The Hoogeveens

Good news, bad news

2009-09-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

This seemed to be the theme for our family this August. I'll start with the good news.

First, Ezra turned four! We had a wonderful birthday party for him with some friends and neighbors. I made a cake once again for him, and he loved it. Several months before his birthday, he had already decided that he wanted a Curious George cake. In fact, every time someone would ask him how old he was, his response was, "Three. August, four (as in, he would turn four in August). Curious George cake." Well, it took me about two hours to decorate it, but it turned out beautifully, and I am quite proud of it. :)

My second piece of good news is the development of Lydia's language skills (among all of her other amazing growth and changes). She is talking up a storm. Just a month ago, she would basically just say one word at a time and would often ask one-word questions (very cute!). Now, she has started putting more words together. It's an exciting time in her language development, and we are really enjoying hearing her speak.

Another piece of good news: we have been enjoying lots of fresh veggies from the garden. We only have tomatoes and basil in our garden this year, but we have some friends who have shared a lot of veggies from theirs. I've been making lots of tomato sauce, pizza sauce and salsa. And I had eggplant parmigiana for the first time--it was delicious and I can't wait to have it again!

The third piece of good news is the success I've been having with couponing. My sister-in-law started couponing a few months ago, and I decided I should really start doing that to save some money on groceries. I've been keeping track of my savings from the coupons, and since I started at the end of July, I've saved $133.13! Now, I'm even more excited to continue using them!

Now for the bad news. Recently, we took the van in to the shop because it was doing a bit of shaking/vibrating when I would slow down or sit at a stoplight. When John called after dropping it off, he said, "I have good news and bad news. The good news is it won't cost $1500 to fix the van." "What's the bad news?" I asked. "It's going to be $900 instead." :( Not long after that, I was in a very minor car accident. The other driver didn't see me and pulled out of an alley, hitting the side of the van. Unfortunately, we got false information from the other driver (partly my fault because I didn't ask for enough information) and now we will have to meet the deductible to have the car fixed. So, the good news is that none of us were hurt, and the bad news is that the other driver lied and we got stuck with the at least part of the bill.

On the day of the accident, my mom had been visiting but was leaving for home that afternoon. John had been out of town for a week taking a CPE (continuing professional education, for anyone unsure of the initials). He was flying in that night, so I was alone with the kids that afternoon and evening. I was on the computer checking email and the kids were upstairs playing. I heard them fighting at one point, but they worked it out and continued playing. A little while later, I heard thump, thump, thump, thump...wailing that sounded little very hearty laughter. Lydia had fallen down the steps with some help from Ezra. I ran and picked up Lydia and tried to comfort her even though she was just beside herself. I tried to get her to tell me where she hurt and she kept saying, "Finger," while pointing to her right hand index finger. Her hand was shaky and she avoided using it. She seemed to be pretty with it, but she was very shaken by this. I spoke with a nurse from our hospital, and she advised me to take Lydia to an ER or an urgent care clinic. So, since John wasn't home, my neighbor graciously came with me to help with the kids and give me moral support. After taking xrays, we found out the Lydia had a buckle fracture and had to wear a too-big brace since they didn't have any that fit on hand. After seeing an orthopedic doctor, she was given an appropriately-sized, very cute and colorful brace, and we were told she would heal in about 2 or three weeks. So, the bad news in this situation is obvious and the good news is that she was not hurt in a worse way than her fracture. We are so thankful that she had no head injuries or a bigger break!

Two days later, Ezra was trying to catch a balloon and landed with his cheek hitting the top of a little child-sized chair. His cheek immediately swelled and later turned into a black eye. The next morning, when I went in to get him up, he declared with excitement, "Mama! I have a big cheek!" He has been having fun seeing the development of his bruise and change in color. And he has gotten a lot of attention from the black eye. Again, I think the good news and bad news are obvious. I just wish that he would grow out of his clumsiness, but I see many more bruises, cuts, blood in the future because of his combination of wildness and clumsiness (not a good combination!).

Here are some picture of the kids and their injuries:

Some other recent pictures:

In case you're wondering from the pictures, Paint the Pavement is a neighborhood activity where you paint an intersection of your neighborhood. It takes a lot of planning and preparation, but it is so worthwhile in the end. We did this with our neighbors this summer, and the end result was beautiful. We met and got to know more of our wonderful neighbors and really enjoyed our time. Ezra had a blast painting and was very disappointed when it was all done. I was disappointed too because I thought it would take longer and I never got a chance to paint anything. At least some of my family can take credit!

A Child's Prayer

2009-07-06T19:56:00.000-07:00

I love listening to kids pray. At a certain age, they start realizing that they can say a prayer all their own, one with their own thoughts and words. They are usually very sweet and sincere...and often quite funny. Tonight, we had to keep ourselves from laughing out loud after Ezra's prayer. It was so cute:

Dear Jesus,
Thank you for this food. Bless that give God a heaven.
Amen.

Vacation in Nebraska

2009-07-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

Last week we went on vacation to Nebraska. I'm sure you're thinking, "Wow! Nebraska! How exciting!" But, truthfully, it was wonderful. We stayed in a cabin with my parents and my sister and her family in Mahoney State Park, about halfway between Lincoln and Omaha. The cabin was spacious, very comfortable, and, most importantly, air-conditioned since it was in the 90's most of the time we were there. While we were there, we went to the SAC Museum, climbed a tower in the park that overlooked the Platte River, hiked (while it was still cool in the morning), spent a day at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, had ice cream at a cute little cafe several times in a nearby town, and spent a day in Lincoln (just the four of us). I have two photo albums to share. The first is of vacation in general (mostly the four kids: Ezra, Lydia and their two cousins). The second is of the day the four of us spent in Lincoln--John showed us around since he used to live there when he was in junior high and high school. We really enjoyed ourselves, but, as always, we're happy to be home again on a normal schedule! :)

Really?

2009-06-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

That was John's response when I told him this story. On the exit ramp from the interstate close to our house, there is often a homeless person holding up a sign asking for money. Usually these say things like, "Homeless. Need money for food" or "Hungry. Please give. Anything helps". Recently, I saw sign I've never seen in this same spot. The sign said, "Ninja killed my family. Need $ 4 karate lessons." At least the guy was creative!

Subway

2009-06-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Ezra was looking at a used Subway gift card that we had saved for the kids. I heard him reading the letters outloud which he often does. Then he said to me, "Subway! Mama, this says Subway!" Blown away by what I just heard, I asked Ezra, "Did you just read that off of the card?" He replied, "Yeah, I sounded the letters out and read it." Wow. That's all I can say....wow.

Last week I was visiting my parents in Iowa. My sister and her family live in the same town, so we see a lot of each other when we visit. Plus, our kids get to play together quite often. Ezra loves his cousin, Sean, and he gets very excited around him. The two boys get each other all worked up, and Ezra often gets too physical with Sean, making him worried and upset. One day on the playground, Ezra was hugging Sean a little too tightly. I could tell Sean was getting upset, so I asked Ezra to come over and talk to me. Here is our conversation:
Me: Ezra, you can't be so wild and crazy around Sean. He doesn't like that.
Ezra (looking past me at Lydia and his cousin, Caitlyn, on the swings): Wow, look at them in the air!
Me: Ezra, you're not listening to me. Look at me when I talk to you. Sean doesn't like it when you get so wild with him and hug him so roughly. Did you hear what I said?
Ezra: Wow, their really swinging!
Me: Ezra, can you tell me what I just said?
Ezra: Look at me.
Me: What else?
Ezra: Listen to me.
Me: What else?
Ezra: (Sigh) Oh, I don't know.
Me: Okay, listen to me now. Sean doesn't like it when you are so rough and wild with him. If he's getting upset, you need to stop what you're doing because he doesn't like it.
Ezra--repeats what I just said word for word, looking at me this time.
Me: Now, you need to go and say "I'm sorry" to him.
Ezra: Okay.
Ezra to Sean: I'm sorry, Sean.
Sean: (sweet sigh, like he's happy) It's okay, Ezra, it was an accident.
Ezra: No, it wasn't!

Quotes from both kids

2009-06-11T17:57:00.000-07:00

Both kids amaze me at how quickly they are growing. Occasionally, when I look at them, I'm amazed to see that they are so big. I think I have a constant picture of them in my head of what they should look like. Ezra, for instance, is constantly at early 3's and Lydia is probably more around 12 months. And then I look at them, and Ezra is growing into this tall, long-legged almost 4-year-old boy and Lydia can already have her hair in pigtails. What happened? Did I miss a few months?

When we were in Target the other day, we happened to see some people that were at a nearby campsite last summer when we were camping at Gooseberry Falls. We found out that they live somewhat close to us, and their son, Finn, is around the same age as Ezra. The two boys played together a lot while we camped and had a great time together. Well, when we saw them the other day, Finn's mother said to Ezra, "You look like you've grown a foot since I last saw you." And that got a conversation going between us and how much the kids had grown. In fact, they didn't even remember that we had Lydia then, probably because she was less than a year old and not yet walking. We tried desperately to keep her out of the mud the whole time we were there. Anyway...while we were talking, Ezra had this funny look on his face and kept looking down at his feet. I asked him what was wrong, and he asked me, "Mama, did I grow a foot?" At that point, I burst out laughing and after a while regained my composure enough to explain to him what she meant by growing a foot. Of course, when he realized what it meant, he laughed too.

In terms of learning, Ezra is growing by leaps and bounds too. For nearly a year, he has been able to recognize all the letters and say them in order. He can count to 30 without help and up to 100 with help on the beginning of each set of 10. For several months, he's been working on learning the sounds of letters. And recently, I found out that he knows some very basic spelling. The first time I realized this was when we were out for a walk. Lydia saw a dog and was the first to point it out, as usual. In response, Ezra said, "D-Dog", (sounding out the "D"). "Dog is spelled D-O-G." I was totally floored when he said that to me because I had never taught him that. After hearing that, we've been working on sounding out 3-letter words and spelling them, and, amazingly, he is doing a fantastic job. We're seriously considering homeschooling, and it may just be a breeze to teach him if he keeps this up!

Lydia is also amazing me lately. She has recently started saying, "thank you" and "excuse me", of her own accord at very appropriate times. And just this morning, when I asked her why she had done something, she answered, "Because," as though that answered the question completely and totally. Later I heard Ezra ask her a question and she answered again in the same way. But he needed more of an answer and asked her repeatly, "Because why?", receiving no better answer than before. :)

Well, I could go on and on, and I guess I already have! I'll save more for another day.

Thoughts from the last five months...

2009-06-10T10:20:00.001-07:00

I will offer only one pathetic excuse for not writing more often and then move on to more interesting things. Here is my excuse: our computer is dreadfully slow which takes away from any desire I have to spend time on the computer, other than checking email and doing bookwork for my teaching. There it is, my excuse. Please forgive me!

From late March, when I started writing this post (pathetic, isn't it?!):
Tax season is in full swing for John right now. But this year seems to be going better than previous years. Apparently, there is always at least one big blow-up with one of his audits during tax season (maybe more than that too, I don't know), but this year, everything has been going smoothly. That's great news because it means I won't lose anymore of my dear husband's time to work! At the end of February, he even surprised me by telling me that he would be able to go with me to a family reunion from his side of the family. And he also surprised me with tickets to a Derek Trucks Band concert while we were there!! That was a fantastic concert, and I came away thoroughly in awe of the band and the music.

A few weeks ago, I drove down to visit my family and play with South Dakota Symphony. I took the kids, as always, and I stayed for about a week and a half for my Spring Break from teaching. I always look forward to my Spring Break because every year I go and visit my family for a week. And very often, the weather is beautiful while I'm there. This year was no exception; the weather was gorgeous some of the days while we were there. Unfortunately, we all ended up getting sick with stomach flu. First I was sick, then Lydia caught it, and then Ezra got hit with it, and his was worse than what Lydia and I had combined. He was just a pathetic little boy, laying on the couch all day with no energy to do anything else. Even after his stomach was feeling better, he was so weak after not eating much and losing fluids for a few days the he still didn't do much for a few days and just laid on the couch. One day, he tried to go outside and play and ended up sitting down several times and eventually going inside. Probably the worst part of it, though, was one day when I thought I smelled a dirty diaper on Lydia, and the smell ended up being in Ezra's pants. He was just laying there on the couch, and didn't even know or care that his pants were dirty. Thankfully, we are all well now, and Ezra will no long have to say to me, "Oh Mama, I just don't know what is wrong with myself."

From mid-April:
Tax season is over!!! Last Saturday, we had our annual Family Day that we always have the first Saturday after Tax Season is over. It was WONDERFUL! The day always starts eating out for breakfast, and we went to the Uptowner, a great, local hole-in-the-wall diner that we went to last year on Family Day too. One of the cooks tried to convince me to try something different, but I had to stick with my favorite: The Tex-Mex which is a HUGE burrito with eggs, crispy hashbrowns, cheese, salsa and sour cream. I actually just ordered a half order, but it looked just as big as a full order, and I only got through less than half of it. After breakfast, we went to the Aquarium at the Mall of America, and we all enjoyed that. Lydia was totally amazed at everything she saw and kept repeating, "Shark!" (even if it wasn't a shark she was looking at). I think we liked the cute little sea horses the best. Then we went to a Starbucks and John ended up getting our coffee and a cookie for FREE! They were having problems with the machine the take the credit card numbers and guy just said it was on the house. Food always tastes better when it's free. :) After that, we spent some time at the Legos area, and John and the kids played with Legos while I sat and knitted. When we were done at the mall, we came home and watched a movie with Ezra while Lydia took a nap. Then we had a quick dinner and went out for ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery. I think we all thoroughly enjoyed our day and were very happy to have John back again more. And I believe John is very relieved to have tax season done again for another year.

From today:
A little over a week ago, we went to visit some friends in Chicago and had a wonderful time. We stayed at a condo right on the beach of Lake Michigan. The condo is owned by friends of the friends we were visiting, and it is a second home for them. It is on the 17th floor, and you can see for miles out over the lake. The first morning we were there, it was a little cloudy, but still beautiful. We took a walk in the neighborhood, had breakfast at a local coffeeshop, and walked on the beach in the soft sand. I practiced violin while looking out over the beautiful scenery, and the kids played. That afternoon, we went for lunch with our friends and went to a museum, then came back to the condo and had delicious breadsticks made by John! The next morning, it was bright and sunny, and the reflection of the sun was almost blinding on the lake. It was a great, relaxing weekend for me to prepare for a busy upcoming week.

The quartet that I have been playing with, for the last year and a half, finally gave our first recital last week Thursday. We performed Beethoven's String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18, No. 4 and Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, "From My Life". The performance went incredibly well, and we are all excited about the whole experience. In fact, it went well beyond my highest expectations, and I will definitely never forget the performance. We made sound and visual recordings of it, so hopefully I can get some of it posted on here eventually.

We had a scary incident on the day of the recital. When Lydia was tested for allergies, the only nut that showed up was peanut. However, we now think that she is allergic to pecans and possibly other nuts as well. On Thursday afternoon, we had been baking some cookies withe pecans for the recital, and my sister thinks she saw Lydia pick one up off of the floor and eat it. She wasn't sure it was a pecan, but it most likely was. Not long after that, she started having a reaction to something. Her left eye started getting all red, itchy and puffy. Shortly before I had to leave to get ready for the recital, her eye was almost swelled shut. I called a doctor friend of mine in a panic, asking her to come over and look at Lydia. Apparently by the time she came, Lydia was looking much better, and her eye was nearly as good as new by the evening. Now, we know to avoid all nuts, and keep them completely out of reach to Lydia.

After that week of stress, we retreated to Des Moines to visit family and relax. Then, we came home and I got sick with a stomach flu. I'm really hoping that my kids do not get sick from it because it is dreadful having sick kids!

Our gardens around our house are beginning to look beautiful. We finally got all of our pots and window boxes planted, and our vegetables in the garden, except for some seeds that should have been planted a month ago! I'm hoping for a good bunch of tomatoes this year from our plants.

Since it's been awhile since I've written, I should probably give updates on the kids. First Lydia:

1. Lydia is turning into a sweet, funny little girl. She makes us laugh everyday with something silly she's doing. She's very good at communicating, verbally or nonverbally. She's quite the talker and is always trying out new words. And very often when you explain something to her, she responds with an appropriate, "Oh." And her funniest nonverbal communication is her nodding or shaking her head to any question.
2. She started walking in January, so now she's practically running. Often, she goes too fast for herself and you can see the fall coming from a mile away! She also thinks it's fun and funny to walk in circles until she gets dizzy.
3. Lydia is becoming a little fashionista as well. She insists on picking out her clothes (or at least one article of clothing) most days. If I pick out something unsatisfactory, she not be happy until I pick out the right thing. She's most picky about her shoes. And her hair is now long enough for pigtails--I love them in her hair. She looks so much older with them.
4. Since the weather is now very springy, we've been enjoying our time outside, and Lydia has come to realize how much she loves being outside. In fact, if you mention going outside and don't follow through, she is very disappointed.
5. Unfortunately, because Lydia has been spending so much time outside, her skin has been looking terrible and she's been very itchy. On top of all of her food allergies, I'm afraid she's developed some environmental allergies as well. When she stays inside for a few days, her skin begins to look better, but the first day out again, she looks worse. I'm not about to keep her inside and away from all the fun just to keep her from itching, so I'm afraid she's going to be extra itchy this summer. We may start going to a dermatologist as well as the allergist we've been seeing already.

