Car! Car! Car!

Today I ran errands, with a car, while Ryan was at work!!!  From January-May, Ryan was able to take public transit to work, but he moved to a different job and there is no easy public transit to where he needs to go.  Since May he has been driving to work each day and I have been home with no car.  This job is about an hour's drive away (that's how big Houston is) and it's not feasible for me to drive him there.  We don't really want to buy a new car until we have a little more job security, and even then I think we'd just like to move really close to where he would work and continue with one car.

It was a struggle, but I think I did very well not being able to get out during the day.  The heat made it worse, since I couldn't even take Willa for a walk somewhere; however, we traveled a lot during the summer and I just got used to really being STAY-AT-HOME!  Thank goodness for our apartment's swimming pool, I think it kept both Willa and me sane.  One of the hard parts of not having a car during the day meant that I had to do all errands and grocery shopping during the evenings or on Saturdays.  This is not fun because that's the only time to be with Ryan!  It was so great to get things done today without having to crowd our weekend out!  Still, I learned a lot by staying home.  I think our grocery bill went down because I really had to plan out our meals for the week and then just go to the store once.

Ryan's parents got a new car and brought their old car out to Houston for us to use.  Thank you!!!  They drove in on Friday and flew out this morning.  Besides being excited about having a second car, we were thrilled to see them.

We got all kinds of projects done while they were here!  Plus, not only do we have a car, we have a baby gate around the harps, a new carseat, and a box of delicious German chocolate bars that Melinda bought at Aldi and brought down for us.  Does anyone else have Aldi?  I've only gone to it in Ohio and it is amazing, I wish they had it here!  You save so much time at the store by not having to make decisions.  I need ketchup, there's only one brand of ketchup there so there is no dithering about Heinz or Hunt's or Kroger's brand.  Plus, with all those less decisions, the store is small and it doesn't take long to walk through.

Here is Willa playing with a little toy that I found at a garage sale on our morning run last Friday.  I don't normally stop at every garage sale, but we've been in the market for a changing table and we finally had success!  Since I was already buying something, I decided that I might as well get something fun because who can resist that cute face?!  She has fun crawling in and out of the little door.  It was perfect timing for the changing table, too!  Ryan's dad was able to help with a weekend paint job, pictures coming soon!

Grandma Daniels and Willa.  We didn't get many pictures, but I think our Skype chats are doing the trick.  Willa wasn't very shy and had fun playing with grandma and grandpa!  She thought grandma was especially hilarious sometimes.

Willa is 11(!!!) Months!

Willa's 11 month mark was yesterday and I totally forgot about it until about 4:00 p.m.  I blame it on the heat.  She was born in the Autumn, so it stands to reason that it should feel more Fall-y if she is already 11 months.  

Look at that giraffe next to her.  There were big changes this month!

She's got quite the personality and loves to smile at everyone and everything.  She is happy in church as long as she can stand on the pew and smile at the kids sitting behind us.  She's very flirtatious and likes to stare at people until she catches their eye, then turn her head and hide abashedly.

We've got a little mover!  Her little arms finally got strong enough and her very laborious army crawl turned into real crawling.  She is EVERYWHERE and I love it.  She is so happy being able to go where she wants.  She's starting to learn that there are places she shouldn't go and things she shouldn't touch.  She slowly starts crawling there and then lunges and speedy crawls towards it as soon as she sees us coming to get her.  It is very charming.

I love these last two pictures.  They sum up her personality.  She is so excited to see Ryan and is trying to get him and the camera.  I kept sitting her on the couch and she would immediately lunge forward and start crawling to Ryan.  She gets so happy.

Attack!

Overall, she is still so much fun and so good.  She still sleeps from about 7:15 pm - 6:45 a.m. every night and takes two solid naps.  She loves her pacifiers in her crib.  I keep about four of them in there and she likes to repeatedly take them out and put them in until she falls asleep. Sometimes when I get her up she has a pacifier in her mouth and one in each hand.  

