Thursday, February 26, 2009

Counting

Sheinah and Travis have developed a bit of a new ritual. On our way home from the store, they start counting to whatever number Sheinah picks. It helps pass the time on the way home. Tonight, Sheinah started the counting and asked her daddy to count with her. Normally, Travis says the number first. This time, Sheinah said the numbers. She counted all the way to 20 without missing a number. After 20, she skipped to thirty one for whatever reason and then she kind of started jumping around. It was just so cute to hear her leading her daddy in the counting!

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Sheinah's prayer

We pray with Sheinah every night before we put her to bed. Usually, we do the praying and she does the listening, but we can occasionally convince her to pray her own prayer. A few nights ago, this is part of what she prayed:

Dear God, (some stuff we didn't understand)....everything I know about you, I love...(some more stuff we couldn't understand).

What a profound prayer from such a little girl!

Home Sweet Home

After nearly two years of hard work, our house is finally (mostly) finished...just in time to put it on the market. We were talking about why don't always keep our house looking like it is for sale and then we realized that it is ALOT of work! For those of you who don't remember what it looked like when we bought it, check out these old posts before you look at the Virtual Tour Travis put together:

Original purchase: http://daminnesotabums.blogspot.com/2007/03/movingagain.html

Demolition: http://daminnesotabums.blogspot.com/2007/05/kingston-progress.html

Summer progress: http://daminnesotabums.blogspot.com/2007/06/house-update.html

Painting done: http://daminnesotabums.blogspot.com/2007/06/painting-done.html

Finally done: Virtual Tour
http://www.tourfactory.com/488011

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Princess nightgown

Sheinah has three special nightgowns that we have acquired over the past year. All of them have princesses on them (she is quite facinated with princesses). She has been working hard on getting dressed and undressed all by herself. Tonight, when she put on her nightgown, she stopped with it down at her shoulders and proceeded to explain why she had done this. It took a few repetitions, but Melissa finally figured out what she was saying. She said she was wearing it like this because sometimes this is how the princesses wear their dresses and then she pointed to the picture on her wall of Belle (see picture, it's a weird picture because we had to find one that wasn't copyrighted). Apparently, she'd be trying to explain this to Travis for several nights, but he didn't understand what she was talking about. There is not much you can say to convice her to wear it the normal way when she has a picture on her wall of the "off the shoulder" look :)

Friday, February 20, 2009

It's all baking "stuff"

Melissa has been sick with some serious infection for about a week now. This means Travis, being the amazing husband that he is, has been doing pretty much everything around the house. As a result, Sheinah and Travis ate brinner (breakfast for dinner) several nights this week. Two nights ago, Melissa was feeling well enough to eat pancakes so Travis said he would make some. Now, we don't keep pancake mix in the house anymore because Melissa found a good, easy recipe for homemade pancakes. The family decided that we like the buttermilk variation of the recipe so Melissa pointed out the variation to Travis and then sat down with Sheinah while he cooked. After tasting the pancakes, Melissa thought something tasted odd, but she is sick so she figured maybe it was just her taste buds. After several more bites she asked Travis to show her what he put in the batter. It took only a moment to discover that Travis only made the buttermilk substitution...he missed the part that required him to reduce the amount of baking powder and baking soda in the batter. That in and of itself would likely not have been an issue. However, when he was reciting to Melissa what he actually put in the mix it was discovered that he put three teaspoons of baking SODA rather than baking POWDER. He stated quite adamantly that it said BAKING on it so he figured it was all the same. He then went on to compare cooking to fixing a car, saying that if he wrote detailed instructions for replacing a ball joint would she know the difference between a ball joint and a U-joint. Melissa responded that those parts aren't LABELED :)

Travis did try to eat the pancakes in a show of defiance that they "weren't that bad." However, he finally admitted that they were not good and threw them out. Needless to say, Travis finally understands that the recipe might actually be important.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Sitting Up


Amaris is almost four months old now and she's been working hard on building her tummy muscles enough to sit up. We gave her a try today with a little help from the boppy and she did great. Maybe now her little bald spot can start growing back since she can do something other than lay down on her back.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

My computer

Apparently, we must spend a lot of time on our computers. Check out this video. It speaks for itself.


Friday, February 13, 2009

Curling is a contact sport?