Now for Ezra:
Not much new with him, but there's always the funny quotes.
1. One evening when we were getting Ezra ready for bed, Ezra wanted help with something and asked John to do it, adding, "You're a good man for it, Daddy."
2. We've been having lots of long, funny conversations lately. The other day, we stopped at a fabric store to pick up my sewing machine that was being cleaned. I noticed on the store that it was 33 years old. When I mentioned it to Ezra, he asked, "So, only 3-year-olds can go in the store?" I told him that I had said the STORE as 33 years old not 3, and anyone could go in the store. So, then he asked, "So, only 33-year-olds can go in the store?" Again, I explained to him that the STORE was 33 years old and anyone could go in the store. When, confused, he asked the same question again, I finally gave up and said, "Ezra, let's just forget I said anything, okay? We'll just go in the store and you can play with the toys." And that was that.
3. When you have kids at Ezra's and Lydia's ages, you start to become familiar with the phrases you say often without realizing it. Ezra has often pointed these out to me in the things he says. When he was around 2, he would ask questions that would start out like this, "Shall we...?" When he was about 2 1/2, he would often say, "That's a great idea, Mama! Is that a great idea?" Lately, after asking me for something (like a piece of candy) and hearing me explain that he can have it later (like after lunch), he responds by saying, "That's what I'm talkin' about!" Or, if I misunderstand him when he asking me a question and I respond the wrong way, he'll say, "No, Mama! I'm talkin' about..." And just the other day, he started out a sentence with, "Now Mama, as I was saying..." :)
4. Ezra's getting better at saying L's, so Lydia is no longer "Yiddia". While I'm a bit sad about that, it is nice to hear him pronouncing words the right way. For a while, he worked so hard at saying L's, and he still struggles with some words. Take the word, "girl", for example: from Ezra is sounds more like, "girler" with the "r" sounding like a little kid "r" sound. Hard to explain, but super cute coming from him.
5. Ezra likes to pick his nose, and we battled it all winter. Nearly every day there was a red streak of blood across his cheek from his picking. He soon figured out that he could hide somewhere to finish picking his nose if I caught him in the act. One such day, he ran to a favorite hiding spot, and I had an idea why. The funny part about this conversation is not that he denies picking his nose but what his exact response is.
Me: Ezra are you picking your nose?
Ezra: I amn't.
6. Washing hands in the bathroom.
John: Ezra, make sure you get that finger that's all dirty from picking your nose.
Ezra: Daddy! I use ALL my fingers to pick my nose!

Other Ezra updates:
I've started doing just a bit with violin with Ezra. He has a box violin and a stick bow. At this point, we're not really faithful about every day practicing, but I'm not concerned about that quite yet. For now, it's fun just playing around with it and seeing how Ezra does. He's actually very good about letting me form bowholds and getting his box violin up on his shoulder. And he loves playing all of the little games I play with my other students when they are just beginning. And we have a cute little foot chart that Ezra had a lot of fun making.

Ezra is also always asking to help with cooking, washing dishes, folding laundry, etc. So, I've started teaching him how to fold some clothes and he often helps me. And, he folds him jammies in the morning and his clothes at night and puts them all away. And whenever we can include Ezra in the cooking, we take the opportunity.

And now for a few pictures.

Recent and Past Knitting projects

Something to make you laugh...

2009-01-15T20:44:00.000-08:00

Today, while I was teaching a lesson, Ezra was whining about wanting someone to play with him and then wanting to play with something I said he couldn't play with at that moment. He continued to whine and even started shouting at me, so I finally put him in time out in the t.v. room. I decided I would leave him there for awhile since he wasn't listening well to me. I ended up leaving him there during the rest of my lesson (about 20-25 minutes). After my lesson, I went in to tell him he could get out of time out and I found him like this:

Some pictures of Lydia that John took tonight:

Blessing

2008-12-19T18:42:00.001-08:00

I have to admit, I am a proud parent. I'd like to think I have the smartest, sweetest, most compliant (well, maybe not most compliant...) kids around. But usually, I drift back to reality and find that my children, although wonderful, are mostly just normal children. This whole evening, however, was a shining moment for John and me as parents. Ezra was his quintessential sweet self. He ate his supper without any encouragement or incentives, and picked up his toys before we asked him. He said his pleases and thank-yous at all the right moments--including a thank-you to me for making jello with him yesterday. He was a wonderful helper to John when making Christmas candy, and he patiently waited to eat one without asking even once if they were ready. And when it was time for bed, he happily went upstairs without complaint, and undressed and put on his jammies all on his own. I'd like to take credit for it all, but mostly I think we've been blessed with a sweet, beautiful, loving child--a gift from God.

Thanksgiving

2008-12-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

We stayed at a hotel with my parents and my sister and her family for Thanksgiving. We had a wonderful time, and both kids thoroughly enjoyed playing in the pool with John. Ezra also had a blast playing with his cousin Sean and his uncle Nate.

This is typical of Lydia whenever she's tired. If you look carefully, you'll notice that the edge of her blanket is under her pacifier. She has done that since she was able to put her pacifier in her mouth by herself. I love it because it's funny, quirky little thing that is very her! :)

Here are some pictures of my sweet little niece, Caitlyn:

We had another cute conversation with Ezra last night. John, Ezra and I had ice cream together after dinner. Ezra finished up his ice cream, and our conversation went something like this:
Ezra: Mmmm...I'm full, Mama. I'm full.
Me: Oh.
Ezra: I think I need more yogurt, I mean ice cream.
John: But you just said you were full.
Ezra: But I need some more ice cream in my tummy.
John: You said you were full, what is your tummy full of?
Ezra: Milk and juice and water and orange juice and apple juice...especially warm chocolate...but not enough ice cream.

Interesting Conversations

2008-12-06T06:42:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to remember to write more funny Ezra things down lately. We've had some funny, interesting conversations lately and thought I would share them.

We have an orange Styrofoam noodle for playing in the pool. Ezra likes to play with it at home all the time. Yesterday morning we were having a conversation through it, trading off talking and listening through it. Here is the conversation we had with it:

Me: Ezra, can you hear me?
Ezra: No.
Me: How do you know how to answer?
Ezra: No.
Me: You can't just say no to everything.
Ezra: But I want to.
Me: So you did hear me then?
Ezra: No, I didn't, Mama.
Me: Well, how did you know what to answer, then?
Ezra: Oh, well bye, Mama.
Me: Bye.
Ezra: (giggles) Let's talk again.

This morning when I walked into his room, he was sitting on his potty. This is conversation we had:

Ezra: I pooped in my potty because I didn't want to sleep.
Me: Oh. Why don't you wipe yourself so we go downstairs?
Ezra: You. You do it.
Me: No. You can do it.
Ezra: Grandma's very good at it. (He was referring to my mom.)
Me: I am too and so are you, but--
Ezra: (interrupting) And Daddy too!
Me: Yes, but you're so good at it that you can do it.
Ezra: Grandma's very good at it, and sometimes she likes to do it, but sometimes she doesn't know how to say no (my dad confirmed this in reference to her children and grandchildren!) ... so she says it like me.

Lydia facts

2008-12-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

It's official: Lydia's first word is Mama. Now, I'm not sure she connects it with calling for me, but she will repeat it when I ask her. I've tried Daddy, Papa and Grandma with no luck yet. But it's very exciting to hear her say Mama with clarity!

Some other exciting bits of information about Lydia:

1. She stands without holding on to anything regularly.
2. She cruises around furniture with at least one hand on whatever she's moving around.
3. She took three steps on her own over the Thansgiving weekend, but it took a lot of effort on our part to convince her.
4. She has several food allergies (dairy, peanut, soy, tomato, oat and egg), but she loves to eat, so we have very little trouble finding things for her to eat. In fact, she's our little carnivore and would love to have meat at every meal!
5. At her last appointment, she was 50th percentile on weight, height and head circumference--nicely proportioned!
6. She's very attached to her blanket (a beautiful blanket made by John's grandma) and never sleeps without it.
7. She LOVES her daddy! (and I do too!)
8. If you ask her to dance, she's does a great wiggle, bounce or dance from side to side.
9. She's incredibly sweet and funny.

There are so many other things I could write about her. We love her dearly and enjoy getting to know her more as she grows up. Ezra still loves her and enjoys playing with her. I hope he continues to love her and show love to her the older they get. They certainly are wonderful children!

Cutout sugar cookies

2008-11-24T11:14:00.000-08:00

Ezra and I made sugar cookies the other day. He had so much fun doing it that I'm going to have to make it a project we do more often together.

Here he is eating one of his creations:

Here's my beautiful Lydia:

I love seeing them play together:

Maybe it's cruel, but I like getting some pictures of Lydia crying just to remember what she looked like. I think it's awfully sweet!

Post bath pictures that I LOVE:

Birthdays, etc.

2008-11-19T17:58:00.000-08:00

Yes, we are alive! And busy! When

Lydia

was born, things definitely changed, but I never anticipated what our lives would be like when she grew up a little. Lately, I find it's hard enough to keep up with feeding, clothing and generally caring for the kids, not to mention other important things...like cleaning, teaching, keeping up with this blog...

Wow, I was just reading through the last post and realized just how much has happened since I last wrote. Here is an effort at relating our last few months to you.

Several momentous events have taken place in the past few months. We celebrated Ezra's third birthday on August 5 and Lydia's first birthday on October 16. Lydia started all-out crawling and then pulling herself up to standing (both sometime in August, I think). She is not yet walking on her own, but she does walk a little with help and behind our toy shopping cart. It looks awkward but is extremely cute. Ezra finally figured out potty training, including sleeping dry without a diaper! In fact, he's been potty-trained now for two months at least. I'm so used to this now that I hardly think of it anymore. What a blessing!

Here's a list of some of the other things that have kept us busy in the past months:
1. a weekend at a cabin with friends (August)
2. tearing apart the upstairs bathroom (August?/September?)
3. working on rebuilding the upstairs bathroom (September to ???)
4. camping with John's family (Labor Day weekend)
5. camping with friends at Gooseberry Falls (September)
6. music gigs for me--South Dakota Symphony concerts, weddings with the quartet, etc.
7. trick-or-treating in our neighborhood
8. knitting (anytime I can!!)--I'll try to post more pictures of my finished projects sometime

And here's a recap of our last few months in pictures:

Ezra's birthday was sortof hard on him. At first, he did not want to turn three. He kept insisting that he was not three, he was two. But he did come around to the idea a few days later. On his birthday, we gave him a little party and invited some neighbors and friends over to celebrate. I made a cake for him, and we all enjoyed it together. Ezra could hardly wait to eat his cake, but when we served him a slice, he only ate about 3 bites and then wanted to go and play. Oh well, the rest of us really enjoyed it!

For Lydia's birthday, we had a little party with friends and family too. It wasn't her first experience with cake, but it was her first experience eating it by herself. Unlike Ezra (or me for that matter), she has no problem getting her hands totally dirty and sticky. Sometime after taking these pictures and loading them on the computer, I seem to have lost around 30 pictures of the event. I can't remember anymore which ones they were, so hopefully they weren't the best ones. At least we have these.

This Halloween, Ezra went trick-or-treating for the first time, and of course enjoyed himself immensely. It was such a beautiful night that our neighbors were all out sitting outside on their front steps handing out candy. When we were done walking around with Ezra, we headed back and handed out candy at our house. Ezra probably had just as much fun handing it out to other kids as he did getting his own! Here's our little dragon (he's roaring in the last picture):

We took a few camping trips this summer. I have pictures from two of them--they're sortof mixed up together here. On one trip, Ezra made friends with a boy camping across the wooded area behind our site. We found out that the little boy and his family live in a neighborhood close to ours! The last picture in this set is of our site when we were packing up from the Gooseberry Falls camping trip. It started drizzling as we started packing up and picked up to a full downpour. John generously allowed me to sit in the van with the kids while he finished up in the rain. As you can see, there were some large puddles after all that rain!

Ezra likes to help his daddy work:

Here are some Lydia pictures. In the first, she's "talking" to John, the cellist in the quartet, whom she loves.

Some pictures of Ezra's affinity to order (the first one is of some beads that are separated by color):

Two happy kids!

One last note: Ezra gave Lydia her first haircut today. We recently bought kids' scissors, the kind with blunt, rounded edges, for Ezra, and he has been spending hours just cutting paper into smaller pieces. Today, I came into the dining room from the family room and Ezra announced to me, "I'm using this to cut hair." "Hmm... That doesn't sound good," I thought to myself. I told him that he should never cut hair with that and that he's only allowed to cut paper. Then I asked him if he cut Lydia's hair. "No, I just cut up here," he replied, pointing to the top of his hair. After a quick inspection, I noticed there was no harm done and was going to leave it at that when I saw a small pile of long hair on the floor--Ezra does not have long hair. Being an intelligent woman, I was able to quickly deduce that Ezra was lying about cutting Lydia's hair. Now, this worried me because Lydia is having some pictures taken on Monday, and I'd like these to look nice. Upon inspection, I found a small patch on top of her head, probably about the size of a dime, cut down to about 1/2". Well, at least it wasn't her bangs. That's more than I can say for the first haircut I got from my sister.

More craislist success!

2008-08-01T06:37:00.001-07:00

Since I forgot to put this in a previous post, I'll just add it to this one. Here is the Mill City Quartet. Look how happy we all are! :)

Last weekend, my parents came up to deliver our van. Then, we were in possession of three vehicles, in needing of selling one. As a result, we've been a bit nervous, anxious and stressed because we are very low on cash! On top of that, John's in the middle of working on a torn-up bathroom, and we have some decisions to make on how we were going to rebuild it. That means that we have to make money decisions while having little cash to spare. We both realized at separate times how unnecessary this stress was and how easily it could be relieved! We prayed that God would relieve our stress, help us to rely on him, and sell our car if it was his will. God is so good! He always answers prayers--sometimes not how we were hoping, but he does always answer prayers. Even though we barely even had to wait on selling the car (John posted the car on craigslist a little over a week ago), it was causing a lot of stress, and we learned a valuable lesson on trusting God. Yesterday morning, John reposted the car on craigslist and listed it on carsoup (craigslist is free, so we waited a bit on listing the car on carsoup since it costs $25). Yesterday afternoon two people contacted John about seeing the car. Yesterday evening, we sold our car! Our burden has been lifted and we feel free. Praise God!

On a side note, we've had some other successes on craigslist in the last week. We sold a clock and a piano, and I'm working on selling our dining table and tv. We've recently been able to upgrade at little or no cost on most of these items (not the clock), so at this point, we have two pianos (one is still at the seller's home), two tables (both in our dining room--see below) and two tvs (the one we're selling is sitting in my teaching studio). This morning, piano movers came over to move our old piano, and on Sunday John will move our new piano in with the help of a few other guys. And tonight, we have somone coming over to look at the table--I hope it sells!!!

This is what our dining room looks like right now with two dining tables. I'm anxious to get the one out of there. We not only have less space to walk around but we also have more table space to leave junk laying around (as you can see from the pictures)!

Here are some recent pictures of the kids to keep you posted on them:

This is how Lydia started out this morning, playing in front of the bookshelf (while I was writing this post):

This is how she ended up (she's waving to me in one of the pictures):

Ezra had fun reading in the pile too:

Lydia fell asleep in the stroller the other day like this (sleeping babies are so precious!):

Ezra wearing my sandals:

Lydia is now an army crawler, occasionally doing a real crawl when she really wants to get somewhere. Ezra's still not getting potty-training. And we're spending lots of time in the kiddy pool and sprinkler outside to keep cool. We hope you're all staying cool too!

My kind of house project

2008-07-24T06:38:00.000-07:00

I don't have any clue how to do the type of house projects that John dives into, but I can do little ones around the house. My type of house project is a mini project like the one I tackled this morning. Okay, I didn't so much tackle it, I just did it because it was pretty simple. When we were on vacation in June with my family, we went to a winery near our cabin, and my sister and brother-in-law gave us a beautiful, unique wine rack. We've had the box sitting on our kitchen floor since then, and I recently got the itch to hang the rack and get the box out of our way. This morning, I decided to just get it done and check it off the list of things to do. Now, I just need to tackle the other hundreds of items on that list...

More quotes from Ezra and other stuff

2008-07-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

Here are some cute recent quotes from Ezra:

Ezra loves watching Curious George and talks often about Curious George and "yellow man with his hat on" (I love how he phrases things). He must have seen a funny one about a skunk recently because he can't get this quote out of his head: "Yellow man with his hat on came out and said, 'Did you be a skunk?'"

Here are two more examples of how he names and phrases things. all yogurt is ice cream to him so yogurt covered raisins are ice cream covered in raisins. The other day, Ezra was trying ask me something about his Grandpa VDH. We had recently seen the VDH grandparents and had spent a lot of time with his grandma, so he was asking about "Grandma's Grandpa".

