheduled until Thursday afternoon. Thursday afternoon, Abigail was taking a drink and somehow, her cup hit the entertainment center and then her cup hit her mouth. I was making dinner, so I didn’t see it happen (I’m going off of what she told me, which is that her cup hit the center and then hit her mouth). About a beat later, she said, “Mom…my tongue is getting my tooth.” She then used her tongue to push out one of her bottom teeth! There was very little blood (maybe one or two drops) and the tooth looked completely whole, so we concluded it was probably already a little loose and was just hurried along the falling-out process by the cup. To be safe, I set up a dentist appointment for her yesterday (I’m so glad they had a cancellation). They took an x-ray and everything looks good. They did point out that another tooth was a little grey and slightly wiggly (there was a time when she was two and she ran into some playground equipment and busted her lip…I’m betting she also hit her tooth and I just didn’t notice), but the area around it looked healthy, so we just need to keep an eye on it and not be surprised if it falls out earlier than expected as well. Hoo-boy!
The Weekly Weather: It’s been cold in the mornings and evenings and mild in the afternoons. It’s been really nice!
What Paul’s Been Up To: With the uptick of COVID cases, it was determined that (mid-week), he would go back to working from home until further notice. I’m so grateful we have his office where he can go and be away from the chaos of the house! It probably makes working a lot easier.
What Sarah’s Been Up To: I did two things I’ve been putting off: I cleaned the tops of my kitchen cabinets (they were disGUSting) and I loaded up and donated a bunch of stuff that had been accumulating in a corner of our bedroom. It feels good to have a few other parts of our home tidied up.
What Joseph’s Been Up To: He had a good week at school, got a haircut today, and also had a play date today, which was a lot of fun.
What Abigail’s Been Up To: She did pretty well at the dentist. The dentist and hygienist were so good and so patient. They only did things that she was comfortable with (a few x-rays were needed, but then they just did an exam with the mirror and a quick brushing with a manual toothbrush). She’s cavity free, which is great to hear! Funny story: the hygienist who was taking Abigail’s x-rays said she liked Abigail’s boots and asked if she could try them on. Abigail said “Sure!”, kicked off both boots, and then took off her socks (I could only look on helplessly from the exam room which was across the hall from the x-ray room). Thankfully, the hygienist just rolled with it (and was cracking up). She just said, “Oh, that’s great! We’ll just put these back on after we finish your x-rays.”
This Week in Pictures:
Why take a picture of a partially-eaten hard-boiled egg, you ask? Why, to remind myself why I will not ever leave two hard-boiled eggs on a plate on the counter to have as a snack after I finish folding laundry, of course. I was upstairs for all of five minutes and came downstairs to find this (and a 4YO with a mouth that was VERY full of egg). She had no issue telling me that she had eaten some eggs and they were “Yuuuuuuuummmmmy!” I thought I had pushed the plate back far enough, but apparently her reach has gotten longer, haha.Pile on Mom!Abigail is suspicious of this interloper who is sitting on HER mom’s lap, too. 😉Everybody has to wear a hat, I guess.Gorgeous blue skies, pleasant cool breeze, and a balmy 68 degrees. I love Texas in January (just don’t ask me in August)! 😀When I took down the stuff that was along the top of my cabinets to clean up there, I discovered everything was covered in a sticky, grimy, dust. I did some serious thinking and decided that the majority of the things that were up there were things that, while I liked them, I decided I didn’t like them enough to have to keep cleaning them. I decided to donate most of what was up there and relocated the few things that I decided to keep.I told her she was cute and she agreed. She then asked me if I would take her picture. 😀These are two things I moved down from the tops of my cabinets: my abalone shell that I got in Ensenada a very long time ago, when my family would camp down there with my dad’s best friend’s family (the story goes that my dad’s best friend’s son, who was either an adult or practically an adult, found the shell while snorkeling and brought it back to camp…where he saw my itty-bitty self with some candy…he offered me the shell for some of my candy and I readily agreed to the trade), and a really beautiful glass teacup that my sister-in-law’s mom gave me (she was working in an antique store at the time).Another fun item: my Galileo thermometer (the little vessels have liquid of varying densities that float at specific temperatures, which are noted on little metal discs attached to each vessel).My non-holiday piano set-up.The new hole in Abigail’s mouth.Toothless smiles are fun!Waiting for the dentist to check out her mouth.Here’s her x-ray. The adult tooth is quite a bit higher than the one next to it, so the dentist was sure it would come in pretty soon.Joseph occasionally likes to play dress-up still. This is a costume that I picked up for him to wear for dress-up and/or Halloween next year (going to get costumes on clearance right after Halloween is great for this).Dress-up time can be quite interesting at times. Abigail is wearing her dress-up/next Halloween costume as well as the mask from Joseph’s costume. 😀
Weekly Happenings: Well, 2020 got one more punch in: we should have been in California this past week, but due to the…current health situation (read: the COVID-19 pandemic), we decided to postpone our trip until the situation is better (which should hopefully be soon, now that the vaccine is rolling out). It was a hard decision, but we know it was the right one. We tried to make this week fun in spite of everything. We had a movie day where we had special movie candy and watched a couple of movies. We went to the zoo. We (well, three of us) watched fireworks on New Year’s Eve (Abigail was asleep…she slept through it all). We packed up Christmas, and welcome this new year with hopes and prayers that it will hold health and happiness for all!
The Weekly Weather: It’s been rather varied. It started out on the warm-ish side (getting well into the 70s), but Thursday was rather cold and rainy (with a high in the 40s) and it’s been rather cold since then. It’s due to warm up again, though. It just goes back and forth.
What Paul’s Been Up To: He still took this past week off, since he’d already asked for it and it was really nice having him home. He was a huge help getting all the outside decorations taken down and packed away. He is currently taking the neighborhood decorations down and then he’ll get them out to the storage unit so that they’ll be ready for next year.
What Sarah’s Been Up To: Nothing too out of the ordinary…I haven’t had students during the break, so my afternoons have been more open, which was nice. I’m looking forward to seeing them again, though. They’re fun to teach.
What Joseph’s Been Up To: He’s been staying up late and sleeping in…in-between all of that has been playing with Christmas presents, reading new books, and playing in the back yard when the weather agrees.
What Abigail’s Been Up To: Thanks to her birthday and Christmas being three days apart, she has a lot of new toys to play with and new books to look at. She’s also really enjoyed having Joseph and Paul around (they’re usually at school and work).
This Week in Pictures:
We missed going to church on the Sunday before Christmas, so we got the kids dressed up in their “Christmas church clothes” the next Sunday instead.It’s rare that I can see both of them sitting still at the same time, facing the camera, so I had to take a picture.Eating popcorn and checking out the jaguar.He was rather regal.It was hard convincing Abigail that the birds did not want her to throw popcorn in for them to eat. We had just talked about how if she accidentally dropped popcorn on the ground, she oughtn’t pick it up and eat it; she should leave it for the birds to eat. It’s hard to tell the difference between birds in an animal exhibit and the more common birds that fly all around us, I suppose.Typical family selfie from the zoo in 2020: Mom and Dad have masks on, Joseph has his temporarily pulled down so that he can munch on popcorn, and Abigail doesn’t have hers on at all. The zoo recommends masks for anyone 10+ (and requires them for any of the indoor areas or animal encounters), but understands if little ones won’t keep masks on.Showing me the kangaroos.Reading more from my complete set of Calvin and Hobbes.I mentioned to Paul that this drawer was driving me crazy a bit because there were some things that hadn’t fit in the more traditional silverware organizer that I had in there before (namely the dessert spoons, the straws, and Abigail’s little spoons and forks). He went on Amazon and found this one that fits the drawer perfectly and has room for everything. The soup spoons and regular spoons are doubled up right now, but after Abigail outgrows her smaller spoons, I can just move the smaller spoons into that spot.Pool noodle battle! Abigail asked Paul for a shield, so he made one out of cardboard for her. Joseph has a nice wooden one (that isn’t in these pictures), but we didn’t want to give Abigail a wood one quite yet (she hasn’t really learned constraint and we’re afraid she’ll damage something…or someone).I love the Happy Meal box helmet. She’d take a swing and it would slip down and she’d go, “Wait…wait!” while she adjusted her helmet. Her foe was quite willing to pause for her. 😉She’s commandeered my Winnie the Pooh.The quote for my board for January. It isn’t often that I have enough letters to actually credit who said it, but it worked out this time.Abigail got this book for Christmas and she loves it. It’s about a little monster that eats books and inadvertently eats his way through a few different fairy tales. It’s interactive (asks the reader to do a few things) and really cute. It even has holes in the pages where the monster has “nibbled” through to escape.Joseph reading to Abigail. I love this so much! I switched out my red and white napkins for my regular grey and white one. I love how fresh it looks! I love the overall look with my table and chairs! They were playing hide and seek…she really thought she’d picked a gem of a hiding spot. 😂
Bonus Video: At midnight on New Year’s Eve, we stepped out onto our driveway and I recorded a bit of “the show”. It was about 35 degrees but it felt quite a bit colder ( I think my weather app said that it felt like it was 28 degrees), so we didn’t last very long outside.
