12.07.2009
I do love my Mona too. I love gummy smiles. She was so good the whole time!
I just love this one.
There's Mona with her hand out. At least she's happy!
Look at our two girls! We love them. Thanks Jen for such cute dresses. I love those too.
I did manage to get myself presentable to take family pictures. Where would I be without this sibling picture or the memory of how much my brother didn't want to be there taking it with us?
The next day the trip was pretty much ruined for everyone else. My Dad, Jennifer and Collin all got the stomach flu. Also on Friday, Rebecca, Natalie and Pearl started losing their voice. (At least Rebecca was the source of that germ though. Wouldn't I feel awful if we'd brought ALL of it?) By the time we were driving into Provo Saturday night, Pearl was so sick with cough, congestion and fever, Greg just dropped me off at the ER. And then Mona and Greg got it, and then me.
Even if we did share too many germs, I loved being with family and wouldn't have missed it for anything! I wish we lived closer to cousins! Pearl talks about them all the time.
She likes to use the word Fa'anunu for everything.
Sometimes it replaces words she doesn't know, as in "Get me that Fa'anunu."
Sometimes she just rhymes with it: "Fa'anunu ba'anunu sa'anunu"
Other times it's an insult: "You Fa'anunu head."
I asked her, "Do you like to say Fa'anunu" and her response was, "That's a silly Fa'anunu."
Three years is a strange age.
Here we are the night before Halloween dressed as witches and a warlock. Our neighbor, who helped us out a lot this summer with gardening advice, invited us to her party. Notice our headstone... our tomatoes reached 7 ft. this summer. We had them tied to huge stakes, our gutters, porch light, anything we could think of to keep them from falling over. Our little backyard was so overgrown.
Our neighborhood had a little carnival on Halloween. Mona's dressed like a candy corn today. She spits so bad she needed two costumes. I had the hardest time choosing costumes this year, because I'm pretty sure it's my last with Pearl. She seemed excited about a witch, but it took A LOT of convincing (and tears, mine and hers) to get her to keep the hat and cape on.
Pearl's birthday was such a fun day. She actually gets the concept of opening presents now. It was so fun to watch her that she had opened all her presents before we even had breakfast. So, doing a birthday on a budget went extremely well. Build-a-bear gave her $5 store credit, plus they sent me a coupon for a free animal. Our new mattress was late in coming so the store sent us a gift card to cold stone, and we let Pearl pick out her very own cake. Naturally she went for the one with berries on it: Raspberry Cheesecake. It was delicious.
On the Sunday after her birthday we had a party at Greg's parents. We drove up after church and Pearl fell asleep on the way.
Alayne and Andrea bought Pearl a really fun play food set. She plays with it EVERY day. By the way, this is Uncle Alex. He came home from his mision in July. It didn't take long for Pearl to warm up to him. They always play so cute and read lots of stories. Shortly after he came home, the Harry Potter movie came out. Alayne and Alex came over and watched the girls so Greg and I could go out and see it. Pearl still says, "Member Alex came over and you and Daddy went to Harry Potter? Do that again."
I feel like I haven't posted much about Ramona. What can I say, she's a pretty happy, easy baby. She sleeps decently. She eats great. She has a fantastic giggle. I feel like her being so good is making up for her spitting up. She is the worst. Well, Pearl was awful, and if I eat onions, Ramona is definitely worse than she was. However, if I don't, it's very manageable. With Pearl it was never manageable.
Mona is very mobile- started crawling at 5 months, pulled to stand at 6 months and started walking along furniture at 7 months.
This is a rare shot. Mona lying still, on her back.
This is a typical face for mona. She likes to spit. She blows for a bit, then giggles, smiles and blows some more.
17 stitches later, this is what it looked like.
It's healed really well. Pearl is great about reminding me to put on her Mederma and sunscreen. We kept a bandaid on for about two weeks. This picture is doing double duty. Pearl is potty training and really likes her panties. She likes to wear them all at the same time.