She is not a very good eater, unfortunately.  She is very picky and it is maddening to figure out what she will eat that day.  If we put something on her tray that she doesn't want, she looks at us and then very deliberately picks it up and drops it off the side while keeping eye contact.  I think a lot of it is texture and a lot of it is just her not wanting to try something new.  If we allowed her, she would eat peaches all day (but wouldn't we all!) and nothing else.  Right now she will eat peaches, bananas, peas (sometimes), chicken noodle soup, chicken nuggets, green beans, eggs (sometimes), whole wheat bread (sometimes)  and that's about it.  Oh, and she really likes oatmeal for breakfast.  I cook some Quaker oats, then put a little bit of brown sugar and a lot of cream on them and she loves them.  She has them every morning.  I always try new things and can get a couple of bites in before she starts dropping it on the floor.  I'd rather cook food for her rather than buying a bunch of processed stuff, but yesterday I bought a bag of chicken nuggets out of desperation.  I only have so much patience for preparing several different things and having her toss all of them off the side of her tray.

She is still my running buddy most mornings.  When it's really hot outside, I put a water bottle in the stroller for me and a sippy cup for her.  I feel like we're kind of bonding together as I chug out of the water bottle and she drinks from her sippy cup.  She's gotten very proficient at the sippy cup. Right now we're just putting water in it; we don't really drink a lot of juice here, so I figure that she doesn't need to either. She can eat the actual fruit instead of drinking the juice.  I'm planning on weaning her straight to the sippy cup. When I stop nursing, I just give her the milk in her cup and not bother with a bottle at all. 

There was a little break between Ryan's projects so he was home for about a week and Willa has had a lot of fun with him.  Now that she's more active, she likes playing with him more.  Sometimes she will even reach for him if I am holding her!  She gets very excited to see him when he is home.   

She's just such a little joy in our life.  She is so much fun, I don't think she can get any more fun, but then she does!  If you ask her to give you a kiss, she will open her mouth and lick your cheek.  If you ask if she is done eating, she will pull at her bib.  It's just amazing to see her start to understand things and communicate.  She still doesn't have any teeth, but she has had two little bumps in her gums for the past month.  Last night I felt in her mouth and could definitely feel a little sharp thing cutting through so I think it will be here any day.

Rothko Chapel

In our search of cheap entertainment, Ryan and I decided to go to the Rothko chapel last week. 

Basically, it's a non-denominational sacred place that was mostly designed by Mark Rothko (he worked with an architect) and the inside is covered with some of his large panels.  It was extremely lame.  First of all, I think my expectations were off.  The Paris Opera House commissioned Marc Chagall to paint the ceiling dome there and it looks awesome.  I kind of forgot what Mark Rothko's "thang" was and was expecting something awesome like what Chagall did at the opera house.

Chagall ceiling in Paris:

That was not the case.  We walked in and found ourselves in a pretty uninteresting room full of dark, nearly-identical panels.  I found this photo online, believe me - I'm converted to the magic of photography now.  The place didn't look halfway as cool as this, which only looks semi-cool anyway. 

Rothko Chapel:

The building itself even seemed kind of lame.  We went in, sat down, and it was just this small room (full of chairs, not these nice benches) and the lighting was lame.  I don't think the lighting illuminated the paintings nearly as well as in the photo, but it could have been the time of day.   Ryan was like, "I'm not going to pretend to admire this stuff." So we walked out.  I feel like Ryan aren't connoisseurs, but we can appreciate art.  Thankfully the trip wasn't an entire waste, in the same block was a modern art collection that we went to instead.  It was a smallish museum, but there were some good things (a little heavy on the Surrealists if you ask me, but it was a private collection).

Back to School

I'm teaching a night class at the community college this semester. I taught over the winter and enjoyed it as much as you can enjoy freshmen writing. I didn't think I'd be able to teach this fall because of our car situation, but they added a night class and asked me if I wanted to teach it. Huzzah! It's going to be a three-hour marathon but only once a week. Tomorrow is the first day and my syllabus is ready. I'm pondering about how to come down as a hard-nose so that my students are more timely about finishing assignments and not missing class this time around. Any ideas?

I'm going to show this clip.

Ryan and I have long discussed what a college professor should wear. We think I should mainly stick to dark, muted tones and lots of layers. Lots of black drapey things, maybe a shawl, a long dark stretchy skirt, maybe a scarf, definitely some reading glasses. Probably some dark striped socks and black chunky shoes underneath. Possibly lots of silver jewelry and bangles. If only I was male and could go with a walking stick and pipe.

Cross your fingers that I don't get any students who will put www.google.com in their Works Cited list!

Crib!

Willa finally upgraded her pack 'n play!  For some reason, I had just assumed that she would sleep in that thing until she moved to a toddler bed, but I guess that's not how things are done.  Mostly, it looked like it was getting crowded and uncomfortable in there; her increased body weight was starting to warp the boards.  We moved up and found her a nice crib.  It was the simplest and smallest one we could find, but it still seems to fill up her little bedroom.

So happy with her new place!

Our little one has become quite the explorer with her new moving skills.  She can go for an hour+ at a time just exploring, except that we frequently have to intervene to keep her or something else from being damaged.

Tragedy: A post in pictures

Sorry for the photo quality, those things reflect light!  Coming soon - Tragedy Revisited: Driver's License Edition.

The Bluths

In case you haven't been following the news, Texas is in one of the worst heat waves/droughts of the state's existence.  I think out of the past 30 days, only one of them has been below 100 degrees.  It is hot hot HOT!  To make matters worse, our air conditioning has been on the fink for the past week.  Not completely kaputz, just enough for me to wonder if I'm going crazy because I would sit around getting hot and sweaty, then the maintenance man would come and tell me that it was working.

Yesterday, it gave it's last farewell and it ended with a bang!  I finally decided that I was NOT going crazy.  What was crazy, was sitting around this extra roomy steam room thinking that my air conditioning was actually working.  After several phone calls, waiting, and nothing - I lost it, marched down to the office and yelled at them.  Well, not quite yelled, but my exasperation showed... or maybe it was my tomato-red face from sitting in a sauna all day?!! I also played the baby card, "My baby is crying because it's so hot!"  This was actually true, she kept waking up from her nap with fitful cries and then fall back asleep; she was only in a diaper and so sweaty.

These people are idiots, but they do respond to intimidation quite well.  A maintenance man came right over, looked at it, and determined that something was broken.  Uh Doy!  Of course they didn't have the part and wouldn't be able to fix it until the next day.  If I had been thinking clearly and not in a heat-induced coma, I might have argued that if they had been prompt with their service then there would have been time to get the part and fix it - so they better darn well fix it today!!  I didn't argue, I just stood there and they told me that they would give us a key to one of the apartment models that they show potential residents!

I think they thought this was a peace-offering because they mentioned that there were beds for us to sleep on there, but it was really quite strange.  The logistics of moving baby sleep stuff and ourselves across the entire complex seemed daunting enough for Ryan and me to see if we could cool off the apartment in the evening by opening all the windows and with excessive use of fans.  This often worked in Los Angeles, since in that land of milk and honey you can usually exist with neither AC nor heater.   Long story short, the apartment did not cool off and at 9 p.m. we trekked across the complex and set up camp.

It was a miserable time, the much touted beds were fakes and it was hard to get comfortable.  Plus, I was just annoyed.  The one saving grace was that I woke up that morning and realized that we were just like the Bluth family from Arrested Development!  We were sleeping in a model apartment!

The living room (see the never-nude in the bottom corner?)

Fake fruit getting washed in a colander

And again, the Never-Nude in all her glory!

I will also add that Willa McCall Daniels initials are W.M.D. - Weapon of Mass Destruction.  We were just like the Bluths!