And the winner is?

We have one more thing we could open for Christmas: The envelope from the ultrasound lady that tells us the sex of our next child.

Should we open it? Or should we wait?

What do you do with your day off?

Ryan decided to mulch the leaves in the garden area with our battery powered weed whacker.

Anna worked on her Goldy Locks and the 3 Bears show :)

Wife

This is the wonderful wife that I married.

Judgment

Its hard being a parent. You need to figure out whats the best for your kid even though it is easier to give in. Some days you need a hard hat.

I was taking a nap (which Anna knew about) and she tells me she can't play her game on the computer. I tell her after nap time I will help her. She can either join me or play something else.

THAT did not go over well.

• She cried


• Her nose ran


• Screamed


• shook fists


• kicked her feet-which is a new one for her

If all this did not happen I would have thought about helping her but she just turned into the 2 year old we never had throwing a tantrum.

I sang "My Little Sunshine" like 29 times with her in my arms kicking and sniffing loudly.

She is asleep now on my bed. We will talk when she wakes up about what went on but right now she needs to rest.

The start of Preschool

I took Anna to her first day of American preschool. Some of you remember that she went to preschool in India in a tie and uniform. Here it is more relaxed.

We got to the door and waited for it to be unlocked. She then told me that she did not want me to come with her to her room.

She actually ran down the hall carrying her bag without me. I did make sure she got in the right class.

She put her bag away and then started to play with the toys. She even gave Mrs. Kirby a hug.

Now what do I do? Right now I am cleaning the kitchen and blogging to you :)

More than a month in

Wow!

We have been so busy the past month. We spent two weeks in the extended stay (dorm rooms have it better.) Then we moved into our new place, learned that the basement leaks a lot when it rains. I took out a dog run as a method of dealing with the frustration. Now I am putting in retaining walls from the former dog run material so that we can have a nice large garden area next spring. (And garlic will be planted in the fall.)

When we moved in I had a plan... and it has worked fairly well. The last house was 2500 square feet, this one is 950, we should be living in about 1500sqft. When the moving truck came we put all the boxes and small furniture in the garage and the big furniture in the house. Then over the past few weeks we are slowly filling the house and emptying the garage. Once we can park two cars in the garage then we will go buy a new TV. (Sold the last tv instead of putting it on the moving truck.)

As of this afternoon we officially have a new member of the family but that is for another post.

Here we are

We have landed in the JLL Extended Stay in Cedar Falls Iowa.

Just one week ago we put all our belongings on a truck in Erie Pennsylvania.

Now to start the job.

Find a place to live.

Find a Church Family.

Find Friends.

Learn the best grociery stores, doctors, dentists, and playgrounds.

Pray for us.

We are moving

We had a garage sale this weekend. I was glad to have my parents down to help attract people and sell stuff.

We did this to empty our home and to get read to move to Iowa.

Ryan has a job there and pray we get to land for a while. We have been here for 9 months now and moving is not fun.

We will miss our Church Grace. Here is what we were up to with them this week : Extreme Home Make Over. Ryan got to even see Ty.

A Quick Drive to Detroit

Saturday we decided to go celebrate with our flower girl Clarice.

She just graduated from high school!

It was so cool to walk in and no one knew we were coming :) Here is a picture of the cool quilt Ryan made. She is the girl on the right. Ryan made 2 matching pillows too!

We went to Great Lakes Crossing after the party for a few hours. We drove home and were in our own bed by 2 AM.

Artwork

Our conversation after leaving Target tonight:

"Mom, look at God's artwork" said enthusiastically by Anna in the backseat.

"Where?" as I turn into traffic.

"Look at the sky and what God painted for us tonight."

These are times when I smile.

Bike Riding with Adams Trail-a-Bike

Ryan has spent the week getting one of his two bikes up and running. We knew that Anna can't ride a little bike that fast so we looked at alternatives on Ebay and Craigslist (why buy new?).

