Corangutan

Meet Otto

This is our Elf on the Shelf. We've named him Otto, because Elayna wanted him "out out" in a reeeal bad way.

Tata Tada

Me: Elayna, you took your shirt off?

Elayna: Picture! Picture!

Me: Okay. Cover your boobies.

Christmas Corner

Since we go home every holiday season, I decided to take our Christmas decorations and whatnot with us this last visit. But I left a few things behind to put us in cheery moods until we actually go home. Thus I give you the Christmas corner (and wall). A scrawny little Xmas tree to start piling presents under and some countertop decor. That is all.

Tubbabub, for short

EV loves her tubbabubba sister, who is so bottom heavy she can almost sit upright by herself.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A VERY happy one indeed!

On our way to KY.

Hopefully the rest of the drive will be this peaceful!

Do You Read? Or at least audiobook?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.  Instructions: Copy this. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

  

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible 

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma-Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dus

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante 

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 

80 Possession - AS Byatt 

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry- fav book ever

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyto

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

TAG: EVERYONE  (I don't have time to list everyone I'd like to do this, so if you frequent my blog and I know where you are, please follow the instructions up top.  Whenever I find time, I'll be making my blog rounds. Happy Thanksgiving!)

Sometimes

Going to the doctor can be fun. Usually this is when it's your baby sister on the receiving end of shots.

Smile!

This makes all her cranky nights and days totally worth it.

2 Mo. Appt. (SHOTS)

Cora screamed, Elayna cried, and I sat rocking in a corner.  NO, just kidding.  It wasn't so bad.  Except the Cora part.  That was bad.  


Everyone went on lunch, so there was only one nurse to administer the shots.  (Versus, two to three people doing three shots all at the same time, which would mean "many much" less screaming and trauma.)  And Elayna was VERY concerned about "Tura."  No amount of reassuring was going to keep her from worrying about why her baby sister was dying. 


It didn't take long for Cora to calm down.  Then Elayna did too.  I treated us to apples with caramel and it was a good day.


We also learned that Cora is in the 75th percentile for her head circumference and length... and then a whopping 95th for her weight.  (And I was concerned she wasn't eating enough.  Pfff!)  I noticed her vitamin drops had more... well, vitamins than Elayna's did way back when so I gave them a taste.  People, one drop made my tongue go numb.  I'm not sure that's the correct response an adult should have, much less a 14lb baby.  So I'll be checking with the doctor before administering said drops.

Mohawks

And we're not even in WA anymore! Elayna's is actually twice that height. I had to fold it over for it to stay. And Cora's, well that's how it is naturally.

Potty, Tura. Potty.

Now if we could just get her to teach herself to use the potty.

Duck Duck

GOOSE egg!

After a fun-filled day, Elayna & Mabry finally went to sleep... at 10pm. The girls & I drove to Cleveland, GA to meet Jess, Mabry, & Cheri (Mabry's Gamma) at the Cabbage Patch Kids Hospital. The girls had a blast playing with the dolls and even got to pick out their own babies to adopt. Elayna named her baby Tura Dess, aka "Cora Jess."

I'm so grateful that Elayna has officially made a friend.  One she was able to play with all day long and wasn't bullied once.  Mabry is just as nice and well-mannered as Elayna and they got along great.  This is the first time she's played with another kid and I didn't want to slap the parent for being stupid-- I mean negligent.  (Aren't you happy Jess?)  Now if we can just get them to move to GA so Elayna can have play dates all the time.

About Elayna's goose egg:  She was playing on a wooden futon that had been laid out and jumped (?) landing face first on the arm rail, which had been covered by a blanket.  Poor girl.  I'm not a coddler, but as soon as it happened I rushed over and picked her up.  Within a second, literally, she had a bright blue raised bruise highlighting a thin red line where she'd actually hit her forehead.  And it just got puffier and puffier-- only not so puffy at all.  It was a hard knot as thick as one of her fingers.  And the crying.  Oh the crying.  I felt so bad for her.  I was able to keep my cool, but on the inside I was freaking.  No one in the house had a poker face when they saw it, it was so bad.  We just didn't know what this could mean.  Could she have broken her face?  Damaged her brain?  What?  What?!  I called "Bala" and she gave me some things to watch for.  Then I called Crr and was reassured when Didi said she would be fine.  Jess was doing what she could to help prepare if we have to take her to the ER.  Ryan told me numerous times to take her if I felt like she needed it.  And folks, the picture doesn't even do it justice.  Not to mention it was taken a few minutes after she'd had ice on it and the swelling had gone down a fraction.  This thing was Uh-uh-gly.  Seriously.  A trophy welt.  It was gross.

Good news is she's just fine.  Twenty-four hours later, the swelling has gone down significantly.  There's barely a raise at all.  But half of her forehead is bruised.  (Gonna make for GREAT Christmas photos.  Thank you futon.)  And she's only brought it up twice.  "Hurt bed Layna."  Her word order is just a little off.

... hello.

Don't let her sheepish grin fool you Notice how her hair tufts up? I think they look like horns.

Memory Lane

Okay the last post's picture reminds me of my absolute favorite photo of Ryan & Elayna.

"Tura"

How EV says "Cora." Might I add that this parenting thing is EXHAUSTING!

Wet Bench = FUN

An ordinary bench after a nice rain is all it takes to put a smile on her face.

My Godsend Home for Lunch.

Oh no.

My ovaries have just shriveled up.

YAYYYYY!!!!!!!

Swinging is fun! (That's our house directly above her head. Our house is perfectly located by the rec fields, parks, dog park, PX, commissary, and ryan's work.)

She sleeps!

Seeesters

"Seeeester" is what one of our Melber friends used to call her sister when she was itty bitty. It was so cute. Here are Elayna & Cora Lise being seeesters. Our firstborn is always asking to hold, hug, and kiss the baby. They're the cutest!

Happy birthday to me

This is my most favorite bouquet Ryan has ever given me! And as another special treat, he took me to my favorite restaurant, Red Lobster. It was going to be a nice date sans children. However, our youth group was NOT hosting a Parents' Night Out like we thought, so the girls celebrated too. Cora was only mildly fussy and Elayna kept telling the wild boy across the aisle to stop misbehaving. I was a good night overall!

Big Sis E.

As soon as Cora Lise started fussing Elayna was on it! She gave Cora a soothie and rocked her car seat. Very gently too! I'm so proud she's such a good big sister.

Deeeep thought

at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Sleep child! Sleep!

This is why my house is unkept, I have dishes waiting to be put up, clothes to be washed as well as put away, and I still haven't had a shower today. She absolutely must be held or will scream so hard and so long she makes herself sick. Ah the joys of newborns.

Meet Leelee

This is Elayna's good friend. We have no idea why she named it Leelee because she can say "belt."

Run Run Run

The girl does NOT stop moving. Ever.