5 months

Jack seems to be as surprised as I am that he is already 5 months old.

He likes long walks in the stroller. Likes to stand and see everything and hates to be held like a baby. Likes peas and green beans - baby style of course, with rice cereal on the side.

The second we lay him down on his back he rolls over onto his stomach and is itching to crawl. He likes to put everything in his mouth. Most of all he seems to really like his sister the best. She makes him smile and laugh and she provides him the most entertainment.

He loves his pacifier and will only go to sleep with a blanket over his eyes. He pulls the blanket up over his face to fall asleep. Don't worry, I pull it back down the minute he is asleep.

He falls to sleep pretty quickly in his crib and is really only waking up once a night now.

He likes singing and reading but mostly enjoys being cute.

My story: Part 1

I was going to make my blog private because I was paranoid about child predators, then my sister explained to me that it's just the crazy in my head. So privatization of my blog is on hold.

What is not on hold is my effort to get back into shape. I have been walking, jogging, and occasionally lifting heavy things. I decided that all of that effort puts me into a category to do a triathlon. Right? So I got out my trusty awesome road bike today to take it out for a practice spin on those 16 miles of race course only to find that walking and jogging (sometimes) do not make you a biker. I went a solid 1.8 miles before I collapsed to the ground convinced that I had developed asthma during the 10 minute ride and some sort of other burning lung disease.

Jim tried to make me feel better by reminding me that I had not biked in almost 5 years and that you can't ride anywhere in Pennsylvania without hills. That made me feel better for a minute. Here I am over an hour after my bike ride with my lungs still hurting and my legs still feeling like bricks.

Why do I share this story with you and publicly humiliate myself?? Because, I want to not suck it up so bad on the bike. I am going to be like those people who couldn't walk around the block but worked their way up to a marathon.

So if you see me biking slower than you can walk, don't worry. It's all part of my success story.

P.S. Triathlon is on hold until I can bike farther than 2 miles without collapsing. I did just have a baby (oh and by the way, how long is that excuse good for????)

Never as easy as you think.

One of the things we need to replace in our "new to us" home is a stove. I have been pricing ranges and looking at various circulars for the best deal since last June. The oven is original to the house, which was built in the early 1970's. At least I am assuming it is original to the house, it might have been replaced in the 80s, not sure. Either way, it is high time for a new oven.

Luckily my mother in law made that possible this week. She came to stay with us for a few days and was very kindly making us dinner one night. She told me she needed a cooking sheet, and since she had recently emptied my dishwasher for me (yes, she is a great help) I figured she knew where it was. I walked out of the kitchen while she grabbed the cookie sheet.

The fire alarm kept going off while dinner was cooking. This is normal, the fire alarm goes off pretty regularly when we use the oven. I think we have a very sensitive fire alarm and a really old oven. Lilly also kept calling from her room "what smells so bad?" I told her to be quiet because Nanna was cooking.

At the end of the 40 minutes we opened up the oven to remove dinner only to find that my mother in law had used my silver plastic cutting board instead of a cookie sheet. There was melted plastic covering the entire oven floor, the racks, the heating elements, and of course dinner. Jim tried to scrape the plastic off and out of the house because of all the fumes. But it was no use. That plastic was molded onto the heating elements for good.

My mother in law felt terrible about it, but I was actually excited. It was a reason to force us into buying a new oven...AND there happened to be the best deal online that I had seen since June. Worked out great.

I ordered the oven and it was scheduled for free delivery and free haul away of the old oven the very next day. Wow, how easy.

Of course nothing is ever easy in this house. The old oven was hard wired into the floor and my sister in law ended up having to take apart the old oven to un-wire it so the delivery guys would take it away. Because of liability reasons they are not aloud to unwire and or rewire ovens directly to the floor.

Seriously, only in Pennsylvania are ovens hard wired into the floor and not simply plugged into an outlet. Nothing is ever easy in this house.

So now sits our brand new oven in the middle of the kitchen with crazy wires sticking up out of the flooring.

Jim is working on it and promises to have all order restored tonight.

Distracted

I have been very distracted since my last post, hope it's not my brain getting hazy with old age. Jim insists that we are middle aged and I insist that his comment is completely hateful and that I am NOT middle aged.

I had a couple of posts started, but got distracted (like I previously said). So in my favorite blogging style I give you a random update via numbered highlights.

1. This is often how I find my children:

2. Jack started eating rice cereal and Lilly caught many extremely unflattering pictures of said event:

3. These two pictures were taken within a week of each other in our front yard. Thus illustrating that Pennsylvania has crazy weather:

The second picture was taken after Lilly begged me to let her wear my "married hat"

4. These two quotes from Lilly made me laugh:

3/10 - "Why do you get to tell me and daddy what to do all the time? Why don't you just let me do what I want to do and let daddy do what he wants to do?"

3/10 - "Can you make me an appetizer? A tortilla with stuck cheese in the middle and another tortilla on top?" aka quesadilla

5. My most favorite parenting moment in recent history (i.e. the past two weeks or so) happened tonight. Jack was starting to roll over and move around and I found him in a different spot than where I had left him. This is the first time that it had happened. I started to praise him and Lilly chimed in at an appropriate time by saying "Indeed Jackson!" This made me laugh and I asked her where she learned the word indeed. She told me she learned that word from the book I was reading to her. (Beaming pride on my face)

6. We went to a local preserve that has beautiful trails with some friends. We stuck the kids into a hollowed tree trunk that is along the trail.