We could do a trailer which she does no work or whats called an Adams Trail A Bike where she rides and even gets to peddle. Well we chose that Adams bike because they were first to respond to us and who knows how long Anna could fit in a trailer too.

She had a ball yesterday, we went to the library, Lake Erie and back. The cool thing is we have the attachments to move her from Ryan's bike to mine in less than a minute.

Kaysa and Kitty Prozac

We have had Kaysa for about 10 years now, Ryan got her as a kitten while we were dating.

She has started marking the house, for the first time in her life. We had her tested and there isn't anything physically wrong with her, just maybe mentally so we are going to try out some medication for anxiety called Amitriptyline.

Keep her in your prayers since the only other alternative is putting her to sleep.

Update: Kaysa was given away to a family of six during our garage sale. She is seaming to be doing well there. We do miss her still but really are glad she is not dead.

Bribery

Growing up if we got a basket at Easter it was the day after (they were on sale).

Anna doesn't know that there are zillions of kids around the USA who get baskets.

I saw this basket and I am using it to get Anna potty trained at night. M&M's worked great for day time but not for night.

I showed it to her and told her that if she was dry two nights in a row she gets the whole basket with the candy, ball and side walk chalk.

Today is day one. She woke us up to show her dry diaper. She cried when I told her she has to have a dry one two days in a row.

Right now she is drawing a picture of it right now.

I hope it works ....

Ugly Quilt Competition

Here is my quilt in the Ugly Quilt Competition in North East Pennsylvania. I won't find out for a few days how I placed. We had to use the orange/pink and green fabric and make it into something nice.

The blue and orange one is a dog bed cover.

The one on the left with the squares on edge is an apron.

In the lower right corner there is a big travel bag.

The rest are wall quilts and table runners.

There was a total of 8 who finished the project. Over 15 people bought the fabric but not all completed it.

Whats your favorite?

The purpose of a childs kitchen

We stumbled on this fact a few weeks ago when we saw sunlight in our back room. Now Kaysa uses Anna's kitchen almost more than Anna does.

I also finished a quilt I made in 2005 - I had to duck the tails of the thread in. Slowly I am catching up on things here. The lady who owns the Curves I work out at just had a little girl. I love the 1930's fabrics, I think they are so cute and remind me of being a kid hearing the mother goose stories. I hope she likes it too.

You wish you had this in your front yard!

This is what we found in our yard today.

The joys of living in the city :)

Anyone need a shopping cart?

What do you do with 500 old business cards?

I got crafty one morning with Anna.

I told her we were going to make a sign for dad out of his old business cards from when we lived in Detroit. I wrote out We Love you Daddy. Notice that its Dad. Anna did the dad all on her own so I tossed out my Daddy cards I made. Its so much sweeter with what she did.

That is so cool, she can write dad and I didn't even help :)

This week in Erie

The washer ate my Pillow!

Kaysa wants to be part of a quilt.

Right now I want to finish a quilt for an Ugly quilt competition. I want to send it with my brother-in-law to my hubby's Aunt who does some fantastic quilting.

Ryan calls me up yesterday from work and they have announced lay offs for 60 engineers.

Next call is he is one of those engineers laid off. He works at GE here in Erie until April 10th.

• Pray he finds another job soon. This is hard, we went though it with GM in 2006.


• Praise if we have to move we don't have to sell a house


• Praise we know that God is in control and it will be ok ... soon

Maybe Anna and I should make dad an apple berry pie. Food always makes us feel better right? No, Anna did not get to use the knives next to her.

Prepared

I hope I don't die. I certainly hope it does not happen 31 years from now. The same for Nancy.

Why 31 years?

We bought 30 year term life insurance. We chose the amounts based on what it would cost the survivors to maintain the same lifestyle. Replace my income or pay for someone to watch the kids.

It was not that hard and I wish we would have done it years ago when Anna was born.

