This morning as I was waking up I heard a bird chirping outside. Lately I've been seeing huge flocks of geese flying NORTH. I sure hope these birds know something we don't about the arrival of spring.

In other news, we're going on vacation!! This is our first real family vacation ever! The last time we went on vacation was for our honeymoon seven years ago. Sure, we've travelled a lot between then and now, Josh and I usually take a weekend away once a year and we've made trips for holidays, this is just the first time the four of us are travelling purely for our recreation together. We're going to Colorado the third week in April. I can't wait to see Jonah's reaction to the mountains. He's seen lots of pictures but the real thing is so much more amazing.

Picture fun

So cute!


Playing with Mazzy.


I caught him saying Uh Oh! He's also been doing this really cute shrugging his shoulders thing but I wasn't fast enough to catch that.

Yes, he is still in his jammies. It's just one of those kinds of days. I was all geared up to go out today until I took Mazzy out for the first time. It's cold! I am really, really sick of it being cold. Enough already. Our backyard is a ice rink from all freezing/thawing/ice storm/rain/snow junk that's been going on.

Nothing too newsworthy lately. The boys and I have had a nasty cold. I think we are finally coming out of it. It was a nice weekend, no work for Josh or I so we did pretty much nothing. Cason's been really cute lately. He's saying Uh Oh all the time. Uh Oh where's the car? Uh Oh where's the pup pup? Uh Oh where's Jonah? Only the Uh Oh is intelligible but I can hear the rest. Jonah's been drawing as much as he can. He's quite the little artist. I think we might go out to a craft store and buy some craft kits today. He really loves when we do crafts together and I enjoy it a lot too.

I'm listening to the boys laughing and giggling in their room instead of napping like they are supposed to be. For now they are both happy with whatever game they are playing. I suspect Cason will be the first to tire of it and when that happens I'll go shush Jonah, but for now it's just nice to listen to their happy sounds.

Mazzy's doing really well. She is a good dog, just a little insecure about her place I think and has probably not had anyone to count on before. She's tried to run away twice now. The other night we really thought we were going to lose her. She slipped out the door when Josh was bringing something in and took off. If we give chase she runs even more. There were several times where it looked like she was going to run right into an oncoming car. It made Josh really mad, it made me love her more. I didn't realize I was so attached. She's already learning alot from us though and on the whole you can tell she's a really good dog. Just needs to learn to trust us a little bit more.

Well I'm hearing talk about poop coming from the boys now, so I better go check that out. ETA: No poop, just two boys bouncing around a crib. Jonah's been moved and hopefully they'll both get a good rest.

Hooray! It's supposed to be in the 40's by the end of the week! It's early but I'm going to start looking for the first spring Robin. It feels like it will be a good week. Jonah will have school again, with his special day on Thursday to celebrate his half birthday. Plus plans to meet up with Lisa and Katie sometime this week for lunch. Jonah has turned a corner and things haven't been so hard these last few days. We're all a lot happier. I finally called ECSEC to see what was going on with that and they hadn't received the paperwork I sent in. Rather than making me wait for new paperwork to send in they went ahead and scheduled an appointment for his assessments. It's set for March 5th. They'll have a psychologist, occupational therapist, autism specialist and speech therapist there to assess Jonah. Josh and I both plan on going as she said they would be interviewing us while each specialist takes a turn with Jonah. It should be very interesting and informative.

Valentine's Day and Dr. visit

Josh went into work yesterday morning to find that there wasn't work for the day because of the massive amounts of snow we got so he came home. It was a really good thing for me because I was still feeling really frustrated with Jonah. It wasn't exactly a nice relaxing day as a family but it was nice to all be together. By lunchtime he was feeling the same frustration that I was so we made a cry for help to my parents asking them if they would watch the boys so we could have a date. They agreed (Thank you!!!) and we were able to have several hours alone. It was so nice. We took the truck so it felt like back when we were first dating. It actually had a great impact on my enjoyment, I think, something about not driving the family vehicle with the empty carseats calling out to you. We had a great dinner at a local Italian restaurant we'd never been to before and really enjoyed our time alone. We don't usually do anything for Valentine's Day, we like to rebel against the idea that someone else is telling us to tell eachother how much we love each other on the same day as everyone else in the world. But for some reason these last few weeks of winter boredom have been particularly hard. I've been dreaming over taking a vacation to Mexico so much that Josh gave me the next best thing. Two and a half months of unlimited tanning. I don't really care if I'm tan or stark white but the time alone in a warm and bright tanning bed will do wonders for my mental well-being until summer comes so it was very appreciated.

