OK, yes, I know I have a lot of explaining to do. It has actually now been months since my last post, and I do apologize. 2012 came to a close, and we already have a good start on the new year. As you may guess, we have been keeping very busy. Apart from family visits, and Mauri having time off, I also allowed my computer time to be almost exclusively dedicated to making some photo books because I had some Groupons for two books that were to expire on February 9th. No, it isn't that I have been working on the two books for months, but since I didn't know what to actually include in the books, I had been editing a lot of the family pictures that I had scanned on my last visit to the US, and that takes up a lot of time! In the end, I ended up making some books of my baby pictures and some pictures from growing up. We'll see how they turn out.
So, anyway, let me get you caught up on our lives since my last post...
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| How Kahlua usually sleeps!! |
Kahlua has been growing at the astounding rate of over a kilo per week!!! She is still smaller than Sheena, but barely. Eric and Kahlua have an intense love-hate relationship. Well, that, I guess, is from Eric's point of view. Kahlua is all about intense love!! She almost loves him (and us) too much.
How can a puppy love too much??? Well, from the moment we wake up in the morning or when we arrive in the car, she is so excited to see us that she can't help but pee. She runs and jumps around, and doesn't realize that the intensity of her greeting can scare little Eric, who obviously isn't growing at the same rate she is. Sometimes she even knocks him over.
Once she has settled down a bit, though, Eric loves to go try to play with her. He jumps on her, pulls at her, and no matter what he throws her way, she seems to just love every minute of it and is very gentle with him.
Eric gets very mad at Kahlua at times, because she has the audacity to play with her own toys. Of course, in Eric's mind, all toys are his. So he scolds her for playing with her chew toys or with the dogs' Frisbees. He runs to pull these things away from her, and then laughs hysterically as she runs after him to try to get them back. Of course the second she gets them away from him, he is back to crying and being upset about her playing with her toys.
The weather has been decent lately, and on the days that it isn't too windy, it definitely feels like spring. Unfortunately, the last few days have been quite windy making it much cooler outside, but we have been able to enjoy a few sunny days in which, when you are out in the sun, you are hot in even a tank top!! I can't complain about that.
We have been making great use of those days. Mauri is on another biological stop, so apart from some maintenance work on the fishing boat, he has had a bit more free time this month. We have decided to use that time for a project that we had been debating for years...a chicken coop/hen house.
Apart from making photo books and writing on the blog, a huge part of my computer time is dedicated to reading about food, nutrition and healthy lifestyles. So, despite it being less well cared for and somewhat abandoned these last few years (since the pregnancy), I have continued to grow an organic vegetable garden each year. Now that Eric is growing to an age in which he actually wants to try to help (sometimes), I think that this year I can actually get out of my rut, and get back into healthy eating/living in fuller force this year. One way to do this is to have a way of getting our own (organic and free range) eggs.
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| Eric fell asleep on the trampoline several days that we were working outside. |
To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of eggs. I refuse to eat them fried...or scrambled... and if I had to name the one food that repulses me the most (apart from chocolate covered worms or grasshoppers, maybe) would have to be the hard boiled egg!! That said, I have been growing to love vegetable and cheese omelets, and two-ingredient "pancakes" made with eggs and pumpkin (or butternut squash) or eggs and bananas. Plus, the hens will provide me with lots of free, organic fertilizer for my vegetable garden, and will help keep the lawn somewhat pest free.
So, Mauri and I have spent the sunny mornings of the last week or two working on making a hen house out of pallets. It has been an interesting project. We started out with something much more, um, rustic in mind. We kept just nailing and screwing pallets together until a house began to appear, but then our perfectionist natures made us take things apart and redo this and that until we actually came up with a pretty nice hen house, if I do say so myself!!
Eric had to be part of the fun, so we kept him home from school several days to help out with the project. He mostly spent the time running around the garden, stealing the dogs' Frisbees and bringing me the occasional kumquat which he proudly picked off my tree for me. He did, however, also try to help out a bit, and would run to the drill, which we were using as a screwdriver, and had fun pushing the button and "drilling" all over the chicken coop. He also helped me pick up the wood scraps that got left all over the garden.
Also keeping me busy was my deciding to make us costumes, once again, for the final costume holiday that Eric will spend at the Escoleta. I figured that next year, when he is supposed to start school, I wouldn't have the opportunity to get into the fun again. So, since Maite had decided to make herself a Minnie Mouse costume, I decided that I would go along with the Disney theme. I wanted to be one of the Disney princesses, and ended up choosing Snow White, mostly because her hair is the most similar to mine, and I didn't feel like wearing any type of wig. I also liked the fact that her dress was very distinctive because of its color pattern, but it was less formal than some of the other princess dresses.
I didn't have a pattern, and I don't know a lot about sewing dresses, so I ended up winging it with the help of a few idea pages online. The trickiest parts were the sleeves and the collar, but I got a general idea of how to sew puffy sleeves online, and just crossed my fingers and got sewing. Overall I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, taking everything into consideration.
To fit with the theme, I wanted to make Eric into one of the seven Dwarfs, but knew that he would never wear a beard for the occasion. So, I figured my only choice would be Dopey. I decided to make the hat, hoping that he would wear it since we have finally gotten him to wear baseball caps again occasionally for short periods of time.
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| Gorra No!!! |
Of course, there was no way, when the time came, that he was going to wear the hat. I actually got him to wear it for a few seconds, but he whipped it off his head right when I was about to take a picture. So, I don't have any pictures of the full costume, but I think the tunic/top turned out pretty well too. I made it one morning quickly before bringing Eric to school.
Anyway, that is what we have been up to lately. I'll try to take a little look a little further back to tell you some of the other things that have happened since then, and to tell a little more about Eric at this stage of life. For now, though, I'll get this post up because it's definitely about time!!
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