Yesterday, Ezra was the sweetest boy he could possibly be. In the evening, John was grilling and playing with Ezra in the backyard. They both had a tennis ball, and when both balls ended up in Ezra's slide, Ezra very sweetly said to John, "I'll go get your ball for you Daddy." At one point, both balls ended up behind the lilac bush where mostly weeds grow. Ezra is now pretty trained to be careful around the plants, so he walked in behind the bush and said sweetly, "I need to step very carefully; I don't want to step on any plants."

I know none of this is especially funny, but it gives a little insight into the sweet little boy I get to care for every day.

In Lydia news, she is now very close to crawling and even if she can't crawl, she is very able to get where she wants but rolling, stretching and scooting backwards. She eats a lot of solids now and enjoys finger foods--this makes me very happy because I don't have to spoon feed everything to her. Lydia is getting much better at sleeping through the night. She still doesn't do it every night, but she does it much more often, and she's learning to go back to sleep when she wakes up in the middle of the night. She's just learning how to wave. Generally, she's a very sweet, easygoing baby with beautiful eyes and a heart-warming smile.

My quartet recently had it's first paying gig. We went to Monticello, MN to do a masterclass and recital. This was a for a summer strings program where they have 8 weeks of orchestra and other activities. The masterclass was split up into violins in one room and violas, cellos and basses in another. Our quartet split up accordingly and taught our classes. It was actually a lot of fun and went very well. The students were sweet, polite and receptive. You can't ask for much more. Then, we did the recital afterwards. We played the first movement of Mozart's Eine Kleine and a Beethoven quartet. Before this gig, the first violinist had been in Fiji with her husband for 5 weeks, so we hadn't gotten together to practice in quite a while. Needless to say, we didn't play as well as we have in the past, but it went quite well in spite of that. We're hoping to build a website and make business cards to advertise the quartet. John's going to play around with logos, look into building the site and making the cards. We're all pretty excited about it. The wonderful thing about all of this is that from all of this excitement, we're finding out just how dedicated we all are to the group and how much we all enjoy playing together. It's not often that you form a group, work well together, enjoy playing together and spending time together, and want to continue doing so for the forseeable (sp?) future. I feel honored to be able to play with such great players and be involved in such an amazing thing.

With all of the quartet excitement, I have renewed energy to practice. I've been making myself do more regularly and I have a goal in mind to help me practice. Last summer, I was working on opera excerpts in the hopes that I could audition for Minnesota Opera Orchestra. However, there were no auditions last fall, so I couldn't. There will be auditions this fall, so I'm working hard on the excerpts again. The rest of the quartet plays in the orchestra, so it would be great if we all could be doing that together. When the audition is over, I hope to keep my practice habits up to keep my fingers moving and my technique in place, if not build on it!

This past weekend, I took the kids to visit G & G VDH while I played in wedding. John spent the weekend at home tearing apart the upstairs bathroom and making the upstairs a dusty mess. :) We weren't planning on redoing this bathroom any time soon, but it became necessary when the tiles started leaning out from the wall, ready to fall out at any moment. Therefore, all of the tile and the walls have now been taken down, and John will have to replace rotting wood and rebuild the walls. Then, we'll put up new tile, replace the flooring and put everything back together again. I'm pretty excited about it even though it was an unexpected expense this summer.

Another big expense we have this summer is a new (or new-to-us) van. We are buying my dad's old van and he is buying a beautiful new hybrid. So, yesterday John posted the car on craigslist and he already got a hit on it this morning. Hopefully, we'll get our van from dad before we sell the car! I can't believe how little effort it took to get someone interested in the car!

Well, gotta go calm a crabby baby (usually so calm and sweet but now lacking sleep) and teach a student. Have a wonderful day!

Sweet, Funny Ezra

2008-07-03T18:53:00.001-07:00

At night, when we put Ezra to bed, we have a ritual of putting on his jammies, brushing his teeth, possibly reading a book or doing a puzzle, and laying down by his bed to talk. Ezra usually directs the topic of conversation (lately the topic involves something with Frog, Duck, Pig or Sheep from Word World on PBS). Tonight, when I asked Ezra what he wanted to talk about, he said, "I want to talk about something, but I don't know what it's called. Can you tell me what it is?"

Later, after I had left him to go to sleep, he started crying and was crying fairly hard for quite awhile when John went up to check on him. John asked him, "What scared you, Ezra? Was it a sound?" Ezra replied, "Yeah, it scared my ears off. The monster didn't need to do that."

More black eye pictures

2008-07-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

This is what Ezra's eye and forehead look like today. Poor kid!

Class Reunion and a Black Eye

2008-07-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I had my 10-year high school class reunion. It was a very strange feeling seeing all those people that I spent every day with in high school and now haven't seen in years. Thankfully, there were also many there that I have kept up with regularly or at least a little over the last 10 years. In the morning, John and I golfed in a best ball golf tournament. I am just learning how to golf, so it was an adventure for me. Needless to say, none of my shots were used for the best ball, but we had fun anyway. And noone ever laughed at me--I'm sure that was out of courtesy!

The weather that day was terrible. It was very windy in the morning and not terribly warm. In the afternoon, it continued to be windy and rained quite a bit which prevented some of the reunion activities from being held (mainly just games). In the evening, we had a hog roast and got to catch up with everyone. We were at a park, so luckily we had rented out a shelter house since it rained while we were out there. Not surprisingly, the days before and after the reunion were absolutely beautiful, and we happened to have the worst day in several weeks, weather-wise. Oh well.

We stayed with my parents while were in town, so Ezra got lots of Grandma/Grandpa/cousin Sean time and Lydia got some Caitlyn time, not that they really interact all that much yet. Lydia and Caitlyn wore their matching dresses, beautifully crafted by Grandma, to church on Sunday:
When John got Lydia up from her nap on Sunday afternoon, she still cuddled with John for a long time afterwards. Of course, he loved it--who wouldn't?!

Sean and Ezra had lots of fun playing with water on Sunday night after church. They each had their own watering can:

We ended up staying over on Sunday night too because John had a meeting with a client in Sioux Falls. After the meeting, we spent a very short time at the Falls so we could show Ezra this beautiful park. My mom remarked that Falls park is a little boys paradise--lots of running, jumping, climbing, etc:

Perhaps the "Black Eye" in the title of this post caught your eye. Or maybe you noticed a big bump on Ezra's noggin in some of the pictures. On Sunday night, we went over to my grandparents house after church (it's a ritual for my family in Sioux Center to go over and have "lunch" after church on Sunday evening). Ezra tripped over a rug by their kitchen table and hit his head smack on a corner of a wall. John passed Lydia over to me and swooped Ezra up in his arms as quick as lightning. In a matter of seconds, a large goose-egg had already popped up on Ezra's forehead. The bump was so big, I felt a little sick when I first saw it. Remarkably, Ezra only cried for a little while and was back to playing in no time. But the incident left a very visible mark on his forehead. This is what it looked like on Sunday night (these pictures don't do justice to the size of the bump--it was huge!):

This is what it looks like today:

Ezra's anatomical terms

2008-06-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

Tonight, while John was changing Ezra diaper, Ezra asked John if he was wiping Ezra's "hangin' butt" or "crackin' butt". :)

Vacation, Sisters' Weekend, etc.

2008-06-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of June, we went on vacation to a cabin near Itasca State Park. We went with my parents and my sister and her family. Ezra had lots of fun playing with his cousin, Sean, like normal. Dad went fishing quite a bit. I knitted as often as I had the chance--probably too much because I made my hands and wrists a little sore. We went to a winery, spent a day in Itasca, drove into Park Rapids, the nearest town, and just generally relaxed together. As it turns out, we don't have very many pictures to document our vacation, and I found that we don't have any of my brother-in-law, Nate. Sorry, Nate. :( The majority of pictures taken were on my mom's camera. I will have to ask her for them so I can post them here. Here are some of the ones we got:

The other day Ezra and Lydia were playing together on the floor. I love watching them together. Ezra is very sweet to Lydia and sometimes just likes giggling with her. Here, he's giving us his wonderful "smile" while having fun with Lydia:

Now that it is consistently pleasant outside, Ezra has been outside playing every day. Some friends gave us a used slide to put in our backyard for Ezra. So, we had one more outdoor project to do, in addition to the million other projects on the list for this summer! :) This was a fun project because it looks so nice and Ezra loves it. He's had loads of fun playing on it already. The added benefit to it's positioning is that it covers up our old, ugly garage.

This is what Lydia spent her time doing (I especially love the last one where she's pulling up her sweet little shoulders and grinning that cute little grin):

Here are some other pics of our backyard:

I heard on the news the other day that the bugs are going to seem about 2 or 3 times worse than years past. I've already noticed how bad they are this year. Anytime I go out to water or weed, I get bit about five times. However, I don't want to complain--I will gladly take the bugs over the terrible flooding happening in Iowa. So many people have lost so much, and we just got extra bugs. We're praying for all of you going through such terrible loss.

Last weekend, my mother-in-law, Connie, my two sisters-in-law, Anne and Laurie, and I had our first annual Sisters' Weekend. Since I'm still nursing Lydia, she came too, but she was the only child there. We all stayed in a beautiful hotel in Bloomington and enjoyed some time together mostly kidfree. The first night, we enjoyed wine, cheese and fruit and chatted and relaxed. On Saturday, we spent the morning at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, had lunch at MOA, ate dinner at a wonderful greek restaurant, Gardens of Salonica, and then went to a play, Mom's the Word--absolutely hilarious! The next morning, we had breakfast together with the boys and then all ventured home. While I was gone, Ezra had a great boys weekend with John and John's dad, Steve. On Saturday, they went to the toy store and picked out a toy together and then spent an afternoon at the river, throwing rocks and having a picnic. For pictures, see Connie's blog, Resort on the Hill (about halfway down, she has a slideshow of pictures from a collection of things including our Sisters' Weekend).

An update on Lydia: last night she slept from 8:30 to 6:00!!! I heard her making noise, looked at the clock and couldn't believe my eyes. Then, after I fed her, I laid her down between John and me, and she went back to sleep for another hour and a half! She's just getting better and better. It's so nice to finally get long segments of sleep during the night, and now it looks like we might even get the whole night to sleep. It feels like a luxury!

Also, Lydia now has two teeth. She got them a few weeks ago, and she just looks so cute with them poking through. Ezra was 15 months!! when he cut his first tooth, so I was expecting Lydia to do the same thing. So, she surprised me when she started cutting her first one 8 months before Ezra did. She has not yet bit me while nursing, so I'm very thankful for that!

Some recent funny quotes from Ezra:

1. He had just finished drinking his glass of milk and realized it was all gone. He is very fond of milk and was pretty disappointed when it was gone. He looked up at me with a sad face and said, "Oh, how am I ever going to get more milk?"

2. John heard Ezra whining in the other room. When he asked Ezra what was wrong, Ezra said, "Can you get me that thing that I wanted?" John asked him, "What do you want?", and Ezra sadly replied, "Oh, I don't know."

Last but not least, here are a few other random pictures of our sweet little children.

Ezra showing his fascination with orderliness and sorting:

Helping Daddy:

Playing on his new slide:

Lydia playing with her favorite toy:

Lydia in her exersaucer

2008-06-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

In case you're curious to see Lydia in action, here's a cute video taken about a month ago. As you can tell, she can be pretty noisy when she's happy. :)

2008-06-17T06:32:00.000-07:00

Here is a post that I started a few months ago and never got around to finishing. It has lot of good info about how what our family has been busy with in the last little while. There are two updates to that post. Lydia has, over the course of that past 6 weeks, slept 8 hours straight about 10 times and once 10 hours straight. We're hoping she makes a habit out of it! And Ezra has not yet figured out the potty training thing. I've given up for now and just continue to have him sit on it so I don't have to do so many diapers in the wash. I'm figuring that in a few months he may be more ready to make another big effort.

April 30: Yes, we are still alive. I go through kicks of post-writing. For awhile, I can hardly post enough, and then, if I wait too long, I get overwhelmed by all of the things I should be posting--how the kids are growing and changing, what we've been busy with, etc. John says I get overwhelmed by a lot of things because I experience the same with things at home: dishes, laundry, basic cleaning. No, I'm not a slob; I just find it hard to keep up with a lot of the cleaning with two kids keeping me busy. All this to say... I must be back on my kick of post-writing because here I am writing again. I'll try to be better, but I'm not making any promises.

I'm happy to say that tax season is once again over and I have my husband back!!!! I think Ezra is also happy to have his daddy back. However, this morning, he told me that he didn't want Daddy to go to work, which made John feel really loved and a bit sad at the same time. On our first Saturday after Tax Season, "Family Day", we had breakfast together, did a little shopping at Fleet Farm and a surplus store (where we found lots of great treasures), and just generally enjoyed our time together.

That day we got our $40 coupon to buy a converter box for our tv, and John was so excited that we just had to go out and buy it that evening. The moment we got home, the converter box was out and John was reading the manual. He hooked it up in no time, and we now have a clearer channel than I could ever have dreamed. I can't believe all of the new channels we now have as well due to the converter box. We're enjoying watching more TPT (Twin Cities Public Television) programming and not having to mess with the rabbit ears.

The day after Family Day, Sunday (in case you hadn't figured that out), after church we had a picnic by the river, and Ezra had a blast throwing rocks in the river with John. I included pictures from this fun afternoon in a different post in May. Lydia is quite the mover now.

On Good Friday, while I was practicing at church for our Good Friday service, Lydia was laying on a blanket on the floor playing with toys. I was watching her while I was playing and saw her slowly roll over onto her tummy for the first time. Her arm got caught under her in the process, and she looked longingly at the toy next to her that was now impossible to grab. Since then, she rolls all of the time. She's definitely nowhere near crawling, though, and if she's like Ezra, she won't crawl for another four or five months. I have no problem with that! Lydia is also still a very happy, sweet baby. She starting to do more hearty laughing for more reasons than just being tickled. Hearing a baby laugh is a wonderful thing.

One thing we are still struggling over with Lydia is her nighttime sleeping. When Ezra was six months old, he was well into sleeping through the night and was probably sleeping from 8:00-6:00 without a meal. Lydia, however, is still waking up once a night and occasionally, but not often, 2 times a night. She eats every time and then falls immediately back to sleep. She doesn't fuss once she's been fed, and she really doesn't fuss much before she's fed unless we keep putting it off. We've started trying in earnest to help her go back to sleep but usually just end up feeding her when our patience runs out and we just want sleep. Here and there, she has a good long stretch of six hours, and then we feel like we're on top of the world, but usually it's more like four hours between meals. Ezra spoiled us with his sleeping habits, and now we're having to make up for that. I really shouldn't complain, though, because as a newborn, Lydia never really kept us awake; she just ate and slept. All in all, we're very blessed. I'll try to remember that tonight when she wakes us up earlier than we would like.

Ezra is making slow, but steady progress with the potty training. When we started this whole business three--yes THREE--months ago, I really didn't think we would still be working on it. Last week, my sister started having her son--four months older than Ezra--run around the house without pants, diaper or training pants, and they've been having a lot of success. He will go, on his own, to the potty whenever he needs to, and he hasn't wet himself at all. So, I thought, I'll try that with Ezra. Well, the good news is that he hasn't yet wet himself. I think he's a bit afraid of running around without any training pants on, so at first he spent a lot of time on the potty. But he has gotten more brave, and I think he's starting to get the concept. The other day, he said, "I didn't pee." I took that to mean that he had to, and sure enough he did in a short amount of time once he sat down on his throne. He did something quite similar this morning again. I'm very encouraged and praying that he's got it down by the time we go on vacation this summer.

Ezra continues to love his little sister. He comforts her when she's crying, plays with her and her toys, and makes her laugh. I love seeing them laugh together; it nearly makes me cry.

Visits from the Grandparents

2008-06-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, we returned from a wonderful family vacation with my parents and my sister and her family. I hope to do a post soon about that, but first I thought I better actually send out the post that I started a few weeks ago and wasn't able to finish before we left. Here it is!

Ezra recently got a bubble blowing toy as a gift from a friend. He's been having a lot of fun playing with it lately:

The last two weekends, we had visits from both sets of grandparents (Ezra and Lydia's grandparents, that is) and my sister and her kids. We have been busy entertaining, but we have really enjoyed having them all here. First, we had John's parents visiting us. While they were here, Steve helped John take out our old, heavy, wooden, cracking, rotting front door and replace it with a beautiful new one. That thing was terrible, and we've been wanting to replace it since we moved into our house three years ago. It was solid wood and took far too much effort to open and close, not to mention the work it took to lock it! Opening and closing it was always a two-handed effort, so if I was holding a baby, it was a trick! Well, John found a new door on craigslist (we love craigslist!) that we thought was beautiful. Finally, he was able to install, and his dad sped up the process with all the help he gave. Here are some pictures highlighting the installation.