It was very hard to wake up today and have him go back to work. I got spoiled in one day by having him around. Cason's been having some bad cold symptoms so I decided to take him to the doctor this morning. I should feel lucky that my kids end up not having anything serious but it's so annoying to take the time and spend the money to go only to be told that it's just a cold. And on top of that, since we weren't able to see our regular doctor this doctor felt it was his duty to tell me that I should be fattening Cason up. I know he's little, but that's it, he's just little. He's not skinny or unhealthy. He has nice pudgy legs and a round belly. He's 21 lbs and 4 ounces at almost 20 months so that puts him in like the 2nd percentile. It annoys me that being low on the chart is somehow seen as a bad thing. He doesn't need to be given high fat foods so that he'll get higher on the growth chart. It just means he's smaller than most kids his age, not that he's unhealthy. I suppose it could be an indication of a problem but when the kid is sitting right in front of you, you can see he's not sick. He's starting to talk a little more, still not a lot but some. He has recently joined in on Jonah's obsession with cars, so now it's "Car! Car!" all the time. It's weird how he doesn't talk that much but he will say things like "Where's the car?" It's not real clear though and most people would probably just hear nonsense.

Complaining

I'm losing it! I'm so tired of the cold. I was glad that school got cancelled today, but at the same time I'm so depressed that we're getting more snow. I'm so tired of winter already. Jonah is really having a hard time with obeying right now. He's just so in his own world that I don't think he hears what I'm saying. Then I end up yelling and it finally gets his attention but I feel horrible for yelling. I just can't wait until it's nice out and it doesn't take a half hour of preparations to get out the door.

An addition to the family...

Well Josh and I are pretty well known for some crazy impulsiveness. We were laughing at ourselves during the drive to pick up our latest addition. In all honesty, we've been thinking about this for a while and knew a good oppurtunity when we saw it. So here she is...

A Puggle named Mazzy.









She's nine months old and already pretty well trained. We're all adjusting to her and she's adjusting to us, but it's been great. When we got to the house where she was, the door opened and Jonah said "That's my dog!" He's so excited. He's been saying for awhile that we should get another dog and that it should be a brown dog. When he saw her picture we heard him quietly say "I like this dog better than Miles." It's surprising that he even remembers Miles. Miles was a good dog, just not the right fit for us at that time in our life.

Jonah's fighting rest time today. Josh got home early and I think he thinks he gets a free pass if Daddy comes home early. So usually fighting a rest time means coming up with every fake excuse in the book to get out of resting. He just came out a minute ago and said his tooth hurt. So I decided to check it and surprise, surprise one tooth is actually a little wiggly. This seems early, but it wasn't super wiggly so I think he's fine. It'll probably come out this summer. Now we just have to introduce him to Papa's special tooth pulling service. The more you resist letting Papa pull the tooth the higher he bids on the pulling. He's been known to pay $20 for one tooth. Not bad.

I started looking into schools a bit more. And realized that I need to apply this year sometime to be able to start the fall of 2008. That's pretty exciting, to get the process rolling. Next task, order my transcripts from Grace. All those Bible classes were great, but will not do me much good toward a nursing degree, so I'm not too hopeful on how much transferable credit I have. I'm pretty much expecting to be in school for 5-6 years.

Does this ever happen to anyone else? I have to click login five times to get the new "google" account thing to actually let me into my account. It's annoying.

My hubby is 30! Yesterday was his birthday and in his own understated way I think he has really had a good birthday. I guess that's sort of putting words in his mouth, but he is really understated about it. I was thinking about it tonight and had this moment of shock that he's actually 30. His twenties are done...gone! Which makes me feel like mine are gone too and they nearly are. I feel old...how can I actually almost be 30...THIRTY, yikes!

Which maybe that's why I'm feeling so anxious. Anyone who knows me well knows that I really want to go back to school to study nursing and then get a midwifery certificate. I feel like I'm just bursting to get there. I want to do it so bad, almost just to see what I'm really made of. My goal has always been to be done by the time I'm 40 (yikes again). This is going to be one long amazing decade. My short term goal is to start school by the fall of 2008. That's a little complicated by the fact that also have a goal of figuring out if we will be moving before then. It feels like such a short time away, but also such a long time away. Hurry up and wait. I feel like I can't commit to a school until we know where we will be living. I also feel really green about the whole process of applying for college. In high school it seemed like there were people who just kinda did everything for you, now it's all me.