Resolution Update

1. Get Maggie in her own bed more often: I think I've kind of said, "aw screw it" on this one. Maggie is only little for so long and she won't want to sleep with us or ask to snuggle forever.
2. Find a new church home: Kind of on hold. Rocky had to work a few hours last weekend, so we didn't go. I think there are a few other churches I want to check out again before deciding on one.
3. Lose weight: I've been very good about getting on the Wii Fit at least every other night. My work out days are Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday, but last weekend I was also able to get in a workout on Sunday. Maggie "helped" me do the hula hoop and run. Maggie likes to hula hoop, but needs my help to get her little hips going, so she thought she should help me as well. As for running, well, she just ran around me in a circle while I ran in place. There are 3 women at work who also use the Wii Fit to work out, so we are able to talk about our progress and see who has opened up what games. I'm really getting into the aerobic boxing. However, I wish there was a way to turn off the hints, especially in yoga and strength. The trainers are helpful, but they can get repetitious. And I don't like being chastised for skipping a day (Too busy to work out yesterday, eh, Wendy?)
4. Eat healthier: I'm trying!
5. Eating at the table: There are very few nights that we do not eat at the table. Maggie loves to pray (Bwess us oh Lawd!) and Rocky has her asking to be excused: "I'm all done. Pease! I'm cused!" I'm also now in the habit of cleaning the kitchen -- at least getting the dishes in the dishwasher -- right after supper. This is a HUGE step for me :)
6. Turn the TV off night: Maybe when it's warmer and we can go outside . . . Though, last weekend, Maggie was in her room and when I walked by she hollered out at me "Mommy, want to play a game with me?" and we played the Brown Bear game on her bed.

January in Montana

Today, it is 3 degrees. Ah, winter in Montana. Last weekend it was 60. We had some people over to watch the football games and Rocky & the men sat out in the garage with the door open, enjoying cigars. Maggie and I went to the zoo on Monday (daycare was closed for Martin Luther King Jr Day) and played in the garage with her trike. One of the nice things about living in Montana is the weather -- mild and dry. We do see the extreme temps (bitter cold, sweltering heat), but not in the same manner as Virginia, Michigan or even South Dakota where humidity has some say in weather conditions.

So, in a small effort to not get into a winter funk (it's actually cloudy today -- typically even on the cold days, it's sunny here), I'm posting some pictures from last Monday:

Potty Training Woes

After the week at home with Maggie over Thanksgiving, she has done very well on her own. She rarely has accidents at daycare and has even woken up once or twice in the night and told me she needed to use the potty. Except for poopies. Almost every day, Maggie will come home with soiled underpants and will tell me that she "pooped in her pannies." So last night, when she came home in the same panties she went to daycare in, I asked her about it "Did you poop in the potty today?" She told me that "Big girls poop on the potty!" And I replied "And you're a big girl who poops on the potty at daycare, right?" Maggie: "No, I don't poop on the potty at daycare!" Guess we still have some work to do.

Inauguration Thoughts

Yesterday was really a historic day and I tried to watch as much of it as I could. A few thoughts:

1. I understand it's in the constitution, but is it really necessary to continue having inauguration on January 20, regardless of what day of the week it falls on? Obviously, this year, people were willing to take the time off work to hit Washington DC and at the hospital, there were lots of people gathered around what TVs could be found. But I ended up missing Obama's oath and was forced to try to watch his speech with the streaming video on my laptop computer -- which was haphazard at best. It was like the speech was coming to me through a bad cell phone connection. It did get me thinking though: was this the first inauguration that people have been able to watch via streaming video online? Or maybe it was just the first that people actually wanted to watch. I don't know that it was really around in 2001 and if it was around in 2005, did anyone care to watch it that way? Anyway, it would be nice if the inauguration ceremonies were changed to the weekend to allow more people to at least view them on TV. The last inauguration I watched was Clinton's first, and that was really just because I wanted to hear Maya Angelou.
2. My daughter will never know life before a black president. That's a little amazing to me. To her, it will just be how things are. Perhaps, she may also never know life before a female president, but maybe not if Obama gets 2 terms. The first president I remember is Carter and the 1980 election. I would have been 8 years old and we thought we were so grown up talking about the election and the hostages.
3. Totally superficial, but Michelle Obama looked lovely. I loved her dress last night. And the girls were adorable as well, though I haven't seen what they wore to the balls (if they got to go). I feel for the girls and hope the Obamas are able to keep them out of the spotlight as much as possible (much like the Clintons did with Chelsea -- whom Maggie got to meet while they campaigned in Montana last summer. Chelsea visited Maggie's daycare).

