Thursday, March 31, 2011

Stop crying and eat your pizza!

I've been occasionally worried about Clarissa's ability to speak lately. Not super worried, she's not way behind or anything, I just sometimes wonder if she's a little behind and if there's anything I need to be doing about it. She says a ton of words and gets her point across fine but she still doesn't really speak in full sentences very often. She puts words together to tell us what she wants, like "more juice" and she asks short questions like "where's daddy?" but she doesn't usually speak in sentences longer than that. Occasionally a three or four word sentence will come out. Not often though and it's still kind of hard to understand her so I'm not always completely sure she says what I think she says. I'm not really that concerned, she's progressing and communicating and I'm sure she's fine, especially considering that she didn't hear English spoken until she was eight and a half months old. I'm just anxious to hear her start speaking in longer sentences, I guess.

Anyway, tonight we were having lasagna for dinner and Josh was whining because he didn't want lasagna. We were sitting at the table eating and Josh was kind of pouting and pushing his food around. We told him he needed to eat and he was arguing about it with Shawn. Clarissa had been sitting quietly in her high chair observing the conversation when suddenly she yelled very clearly "STOP CRYING AND EAT YOUR PIZZA!!".


It went dead silent for a minute and we all looked at her like "did she really just say that?" and she looked at us like "What? Somebody needed to say it." and went back to happily eating her dinner and we all burst out laughing. I had no idea she could say a sentence that long! Apparently she has lots to say she has just been waiting for the right time to say it, lol! :)

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Spring has sprung!

It's finally starting to look like Spring around here and that makes me happy! It's been raining like crazy lately but then the sun comes out for a bit and it's making the grass green and the daffodils and magnolias in my yard bloom. I love this time of year. I love seeing the birds and the green grass and the flowers again. It feels good to go outside and feel the sunshine (in between the rainstorms!).

The boys have been on track break all month and Shawn took a little time off so we've had some good family time these past few weeks. We got some spring cleaning done and during Shawn's time off we got ourselves hooked on The Big Bang Theory. Seriously, how have I missed out on that show all this time? My brother kept telling me how funny it is and we have the same taste in TV shows and the same weird sense of humor, so I decided I'd better check it out. Shawn and I burned through the first three seasons every spare second we could find over the past few weeks and now I'm officially obsessed with it. If you haven't seen it, you really should!

In other news, I found an old friend on Facebook today. I love it when that happens! How did we ever survive without Facebook? :) I love catching up with people I haven't seen in a while.

When I was in high school I had a boyfriend who was really into computers and when we were newly dating he introduced me to something called a modem. :) This was in 1992, before anyone had really heard of the internet and using your computer to talk to people was a foreign concept. He hooked a modem up to my computer and it blew my mind, lol.

The only thing we could really do with it back then was use it to connect to local chat boards and it quickly became my favorite pasttime. I think I can officially blame my internet addiction on my high school boyfriend. Thank you, high school boyfriend. :)

Anyway, we made a bunch of "computer friends" and we were a pretty strange bunch, lol. I've always gotten along better with males than females and all my computer friends were guys, so it worked out well. I was the only female in the bunch, which included a 25 year old Navy guy (I was 17 at the time), a college student with a mowhawk and an earring shaped like a knife (who became one of my best friends, which completely freaked my mother out. That was just a bonus, lol.) and assorted high school boys. My friends from school would ask me how I knew all these people and my answer was always "I met them on my computer", which you can imagine got me some weird looks. In my small town in 1992 most people weren't making friends on their computer.

I've kept in touch with some of those friends over the years. Navy guy and mowhawk dude are still friends of mine and today I reconnected with another friend from that crazy bunch. Catching up with him reminded me how fun those days were. I've been remembering some good times today.

And now that I'm telling this story it occurs to me that I'm lucky that all my computer friends were nice people and not serial killers. I would never let my daughter hang out with weird dudes she met on the internet! There were no internet safety classes back then. :)

Anyway, I hadn't meant to go off on that tangent when I started making this blog post, but there you have it, the story of how I've been a big old computer nerd since high school. :)  Maybe that was more information than I should have shared about myself, lol!

Stick around, you never know what tangent I might go off on next! :)

Monday, March 14, 2011

He drives around, all over the town...

I was feeling nostalgic today. This is just as funny as I remembered it!

Friday, March 11, 2011

Flat Stanley goes to Korea!

Remember a few years ago when they did the Flat Stanley project in Josh's class and I got him to Korea? Well this year it's Matthew's turn and Flat Stanley is going to Korea again!

When Josh did his project I didn't know anyone in Korea so I managed to get him sent over through our adoption agency and a social worker at the agency in Korea took him. (That same social worker was the one who handled our case while we were in Korea so we actually got to meet her several times while we were there, which was fun!)

This time it's a bit easier because I have friends in Korea now. I e-mailed Jin-Ha and asked her if she could be Flat Stanley's host and she's excited to have him come for a visit! She has two boys who will enjoy being his guide in Korea.

So we're going to be packing Flat Stanley up and mailing him off to Korea in the next few days. I can't wait to hear all about his adventures. I'm completely jealous, I wish I could go with him!

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Rain

I'm sitting here listening to it rain outside. I absolutely love rainy days! There's something about being inside of a warm house when it's cold and stormy outside. It makes me want to curl up with a book. Or in this case my laptop so I can get a blog post written!

This has been kind of a crappy week. I ended up in the ER on Sunday with stomach pains and after doing a bunch of tests that all came out negative (and after leaving a bruise on my arm the size of Texas after trying to insert an IV) I think I've decided that I have an ulcer. The next test they'll want to do is an endoscopy and I'm not super excited about that so I'm eating super carefully, taking medication and hoping and praying that it goes away.

In more exciting news, Shawn signed up for taekwondo last week! He's been wanting to do it ever since the kids started and he finally decided to go for it. It's great exercise and it's a lot of fun! The taekwondo school the kids go to also offers adult classes and family classes, so he goes to an adult class one night a week and he goes with the boys to a family class one night a week and then the boys do two other kids classes per week. Needless to say we spend a lot of time at the taekwondo school these days. :)

It's fun for the boys because they're much further along than Shawn so they like that they can teach him. The boys just tested for their blue belts last week and had their first blue belt class a couple of days ago. I'm so proud of them, they're getting into more complicated kicks and punches now and it's really fun to watch what they can do. Every time they start the new belt class they look at the moves they have to learn and declare them impossible. Then by testing time they're up there performing them like it's no big deal and they're ready to move on to the next "impossible" task. :) They've been in taekwondo for a year now and they anticipate about two more years before they earn their black belts. It's been really fun to watch them progress.

In Clarissa news, I've remembered how much I enjoy two year olds! Everyone always talks about the terrible two's but I don't find two all that terrible. Clarissa is SO cute! Every word that comes out of her mouth is absolutely precious. My favorite time of the day is when she wakes up from her nap because I go in her room and lay down by her for a few minutes and she always has a big story to tell me. I can't understand 90% of what she says, but she talks and talks and it's very animated! Today she was telling me a big story and I could make out something about lunch and bread and then she started listing animals. I have no idea what she was talking about but I just eat up every second of it. I love watching her learn and grow and I love our alone time during the day. We have such a strong bond, I absolutely adore her.

This is the boys last week of school before track break. Starting Monday they'll be home for the next three weeks. It's always a little more chaotic with all three kids home but I'm looking forward to it. It's a nice break from the routine.

That about wraps up all the news from our house! Shawn left with the kids to run an errand so I'm going to go back to listening to the rain and enjoying the peace and quiet for a few more minutes. I've got to take the quiet moments when I can get them!