This is the house where my mom spent most of her summers. This fall we took a one day trip up to Paris, ID (north side of Bear Lake). The house is so run down. I'd love to see it fixed up some day...
I have no clue what this machine does. It was scary walking across the field to it because we passed an animal skull on the way, and when I was little and came to this house there were little black snakes all over.
At about 8 am we pulled into Celeste court and surprised my mom. Then we hurried and got ready for church where we surprised my dad. It was a fun Father's day treat. Almost as fun was answering the phone when my sisters called... "What are YOU doing there?"
Fortunately, we had a beautiful drive through the black hills.
Unfortunately, we got in too late to see the fireworks at Mr. Rushmore.
Fortunately, there was such dense fog nobody saw them and we didn't end up wasting our entire day waiting to see nothing
Unfortunately, all that dense fog was a storm and it poured and we were sleeping in tents and one of the tents flooded.
Fortunatel,y the tent that didn't flood slept as many as 9.
Unfortunately, we had 11 (including a pack 'n' play)
Fortunately, Pearl talks in her sleep and "berries, yeah I like berries" will never be forgotten.
One of the highlights of the trip was going to Bear Country. Abby rode in the car with us, and, because we went through the park at about a mile an hour, she was driving with Greg when a bear stood on our car!!!
It was a very fun summer!
6.15.2009
In the past few years, I have helped my family (several times) "try" and recover lost files. I have also lost things a couple of times on my own box. The biggest disaster was my dad's hard drive about a year and a half ago. He had all of his digital pictures on it (not backed up) and the drive decided it was finished. Well, needless to say he paid about $1,500 to get the pictures back and some of them were damaged. I personally have TONS of pictures, videos, etc on my drives and I was trying to back them all up via DVD and then have a copy at my house, my parents house. I also had them on an external drive, my iPod, and then favorites on Picasa. Well... needless to say... 30+ GB of pictures sure does use a lot of DVD's and hard drive space... especially with 10x redundancy!
I attended a Ruby Users group meeting at Mozy a couple of months ago and then decided to look them up. This was about the time they were advertising hard with their commercials. I thought "Unlimited space for 5 bucks, impossible." I decided to give it a try for a month to see if it was true. Well, I am now backing up about 500 GB for 5 dollars a month... yes, that's right 5 dollars a month.
Features I love:
- Unlimited (yes, unlimited) space
- You have a Mozy drive that contains all the files that are on the Mozy server
- Quick restore
- Can be scheduled (for the middle of the night)
- You can throttle the speed of the uploads
- Well, lets face it indexing that many files takes some time...
- Mozy can take up a good chunk of CPU and memory during a backup.
My parents have already used Mozy a few times to backup accidentally deleted files. Mozy keeps deleted files for 30 days... so you have a bit of time just in case.
Anyways, this link will give you a 10% discount on the service. I would give it a try. That 1500 bucks would have paid for about 25 years of the service... well worth it in my mind.
6.10.2009
Mona is congested and has thrush... good thing she has Pearl to take care of her. Pearl doesn't just play doctor, she plays "Dr. Berry", our family doctor.
Yes, you're seeing it right... they're wearing the same clothes. The sad thing is, I think Mona will grow out of them first! Pearl makes all sorts of strange discoveries while Mom is busy nursing Mona... how to open the back door, where Mom keeps the marshmallows and, today, that she fits in Mona's clothes.
6.06.2009
Aunt Andrea took Pearl to the Zoo. Pearl had so much fun. She was talking for days about different animals, the animal playground, and anything she could remember.
Note to Andrea: Pearl wants to know when you're going to take her out again! 
5.05.2009
Ramona was born at 7:20 pm on Sunday, March 29th. According to Navajo legend, she revels in nudity and is bonny, blithe, happy and gay (If you've never been to Grandma Daines' house. don't expect that to make sense). She was 8 lbs and 19 inches long.