The spider web keeping the tarp in place since we were doorless for the first night of work:

A view of our tarp door from the outside:

Connie stepping carefully around the hole created when John and Steve took out floor boards to install the door frame:

John break apart the door (I think this, of all the work he did, was the most fun and rewarding!):

John and Steve proudly showing off what was left of the door after destroying it:

John putting the broken door under the porch:

John leaving a message for future owners of the home. In case you can't read it, it says, "Destroyed 5/25/08 Dig straight down 100' to find the loot. - John":

Taking a short break from laying the flooring in the front porch:

Two tired guys:

John showing off his new tool belt:

Grandma and kids having fun together. Connie made a beautiful Candy Land path for Ezra to run up and down on:

Throwing the old keys to the old door under the porch (notice how happy I am to be throwing those keys away!):

Locking the door while holding a baby--so easy!!:

This is what Connie spent most of her time doing:

Look at our beautiful new door!!!:

Going out for ice cream for my birthday (Ezra got his own!):

The next weekend, my family was here. They came to hear my students' play at a recital on Friday and to hear my quartet play at our church on Sunday and also at the recital. Everything went wonderfully. I was very proud of every one of my students--they all prepared well and played beautifully. I had some pictures taken of my students with me at the end of the recital, but, unfortunately, I still haven't gotten any pictures of my quartet together.

On Saturday night, John and I went to his firm's After Tax Season Party. It was held at the Wabasha Street Caves, and we had to try to solve a murder mystery during dinner and dessert. Then, we got a short tour of the caves. We found out many very interesting pieces of information about the caves: during the Prohibition Era, the caves had a speakeasy; at one point, there was a restaurant in the caves that was frequented by many well-known gangsters; the caves were also used to grow mushrooms out of horse manure; etc.

Unfortunately, I didn't get many other pictures of my family visiting, so here are two other random pictures of the weekend.
Ezra, Sean and my mom playing on the front sidewalk with chalk:

Ezra fast asleep after a busy weekend playing:

Vacation and other fun family pictures to come soon!

Family picture

2008-05-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

Today after church, we set up the tripod to take a nice family picture. It took us a bit to finally get the one we really wanted, but Ezra was surprisingly patient and good about taking the pictures. I'm sure it helped that we bribed him with a treat if he cooperated while taking the pictures. You'll notice that we never caught Lydia with a good expression; I guess that would be asking too much.

This is the picture we were going for:

This is how we got there (watch Ezra's progression--he's the most entertaining, John and I look pretty much the same in every picture):

Ezra wanted John to take a picture of his back first

Oops, a little blurry

We all look a little uptight

John's head is partly cut off

Ezra's in his own world

Ezra making an effort to smile nicely

Are we missing someone in this picture?

Ezra "smiling"

Not quite the smile we were going for

Ahh, here it is...not perfect, but you can't ask for much more with a squirmy toddler

Picture update

2008-05-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

My father-in-law is in town for a few days and came over to have dinner with us last night. He made it pretty clear that posting once every two months does not cut it when you have a little baby who's growing and changing quickly. I felt obligated to post pictures of Lydia and Ezra to appease him. :) So, this for you, Steve (and Connie, who also had the same sentiments). I'll try to be more faithful in the future--is this enough for now?

Dressed in Sunday best:

In a thoughtful pose:

Busy playing:

With cousin Darin:

With Daddy:

Asleep on Daddy:

With two members of the Mill City Quartet (the quartet that I've been playing in since November):

Happy girl:

Happy, messy girl:

With friends Amalia and Aletha:

The kids with Grandma and Grandpa VDH:

Sleeping on the couch after falling asleep in the car on the way home from a shopping trip:

Working on a modeling career?:

Playing with his new (to him) garage/ramp--a great find on craigslist for $5!:

Sitting on the potty, playing with markers (sometimes he sits on the potty while having breakfast, lunch or supper too):

At the river throwing rocks, climbing tree roots and sitting with Daddy:

Funny bumper sticker

2008-03-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

Last night we saw this on a bumper sticker:

Upholsterers never die. They always recover.

2008-03-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

I was shopping at Target with the kids today. I was wearing Lydia in the carrier, and Ezra was sitting in the shopping cart in the big area, not the sitting area for kids. He was busy talking away about something. He often just talks, and I find myself not really even noticing that he's talking until I realize he's trying to get my attention. Today I noticed that he was talking to someone, most likely imaginative, as if he was holding a conversation. I overheard him saying something like, "Just hold it, just hold it. No, don't do that." When I asked him who he was talking to, he held up his hands for me to see and replied, "These hands."

I look forward to seeing what else his wonderful imagination creates.

I could be Harry Potter...sortof...

2008-03-07T15:20:00.000-08:00

...without the magic powers, the English accent, and the physical parts required to be a male. Okay, so it's a big stretch, but that's who I thought of when I taped up my glasses today. :)

I was helping Ezra get dressed, he slipped and knocked my glasses down, and I picked them up in two pieces. Then I called John and told him that I had bad news. :( No, I am not planning on making this a new fashion statement. I'm just hoping that the tape will last me until I can get my new glasses...

Here's the culprit:

Here's his darling little sister:

It's tax season again

2008-03-06T07:02:00.000-08:00

Despite how busy tax season has been this year, it hasn't seemed so terribly long yet. In fact, John said to me the other day that he couldn't believe that March has already started, and to him, March means that tax season is nearly finished. Last weekend, John and I went on our first actual date since Lydia was born. It was wonderful! We went for dinner and then bowling. We haven't been bowling together for about 5 years, so we really enjoyed ourselves. And the dinner was excellent. Our neighbors across the street took care of the kids while we were gone--it is wonderful have such great neighbors that you can trust and with whom you enjoy spending time.

Ezra has not made any major breakthroughs in potty training yet. He's still been pretty willing to sit on the potty--especially when he gets to watch Sesame Street or another PBS Kids show--but he's just not recognizing the feeling that needs to yet. At this point, I don't want to stop working on it, but I just hope that he figures out what he needs to soon. I would think he wouldn't mind spending less time on the potty and more time just playing.

After going through several prototypes of fitted diapers, I've come upon the best diapers so far. I finally figured out that if I traced our covers out on a piece of paper and used that as a pattern for the diapers, that the diapers would then fit really well in the cover. I'm not sure why that never hit me before, and it took plenty of diapers to figure that out. Oh well. I also figured out that knit fabric is the best for the outside of the diaper. I started using old shirts from my closet and John's and liked those diapers so much that I went to Salvation Army to buy more shirts for more diapers. Here are some pictures of the newest diapers on Lydia. I hope it's not inappropriate to post the ones of Lydia with only the diaper on, but John liked them the best.

Ezra has been calling me by my first name lately. I don't know exactly where that's coming from, but I suppose it's just from hearing me answer the phone and hearing John talk to me. When we are in the store, he will sometimes say, "Hey Erika, look at this." And the past few days, when he's sitting in bed getting ready to take his nap, I've heard him over the monitor yelling, "Erika, Erika, Pinocchio's coming upstairs." He has a good imagination already. :) Here's a video of him over the monitor. I apologize for my terrible video skills in this clip (even though it's only of the monitor) but I was holding Lydia at the time and when she squirms, so do I, and I forgot to take the lens cap off before I started taping. :)

Well, I finished the beautiful little sweater for Lydia that I was talking about in the last post. I just love it. I have to start making sure that I have my kids actually wear the sweaters that I make for them, and have them use them for at least the amount of time that I spent on making them! So, Lydia has been wearing her sweater every Sunday to church, and I'll have to put her in it more often too. Here she is in it (it's missing it's ribbon in the front to tie it together, but it's still pretty cute this way):

I also made this one for her two weeks ago:

Since it has been starting to warm up a bit again (other than our cold snap for the next few days), Ezra has been having fun playing outside again. He loves playing outside with John--that have a lot of fun together. Here's Ezra after coming in from playing--what bright red cheeks!

I will try to get a picture of Ezra and his daddy playing together too.

Well, have a great week and weekend. I plan on visiting family soon while John is busy. I'll try to get lots of good pictures of Ezra and his little cousin, Sean, playing together.

Cool new diapers

2008-02-06T08:56:00.000-08:00

Well, I have renewed interest in cloth diapering again. It's not like I just stopped using our cloth diapers, but my interest was waning (is that the right spelling?) after having to diaper two kids for a while. Recently, my sister-in-law lent me some of her diapers since her youngest is now potty-training. She had a few pocket diapers, which I had never used before, and I LOVE them. In fact, I love them so much, I ordered a few more of them so I wouldn't run out of them so quickly. I also ordered some pocket trainers for Ezra so that we wouldn't have to keep buying more disposable ones for nighttime and naptime. I can't wait to get them and try them out!

With my renewed interest, I've been doing a lot of online research about cloth diapering again, and came upon a great website some patterns for making diapers. On it, there was a free pattern for making fitted diapers to go inside covers. We have lots of covers, but no fitted diapers, which are way easier to use than plain prefolds. So, yesterday I decided to try it out. I used some large scraps of fabric leftover from other projects to make the diapers: flannel on the outside and the soaker pads, and fleece on the inside to wick away the moisture. I'm so excited about the diapers that I went out last night to buy more fabric to make more diapers. Now, these diapers aren't necessarily store quality, but they aren't bad, if I do say so myself. I'm pretty proud of them--just ask John. :) And I'd like to think that Lydia likes them too since they're so soft on the inside and don't feel as wet with the fleece. I've made four so far, and I think I might try to make a dozen or so depending on how inspired I am. We'll see.

I've also been back into a knitting kick and have made a few things for the kids. Here's a picture of Ezra in his new hat. He loves it because it's red.

Also, a picture of Ezra wearing his training pants as a hat. They're not quite as effective that way. :)

I'm also working on a new sweater for Lydia, which I'm very excited about. It's just a beautiful pattern. I'll do my best to post that when it's done because it's so beautiful.

And last, but not least, here's a picture of John with Lydia in the wrap. John was wearing her the other day while we were making dinner, and she just fell asleep in it. So precious!

Potty Training!

2008-01-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

Yep. That's what we've been busy with lately in the Hoogeveen household. And boy is it a lot of work! My mom came to visit last Thursday and helped with the beginning potty training this weekend. We've been noticing improvements every day, but we still have quite a way to go. On a positive note, Ezra kept his training pants dry and clean all morning yesterday morning and he even told me once the he wanted to sit on the potty and then produced something. Okay, I'll spare of the rest of the details. Just keep sending positive thoughts our way in the next few weeks as Ezra learns to recognize the cues his body is giving him.

In other news, we're finally all healthy again. About a week before we left for Christmas vacation in December, all of us got sick. Ezra had an ear infection in both ears, Lydia had RSV, I had a sinus infection, and John got a cold. As usual, John was healthy in a day or two, and I suffered for about 50 times longer (that might be a slight exaggeration). Ezra was feeling better by the time his medicine was gone, and Lydia started improving soon after I took her in too. I, however, did not realize that I might have more than a normal cold until I was in the midst of an awful sinus infection. So, I was sick for a week before, all during and even a little after Christmas vacation. Then, as I was just starting to feel better, Ezra got a stomach flu, and then passed it to John and me. We had planned on starting potty training that weekend, but the flu threw everything off. But, thank goodness, we are all feeling better and hope to stay healthy for the rest of the flu season!

Ezra has lately shown a strong affinity towards the color red. His red Christmas sweater vest from Grandma "Hoovegeen" was first choice every day for a while. And for a while, when I would get him up from his nap, I would find him in completely different clothes from what he was wearing before the nap--this always included the vest. One morning, he even put his vest on over his jammies (see picture below). The last time I had to buy socks for him, I bought two pairs of red socks. Those two pairs have gotten so much use in the last few weeks, that i had to go and buy a few more pairs because he only ever wants to wear them. Recently, he's also started picking out his own clothes, and very often there is some red involved...the socks, the vest or simply a red shirt.

Lydia has changed an incredible amount over the last month. She is such a happy baby and very easy to take care of. Although I don't particularly enjoy changing diapers, my time with her during diaper changes is one of the sweetest during the day. She must feel very free without her diaper on because she is a wild kicker when her diaper is off. Sometimes I just let her kick for ten minutes while I stand and watch. I have a hard time taking my eyes off of her sweet face when she is that happy. Occasionally, she yells so loud that she scares herself. Then, she has to stop kicking and think about that for a bit before she can resume activity again. Here are some happy pictures of her:

I'm still amazed by the love that Ezra shows his sister. He's very gentle with her--as gentle as a 2-year-old can be--and sometimes need to stop in the middle of his playing to go and give her a hug and kiss. And very often, in response, Lydia will give Ezra a big smile. Sometimes I feel like my heart will burst when I see that. One of my great desires for my kids is that they love each other and become good friends. They're on the right track so far.

On Sunday the 13th, we, as a family, had a big day. Lydia was baptized. The service was beautiful and very meaningful, and we were blessed to have friends and family join us on such an important day. Here we are together with Pastor Archie:

Lydia in her baptism outfit and blanket:

And the two kids together:

John has now officially started tax season, unfortunately for us all. John enjoys his work and has a great work atmosphere. He has wonderful coworkers, and has made many friends there. But tax season is always hard on our family (as it is for the families of other CPAs). John comes home a very different person every day during tax season--he's not usually crabby, just tired and not himself. And once tax season starts, I start counting down the Saturdays until it's done. We still have 12 more--that just sounds awful! Usually during these busy months, I make a point of taking some trips since John's busy anyway. This year will be my third or fourth weeklong trip in March to Sioux Center to visit family. Ezra, of course, loves having that time to spend with his cousin and his grandma, and I love having someone to spend time with other than my kids. Now Lydia will be able to experience tax season with us.

To close, here are some sweet pictures of Ezra sleeping. We almost always have a little chuckle when we go in a see him at night because he's always sleeping in some funny position. The other night, he was facing the wrong direction with his head and neck buried in blankets. Usually, he has his stuffed monkey laying over his neck or a blanket in the same spot. But the other night, he had his mouse, Peter Van Meter, (name by John's mom when it was John's toy) laying on top of him:

I can't really explain this one, but it sure is cute:

Well, I think that's all from us for now. Hopefully you'll hear from us soon about some potty training success!

Updates

2007-12-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

I thought I wouldn't be posting anything else before Christmas which is why I did a Christmas post already. But amazingly, I have the urge today--I thought I had better take advantage of that. Lot of things have been happening lately in our little family that are worth noting. Here's a rundown of our lives lately.

I have started playing in a quartet within the last month or so with some good friends from school and a cellist they knew, who has now become a good friend too. We're hoping to give a recital sometime this Spring and decided that we need to actually schedule some dates to give us extra motivation. It has been such a joy to work with these people, and I look forward to the rehearsals every time. Playing in a group in which you work well with the people and are equally matched in abilities is very exciting. I'm eager to see what happens in the coming months as we start having more rehearsals and get to know each other as a group. We've been working on coming up with a good name for our quartet. We may have already found a good name, but if you have any suggestions, let me know.

John has been quite busy at work. He's been out of town a lot lately at his audits--sometimes overnight, sometimes just for the day driving back at night. I've had the opportunity to go with him a few times and stay overnight at the hotel with him. Last Thursday and Friday was one of those instances. Thursday, Ezra, Lydia and I drove to St. Cloud to meet John there. We spent the afternoon in the hotel room while Ezra "slept"--his sleeping mostly consisted of laying down, kicking against the wall and talking or singing. That evening we went to the pool area and John and Ezra played in the pool while I soaked in the hot tub. Ezra had a great time playing with Daddy. This is a relatively new thing, since he has in the past been sortof scared of the pool. The next day we went shopping in the crazy busy mall. I got some Christmas shopping done and found some great deals on clothes for Lydia.

The weekend before last, we had another opportunity to let Ezra play in the pool. We had our second annual trip to the Wisconsin Dells where we met our good friends, the Pattens, there. We started this last year and had such a good time that we decided to do it every year sometime during the winter months. Since that time is off-season for the Dells, you can get good deals on a hotel room there, and we found a great suite for the seven of us (Travis, Sheena, their little girl Gracie, John, Ezra, Lydia and me) with two rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchenette. Last year was quite a bit different since there was only one kids with us. Well, not quite, because Sheena was pregnant at the time but hadn't yet found out for sure if she was. And then we found out in January that we were pregnant too. It's amazing what happens in a year! Well, we all had a wonderful time together last year and this year again and are already looking forward to next year when our two little girls are big enough to play together and play with Ezra!

Ezra is now a fountain of words. He is always talking. For the past few months, he's been our little copycat, copying absolutely everything we say. We realized pretty quickly that we had to watch what we said around him because the same words would probably be coming out of his mouth. Because of all of his copying, we've had some pretty funny quotes from him. When I was teaching one of my first lessons back after Lydia was born, the mother of my student was saying to Lydia, "Aren't you pretty?" Then, from the other room, I heard Ezra say, "Mama, are you pretty?" When we laughed in response, he added, "Ezra's funny".

When he first started praying at meals, he would pray longs prayers, thanking God for everything he could see while sitting at the table. One of them went like this: "Dear Jesus, Bless VeggieTales, Thank you for the Lydia, the Daddy, the Mama, the Monkey, the Ezra's juice, the Mama's juice, the eggs, the water, the flowers, the Ryan, the Angela, the Somebody, Amen." Another day, he added "the t.v." as well to his prayer. Sometimes his prayers would be short, like this: "Dear Jesus, Thank you for the food and Angela. Amen." Lately, he's just shortened it to "Dear Jesus, Thank you for the food. Amen." And he does this while bowing his head and talking in a soft voice--I guess that's how we pray. :)

He's also taken to calling people or things "This One" if he doesn't know their names. When we were visiting John one day at his office, one of John's coworkers had stopped to say hi and was leaving. Ezra's response was "Bye bye, this one."