7. Today I tried to explain Easter to Lilly. The conversation went like this:

Me: Lilly, Easter is a day when -

Lilly: We get stuff.

Me: No, Easter is a day when we think about and remember -

Lilly: And we get stuff.

Thanks a lot commercialism of Easter, I really have my work cut out for me this year. Check out my friends blog for her ideas on a Christ centered Easter.

8. Jim ran a 7.1 mile race through the snow, mud, and mountains of our town. Then he had to slide down a snowy slip-n-slide to cross the finish line.

9. We spent the weekend with my dad and went to my favorite location - The Baltimore Aquarium. Jim got amazing shots of the dolphin show (I love dolphins and marine life. My friend emailed me and told me for my birthday she would give me shark week if she could - perfect gift Melissa).

10. My sister had her gallbladder removed and emailed me filthy pictures of the gallbladder still attached to her and the gallbladder removed with the countless stones. It is a disturbing image that is burned into my brain that I cannot look away from. If you want to see it, check out her blog.

Have a happy week.

March 1 - Happy Elizabeth Day

The Olympics are over along with February. Good riddance to you February. Next year I am going somewhere sunny and warm for February.

How did your Olympic project go? I didn't finish both of my mittens, but I really did try hard. I am like all those skiers who kept wrecking. I am the Lindsey Vonn of knitting - didn't finish the way I wanted to but still rocked for most of the time. I give myself a gold and a bronze medal for the mitten and the lining of the mitten.

I am not committing to that second mitten until I feel emotionally prepared to go down that journey again...maybe in another 4 years. 2014 - Sochi, Russia here I come!

I have a new secret knitting project for my 30th birthday that I am going to embark on and I will need help. Details to come later.

In the mean time my goal for March is to actually finish the projects I started: Lilly's leg warmer #2 and Brian's hat.

Feb 28

On this day 86 years ago in a small town in Germany my Grandma Russell was born. I smile when I think about how excited I was when Grandma would come to visit her east coast grandchildren. She would make us bread and homemade jam during her visits to see us, that was one of my favorite things about her visit.

When Lilly was a new baby and Jim was gone every night waiting tables, I would call my Grandma regularly to find out more about her. I asked her questions about her life in Germany as a young girl, her ride across the ocean to the states, her courtship with my Grandpa during WWII, and her marriage that lasted over 60 years. She was still very lucid and told me great stories.

Here are my grandparents in Milwaukee
This is my grandma on her wedding day. She hated those flowers because they hid her beautiful dress and small waist.

Since my Grandpa died my Grandma has slowly deteriorated and is now living in a nursing home with alzheimer's. I used to be scared to talk to my Grandma for fear that she would not remember me. Now I realize that even though she doesn't remember me, I still remember her. I called her to say "Happy Birthday and I love you." That did my heart good. I also figured out if I say "Hi Grandma" really loud she knows enough not to say 'who are you.'

My Grandma was an avid knitter and loved to bake bread. We are connected through needles and dough - I love that.

My great-grandmother was a wonderful seamstress and supported her family by sewing when they immigrated to the U.S. from Germany. That talent skipped a generation and landed on my mom, who is also an incredible sewer. The knitting skipped my mom and hit me. I love that we're all connected through a craft that transcends the generations.

I think this picture is of my grandma's family 'along the way to the Salt Lake temple' before my grandparents got married. Is that true Russell family?

My Grandma still has some of her spunk left. She said "Yeah you knit, but not like me, you knit the American way." I just thought 'ok grandma, whatever you say.' Then when I got off the phone I remembered a German lady who came into my yarn shop to show us the German way of knitting which was much faster than the American way (according to her). I could hear in her voice over the phone that she also thought the American was inferior. That makes me smile.

Happy Birthday Grandma.

Snow Day = Project Overload

We have a snow day today and Lilly has a stomach bug, which means we are inside for the long haul. It's days like today that make me go crazy for projects. I think I subscribe to a few too many craft blogs because every day I find more and more projects I want to take on. Below are some of the latest projects I want to embark on (with links to the tutorials and website that I found them on). I also need to feed my children, clean my house, and finish all my other projects which include but are not limited to: mittens; owl paintings; hat for brian; other leg warmer; curtains for my room; repainting Lilly's room; corkboard for jewelery; and decorating Jackson's room.

Here are the projects that I want to add to that list:

These are crocheted garden tie-backs that I want to make for Lilly's curtains on her closet.

http://littlecherrytops.typepad.co.uk/files/garden-tie-backs.pdf

Cards made with leftover yarn, I definitely have that!

http://www.marthastewart.com/article/yarn-embellished-cards?xsc=eml_crd_2010_02_25

Fabric silhouette

http://curbly.com/tags/silhouettes

I will probably just stick with cleaning, eating, and napping today, and choose one project to work on. Paired with keeping sick Lilly away from healthy Jack and maybe some of this: