Wherein I talk more about eBay

Another thing I like to buy on eBay-- baby clothes. It's thrift store shopping with the convenience of not having to leave the house. The best of all worlds really. Anyway, I generally bid on clothes that come in groups of several pieces because you're bound to get some good stuff. I recently got some that included baby gauchos! I didn't even know they made gaucho pants for babies, but apparently they do and they are pretty freaking cute. Soooooo, since baby was wearing said gauchos yesterday I wanted to take a picture. Unfortunately, Kalena has decided that she is much too busy to pose for pictures these days.

Busy pulling the power cord out of Brian's laptop.


Busy trying to grab Brian's feet on the coffee table.


Busy picking out toys.


Busy crawling away from me.


Busy trying to wrestle the camera from my hands.


Busy trying to get to the diapers and throw them all over the room.


So here's the best shot of the bunch. Tongue out, making her way over to Brian. She has power cords to pull on you know.

26

As of today, for the next 7 months Brian and I get to be the same age. Today is not just his birthday, it's his GOLDEN birthday. 26 on the 26th. And that means from now until my birthday in September we're both 26. (After that I have to be old again.)

So happy birthday to Brian!

9 month checkup

Kalena had her 9 month checkup yesterday. It was supposed to happen last Friday, but they called right as we were leaving to say they were missing a doctor so they were swamped with sick kids and rescheduling all well visits. ANYWAY. She is 29 inches long and 20 lbs 4 (I think) oz. That's 90th percentile for height and 75th for weight so you know, still big.

She likes to wave a lot these days. She waves at her crib when we go get her out of it, she waves at us from across the room, she waves at nothing in particular. She sticks her arm straight up in the air whenever she does it which is just too cute. I want a picture of it, but more often than not I'm holding her while she does it. So...yeah. That's all I guess.



P.S. Someone needs to come over and eat my sugar cookies. They are pink frosted and delicious and they are calling my name! I just shouldn't bake.

The downfalls of digital cameras

A week or so ago I got ambitious. I decided I wanted to sort through the pictures on my computer and print out the ones I want to scrapbook. Turns out that, with the exception of our honeymoon pictures, the last time I printed pictures was my college graduation. Which means I have almost 4 years worth of pictures on my hard drive. A BUSY 4 years. I got married, 3 of my siblings got married, Brian's cousin got married, both my nephews were born, I had a baby, we went to Hawaii, we went on a cruise, we bought a house, we got some dogs, and many other things. And ALL these events are recorded in pictures which are oh so conveniently located in folders on my computer. Folders that, all told, hold more than 2,000 pictures.

Fortunately, I get to pick and choose which ones to print. Unfortunately it is taking me DAYS to do that. Note to self-- print pictures more often!

I TOLD you I was going to talk more about online shopping

So, remember in this post when I said that I ordered a bunch of kids books online? Well, they are here! I've been reading them to Kalena, or trying to anyway. She is much more interested in attempting to rip pages out of the books than listening to the stories. So when I say "reading to" Kalena what I mean is "reading out loud in the same room as" Kalena. She'll enjoy them sooner or later. Since I know you're all DYING to know what books I got, I'll show you:


Yes, I am nerdy enough that I took pictures of the books I bought. Also, yes. That is a lot of Dr. Seuss. I love the library, and I'm sure we'll be spending lots of time there when Kalena is older, but these are all books I think are worth owning. Now you tell me: what books would your collection be incomplete without?

9 months & 1 year

Today Kalena is 9 months old. I like the symmetry in that. 9 months of pregnancy and 9 months since. Today is also the one year anniversary of this blog. One year ago I wrote my very first post. You'd think after a whole year of blogging I could come up with something interesting to say, but no.


**Edited to add since Kari asked: Of COURSE she's laughing. As always.

Oh, you know.

Nothing to say, just pictures to post.

Crazy after-bath hair.


Photographic evidence that I'm not opposed to all things valentine-y. (You might not be able to read the onesie, but under the penguins it says "I love you.") Of course, I bought this around Christmas time, not for Valentine's day but whatever.


Ever the smiley, happy child.

Happy Hallmark Holiday!

I'm not a Valentine's day hater like many of my college friends were, but I'm not just a huge fan either. It just seems a little overrated to me. Restaurants are crowded, pink and red stuffed animals are well, strange, and personally I'd rather have a single sumptuous piece of dark chocolate than a heart shaped box of mediocre bon-bons. Also, roses on Valentine's day? UNREAL. Flowers.com has 18 roses in a vase for $114.99. Over ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS for something you're going to THROW AWAY in a week! You can get 18 roses from Sam's club for $12.99 and you know something? Once you put them in a vase nobody will know the difference.

I think we should continue celebrating Valentine's day like we did in elementary school-- all day party with cupcakes. Because who doesn't love cupcakes? Anyway, just my opinion.

Also, if you ever get the urge to buy me flowers? Roses from Sam's club would be lovely.

Why do I love ebay?