To start it all off I went to Dave Ramsey's website and asked for an ELP (Endorsed Local Provider) in my area to contact me. If you want your own ELP go to daveramsey.com and look on upper right of the first page. Our ELP is also our investment advisor & assistant. After meeting with our advisor and he gave us some information to read and talk about, no high pressure sales. We called him back a few weeks later. He visited with some applications and we paid our first years deposit. Then a nurse came to the house to draw our blood and weigh us.

As an aside we learned that if the vampire oh I mean nurse would tug on the vain a little while putting the needle in the vain is much less likely to roll.

Ok so the insurance company looks at our blood work for everything that might kill us. The more things that might make us die in the next 30 years the more we got to pay each year. I found out that I have high cholesterol. Mathematically based on how much higher my premium is I have almost a 1% chance of dieing from my cholesterol vs living to see my 60s. Now all we need to do is keep paying our premium each year. Yes we could have paid monthly too but then that is just one more bill to worry about being late on.

The worst part of it all, besides thinking Nancy might die and leave me here, was having to fast overnight and skip breakfast before getting the blood drawn. The good news is we can take our blood workups to our doctors to for them to look at.

Oh yes we have a will, written before we went to India. That needs to be updated now cuz if we both die our daughter would be coming into a whole lot of money all at once... usually not a good thing.

We still have snow

For those of you who wonder what its like in Erie ...

From our house steps to where we park the cars, one in the drive and one on the street.

Ryan trying to smash the snow so we have room for more snow. Yes he is 3.5 feet up in the air on snow. We have had over 100 inches of snow, only led by Marquette Michigan at 150 inches.

I liked going past this Barnes & Noble to just look at their ice :)

Wednesday

Anna got more trains for christmas. We hit the jackpot at a train show and she got more track.

That is Kaysa coming out of a paper bag once she knew Anna was running around down stairs.

She doesn't want to be in the bag if Anna jumps on it.

Anna is in her chair coloring in our room.

Sledding

I picked up this sled for $3 at a garage sale.

Its first owner was a boy named Tim and its from Christmas of 1953.

I fixed it up with a bit of hammering - gentle persuasion like my daddy taught me:) and some wax on the rails.

It ran though the snow like butter :)

Can you tell we are on an icy sidewalk?

What I've Done Today

• Ran Dishwasher
• Emptied Dishwasher
• Made Duck Puzzle & Alphabet Puzzle
• Played with Playdough
• Blogged - right now :)
• IM'ed Q
• Ran Dryer
• Put cover back on couch cushion
• Talked 3 times with doctors offices
• Made appointment to get car fixed
• Listened to 2 car talks
• Made meal plan for the week
• Clipped coupons - need to sort out old ones still
• Made New York Paper Pieced Star
• Vacuumed upstairs
• Cleaned outside of sink and toilet
• Printed 2 mystery shops and 3 paper piecing stars
• Colored with Anna
• Cleaned and organized buffet and Anna's downstairs bookshelf
• Cleaned dinning room table
• Cut apple for anna
• Made mix for tuna cakes
• Found a screw in Ryan's collection to fix my Key Fob :)
• Took Care of my mail - I got my PA Drivers Liscence

How to Get a Drivers Licence

It took a month but I got one here in Pennsylvania:

Here is what you need:

1. Your old Licence
2. Your birth certificate - if married also marriage certificate
3. Social Security Card - I could not find mine so it took 2 weeks to get it during Christmas season
4. 2 proofs of address - must be bills and not just cards

It took me 2 hours on my second attempt to get it. You don't need to take any tests except one of patience. I had hope when they had 4 windows open, I am number 448 and started at 416. Then they went down to 1. It took 1.5 hours to file for my licence, 5 to get in line for the picture and 10 to get Nancy spelt without an E
At least they had a public bathroom there.
Pennsylvania has farmed out who does registration and licence tags so you have to shop around. I just found out I need a form signed by a mechanic or notary reaffirming my VIN number then I will try again. This is through the same company that is willing to insure my car without verification of VIN.
I don't understand.