After hearing me talk on the phone at least once every day, he's started pretending to talk on the phone too. This is what a normal conversation would sound like:
"Hello Grandpa, Hi. Do you what to talk to Grandma?" or "Hi Grandpa. Do you want an apple?" or (I think this one is the funniest) "Hi, this is Erika downstairs."

Since Ezra is constantly talking, I sometimes just drown out what he's saying without even realizing that I'm doing it. So, if he is telling or asking me something, he'll just keep repeating it until I respond. Sometimes it gets pretty emphatic if he's waited for too long for me to respond. One of the funniest examples of this was when he wanted to eat some banana bread. He had been telling me, "I want some banana bread." (That's his way of asking.) After waiting and repeating multiple times, he finally added, "I PLEASE want some."

Okay, I have just two more quotes before I finish up with the Ezra section. These two quotes are things I've heard him say in bed in the morning when he's waiting for me to get him up: "Mama, I need soap. I NEED some." and "Round and around and around, Mama." (I think the second one came from the song, The Wheels on the Bus. :)

Lydia has been changing a lot over the past few weeks. She started smiling at about 5 weeks, and gives us lots of smiles and coos every day. We've spent lots of time together having long conversations about baby stuff. :) She's quite the sweetheart. She's started getting her hands to her mouth a little more lately, and I think she might be a thumbsucker. She's also a very good sleeper. A few weeks ago, she started sleeping 6 or 7 hours at a time at night. But we've all been sick lately, and she's reverted back to waking up 2 or 3 times a night to eat. I'm sure she'll get better with her sleeping when she's no longer sick.

Mostly, the last few months have been wonderful, but we did have one really sad event recently. Our closest friends, the Vissers, moved away on very short notice. We've spent a lot of time together in the last few years, especially after we moved to within 6 blocks of their house. We didn't get much of a chance to say goodbye and are very sad to see them go. We will really miss them here but wish them the best as they start new jobs and introduce Amalia to a different home.

Well, I guess that about does it for our family updates. And I can't spare anymore time to this post because Lydia's getting fussy again and Ezra's needing a little attention too. It's rough having two kids sick! So again I'll say have a blessed Christmas. Love to all!

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-17T08:57:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures of the kids and a video of Ezra for your enjoyment. I pray that you all may be blessed this Christmas with family and friends that enrich your lives, and that you may also be a blessing to them. Have a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our dear Savior.

Yes, I know, this is not a picture of the kids, but I thought I would include it anyway. This is a flannel quilt I made for Lydia. It was a lot of fun to make, and very easy--I can't wait to get it quilted and then sew on the binding so that I can use it.

My two sweeties

Ezra loving his sister

Ezra in his Sunday best

Lydia in her Christmas dress from Grandma "Hoovegeen"

Ezra loving his sister some more

Ezra sliding on the steps

Have Patience

2007-12-07T07:26:00.000-08:00

Ezra loves to sing and loves having someone sing to him. One of his favorite songs is "Have Patience," and he has learned to sing it quite well. My mother-in-law wanted to have a video of him singing it and we recently got a camcorder, so I'm posting a few versions of it. They go from "No no no no no..." to singing it quite beautifully to singing in his own crazy way. Ezra also loves watching videos and looking at pictures on the camera, so I had to explain to him every time that first he had to make the video so that he could watch it. You'll hear him in at least two of them at the end asking to watch it. Pretty cute (at least I think so). Enjoy.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2007-11-20T08:34:00.000-08:00

Here is a recent family picture we've taken (thanks to Ryan and his photography skills) with the newest member of our family.

Taking a family picture is getting more difficult. Ezra has two options for pictures: still and serious or crazy with a smile. We're lucky if we can get a good picture of him with a smile and us facing the right direction. I guessed we lucked out with this one even if he isn't quite smiling.

Notice the sweater that Lydia is wearing in the picture. I just finished that on Saturday so that she could wear it on Sunday (oh yeah, and I made Ezra's sweater too). I think Lydia's sweater might be my new favorite sweater pattern. Here it is minus Lydia:

And another sweater I made a few weeks ago for Lydia--it's only going to fit for a few more weeks, if that:

A few shots of Lydia by herself, very wide-eyed:

We've realized lately that we have way more pictures of Ezra as a newborn by this age than we have of Lydia. And the pictures we do have of her are mostly her with Ezra. So, we're making a big effort to take more pictures of her by herself.

Here's Ezra eating and wiping his mouth himself--such a big boy! Notice that Piglet is sitting at the table with him. He's quite attached to Piglet and carries him around often either by Piglet's arm or tucked in his own arm. We often find him sleeping with Piglet tucked in his arm too.

We wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving!

He's in love

2007-11-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

My dear little boy is such a little sweetie. He has found a new love--his sister. We're so happy about the way that he interacts with Lydia and the gentleness that he shows her. Here are some good examples:

Ezra is adjusting extremely well, so far, with having a little sister that takes away some of his mother's attention. I'm sure that as Lydia gets bigger and starts getting in his way and stealing toys, he may change his mind a bit. But I think that with his sweet disposition, he may just always be a sweet big brother to her. And if Lydia's disposition matches her big brother's as much as her looks do, then we'll have two very sweet, wonderful children.

Speaking of Lydia's resemblence to Ezra, here are some pictures to compare them (Ezra's on the left and Lydia's on the right):

Thank you all for your congratulations and wonderful comments from the last post. It's nice to know how many people read this blog and are interested in our lives. We are thankful for you all!

Lydia Christine Hoogeveen

2007-10-17T18:42:00.001-07:00

I'm proud to announce the birth of our daughter, Lydia Christine Hoogeveen!! She was born on Tuesday, October 16 at 11:50 a.m. She was 8 lbs, 10 oz. and 22" long. So now that I got those facts out of the way I'll show you a picture of my beautiful girls:

This was the two of them taking a bath about 4 hours after she was born - this would by Lydia's second bath and she was born in the tub. I suppose I should fill in the details leading up to the birth in the tub:

Erika went into labor at around 2:00 a.m. She was sleeping in bed between contractions for a while and by about 3:30 realized that she really was really in labor - which she was quite excited about (as well as a bit aprehensive since, well, labor isn't called labor for nothing) since she was due on October 10. So we got up and went downstairs to do some laboring on the futon and on the exercise ball. We also called Erika's parents since they were going to come and take care of Ezra while Erika was in labor. So at 3:30 a.m. they got out of bed and hit the road to make the 4 hour trip up here. They picked up Ezra at about 8:30 and headed out for bagels and a trip to the mall of america to walk around. Erika's contractions were making progress and at about 9:30 we arrived at the hospital - St. Josephs. Erika's contractions then started coming right on top of each other without any breaks. The midwife thought she was probably dehidrated, as she puked several times, so she had an IV for a liter of fluids which made the contractions separate again a little bit. A little while later we moved to the big tub - a jacuzzi like water-birth tub (without the jets). I suppose she labored in there for about an hour and a half (taking her from 5 cm to 10) and out came Lydia!! That last sentence makes it sounds like Lydia just came out- I'll rephrase that to say that Erika PUSHED that girl out. So I am extremely proud to say that Erika did this all without any pain meds. It was a very different experience from Ezra's birth which had more complications and required an epidural and a whole host of other wires and connections. This one was just Erika, me and the midwife and nurse in the tub welcoming our little girl. Praise God!

This next picture is when Ezra came in and met Lydia. He wanted to sit on my lap and as soon as he got up there he pointed at Lydia and said "no this one."

Here Ezra is playing with his new blocks that were wrapped up for him as a gift from Lydia:

Lydia's and Erika's fingers (I probably didn't need to tell you that):

If you look closely, or click on the picture to see the full size image, you'll see all of the hair that is growing on Lydia's ear. Ezra had this too; it makes her look like she has cat ears. It's pretty cute.

Here's our wide eyed little girl with a smirk that looks almost like a smile, although I'm rather certain that this face isn't quite connected with happiness or joy yet:

Lydia sleeping:

Another Lydia face:

And here is a wonderful picture of my girls. They are so beautiful!! This picture was taken roughly 26 hours after Lydia was born. Does Erika look great or what!

Both Erika and Lydia are doing well, and as of now, Ezra seems to be adjusting well to having a sister. He is so gentle with her, giving her hugs, kisses, and patting her gently. It's only been one day, and I'm sure we'll have some meltdowns, but so far, it's been great. I'm enjoying some time off of work to focus on just serving my family and getting to know my new little girl.

-John

Lots of pictures (sorry, no baby pics yet)

2007-10-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures from the last few days. John instructed me to post these, so I'm dutifully following his orders. :) Plus, I'm hoping that this is the last time I post before we have a newborn baby to showoff! Keep your fingers crossed...and maybe your toes too.

On Saturday evening, John made the best breadsticks he's ever made. We don't know why they turned out so well, but they were perfect. Ezra joined in on the baking--he likes to be involved at least by sitting on the counter and watching. John always gives him little tasks that he can handle. Here he's helping count out cups of flour, stirring the dough and even kneading with his own little apron (with one of his classic little "smiles" on his face)!

Last week, I finished a pair of socks that I was hoping to finish before I went to the hospital. Homemade socks are so comfy and warm, and I really wanted to take a new pair along to the hospital to look forward to wearing.

This sock is one that I started for myself after I finished the last pair. They're kindof crazy. The yarn is 98.3% cotton and 1.7% elastic so they have more stretch than the typical wool socks I've made. The funny stripes come from the interesting pattern built into the sock. I just have to finish the foot up through to the toe...and then make the other one. :)

Incidently, my midwife shares my passion for knitting, and today at the beginning of my prenatal appointment, we talked for probably 10 minutes about knitting projects (mainly socks) before we actually got to the business at hand. She tried out my favorite sock pattern and fell in love with it too. I'm so proud. :)

Here is an example of the kinds of burpcloths I like to make as gifts for people. These are two that my sister wanted me to make as a gift for a friend. I also recently made two for her and two more for us (in addition to the three I made when Ezra was a baby). They have two layers of flannel and are crocheted around the edge with a nylon thread that is really sturdy and long lasting.

Here are the latest bit of progress on the nursery. John has two coats of paint on all of the trim, aside from the chair rail, and a fresh coat of paint on the ceiling. He still needs to get one more coat on the trim, two coats of paint on the walls, nail up the chair rail and paint it, and paint the bifold doors (the color has not yet been decided for them). At some point, he's also going to put shelves and a clothes rod in the closet, but I don't see that happening until well after the baby is born. Oh well, he's still making progress. You'll notice in the last picture of the room that John left a nice message for me. He's pretty sweet.

On Sunday, Ezra wore a new outfit to church (yes, we did end up going to church--we just sat in the back and left right after the service was done to avoid the questions). We've been waiting to dress him in this because it hasn't fit until now. I just love it on him. He looks like such a little man! He's smiling so nicely because he thought the flash was funny whenever John took a picture.

I sat on our exercise ball during lunch and Ezra thought he would try out sitting on a ball too. Only, he thought it was more fun to actually fall off of the ball than try to stay on it.

In other news, I had another prenatal appointment today. My blood pressure has been around 100/60. Last week it was 120/72, and this week it was 140/80. The nurse said, "Maybe this is a sign that you'll be having that baby soon." I said, "I sure hope so!!" Also, my midwife confirmed that the baby has indeed turned and now has his/her back on my left side. Yeah!! That is very good news. My midwife did a nonstress test while I was there--basically just monitoring the heartbeat (Ezra calls it the "heartbeep") to make sure the baby's okay even though I'm past the due date. Everything was great. So it's still just a matter of time before this baby decides he/she can come out! Keep us all in your prayers as we wait patiently (or mostly not patiently) to meet this child.

Good news...I think

2007-10-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

I believe the baby has turned, at least slightly, from the posterior position. Within the last few days, whenever he or she has hiccups, I feel them only on my left side. I even had John feel both sides of my belly when the baby had hiccups and he confirmed that they are only on my left side. So...I'm hoping that means that the baby is in a good position to turn the right way before or at least during labor!! And yes, we are still waiting for this baby to arrive. My official due date (not that it really means a lot, obviously) was on Wednesday and that day just came and went, much to my disappointment. I'm considering either not going to church tomorrow or coming late, sitting in the back and leaving early so that I don't have to answer anymore "So, no baby yet?" questions. They do get old after awhile. What also gets old is the question, "Has the doctor said anything about when you might go into labor?"...or the other one, "Any signs that labor might happen soon?" Well, I am nine months pregnant; I think that's a pretty good sign. :) Well, I should go and get Ezra from his "nap". We put him down around 2:00 and he is still not sleeping yet (at 5:00). He's just been sitting in bed talking, singing, whispering and who knows what else!

Fall leaves

2007-10-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

Ezra loves the fall leaves that are all over the ground lately. Today, we walked to the coffee shop, and on the way back he wanted to walk instead of ride in the stroller. So, we took a very leisurely walk home as he stopped often to pick up leaves and carefully place them in his hand. The 3rd and 4th pictures are more good examples of Ezra "smiling". He really is a sweet little boy!

Caitlin

2007-10-08T08:34:00.000-07:00

Here are the pictures that the hospital posted of Caitlin (pretty nice service from the hospital, eh?). Caitlin's older brother, Sean, was born with very blond hair, so Caitlin's dark hair is a bit of a surprise! I'm not sure yet who she looks more like, but I'm leaning toward her looking more like Jennifer. My parents say the pictures just don't do her justice and that she is just a beautiful little girl. I can't wait to meet her, whenever that may be...

A new niece!

2007-10-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

Today we welcome Caitlin Aine Frens (I believe that's the spelling) into the world! Caitlin is my sister and brother-in-law's newborn daughter, born this morning at 8:15 a.m. She was 8 lbs., 13 oz. and 22". My sister went into labor at about 2:00 a.m., went to the hospital at about 4:00 a.m., pushed for about 40 minutes and then welcomed her little girl into the world. Both Jennifer and Caitlin are doing very well. Hopefully we can post pictures soon.

Nesting?

2007-10-04T15:08:00.001-07:00

Well, no baby yet (the due date is October 10), but I have accomplished a lot in the last few weeks in preparation for the baby. Some of these projects were halfway done, but I just needed to have some motivation to complete the projects. Well, waiting for a baby to arrive and knowing how little time I will have in the coming weeks after the baby is born is sufficient motivation! Here's a list of the things I've finished so far (some pictures included).

1. most of the top of a quilt for Ezra's toddler bed (my mom is going to add a few borders and then quilt it and finish it off) :

2. a sweater for my nephew Sean:

3. a newborn size sweater for our little babe:

4. a baby dress (a gift for friends at church):

5. a toy organizer that hangs on the back of a car seat:

6. some flannel burp clothes with crocheted edge for my soon-t0-arrive niece
7. more cloth wipes in preparation for two kids in diapers (we use cloth diapers too)
8. a large flannel blanket for our little babe

Also in the works are 2 more burp rags (for my sister to give as gifts), a baby sweater (a gift for friends who recently had a baby), training pants for when Ezra starts toilet training and a little hat for our little babe that I started at the beginning of August and never finished.

I know some would call all of this nesting, that thing that happens to pregnant women just before they go into labor. Well, I call it completing projects that I neglected to finish until now. I guess I work best under pressure.

Here's an update on the baby. On Monday, I had an appointment with my midwife. She told me that the baby is now in a posterior position (facing the front with head down). Don't worry, this is not as serious as breech position (head up), but it's still not wonderful. Posterior babies make for long, hard back labor, and can cause a problem when pushing the baby out. There are things that I can do, and am now doing, to turn the baby before I go into labor, but there is also a possibility that the baby will also turn during labor. I'm hoping that one of those happens, so I don't have to deal with the problem of delivering a sunny-side-up baby or having to fight the midwive/doctor to not have a c-section.

A few things I have been told or read about that are good for turning a posterior baby are being on your hands and knees (here, I'm eating ice cream while on my hands and knees)

being in the knees to chest position (Ezra thought he would join in on the fun)

and climbing stairs to get the baby's head in the right spot. I've also read that picturing the baby turning and talking to the baby, encouraging it to turn, while relaxing in the tub can help, but that just seems silly. I've also been doing some floor mopping, cutting out patterns and reading on my hands and knees. If the baby has not turned around by my appointment on Monday, I may just try acupuncture--apparently acupuncture can do amazing things to turn a baby out of posterior and breech positions.

On the up side, I asked my midwife how big she would guess the baby is right now, just for fun. Of course, she could be very wrong, but it's fun to find out and then compare to the actual size of the baby. She said that she think he/she is about 6 or 6.5 lbs right now. Ezra was 9 lbs, 3 oz. I think it would be crazy if this baby was 2.5 or 3 lbs smaller than Ezra! Plus, it would make delivery a bit easier. We'll see.

Headlines

2007-09-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

John has a little desk flip calendar called Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Calendar. Okay, I guess it's intended more for the bathroom but he keeps it on his desk at his office and reads through something funny every day. Monday's page was all funny headlines. Enjoy:

Psychics Predict World Didn't End Yesterday

Chicago Checking on Elderly in Heat

High-speed Train Could Reach Valley in Five Years

Suicide Bomber Strikes Again

Marijuana Issue Sent to Joint Committee

Girl Kicked by Horse Upgraded to Stable

Sun or Rain Expected Today, Dark Tonight

Here's How you Can Lick Doberman's Leg Sores

Full term!