Because without eBay, I wouldn't be able to afford this:



Well, eBay and our tax return. Speaking of which, why do I love Brian so much? Because he is ridiculously on top of things and did our taxes so early that we got our return 2 weeks ago. Yay for extra money and online shopping! And don't worry, I'm sure you'll be getting more posts about the online shopping. Especially since I'm a nerd and my biggest purchase was a bunch of kids books. I am overly excited about these books, but I just can't help myself. Anyway, I'll post more about them after they get here. (Soon I hope!!)

Guess who found the camera charger?!

So, turns out the camera charger wasn't actually lost, I'm just an idiot. Apparently, the cord has been sitting on Brian's desk all along while I looked for it in drawers and duffel bags. The thing is, it was sitting next to our video camera so I just assumed it was for the video camera. If I had ever bothered to pick it up and look at it, I could have been taking pictures weeks ago. Live and learn.

Anyway, I was glad to have it because Brian put Kalena in the very cutest outfit in the world today. (Seriously, the whole world.) After I took some pictures of this adorable outfit, I was looking at them and all I could think was-- when did this tiny helpless thing--


turn into her own little person?

Oh so blue

This is my dad holding Patrick and Kalena over Christmas. I really like this picture because you can see how blue Kalena's eyes are. And I know you can't see very much behind the glare on my dad's glasses, but the blue eyes are there too.

Moving on up

When Kalena was born we got a card that said, "Forget baby proofing" on the front and on the inside it said, "It's too late, one already got in!" That's pretty much how I feel these days. A few weeks ago, Kalena realized that she could crawl out of the living room and into the other rooms. (Before, the tile floor at the edges of the room were like some sort of barrier.) Since then she's been on the move and into everything. Well, everything she wasn't already into. She likes to chase the dogs; she is fascinated by the dog door; she wants to pull books off the bookcase and get into the kitchen cabinets. She pulls down the dishtowels hanging on the oven door and not too long ago Brian caught her with two fistfuls of dog food.

We keep talking about how we ought to buy baby gates, but instead of doing it we just push the ottoman in front of one of the doorways. I think that's going to have to change though. Because last week? She discovered the stairs. She can only make it up one right now, but it's just a matter of time. Since we all prefer she not fall down said stairs and crack her head on the tile, I think baby gates are in order.

Ah stairs. Good times.

About this sleeping through the night business

Kalena doesn't always sleep all night. Now, I know you're saying-- But Elsha! What about that post you wrote about how nice it was to get some sleep now that Kalena is sleeping through the night?! And you're right; I did write that post, and I wasn't lying. We're still getting sleep. Because these days when Kalena wakes up she doesn't need us to help her back to sleep. Wake ups that used to start with fussing and escalate to crying and needing a bottle are now just a few minutes of fussing before going back to sleep. Sometimes she doesn't fuss at all, she just talks to herself for a few minutes before going back to sleep. Most night she does this at least once between her bedtime and ours. (I have no idea how often she does it in the middle of the night, because we keep the monitor turned down low enough that we'll only hear it if she's actually crying.)

Really the whole thing sort of surprised me. I expected that she'd start sleeping through the night on and off before doing it on any sort of regular basis and instead one week she didn't sleep through the night at all and the next week she did it every night. Also, I expected that she would just stop waking during the night (they do call it SLEEPING through the night after all) not that she would up and start putting herself back to sleep. But hey, I'm not complaining! We never did anything to try to make her sleep through the night and I'm glad about that. I'm pretty sure trying to force it before she was ready would have driven me crazy. Sleep deprived was enough, I didn't need to add crazy on top of that.

Anyway, I'm sure that none of you care about the sleep habits of my child. I would make it up to you by posting pictures of her, but my camera battery is dead and I have NO IDEA where the charger is. More cleaning is in order I guess. I'll stop rambling now.

I'm sure the feeling is mutual

Technology I am hating right now:

My phone for neglecting to ring or tell me I have a voice mail until I open it to check the time. 3 hours after the fact.

Blogger for being incredibly picky about what kind of formats it will work with. (Don't worry, I finally won this battle-- like the new header?)

Inkscape for saving over the one file I needed and then shutting down for no good reason.


Yeah. I'm 0 for 3 tonight. I want to add some more stuff to my blogger template, but I'm not sure how soon I'm going to be in the mood to fight that fight again.

Lost and Found

Hey, remember this post? I found one of the missing things! As always, my mom was right. I found it by cleaning. Actually, here's the story. A couple weeks after we got back from Hawaii I realized one of Kalena's blankets was missing. Obviously she has lots of blankets, but this one was pale green and really soft and had Winne the Pooh on it so I was sad it was missing. I knew we had it with us in Hawaii, so I was hoping we hadn't left it there.

By about December I gave it up as a lost cause. I knew it wasn't in the laundry or her room or the car, so I was pretty much out of ideas. At this point I hadn't seen it in 5 months. Then last week I was cleaning some stuff out of our closet including the garment bag Brian had taken to Hawaii. All it had in it was a couple empty hangers, but I figured I'd check the pockets before I put it away. And what do you know?! There was the blanket, along with a pair of shorts I'd been missing.

Brian always takes his garment bag as his carry on so we must have just stuffed it in the pocket when it wouldn't fit in her diaper bag. (The shorts were in there because I changed into pants at the airport.) So now you know, clean when you can't find something. And don't wait 6 months to unpack your luggage.