For now, she mostly goes by Mona. Also, Pearl is no longer "Baby Pearl." Sad but true, life goes on and now we have Baby Mona. The "baby" in front of their names helps people distinguish between them and all the grandma's with whom they share names. If you feel you need to youthanize Pearl's name still, call her "Pearly." That's what we do.
Pearl adores her sister! She was kind of in shock when she first got to the hospital, but it didn't take long for her to warm up. While I was being transferred to recovery, Mona was getting her bath and all that stuff. Pearl went to watch then came back to my room. The whole time she kept saying she wanted to go back and see her sister. She's pretty gentle with her and very helpful. I think having my parents here for the first two weeks was helpful not only to me, but for Pearl. She got loads of attention!
Pearl talks all the time about how much she doesn't like sharing (for example, she's good and asks for jelly beans and I give them to her and then she informs me "I not has to share my jelly beans! It my jelly beans" However, she often follows a statement like that with "I share my room with Mona. I share my toys (pronounced toes) with Mona." I wish I could write the way Pearl speaks. She has the greatest intonations and she annunciates every letter so well. We love listening to her.
Mona sleeps fantastic!!! The first night she did 8 hrs, the second night was pretty horrid, apparently that's when their digestive system kicks in and can cause some indigestion. Other than that though, she goes to bed around 10, sometime as late as 11. and rarely wakes up earlier than 4:30, but usually not until after 6 am. Kind of nice.
Before any moms get to jealous, let me tell you, she is just making up for how disgusting she is. I don't know how she's gained so much weight already (10 lbs at 5 weeks), because she doesn't seem to keep much down. I have nearly 30 burp cloths and still have to do a baby load at least twice a week or we're using dish towels and wash cloths with her. She always smells like sour milk, even though I am always wiping up her sticky face, neck and hands and changing her clothes (good thing we have lots). It's so bad some days I think I would rather have a baby who slept less than one who spit up this much. Not that I have a choice or would give up my Mona. I spent a fortune on some pills that may or may not help yesterday, so we'll see.
Labor and delivery were amazing! Greg and I took hypnobirthing classes, and they helped us to look forward to labor and delivery rather than view it as a necessary evil. Hypnobirthers believe in going into deep relaxation and having pain-free births. Those who get an epidural are probably the only ones who truly experience a pain-free birth, but it was pretty remarkable to come close to that through relaxation. One of the affirmations I was supposed to repeat to myself was: "I will turn my birthing over to my baby and my body." That gave me the giggles, but it really worked! While it was not exactly pain-free, I can honestly say it was not that bad. It was really different to not be so consumed by pain (Pearl was induced that it was just so intense and unlike anything that my body had ever done, that it was not that great an experience) that I could focus on nothing else.
I had been having braxton hicks for nearly 4 days at pretty regular intervals, but when I woke up Sunday morning I had my first real contraction. I knew it because it was all in my back, just like the with Pearl. The picture is of me at about 10 am, a few hours into labor. My body took lots of breaks while laboring, so I kept doubting I was actually in labor, which is why by the time I actually got to the hospital I was dialated to a 6.5 and having 60 sec contractions, 90 sec apart. It went pretty fast from there, and probably would've gone even faster had my water broke earlier. She was born about an hour and a half after I was admitted.
The whole process felt instinctive and natural. The most amazing part of all was delivery. I know it generally goes much faster the second time, but I really didn't think it would go from 45 min. of pushing with pearl, to just a few minutes of relaxed breathing for Ramona. Instead of "pushing" her out, I did these things called "J" breaths and she pretty much just slid out. I swear it's true. I had been skeptical of the hypnobirther's delivery method, but when I did my first "J" breath (hard to explain how that works), I got this huge silly grin, IN THE MIDDLE OF DELIVERY, because I knew Ramona would be here any second and that it was going to be easy! My body recovered quickly too! I had my doubts and reservations, but I LOVE the hypnobirthing method.