2007-09-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

Well, the baby is officially full term which means he or she can safely come any day now. I have to say that I'm looking forward to meeting the baby any day now too. Ezra gives the baby a kiss and hug fairly often, and I wonder how much he understands about the baby. I'm really looking forward to finding out what he will be like as a big brother, but I think he's going to be wonderful. He loves babies and other little kids. Our Bradley Method teacher suggested to us the other day that we have a gift from the baby ready to go so that when he meets the baby for the first time, we can give him a gift from the baby. I think we'll try that--it sounds like a good idea, and of course he loves gifts no matter how big or small.

John still has to get the nursery done, and, of course, it would be wonderful if he could get it done before the baby arrives. I have a feeling that there will still be a bit of work to do on it after the baby arrives. He still needs to sand, prime and paint the walls, put up the trim and chair rail and paint, hang the bifold doors, and build shelves and hang a clothes rod in the closet. Hmmm...that looks like a lot now that I have it typed out in front of me!

I'm planning on teaching right up until I go into labor so that I can take off the most amount of time possible from teaching, which will probably be about 4 weeks. I keep wondering how that will go because I'll need to contact all of my students when I go into labor. Hopefully that doesn't happen on a day that I teach, but I guess I don't get to pick the day and time... I've noticed that most of my students are looking more and more at my big belly, probably thinking how huge it is and wondering how much bigger it can possibly get! :) Actually, I'm amazed that it's not any bigger than it is because I don't think I'm as big as I was when I was pregnant with Ezra. I haven't had major swelling in my hands, feet and ankles like I did before, which is a huge blessing. I am very thankful for that! I also have only gained, so far, about half of what I gained with Ezra, but I did start 14 pounds over what I was before I was pregnant with Ezra. I'm hoping that I keep going on this track until I go into labor. I check my weight every morning when I get up just to see my progress. :)

Here are some pictures:

Baby belly

Ezra giving the baby a hug

Ezra showing off his "baby belly"

Ezra posing with me on the steps

On a side note, we discovered this evening that Ezra shares one of my weird food cravings--he also likes to eat raw spaghetti noodles! In fact, he's been helping himself to them this evening after I left the open box on the counter. You can see a bit of a noodle in his hand or him in the process of eating one in some of the pictures. I suppose I should put away the box before he eats the whole thing. :)

Well, maybe the next time John or I post we will be able to make a baby announcement...or maybe you'll have to wait over a month yet. We'll see!

So Very Dutch

2007-09-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to a coffee shop (Erika, Dawn, Ezra and I). It started out as any other trip to the coffee shop might - we ordered coffee, sat down, Erika started knitting, and Ezra was telling his Grandma where she should sit and how they would play together. In the area we were sitting there were a few other people who ended up leaving before us, so Ezra had a lot of space to play and "read" the newspaper. He also like to "fold" the newspaper, which, to the untrained eye, might appear to simply be crumpling it up into a ball.

Anyhow, as Ezra was playing, he decided to look into the cracks on the sides and the back of the seat cushion of the chairs that were there. Low and behold (that phrase seems very odd typed out), he had found a Dime! Okay, okay, that's not all that exciting... but after that, he found a quarter! It was a proud moment for me - my little boy finding all that money! It moved me such that I decided to look in my own chair. I found 2 quarters and a dime! We'd hit the Jackpot of chair change! Erika said I should keep looking until we get out drinks completely paid for. I thought for a moment that I shouldn't, becuase it might look odd if I'm going around searching through the cracks on the sides of chairs. But then I though I might find a quarter! And a quarter is a lot of money!

I very sneakily pretended to be testing the comfort of chairs all over our end of the coffee shop - I'm sure it was extremely inconspicuous as I am very sly. You might say... like a fox. It appeared that we were sitting in a hot spot as no other chairs yielded as much money as the ones we were sitting in and the ones Ezra was looking in. All in all we ended up with $1.58 - quite bit for "couch change." I felt more in touch with my Dutch roots than I have in a while, although I had just purchased a coffee drink for $4...

The money was put in one of Ezra's toys so he could play with it. We later secretly replaced the money with buttons - although we decided we might buy Ezra a toy with that money at a second-hand store.

Breakfast time

2007-09-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

This is how Ezra likes to have breakfast most mornings with his daddy--sitting on John's lap and sharing his cereal. He's finally starting to get pretty good at using a spoon and not turning it upside down before it gets to his mouth. :) He actually posed for the first picture because he saw John posing.

It's about time...

2007-09-11T20:00:00.000-07:00

Since it's about two weeks past, and that's when I usually end up posting about something, I guess it's time to tell you about two pieces of mail that came to our house recently. While doing a routine mail check, I came across a large envelope from the University of Minnesota bearing the words, "Fragile! Do not bend!" I immediately opened the envelope with an excited feeling in my stomach and big smile on my face. Can you guess what it was? In case you weren't able to guess, the contents of the envelope revealed a beautiful 8.5" x 11" piece of paper announcing, "The Regents of the University of Minnesota on the recommendation of the faculty have conferred upon Erika Dawn Hoogeveen the degree of Master of Music with all its priviledges and obligations." I had been starting to worry that perhaps my paperwork got lost or I missed just one last signature and had to do the degree over again in order to ever see my name on the diploma. I guess not.

Two days later, we received another very exciting piece of paper in the mail. It was addressed to John, but when I recognized it, I couldn't help but open it and stare at it with yet another great big smile on my face. This beautiful piece of paper stated that he was officially a CPA!! No more tests, no more waiting, no more money spent on tests!

And so, in celebration of these two very important milestones in our lives, we decided to go to the state fair, take in some interesting sights and eat all of that wonderful, terrible food--Australian battered potatoes, cheese curds (my personal favorite--I could eat these all night long), Sweet Martha's cookies with milk from the bottomless cup of milk for $1 stand, etc.) Mmmm...I'd like to go again just for the food, but the fair ended on Labor Day. So sad.

Continuing on the Subject of "Order"

2007-08-31T08:34:00.001-07:00

Last night I noticed that Ezra's toenails were getting rather long, so I decided I should cut them before he went to bed. He is okay with this sometimes, and sometimes he is not - last night he was not. He was a rather tired boy, and so when I sat him on my lap to start cutting his toenails he started crying very whinily saying "no daddy, no daddy." I proceeded to cut his big toe nail after which I proceeded to the third toe because the second toe nail was already short enough. Through his tears Ezra looked up at me and stopped me saying, "this one daddy, this one." He was pointing to the second toe nail which I had skipped.

Apparently, Ezra dislikes disorder more than he dislikes getting his toenails cut. Even though he didn't want his toenails cut, he wasn't about to let me do it out of order! What a travesty that would be!

Lining things up...again

2007-08-28T12:52:00.000-07:00

Here are some more pictures of Ezra and his obsession with lining things up. The yarn is from a project I finished awhile ago--he declared that all of the ends I cut off were his. This is what he does with them quite often.

And here is what he does with his cars:

In case you weren't sure, he's "smiling" in this picture. He still doesn't really understand the whole smile thing, but it sure is cute!

On a different note, this is how we found him sleeping the other night. The only thing I can think of to explain it is that he was running around and flopping down on his bed and then got tired and fell asleep leaning on his bed.

Here's a close-up:

Happy 2nd Birthday, Ezra!

2007-08-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, August 5, was Ezra's 2nd birthday! (I know I'm a little bit behind on posting--I should have posted this last week already...oops.) Anyway, we had a little birthday party for him. John parents were visiting and we invited some friends over to celebrate. Ezra loves Elmo (only from his toys and books--not because he actually watches Sesame Street. We can't get public television in very clearly here.) So, I made him an Elmo cake. I'm amazed that I was able to make it turn out so beautifully. Well, here are the pictures of the party.

The Elmo cake:

Opening presents:

Blowing out the candles and eating the cake:

Posing with Amalia:

Giving Amalia a kiss:

In other news, I think Ezra is starting to understand just a little bit what it will be like for him to be a big brother. The other day I babysat Amalia, and at first Ezra was just a tiny bit jealous. Amalia sat on one side of my lap, and Ezra sat on the other. Then, he decided he wanted to hold her. So, I sat Ezra on my lap and Amalia on his lap. I told him he needed to hold her with his arms, so he happily put his arms around her and sat on my lap with a big smile on his face. He also loves to give her kisses and hugs. Of course, he's not all that familiar with a fussy, crying baby yet and giving up my attention so that I can nurse the baby, change a diaper, etc., but I think he'll adjust well. For now, I just need to remind myself to enjoy this time that have with Ezra before the baby's born.

2007-08-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

In case any of you were wondering, while watching the news of the bridge collapsing here in the Twin Cities, we are doing fine. We were nowhere near the bridge during the collapse. In fact, we were outside working on our yard when it happened--we didn't even know about it until my mom called to see if we were okay. Thankfully, we haven't heard of anyone close to us that was involved, but I'm sure there are a lot of families who are suffering today because of it.

Ezra's toddler bed funnies

2007-08-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

So far, sleeping in the toddler bed has been a success for Ezra. But every once in a while we notice something funny after his nap or in the morning when we let him get out of bed. We knew he was occasionally getting up to get something, like a book, to keep him busy until we got him up, but these little stories make us laugh nearly every night. Last night, we found one of his stuffed animals, that he had in bed earlier with him, dropped into the crib later on. We turn the fan on for him every day during his nap and before he goes to bed, and a few nights ago we found that the fan had been turned off--apparently he didn't want the fan on that night. One morning when I went in to get him out of bed, he was just standing by the door waiting for me. A few nights ago, when sleeping in his pack and play at my parents' house, we found him totally covered by his blankets:

And here's the best one--this is how we found him on Sunday afternoon during his nap (other than the obvious funny part of the picture, you'll notice also that his diaper is sticking way out of his shorts, indicating that he was trying to take it off or just play with it):

We need tomato advice

2007-07-30T11:01:00.001-07:00

We are just starting to get some ripe tomatoes in the garden. I look forward to this point from the time the weather starts to get cold in the fall and the tomatoes are finished until they start to ripen again in the summer. Fresh tomatoes from the garden are some of the finest things in life, I believe. Well, we need some help this year.

From the top, our tomatoes look beautiful, like this:

From the bottom, they look like this:

They all have this, and I don't know what's going wrong or what to do to fix the problem. Any suggestions? We welcome any you might have!

New hairstyle

2007-07-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

I did it...I went and cut 10 inches off of my hair. I've been growing my hair out so that I could donate it, and it was finally long enough. A few weeks ago, I went in to get my haircut and warned John that I might come back looking very different if my hair was long enough to donate. It was, but I chickened out thinking it just would be too short. When I got home, John said, "You should have just done it." Well, then all I could think about was how nice it would feel to have my neck free of heavy, hot hair and not having to do anything to my hair to make it look nice. So, this past weekend, I went in again and did it. It's all gone...well, not all, just what was left after the 10 inches were removed. By the way, as you can see in the pictures, my hair stylist is pregnant too. The crazy thing is that she is due on the same day that I am!

Before:

Getting it ready to cut:

Starting the cut:

After, with my newly removed 10 inches of hair:

Another after picture:

I figured John would like the new cut, but I didn't figure that he would love it so much. He's probably told me about 10 times how much he likes it and how nice it looks on me. Thankfully, he doesn't miss the long hair because I can't get it back now. :)

Vacuuming

2007-07-23T18:26:00.000-07:00

This week I had a first in my life. I vacuumed my yard for the first time. I would think this would be a first for 99% of the people reading this too, so I think I should add some clarification.

When we moved in I noticed that my neighbor two houses over, who is meticulous about his lawn, would periodically vacuum his yard with his shop vac. Erika and I would speak in hushed voices about how we thought maybe our neighbor was a bit crazy, and it ranked right up there with the old lady I used to see in Sioux Center who would wet-mop her front sidewalk (near the stoplight at 75 and county road H30 or something - the road that goes by bear park and is the 'blacktop' route to orange city).

Our neighbor, as it turns out, has a black walnut tree just like we do. A favorite food of squirrels is walnuts, and their favorite place to eat them is either in our yard, or in our walnut tree. As they eat them, they shower down bits of the soft green outer part of the walnut which ends up on the lawn in little piles. The best way I can see to clean those up is by using a vacuum.

The upside to this chore is that I get to use my super-sweet shop vac that I got at Home Depot the day after Thanksgiving for $25 (yes I was a crazy shopper at a store at 6:00 a.m. - I never thought I'd see that day....but the shop vac... it was SO cool!!). Using that shop vac is one of the greater pleasures in life. The suction is amazing! But that being said, to any passer by, I'm just a crazy guy who vacuums his lawn.

Knitting joys and frustrations

2007-07-21T05:31:00.000-07:00

I recently finished a few projects that I'm pretty proud of, and I started a few that I think will turn out really well once their done. My most proud accomplishment recently was a sweater for myself. It seems that whenever I make something as a gift (usually a baby sweater or something along those lines) the project always turns out well, but when I make something for myself, it doesn't turn out as I had dreamed it would. Well, this sweater was different. I absolutely love it. Here it is in all of it's glory:

I also finished a beautiful little dress for Amalia, Angela and Ryan's little baby girl, but I forgot to take a picture of it, so unfortunately I can't show it off yet. Hopefully, I can get a picture of Amalia in the dress soon, but for now, here's the picture on the pattern:

Well, those were my knitting joys. Now I'll tell you some of my knitting frustrations.

Whenever you make something yourself instead of buying it, you run the risk of it not fitting or just not turning out as the pattern promised (even if you follow it perfectly and check your knitting gauge before you start). Or, you might find a mistake in the pattern and have to figure out a way of fixing it so that the project turns out as the picture promised. Or, if you're like me, you just can't stand to follow a pattern perfectly and have to play with it a little to make it more like what you want for yourself. And, even if you follow things perfectly and purchase the correct amount of yarn, you are never guaranteed to have the right amount. AND, if you don't purchase the right amount when you start the project, there's a chance that the color could be gone the next time you go to the store to get more. Well, the following was my most recent experience.

I decided to make a baby sweater for a friend from church who had a baby a few weeks ago. I thought, I'll just use up some of my yarn from a leftover project. That way I can get rid of it a little. So, I found the perfect yarn, but realized I just didn't have quite enough of it left. Should I make a smaller size than I had planned or purchase just one skein of yarn to complete a larger size? After debating, I realized that I had most of another skein of that same yarn in a different color, so if I bought just one skein, I should have had enough with all three colors and could do some interesting stripes. I got to work quickly out of the excitement of such a project--I don't usualy do stripes because they're a bit annoying but this sounded interesting.

I finished the back in no time and started on the front. Three quarters of the way through the front right side, I ran out of the cream color that I had a little bit of at home, but I thought, "No problem, the store should have plenty of that, it's a pretty normal color!" Well, can you guess? They didn't have it on the shelves anymore and didn't have any in stock in the back. So, I would either have to go on a wild goose hunt for one more skein or ask them to order more of that color, so that I can have my one skein, and then wait to finish my project for several weeks or more until the shipment came in. I decided on the wild goose hunt--surely there must be that color somewhere in the metro area.

We went home, and I spent the next half hour looking at different metro stores online and calling some of them to ask about their stock. I managed to find only two stores that carry that type of yarn, but couldn't see if they had the right color. So, this morning, just as soon as one of those yarn stores was open, we drove over to look around. I found what I thought was the exact color, checking it with several patches on the sweater. I bought it, started knitting with it and realized that it was just a tiny bit lighter than the other cream yarn. So, the question is, will you notice the difference in the long run? Is it worth taking out the whole front right side of the sweater so that I can use the same cream color for all of those stripes or will you even notice any difference.

You may be thinking, who cares? Sometimes I think that too, but I just can't stand mistakes in my projects. So, I guess I'll just have to see what happens when I finish the other side of the front and put it together. Wish me luck...

Plumbing Project

2007-07-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

After having put so much work into our downstairs bathroom last year, it has sat useless (for bathing) for a couple of months now. The drain became clogged in May sometime, and I've finally gotten around to fixing it. Now, you may already be calling me a lazy husband, but the problem was a little bit bigger than just a clogged drain.

I thought that unclogging the drain would be straight forward and simple. It wasn't. This fits with the "homeowners law" that should be listed right after Newton's laws of thermodynamics. This law states that the actual time to finish a project is the inverse of the expectation. So basically the faster and easier I think a project will be, the slower and harder it will actually be.

What I expected was to be able to go to the basement, open the drain trap, and remove the clog. I did locate the drain trap, an old style "drum" trap. The trap and the pipes were made of lead and there was a brass fitting to unscrew at the bottom to unscrew. Simple right? Well I don't know what genius thought up the idea of putting brass fittings on a lead pipe, but I've decided that it's just stupid. If you don't know, brass is much, much harder than lead, so when you try to unscrew it, if it hasn't been greased really well, or if it just hasn't been opened for fifty years, all you end up doing is bending and twisting the lead pipe. At this point I didn't have the clog undone, but I did have a new water leak in the basement from the pipe I had just bent!

The project went from taking out a clog, to removing a drum trap and trying to figure out how to put in a modern "P" trap according to code. This is why the tub sat clogged for 2 months. But at long last, as of this past weekend, the project is finished!!

Here I am having successfully removed the old trap:

The piece I removed was one big soldered together piece of artwork. It was replaced by my own work of plastic art shown below (looks a litle bit like a home-made paintball gun doesn't it?):

The picture doesn't quite do it justice. The very left side is the "P" trap. All of the rest of the stuff is what I needed to put together to make it fit into the spot that I took the drum trap out - an engineering achievement of nearly all the parts on the shelf in that section of Menards. You might be thinking that this looks rather amateur, but hold your judgement until you see it in place:

Looks pretty good, eh? If there is a clog in the future, there are at least 7 access points along this spot that I'll be able to access. And there wasn't a single drop of water that leaked out when I checked it after I was done!

MacDonalds

2007-07-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

Fyi, this is John posting.... my very first time posting. I just want to set that out there since I feel like I'll be misleading you if I don't say that even though I am one of "The Hoogeveens". So there it is - now here's my story:

So we stopped at MacDonalds on our way home from the farmer's market (I know that's sounds a little ironic or something). This is a bit unusual for us to stop there, but we've been seeing all these fantastically wonderful commercials about their premium iced coffee that looks like it will make all your dreams come true! So we decided we needed to stop and see if their $1.69 iced coffee is as good as a $4.00 iced coffee. We pulled up to the drive up ordering thing. A young gentleman asked us if he could help us (young gentleman might not be quite the right term - he sounded young, but maybe young 'player' might be more appropriate. He sounded like his shorts were about to fall off, if you know what I mean). We then had the following conversation:

"What flavors of iced coffee do you have?"

"Well we have the plain, which has like, sugar in it, and it like, tastes like sugar... and we have vanilla and hazelnut."

I was thinking oooooohh, sugar! I love the taste of sugar! I'll have the sugar kind please!

Clearly he had not spent much of his free time in a coffee shop. Perhaps he's never even been to a carabou (MN coffee shop chain)! What a travesty! I suppose at this point I start to sound like a coffee snob. If I started working at a high end wine store, some wine snob might write the same type of post about me:

So I asked this guy what the difference between these two bottles of cabernet was and he said, "well that one is on sale, and it's a great deal! If you have a coupon it's only $6. But you also must consider the label, the label on this one is really cool, so you might want to go with this one, even though it's more expensive."

I guess that's about all I'm gonna say about that.

Big boy bed

2007-07-14T06:53:00.001-07:00

Success! Last night we put Ezra to bed in his toddler bed for the first time. We have a routine of singing to him every night before we put him to bed. So, last night we sang to him while he sat in bed. We had to tell him several times that he was going to sleep in his big boy bed instead of his crib. I was a bit worried that he would get up out of bed and run to us the second we left the room, but, our surprise, he just stayed in bed and cried a little bit until we left the room. Then he stopped crying, laid down, got comfortable and talked to his stuffed animals and blankets. In the morning, we heard him talking in bed, and when I went in to get him, he was still laying in bed, wrapped up in his blankets. When he saw me, he said, "All done, bed," and climbed out. I think he's just so used to having to stay in bed that he didn't realize he could get out before I came in to get him. I hope he keeps thinking that way!

Vacation pictures

2007-07-10T14:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a collection of pictures from vacation:

Ezra and Sean playing together outside:

Ezra and Nate spending time together:

At Cosmos Mystery Area:

Mount Rushmore:

A waterfall at Spearfish Canyon:

Views from our hike to the top of Harney Peak (John carried Ezra all the way up and most of the way down from the peak--7 miles! Of course, I carried a child all the way up and down too!):

The boys playing together at the cabin:

My mom with the boys (she spent a lot of time playing with them):

My mom and Ezra at Wall Drug:

Well, that's a quick tour of our vacation in the Black Hills. We had a great time together and kept quite busy seeing as much as we could while we were there!

2007-07-10T07:54:00.001-07:00

John has a pair of snorkling goggles that he uses sometimes to explore bodies of water for interesting rock, shells, fish, etc. This past weekend we went camping, so he had it out to use, but never ended up actually using while we were there. When we got home, it ended up setting out apart from the camping supplies, and Ezra played with it for awhile. I don't think he had any idea what it was for, so John showed him what he looked like with the goggles on. Ezra's reaction was, "Monkey!" Apparently, when we put the goggles on, we look like a monkey. Sometimes he takes toys to bed and plays with them before he goes to sleep. Yesterday, the goggles were sitting on the floor in his room when I was getting him ready for a nap. I was holding him and singing to him before he went into the crib, and he kept reaching for something. He finally told me he wanted "Monkey" in bed with him! :)

Fireworks!

2007-07-05T06:38:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to see fireworks by the river. We found the perfect parking spot! I love it when that happens. We got to our spot around 8:30 or so and sat there playing cards until the fireworks started at 10:15. We saw 3 other pregnant women in the area where we were sitting--when you're pregnant, you notice everyone else around that's pregnant too. Ezra really enjoyed the fireworks, even though it was way past his bedtime. At first, he was a little bit scared, so John put his hands over Ezra's ears--after that, Ezra was mezmerized. At one point, John wanted to move Ezra over to the other side of his lap, and Ezra took John's hands, put them right back over his ears and held them there tightly for the rest of the time.

I'm back

2007-07-03T08:57:00.001-07:00

Alright, alright, I'll finally write again. Ever since we got back from vacation over a week ago, I have felt overwhelmed by all the stuff to post about vacation and have not even looked at other people's blogs. But I'm back. I'll try to be better...

Here's some baby belly progress:

As you can see, the baby is growing well. And I must say, this baby is one active baby. I don't remember Ezra moving around this much when I was pregnant with him. I'm only 25 weeks pregnant and already I've been seeing my stomach move when the baby is especially active. I do love that feeling, though. I feel like I'm getting to know him/her a little. My sister, who is due on the same day as I am, reports that she is having a girl (or at least they're about as sure as they can be about it before actually having the baby). So, my parents are nearly positive that we are having a girl too.

This is Ezra most recent fun with cars:

He is very fascinated with lining things up and organizing things. In fact, if you can see this in the picture, he even has all the cars lined up facing the same direction. We never showed him the difference between the front and the back of the cars, so he learned that all on his own. At church, he lines up his crayons with all the points facing the same way. At home, he takes all his blocks out and then lines them up or puts them away in their box as carefully as he can. If he has more than one of something, you can bet he's going to find some way to line them up or organize them in some way. My parents say he gets that from his mother. They like to tell stories about how when I was little, I would line up, separate and sort M&Ms and Skittles according to color. Hopefully Ezra will keep that up until he's old enough to clean his own room and then keep his room neat the way he keeps his cars neat.

Here's a hint of what we did on vacation (don't worry, I'll do a dedicated vacation post soon). Can you tell where we are in these pictures?

Quote

2007-06-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a quote from my nephew Sean, my sister's son, who is a little over two years old. When asked the other morning what he wanted to eat, he replied, "Vegetables, please."

Sorry for the delay...

2007-06-14T15:29:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I apologize for the amount of time between the last post and this one. Frankly, I just haven't felt like sitting down and writing, and I wouldn't have known what to write anyway. Since I wrote, we took a little trip to Des Moines to visit John's family and a trip to Chicago to visit Bethany and Romica and Travis and Sheena. Here's a picture of him sleeping on the way home--I love how he's sitting with his leg up on the other and holding it with both hands. :)

Ezra discovered this slide at Bethany and Romica's church and enjoyed going down, over and over and over.

Playing in the dirt, what fun!

This was my knitting project for the weekend (a pull-over sweater with a pouch for Ezra--I'll have to post of picture of him wearing it):

My sweet, dirty little boy:

Tomorrow, we are leaving again for our week-long vacation with my family to the Black Hills. I've been looking forward to this for quite some time, and so has John. He is now especially looking forward to it because his last few weeks have been very busy at work. This week Monday and Tuesday he put in 11 hours of work, and yesterday he did 14 hours. Today, he worked in the morning and went to a golf outing with some other work buddies. And then back to the grind again for one more day tomorrow before we leave town. Meanwhile, I have been trying to stay cool during our week of 90-degree weather. I've been noticing that my ankles are starting to feel swollen again like they did the last time I was pregnant. But I've been combating it by drinking a lot and keeping them up on the couch as much as possible. I hope they don't get as bad as last time.

Ezra continues to be a sweetheart and he reminds me everyday how much I love him by the sweet, cute, heartwarming things he does. Just watching him do mundane things make me smile. He recently started singing Twinkle Twinkle and Jesus Loves Me almost all the way through with us when we sing with him at night. And sometimes randomly during the day he'll just start singing them and ask me to sing them too.

The other day, John came home from work with two big garbage bags full of clothes for Ezra from a friend at work. I think we have enough clothes for him now that we won't have to buy any for the next two or three years! John was joking with her that as she buys clothes for her boys now, she's choosing Ezra wardrobe for the future too. :) Here's everything she gave us.

I've been back into knitting lately as much as I was before I got pregnant (during the first trimester, I was so tired every day that I didn't do any knitting for almost three months!) Here are some recent projects (the second sweater is actually finished now, I just haven't taken a recent picture of it):

As always, I have lots of other projects in the works: a lacey cardigan for me, some little slippers for Reuben and Heidi's baby Eden, a little sweater dress for Ryan and Angela's baby Amalia, socks for my mom, socks for me, stuffed animals, etc., etc. It's pretty ridiculous, actually. I just can't do one at a time--I need variety or I get bored with a project, especially when it is a big project.

Well, I expect I will not be writing for the next week, so have a lovely week--we should be enjoying slightly cooler weather in South Dakota and hopefully you all are having beautiful weather wherever you are too!

My birthday!

2007-05-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

It's my birthday today! I love birthdays. Everyone needs a special day for themselves when they can celebrate with those close to them--that's what I love birthdays. I love making John's birthday special, and I can't wait until Ezra gets old enough to appreciate his birthday so I can load it full of things he enjoys. My mom, sister and nephew drove up here yesterday to stay until Saturday and celebrate with me. This morning we went out for bagels at Breugger's, and then I took my sister to an SPCO concert--that was a birthday present for her birthday last September, but it felt like a birthday present for me too. It was a such a beautiful concert. Joshua Bell was the director and soloist, and he played the Bruch Violin Concerto, the Bach Violin and Oboe Concerto and Mozart's "Prague" Symphony. I couldn't help crying after the last piece, the Bruch, because it was so beautiful and beautifully played. It's funny how tears can creep up on you like that--I was just sitting there enjoying the music and suddenly it was done and the tear were just brimming in my eyes ready to run down my cheeks. And now the boys are in bed and the we three are relaxing (while John's at work). Tonight we're going out for dinner. It's been a wonderful birthday so far!

Caramel Roll Recipe

2007-05-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

I've had requests for this recipe, so here it is. It takes awhile, so make the night before or get up early to make them for breakfast. Enjoy!

Gooey Caramel-Pecan Rolls

Ingredients:
4 - 4 1/2 cups flour (I usually do some wheat and some white with a little bit of wheat gluten to help the wheat rise more)
1 pkg active dry yeast (2 1/4 t., I think)
1 cup milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. ground ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, orange peel or lemon peel (optional)
2 eggs
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 T. sugar
1 t. cinnamon
1/3 cup butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
3 T. light-colored corn syrup
1 cup pecans

Directions:
1. Stir together 2 cups of flour and yeast, set aside.
2. In medium saucepan, heat milk, 1/3 c. sugar, 1/4 c. butter, salt and optional spice until warm and butter almost melts. Add to flour with eggs. Beat on low-medium speed for 30 seconds, scraping sides of bowl. Beat on high for 3 minutes. Stir in as much remaining flour as possible.
3. Knead dough 3-5 minutes. Place in greased bowl, turn to coat. Cover and let rise in warm place until doubled, about an hour.
4. For filling, sitr together 1/2 c. brown sugar, 2 T. sugar and 1 t. cinnamon. Set aside.
5. Punch dough down, turn out onto lightly floured surface, cover and let rest for 10 minutes.
6. While dough is resting, melt 1/3 c. butter in medium saucepan. Add 2/3 c. brown sugar and corn syrup. Cook and stir until combined. Pour into ungreased 9"x13"x2" pan. Sprinkle pecans evenly and set aside.
7. Roll dough into an 18"x10" rectangle. Brush 3 T. melted butter on dough. Sprinkle filling over dough and roll up. Seal seam. Slice into 12 pieces and place rolls in pan. Cover and let rise 30 minutes or until doubled. (Or, cover loosely with plastic wrap or pan lid, leaving room to rise. Refrigerate for 2 to 24 hours. Uncover and let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes.)
8. Bake in 375-degree oven for 20-25 minutes. (Put rolls in oven while preheating.) Cool for 5 minutes and invert.

*To make ahead: prepare and bake as above; cool completely. Place rolls in freezer container or freezer bag and freeze for up to 3 months. Before serving, wrap each in foil and bake in 300-degree oven for 25 minutes or until warm.

Mmmm! Caramel Rolls

2007-05-22T10:38:00.001-07:00

One more thing today and then I'm done posting for the day...or maybe week. A week ago, I tried a new caramel roll recipe and it was AWESOME! I can't make that word big enough to express how amazing those rolls were. Then I made them again this past weekend to enjoy during the sale and they were even better! How can that be? I don't know, but they were! Here a picture of my first batch:

Pictures!

2007-05-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

On Friday evening, my students gave a recital. I currently have 7 students, but will be adding on soon. The recital was wonderful. Nearly all of my students did a solo piece and a duet with me. I have two students who are father and daughter, and they did two duets together. Here they all are with me.

This past weekend, we had a yard sale at our house.

Friday and Saturday all day, we sat outside hoping for flocks of people to come our way and buy the stuff we don't want. This is what I spent most of my time doing while sitting outside waiting for people to arrive.

We did fairly well with the sale, but of course we ended up with plenty of stuff afterwards. Friday, the weather was gorgeous. Saturday morning, we set up and then it rained--no poured--for 10 minutes just as the last few things got set up outside. So, we hurried to take in the things that shouldn't be outside in the rain. Then the rest of the day was again gorgeous. In the evening, we set out signs saying, "Free!" and tried to get rid of more stuff. John and I were gone to a concert that night, but Robb and Tracy, who came over to look after Ezra, reported that even though the sign was out, a very honest person still had to come to the door to give us $2 for the stuff he/she was taking! Yesterday, some kids were walking by and asked if they could take some of the stuff. I said, "Please, it's all free. Take as much as you want." One of the kids wanted to take it and sell it for $10, and my response was, "I don't care." I just want to have all of that extra stuff out of my house!

On Saturday, after it poured for ten minutes, we had several puddles on the sidewalk for Ezra to play in. He had fun stomping through them and watching the water splash around him.

Here's an updated picture of me and baby.

Lately, Ezra has decided he likes wearing bibs at all times of the day. This morning, after I came back from the gym, he saw some oatmeal sitting out and wanted to eat the rest of it. So, in order to do that, he decided he needed to have his bib on. After he was done eating, he did not want his bib taken off--in fact, he wanted another one on top of it. So, here he is with two bibs on, looking at books.

By the way, for anyone who still cares, I have not seen the baby birds for nearly a week. They've outgrown us. :(

Baby birds

2007-05-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

Perhaps noone finds the development of the baby birds as fascinating as I do, but I'm enjoying seeing those birds grow up. This evening, John went over to see the birds and tapped on the ladder to get them to stick out their necks. At the sound, they all (three or four, I believe) flew up out of the nest and into his face. I guess they're old enough and strong enough to do that now! :) Later, I was moving around some mulch and was about to stretch out my hand and move another clump when I noticed that one of the babies was sitting right in front of me on the ground. I called John over and we both stood there talking while the bird sat there. It was in no hurry to move. One of our neighbors was even over with her dog and the bird still didn't move with the dog walking around it. I think the mother bird was not very happy that we were so close to her precious little one.

Updates

2007-05-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

I have several updates to post. This first, most important update is that two new babies have arrived in the last week or so. We welcome Amalia Grace Visser, born to Angela and Ryan, and Jack Isaiah Lee Covington, born to Laurie and Sean. I've seen and held Amalia a few times already, and I can attest personally to the fact that she is very cute and very sweet, despite the not so wonderful labor her mother had to go through to bring her into the world! Apparently, she is a healthy, happy baby who has already returned to her birthweight and added 7 oz. on top of that all within her first week. Wow! Jack was just born yesterday evening and is a very large newborn: 10 lbs, 13 oz!! And Laurie was able to make it through labor without an epidural--way to go, Laurie! So, Ezra now has another cousin and a new friend as he awaits the birth of his little brother or sister. I'll post pictures later.

My second update is another picture of the little birds we have in our robin's nest on top of the ladder. They're getting bigger and bigger every day. I wonder when they'll leave the nest. I'll be sad to see them go.

