Laundry = Bath Time + a Walk

Monday night it was laundry day, again. We have decided to try and go once a week instead of every 2-3 weeks so we aren't there quite as long. We are there long enough for Amelia to make a mess of herself though!


Gross! We let her crawl around because there isn't much else she can do. She will only sit in her stroller for so long before she freaks so we reserve stroller time for when we are folding everything! Laundry day is always bath day for Amelia. She has so much fun in the tub!



Last night, after dinner, Jason and I went on a walk around Bay View since it was a nice night and ended up at Babe's Ice Cream 5 minutes before they closed! We got a treat and walked home. Amelia had a great time:


See the chocolate on her lips? We let her try a bit of our ice cream :)

That has basically been our week so far. Pretty boring!

Cleaning Day

NOTE: The 2 videos on here don't seem to be working right now. They were working yesterday, so I am going to just leave it be and see if they start working again. I am hoping it is just an issue Blogger is having.

Today, on our last Monday off as a family, we cleaned. We cleaned the house and we did our laundry! Amelia is a funny kid. She is terrified of most of her toys that make noise but she loves the vacuum cleaner:


After cleaning around the house, we headed to the laundromat. Amelia tried her best to help out:


She kept closing the door on me:


(I took this through the door)


Wait, that's not right!

While we finished getting things going in the washer, we had to contain Amelia somehow:



Doesn't that look like fun? It was until she tipped the thing over. She didn't get hurt but at that point I had hurt myself:


It has gotten worse since I took this picture too. Basically, as I was closing one of the washers I heard Amelia shriek and turned quickly to make sure she was ok in her "cage". Well, she was. It was a happy shriek. I, however, had smashed my middle finger in the door handle. It is all bruised underneath the nail today. I am not even using that finger to type. It hurts that much!

Amelia is so fascinated by washers:


She is also fascinated with laundry carts:


In fact, we spent a good chunk of the night wheeling a laundry cart around while Amelia crawled after us. She was so determined to catch us! I tried to get a picture of her concentrated little face but they never turned out. I can show you this:


That is how dirty you get crawling around on the floor at the laundromat.

This is a video from yesterday morning:



This is what Amelia does these days. She plays and all of a sudden starts crying. I am to the point where I am starting to think it is hilarious. I know she is fine. I think she knows she is fine too. So why the crying?

ps - I showed Amelia this video and she watched it and smiled. So apparently she thinks it is funny too...after the fact!

What a Wednesday

Wow, last night we were in bed by 8:30 and I think I was out before 9! We have gotten a lot of sleep the past two nights, which is great!

Today we went and got all of Jason's laundry washed. Amelia is still amazed with the washers. It's a lot of fun watching her be so enthralled with something so ordinary:


After that we headed to Blain's Farm & Fleet (not Fleet Farm, Fleet Farm is ten times better than Farm & Fleet) to get me a new jacket. I don't quite fit into mine. I am hoping that by next winter I have gotten rid of some of my excess, so I can fit into my nice Columbia again! While we were there we also got Amelia a couple of Christmas gifts. Their prices were lower than Target!

She is finally sitting up:


She has been able to a couple of months now but never wanted to. She'd sit there for a few seconds and decide that being on her belly was better. Now she is figuring out that sitting up has it's advantages too!

I put her into her pack 'n' play this evening so I could do a few things and when I looked in on her, this is what I found:


The poor thing was worn out! Since we were out most of the day she didn't get her usual nap. She napped in her carseat while we were out, for maybe an hour, but that is nowhere near the length of her usual late morning nap! I got her up a little after 5, changed her into pajamas and let her play for about 30 minutes and I put her to bed!

Over the weekend, Amelia learned how to pant, like a dog. She sits there, panting, with her tongue hanging out. Why??? All we can figure is that she picked it up from Molly, her Great-Grandpa Peterson's dog. Molly panted in her face a few times and now Amelia pants too... It is so strange. For awhile I thought something was wrong with her, like she couldn't breathe, but she is fine. She is her normal self, only she pants now. This picture was taken while she panted:


Strange little thing that girl is.

This evening I have done all the dishes (there were a lot, remember, we had "Thanksgiving" dinner last night), done some everyday picking up, made applesauce and more! I have lots more I'd like to do tonight so my momentum better stick around!

Our Tuesday

Well, it was another typical day...which means, nothing too exciting to report. Over the weekend we became more determined to get Amelia to accept her sippy cup. She is starting to get it, but is not quite there yet:


Saturday I held her, screaming, and kept the cup in her mouth until she started to drink from it. So, she will accept it, eventually, from me. When she has it on her own she is more content to chew on it than anything. I gotta get her to understand she needs to tip her head back a little and maybe she'll be an independent drinker!

Amelia has her lamb hat and mitten set already (seen in this post). But I got her a hat and matching mittens from Target's dollar section too:


Now she has a set for days that aren't too terribly cold.