We've been curling every Wednesday night for the past 4 or 5 weeks...it's kind of our date night. This week, there weren't very many people there so we curled in teams of three people instead of four. For those of you who have never curled, let us explain why this small fact is important. When there are four people curling, one is the "skip" (basically the captain of the team) who shows you where to aim your "rock" (the large granite stone) and decides the team strategy. One player throws the rock, one is skipping, and then the other two players "sweep" the rock if needed with the broom to either help it go faster or to make it go straighter down the ice.

Now, when you only have three players, that leaves only one person to sweep. Sweeping is actually the most strenuous part of curling, it takes quite a bit of work. So, sometimes the person who is throwing the rock might need to move quickly after throwing it to help sweep their own rock. This is what happened on Travis' first rock of the second end this week. Melissa was skipping (because she doesn't sweep all that well), and a girl named Courtney was sweeping. Travis threw the rock and felt like he didn't throw it hard enough so he decided to run up to help Courtney sweep. This was probably not the best idea he has ever had. Running on ice is not exactly safe...a lesson that we thought Travis learned five years ago when he got a concussion running on the ice playing broomball. Wouldn't you know, a similar thing happened when he ran this time. His feet ended up in the air and his head ended up on the ice....and he didn't get up.


The short version of the story is that he cut his head open in two places and bled quite a bit on the ice (we are curious about how they are going to fix that up). There was an ER doc curling that night who came over and checked him out, saying that he needed to go get stitched up. The ambulance came and agreed and one of the other curlers drove us to the hospital. Travis got three stitches and four staples and we were out of there in less than two hours. The funniest part was that the doctor who stitched him up actually wants to go curling!


Saturday, February 7, 2009

Nighttime Rise

Sometimes Travis takes Melissa and the girls to school (because he is an awesome husband). We have to leave pretty early to get the girls in their respective rooms at the Children's Place and Melissa to work on time. Since we live in the frozen northland, the sun rises pretty late. Thus, we get to see some pretty awesome sunrises. The other day the sun looked red and Sheinah was facinated by this so she started paying attention to the sky on the way to school. Suddenly, she yelled out "Dad, look, God painted a sunrise for us! How did God do that?" Then she went on to say some stuff we didn't understand. The next thing we heard was something about "nighttime rise." It took us a minute to figure out that she was talking about how the sky gets dark after the sun sets. Travis started to correct her and tell her that was a sunset, but we decided that we kind of liked the term nighttime rise.

Last night, we went out to Perkins to have breakfast for dinner (our whole family can eat for like $15). On the way, there was an amazing sunset that we were watching as we drove. When Travis tried to get Sheinah to notice it, he called it "nighttime rise." Sheinah proceeded to say "DAD (in an exasperated tone), nighttime rise is when the sky turns dark, this is afternoon nighttime rise." If only kids came with a dictionary or something...

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Sheinah goes to the dentist

At three years old, we figured it was time for Sheinah to get her teeth checked out. Yes, we realize that this set of teeth will be replaced, but we wanted her to get used to the dentist while she was young. Travis had the honor of taking her since it was at Melissa's check-up last month that the dentist said Sheinah was old enough to come in. Our dental hygenist is amazing! She let Sheinah sit on Travis tummy while she cleaned his teeth. She told Sheinah what she was doing and showed her all the tools. Thus, when it was Sheinah's turn, she was her usual cheerful self. She let the hygenist do the entire procedure without a single unhappy moment.

The best part was when Melissa asked her how her appointment was...the first thing Sheinah told Melissa was that the dentist told her she had to stop sucking her thumb and stop peeing in her pull-up. Now, the real story is that our dentist has a three year-old also. He DID tell Travis that Sheinah's teeth were starting to be affected by the thumb-sucking and that she did need to stop. However, the pull-up statement was exaggerated. Travis and the dentist were just talking about having a three year-old and mentioned that we were working on her getting through the night dry. Sheinah interpreted that to mean the dentist wanted her to stop peeing :)

Enjoy the pictures (they were taken with Travis' phone so the quality is not all that great).

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Row your boat

Now we can't exactly remember what got Sheinah to start singing, but we thought you might enjoy the performance. It should be noted that we are not entirely sure what she is talking about when she stops singing, but it sure made her laugh!