It was an important day in our history and I'm happy to live in a time that I am able to be a witness to it from the other side of the country, even while sitting at my desk.

Cookies!!

Maggie and I baked cookies today. I think they turned out pretty good, though they are crispier than we like (I wasn't paying attention and, well, forgot them. I did set a timer, but didn't hear it right away). Maggie had fun helping.

And tasting. As Maggie would say "It's really taste!"

Great Works of Art

Maggie has been in day care since she was 8 weeks old and she has been making art since about that time. Well, maybe not that early, but I know when she was a few months old, the care givers as VCU Child Care put those little baby feet into paint to make art for the wall and we took her to a pottery place and put her little baby feet onto mugs for the grandparents. Most of it has come home. And I think I've kept about 50% of it. Of course, that doesn't include all the pieces of art she has created at home, though I've probably kept fewer of those. Most of the pieces are in a box in the crawl space. I have 3 pieces in my office, 2 finger paintings hanging on the inside of cupboards and a few that I kept out with the intention of possibly framing. If I learned nothing else from my first job in Grand Rapids (and I probably didn't), I learned that your child's drawings should be considered priceless pieces of art and hung on the wall. Okay, not ALL of them are worthy of framing, but there are a few. I do hope that Maggie continues to enjoy art and maybe even comes to appreciate art that wasn't created by her. In the meantime, her "board" will help her create many many beautiful works!

Resolution Update

I figure if I'm going to make resolutions, I need to track my progress so here goes:

1. Get Maggie in her own bed more often: Little progress. Though Rocky put her to bed the other night and she slept there all night long. I put her in her own bed last night and she slept until around midnight, when I was woken up by Rocky telling me she's awake and calling for me. I laid by her for a little while until she asked to go to "Daddy's room." She tossed and turned there until she finally told me she had to go potty. I think that's a pretty good reason to wake me up, especially when she really did go potty and it wasn't just a stall tactic.
2. Find a new church home. We attended a Presbyterian church on the other side of town last weekend. It is small, but very friendly. The crowd seemed older, but they only have one service (11 am) and football starts at 11 am here, so I'm curious to see if the crowd changes when football is over. We couldn't find a church we liked with an early service, so we are expanding our criteria.
3. Lose weight/eat healthier: Slow progress and I should probably split this out. But for now . . . I'm tracking my food on spark people.com and have been for a few months. It also allows me to track my activities, but I don't believe their calorie burning counts, so I try to just keep track of my time and disregard what they say about calorie burning. My tracking has been lacking lately, and I find I eat better if I have to account for it! I did skip my work out last night with a lame excuse: I wanted to use the Wii and Maggie was watching TV there.
4. Eating at the table: We are doing great on this one! Every work night we have eaten at the table. I was a little lax this weekend, but right now Maggie loves to help, so she will start setting the table for me while I finish up dinner.
5. Turn the TV off night: I think I might try this tonight. It is Rocky's workout night, so I think I will bring out Uno and Candyland and see if I can entice Maggie. I don't enjoy Wednesday night TV, but if the games don't work, I am going to try to get her into the Planet Earth shows on Discovery. I've DVR'd a few and I think they are cool. She did like seeing the humpback whale on one episode. So at least it would be "healthy" TV tonight.

Silly Maggie

Maggie loves to "help." Today, she "helped" me fold laundry. It mostly consisted of her putting Daddy's socks on her legs and arms, and trying to get a sock on her head. It didn't fit.

2009 Resolutions

I've been thinking about resolutions the past few days. I seem to make the same every year: lose weight, eat healthier, etc. While those are still in view, I thought there are a few others that I should pursue:

1. Get Maggie in her own bed more often. Maggie used to be a pretty quiet sleeper. Not so anymore. She's a very warm blooded little girl and when she gets hot in the night, she starts kicking the covers off. She is usually snuggled close to me, which means, my covers get kicked off as well. My hesitation is that she still wakes up in the night and isn't good at getting herself to back to sleep, so I get "Mommy, where are you?" through the monitor. Which means my sleep is disrupted. And the most important thing here is that I get my sleep!
2. Find a new church home. We've been on this search really since leaving Michigan. We loved our church there -- it was a great fit for us. We had a pretty good church in Virginia. And now, here we are in Montana, back in the search. We need to stop looking for another Westminster and just look for a good fit.
3. Yeah, well, I'm going to keep losing weight and eating healthier on the list because they need to stay there. I did set up a work out schedule for Rocky and me and I did about 40 minutes (total) on the Wii Fit last night. I like the Wii Fit because I'm not doing the same thing for 20-30 minutes and I still feel like I get a good workout.
4. Along those same lines, we need to eat more meals at the nice dining table we have and not in front of the TV. We all eat better that way, and it seems like Maggie actually eats.
5. I would like to establish a game night and turn the TV off, but Maggie is still a little young for board games. We could make it a Wii night as Maggie loves to play "The Wheel Game" (MarioKarts), "Make Music" (Wii Music) and "Do Strong Legs" (yoga on the Wii Fit). However, it's not always fun for us to play those games with her, but maybe that's just all part of being a parent.

I think that's a pretty good list, pretty long. I'll have to check back on this list in a month to see how well I'm doing.

Kicked out of Yellowstone

Okay, we didn't REALLY get kicked out of Yellowstone, but we didn't get to spend as much time there as we would have liked. Rocky's folks came for a visit over New Year's and we thought it would be fun to visit Yellowstone in the winter. We looked into a Snow Coach ride, but we only wanted to spend half a day in Yellowstone and it was more affordable to take the trip ourselves. We had more flexibility and would be able to drive every where the 1/2 day trip in a snow coach would go as well. We also decided to splurge and got a suite at the Best Western in Gardiner for the night before -- well worth the splurge!

The weather forecast was for cold and light snow. We left New Year's day after lunch and got to Gardiner right after dark. We had a nice supper and enjoyed our suite. There was plenty of room for Maggie to run, run, run together with Grandpa. The next morning, Maggie got us all up early, so we enjoyed a nice breakfast before heading to the park. The wind was blowing and it was snowing a little, but we figured once the sun was up, it would let up enough for us to enjoy the park.

We saw lots of deer and elk on the short drive from the hotel to the park. Rocky started taking pictures right away (and is trying to figure out where they got saved on his camera).

We got to the ranger check-in station and were then informed that we probably wouldn't get much further than Mammoth as it was snowing and blowing, and one of the Yellowstone snow plows was stuck on the road to Cooke City. We had come this far, so we weren't going to turn around right away, but thought we would check it out. We saw more elk and deer, and some big horn sheep and a bald eagle on the 5 mile drive to Mammoth. We could watch the temperature drop on the drive up the mountain -- even with the cold temps and blowing snow, we saw a few truck-bed campers at the campground. By the time we arrived at Mammoth, we knew our stay in Yellowstone wouldn't be long. We drove a little past, but the ice and snow were more than we wanted to risk. We did check out the gift shop. Maggie had fun making flattened pennies with Grandpa and even got an "official" Junior Park Ranger badge with her name on it. We had to get it as we so rarely find anything that is pre-printed with "Maggie." And then we headed home -- noting we would be back!

The three hour drive home wasn't bad -- it was clear so we were able to see the mountains. We swung through Red Lodge for lunch and some fun shopping. Maggie finally fell asleep between Red Lodge and Billings and didn't wake up until almost bedtime! All in all, it was a nice way to start off 2009!