We spent this evening at the laundromat. It was nice to be there without being rushed for once. That doesn't happen too often. Amelia was in fairly good spirits despite it being past her bedtime :)

Change in Plans Today

This morning the weather was not suitable (see above picture) for us to do outdoors activities. We woke up at 7, heard the rain and the cars driving on wet roads, and we went back to bed for an hour. We got up a little after 8 and tended to Amelia's needs and got everything ready for the laundromat. We had the place to ourselves today for once! Amelia had her morning nap in her carseat and Jason and I played around with the camera. This one picture pretty much sums us, and our relationship, up:


Once Amelia woke up she went flying around the laundromat with her daddy:


Amelia even joined in the laundry fun once the clothes were dry:



After we finished our laundry we went to Whole Foods to get some produce. The produce we were going to get at the farm to be precise. On our drive along the lakefront we noticed the Villa Terrace (decorative art museum) was looking pretty, so we took a picture:


Amelia has been all smiles this afternoon:



Lastly, here is a picture of tomorrow night's project:


I asked Jason if we could make baby food together tomorrow night when I get home from work so hopefully it works out!

Mother-Daughter Morning

This morning (well, actually, it is after midnight, so yesterday morning) Amelia and I ran errands together. We got up and she had her first taste of pears...which went well. She likes her fruits! After her breakfast we got ready to leave the house.

First we went to UWM so I could photocopy some reading for class Monday. We don't buy all the required texts (either for reason of cost or reason of availability of the text) so most classes have books "on reserve". I have four chapters from two books to read for my graduate course out of books on reserve. I opted to photocopy them to bring home because reading in the library with a very active 7 month-old seems problematic to me. I will need to get that done tomorrow night, no questions asked...she is expecting us to give oral reports on what we read (vs the usual typed papers on everything we read). I would much rather write a paper (I never though the day would come when I would say that!).

Once we left campus Amelia and I grabbed some fast food for a snack because I was starved. In my hurry to get Amelia ready and get her fed, I never ate. After my snack we headed to the laundromat (my work clothes were in desperate need of washing). It was the first time I had ever done laundry without Jason (he was working brunch). I amused myself by using the timer to take pictures of Amelia and I. We got a couple keepers, like this one (note my new glasses):


I had some trouble getting her to look at the camera. Remember, when the orange light goes on on the camera, she does that goofy, scrunched smile. Well, when the timer is counting down that orange light flashes for every second. We were on a ten-second self-timer, so she scrunched up, ready for a picture for about the first two seconds. Then she would get all confused and start looking around. It was fun. I am sure the people in there thought we were weirdos :)

Amelia likes the laundromat. Here she is watching our clothes be washed:


She is bent over like that because she discovered that on the tile floor she could push herself. I would sit her up, normal, and then by the time I got the camera ready she had pushed herself back and was enjoying "the show" bent over.

I was hoping Amelia would take a nap during at least part of our laundromat visit but there were two very loud and active kids there, running and screaming the whole time. Once I tired of playing with the camera self-timer Amelia hung out in her carseat. She would lift her legs and slam them down over and over and at one point she had moved herself into the middle of the room. I see what they mean about warning parents about putting those carseats on elevated surfaces! Had she been on a counter, she would have fell and she wasn't strapped in! Here she is being a good girl in her seat:



Tonight marked my second shift working the Milwaukee Film Festival. Once again there was a movie being screened that I wanted to see :( Every film I want to catch is on a day that I am available to work! Isn't that the way it always goes? The following is a list of some of the films I would like to see from the festival. This list is a virtual list to myself, so that I have somewhere to reference in the future (I will lose a post-it with movie names on it in about 2 hours. This is more finite):

Waterlife
No Impact Man
Seraphine
North Face

I am sure there are more that I have already forgotten, so I might have to add to the list over the next few days. We were able to watch last night's feature (Modus Operandi) in the comfort of our own home :) It was made by a local filmaker and he had copies available. I texted Jason and told him that and he said to pick one up. No sense in us missing everything from the festival, especially when I work at one of the venues!

I had better head to bed because I open in the morning. I am just not that tired yet though! Hope everyone is having a good weekend :)

Laundry Day

Today was laundry day for us. This means packing everything up and heading across town to the laudromat near our old apartment. There are closer ones, but we are partial to this one. When we go during the day it is pretty quiet in there and we can do ALL of our laundry at once, I mean we're talking on average 12 loads and sometimes as many as 15+. We get there at least once a month, on average usually every 2-3 weeks though. Is is also next to Glorioso's, which we both enjoy.

Amelia likes the laudromat, she even "helps" us!




Where's the baby?
We tend to fill these table 2 or 3 times when we are folding. We have a lot to wash when we go!

Now it is time to put away all that laundry and get ready for a long night at work. I hope I get all the closing chores done fast tonight so I can read for school and maybe get some sleep tonight! I get off at 1 a.m. and have reading/studying for the mid-term to do before I go to bed. I am thinking that with a baby in the house an all-nighter would not be as "fun" as they were pre-baby...so I want to get as much as I can while at work tonight, I need my sleep!

*Upon looking at this post I am amazed at the differences in picture quality of my cameras. Today's were taken on my old, beat-up point-and-shoot, which we don't use as often anymore because the Canon Rebel xti takes amazing pictures (it is double the megapixels of the nearly 6 year old point-and-shoot). One of these days we will get a new point-and-shoot, because sometimes, like laundry day, lugging the SLR around is just not easy.