My third update is also a little bragging on what I did yesterday aside from the craigslist success I mentioned yesterday. For months (or maybe longer), I've been dreaming about cleaning out our front porch so that we can turn it into a nice place to relax in the spring and fall (too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer). Yesterday, I cleaned everything out but the huge air conditioner that we are selling at the yard sale this weekend, the papasan chair we're selling over craigslist, the bikes, the stroller and the recycling. It looks so empty and so beautiful, like it's just waiting to transformed!

My fourth and final update is on our backyard. Last year, we transplanted a lilac bush from a different area of the yard and were wondering how it would do this spring. John pruned it according to what we had researched for lilac bushes, and the result was a bush full of blooms--well, as full as a new little lilac bush can get:

Also, here's a picture of one of our azalea bushes (new from last spring) just starting to bloom for the first time:

On Friday evening, John, Ezra and I went to a big annual plant sale in our neighborhood--it's a fundraiser for the Friends School of Minnesota. It's always a huge sale full of lots of interesting plants. This year we decided to try a bunch of plants that were new to us for all the spots that needed to be filled in our backyard. So, all day Saturday, from 8:30 to 6:30, we planted, transplanted, watered, and spread mulch (free mulch from the neighborhood county compost site!). At one point towards the end, my tiredness hit me and I was just done, but the result is amazing. We are so pleased. We haven't yet taken pictures, but we will soon. On Sunday, Mother's Day, we relaxed and enjoyed everything that we got done the day before. We went out for lunch, as is our Mother's Day and Father's Day tradition, to TGIFridays and shared a wonderful meal together.

Craigslist is amazing!

2007-05-14T12:50:00.000-07:00

This weekend, John and I are going to have a yard sale, but we thought we would try to get some stuff out of the way ahead of time. So, I posted two bookshelves, an office desk and chair, a coffee table and a papasan chair all on craigslist. Well, I already knew it was awesome, but after today, I'm in love. (Don't worry John, I still love you, Ezra and the baby much more.) Within half an hour after posting those items, I had responses for all of them, and I've already sold two plus some other yard sale stuff not posted. We are so happy to be finally getting rid of this stuff that has just been sitting around in our basement (some of it for the past four years!) It's just so freeing!

Tax Party and G & G "Hooveging"

2007-05-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, John and I went to a work party to celebrate tax season being over. I wore the shirt that my mom and I worked on last weekend.
The party was at Summit Hill Manor, a large, old house in a neighborhood full of old, beautiful mansions. I would say the house wasn't anything special compared to some of the other amazing properties on Summit Ave., but it was a nice place to have a party. The food was good, and John and I enjoyed spending time with friends. I drank lots of punch while everyone around me was drinking quite a bit of alcohol. Don't worry, John was responsible, but I still had to be the designated driver. Ezra stayed home with his Grandma and Grandpa Hoogeveen who came to visit this weekend.

John and Steve worked on knocking out and rebuilding the wall enclosing the very narrow and long closet in the new nursery. Currently, the frame is constructed for the new bi-fold doors, and the wall is ready for sheetrock. After the wall is completed, John will build shelves, install a rod for hanging clothes, hang the doors and paint more pleasing colors on the wall. John estimates that the project will still take another 3 weeks at least, but to quote Steve, "It always take longer than it does."

While John and Steve worked, Connie enjoyed some quality time with Ezra while I did things I can't normally get done while Ezra's awake--fun things like cleaning, folding laundry, etc. Ezra used his last year's birthday present (a kid-size table and chairs) from friends for the first time. If you look closely in one of the pictures, you can see some of the laundry I folded sitting on the couch behind him.

We discovered this weekend that we have a robin's nest sitting on top of our ladder. I told John that he's not allowed to use his ladder this summer. The eggs have already hatched and the mother bird let John get close enough to take a picture of the babies.

G & G Van Den Hul come to visit!

2007-05-03T18:05:00.000-07:00

My parents came last weekend to visit us. The weather was beautiful, John was free for the whole weekend since tax season is over, and we were all ready to enjoy ourselves. On Saturday morning we went to the James J. Hill House. It's really a mansion--36,000 square feet, 13 bathrooms, 16 chandeliers, amazing carved woodwork, several balconies. Hill was responsible for building the Great Northern Railroad from Minnesota to Washington, but he was involved in all sorts of other things in his lifetime. He was, of course, incredibly weathy which allowed him to own this mansion as a winter home, I believe. He had at least 3 other homes as well, maybe 4 or 5. I can't remember. I should just get out the brochure but I think I threw it away already. Anyway, it was incredible.

Mom and I spent a decent amount of time sewing a shirt for me to wear to the After-Tax-Season Party this Saturday. I'll post a picture later. She also spent a lot of time with Ezra, reading, going for walks, etc.

My dad kept busy, in his spare time, pulling weeds (mainly dandilions) and vacuuming his car and mine. Our car was in severe need of a good vacuuming. If I'm correct, I would say we haven't done so in a year and it was a bit of pit. Dad said that there was a lot of long hair and asked if I regularly do my hair in the car. Well, not regularly, but sometimes... He also spent a lot of time running around the backyard with Ezra.

On Saturday afternoon, our neighbors' granddaughter saw us get out of the car and squealed when she saw Ezra walking around. So, her grandma took her out to play with Ezra. The playing basically entailed running around after each other, squealing, sitting on the front steps and posing for the camera.

This weekend, John's parents will be coming to help with work on the new nursery. I'll make sure to include before, after and in between pictures later. In preparation for John's parents, I've been telling Ezra that Grandma and Grandpa Hoogeveen are coming to visit. In keeping with the Hoogeveen grandchildren first pronunciation of the name, his first try at saying it was "Hooveging". I'm sure his grandma and grandpa will be tickled pink to hear it.

Great book!

2007-05-03T13:59:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a great book called The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad. I was riveted from start to finish. It's a book that written in a fictional way but is about an actual family from Afghanistan. It was fascinating to read about the culture there and how things have changed so many times over the course of 10 or 20 years--or even just 5 years. With every different story of another family member, I couldn't wait to see how that exact story would play out and was disappointed when the author made me wait to find out. I found very little in the book that I could really be happy about--the stories were quite sad as a whole--but I had a hard time putting the book down everytime I started reading it.

Happy 50th!

2007-04-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

One of John's coworkers (well, I guess he's John's boss) turned 50 yesterday. So, he and some of his coworkers decided to decorate his office for the occasion. I spent the whole morning shopping for black balloons, streamers, and anything else appropriate. I didn't know where a party supply store was nearby, so I looked at about 5 different stores until I ran into my neighbor who clued me in to a place nearby where I found everything I needed. Anyway...here's how it turned out, including the very witty sign he made for the door.

While I was teaching yesterday evening, this is what Ezra was doing.

He even pulled out the vacuum and tried to start it using his foot, which is how I always do it. He's been watching me, apparently.

New discoveries

2007-04-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

John and I are continually discovering things about Ezra that we didn't know he knew or understood. The other day I sneezed, and Ezra responded, "Bless you." He hears it often whenever someone sneezes, but I had no idea he had made that connection between sneezing and saying, "Bless you." Another recent example is this: Yesterday evening while I was teaching, John was sitting on the couch playing with Ezra (his favorite thing to do when he comes home from work), and discovered that Ezra can pick out a violin sound and piano sound. (Maybe this seems like it should be obvious how he can recognize it, but it still amazes me.) This toy is one of his favorites:

It has five blocks that all play different little sections of a certain piece. When you change the blocks around, it plays the piece in a different order, and when you turn the blocks to different sides, it plays those sections on different instruments. There is a strings side, a piano side, a percussion side, a trumpet/brass side, and two other sides I can't remember right now. Well, back to my story, last night John discovered that Ezra knows which side is the violin (strings) side and which is the piano side. He would point to it and say, "Violin," which of course amazed John and later amazed me when he told me about it. These little things that he learns every day, things that seem so simple to us, are beautiful to see as he develops and grows--a testimony to how God cares for his children and blesses them.

Here are some pictures of Ezra playing on the couch with John.

Here are some pictures of Ezra playing with his cars after having a bath the other night. Apparently it's more fun to play with cars when you are running around naked.

A week past Tax Day

2007-04-24T12:03:00.000-07:00

I guess I never officially posted that Tax Day is over and we are celebrating here. I'm sure everyone is aware when Tax Day is over, but that day means even more to our family because it means that John is no longer married to his work and can once again be married to me! On Saturday morning we celebrated by having breakfast at The Machine Shed and then going shopping for fun at Savers. In the afternoon, Angela came over and watched Ezra, who was sleeping for 95% of the time, while John and I went to the driving range together. It felt like a date even though we were just practicing our swings. John is really excited about the fact that I'm giving golfing a try. We had a 2-for-1 coupon on a bucket of balls at the range, so we each had our own bucket of balls to use. I got really tired about halfway through--it's amazing how tiring it is to swing a club over and over. I'm actually not that bad, much to my surprise (and John's, I think). Apparently he thinks I'm going to be beating him in not too long, even though I haven't even been on a golf course yet. We're figuring that we should go to the range and perhaps try out a course (for my sake) as much as possible now before I start getting really big (from the baby, not just from gaining weight!) and my stroke becomes really awkward. I'm enjoying it so far, so we might as well take advantage of that for as long as possible!

This morning I was doing dishes, and Ezra wanted to sit on the counter and watch. So, I set him up there and kept watch out of the corner of my eye. I wasn't really paying attnetion to what he was doing, though, and noticed after awhile that he was playing very quietly up there. When I looked up to see exactly what he was doing, I discovered what was keeping his attention for so long. He had grabbed our container of salt and poured the whole thing out on him and on the counter. When I told John about it later, he said, "Well, at least it wasn't flour." That's the truth!

I Passed!

2007-04-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

You can almost officially call me Master Erika. I still have some forms to fill out and signatures to obtain because my silly brain was not working correctly and I didn't get them before the exam. But I passed! I would say that I did okay. I didn't wow the committee with my answers, but I performed sufficiently. They were allowed to ask me about any music question they could formulate. For nearly the first half of the hour, the theory prof in my committee asked me about tonic cadences and how they were approached and viewed differently by certain different composers. He led me through the questions a little and then basically talked a lot. In fact, I'm sure he talked more than I did! Then my Suzuki prof, Mr. Bjork, asked me some questions about the pieces in my master's recital (three years ago) and about the Suzuki Method in general. I think I answered his questions well except for one question about where a certain piece is now used quite frequently other than the concert hall. I had no idea and said so. Apparently it has been staged for ballet. Miss O'Reilly, my amazing and wonderful violin teacher while at the U, hadn't heard of this either, so I felt a little bit better. Then came Miss O'Reilly's turn, and she asked me only one question to which I didn't even know the answer. She had to kind of guide me through it, so I made it. Apparently it is okay if you can't answer every question. I would say that 75% of the material I studied was not even discussed. Miss O'Reilly had asked me to know my pedagogical family tree, and I memorized it (but apparently not well enough to answer her one question to me). The theory prof had said he would focus on the difference between musical periods and musical sentences, giving examples of each, and he didn't even mention them. Well, I'm just happy I passed!

More Ezra pictures

2007-04-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

Ezra loving his blanket.

Ezra loving his daddy.

More Ezra "smiles".

14 weeks?

2007-04-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

After I last posted a few minutes ago, I realized that I forgot to mention my last prenatal appointment. So, I'm not very good with remembering which week I'm in, but I think it's 14 or 15 by now. We went in earlier this week and heard the heartbeat--a good strong one. I believe the midwife said, "It's going to be a girl," (in her scientific opinion). I found out that I lost 4 lbs (oops), my blood pressure has been low (something like 100/64), and I'm once again measuring big for the point I'm at (3 weeks bigger to be exact). Last time, they changed my due date to a week and a half earlier (July 24) and then Ezra was born on the original due date (August 5--on his great grandpa's 80th birthday!). So, this time I requested that they (pretty please) not change the due date. We'll see what happens. Here's a picture of me now:

Here's Ezra the other night playing with John's old sunclip:

picnic in the park

2007-04-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

I just checked the temp on weather.com and today's high is 62. We went on a picnic today after church and took along golf clubs and foam golf balls to play with in the park. The weather was so beautiful. We ended up playing frisbee with friends, doing some golfing and playing catch. Ezra, of course, had lots of fun running around, playing with balls of various sizes, lugging around golf clubs, etc. John's teaching me how to golf. Yesterday, we practiced beside our house with wood chips. Golf takes a lot of concentration--I had no idea. Now I know why people are so quiet when it's time for someone to make a shot. John's really excited about the prospect of the two of us golfing together. I don't want to get his hopes up too high, but hopefully we can make that happen. Can you see me golfing? It's a bit of a weird picture, but maybe it will happen!

Tax season is almost over!!!!!!

2007-04-14T13:21:00.000-07:00

I am so happy to finally have a Spring day again after having the weird snowy cold weather we've had for the past two weeks or so. Today is the final Saturday of tax season for John! I cannot tell you how excited I am for it to finally be over! It's 3:30, and he should be coming home soon, which is unheard of on the last Saturday of tax season. It seems like this time is usually hell for them until tax day rolls around. Finally I'll have my husband back and Ezra will have his daddy back.

This morning, to fill up my day a little instead of feeling sorry for myself for being alone, Tracy Keizer, Angela Kroze Visser, Ezra and I went out for coffee. It was wonderful to be out on a beautiful day with my good friends. Plus, now that I've made it into the second trimester, I'm feeling so much better again. I don't remember having this with my first pregnancy, but this time I was always so terribly tired and my stomach was constantly on the uncomfortable side. I realized this week that I'm finally feeling myself, and I have my energy back again. So, being out today was a blessing.

I'm very proud of myself because yesterday I did a large amount of cleaning that has needed to be done for quite some time. We had a stack of dishes and a messy kitchen, and just lots of general cleaning to do. So, I started on the kitchen and just kept going--I didn't want to ruin my streak of energy and desire to clean. I did the dishes, cleaned all of the countertops, bleached the sink, rearranged two cabinets (much needed!), vacuumed, swept and mopped the kitchen floor, vacuumed both upstairs and downstairs, cleaned the upstairs bathroom and mopped the bathroom floor, tidied up the guest bedroom, cleaned up Ezra's room and just generally picked up in the house. Now, I just have to clean the downstairs bathroom, vacuum the steps, dust, and do a little more picking up and I'll feel great. And I need to get a little more motivation to study hard for the exam coming up in a little over a week!

And now, my dear, wonderful husband is home from work, so I'm going to go and spend time with him!

Master's degree...

2007-04-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

I've been trying throughout the day to upload pictures to a post about Easter--yesterday I worked on it too with the same problems--and so I'm just going to leave it for now and go back to it later. Instead, I'll tell you the good news about my master's degree. I am finally taking the oral exam on Monday, April 23--this is the final step in completing the degree. I handed in my master's project about a month ago. This project was a large collection of group activities for Suzuki group classes. I collected them from several different books and the Suzuki Journal, and I believe I had about 400 or so in total. It was a big relief to finish that and hand it in. On our way back from Des Moines this weekend, I happened to run into my Suzuki Ped prof at a gas station somewhere in Iowa on I35--it was such a crazy thing. He mentioned that he thought my project was very well done! I was incredibly happy to hear that. Now, I just have one more step, and then I am free of school! Don't get me wrong, I loved the program, my violin teacher, many of the other profs and the friends I met while there, but I am very anxious to be finished, especially with the thought of another child in the house. Anyway...

Easter

2007-04-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

Finally, I have gotten all of the pictures attached to this post. I've been working on it off and on for the past week, which is partly why I haven't posted much. Anyway...

Here are some highlights from Easter in Des Moines with most of John's family (I intended to post these two days ago but it's getting harder and harder to do any computer work with Ezra around):

Ezra had a lot of fun playing with his cousin Shannon. They were dressed in their matching Easter outfits that their Grandma Hoogeveen made for them. Basically, everything that Shannon did, Ezra copied. He's pretty good at that.

Ezra giving his daddy a kiss.

Ezra playing in a small space between the chair, table and wall. He found some geranium petals on the floor that looked like fun to play with.

Ezra discovered that he loved playing with matchbox cars and could line them up in lots of different ways.

Jammies off

2007-04-06T12:37:00.000-07:00

This morning, when I went in to get Ezra out of bed, I found him with his jammies (pajamas) unzipped and mostly stripped off (his feet were still stuck inside). He also had pulled his diaper cover off, so he was just sitting in his wet cloth diaper in his crib, waiting for me to take him out. However, when I took him out of the crib, he wasn't too ready for me to change his diaper, even as wet as it was. I didn't think of taking pictures, but I did take some the other day when he stripped his jammies off down to his feet. As you can see, he attempted to take them off of his feet too, but he was only successful with getting one foot out.

New glasses

2007-04-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

I got new glasses. What do you think?

Before

After

Here are some pictures from this past weekend with my family:

Jennifer reading to Ezra, who's listening intently.

Ezra climbing over and bouncing on my mom. (If she sat up, he immediately said, "Lay down," and tried to push her over.)

Sean, Ezra's cousin, decided to try climbing on my mom, but decided that wasn't really his thing. So, he just laid down on his blanket.

April Fool's

2007-04-02T14:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was talking to John on the phone (I'm in Sioux Center right now and he's in St. Paul), and we got to talking for awhile until he said, "Do you know where I am right now?" I guessed that he was at home. He said, "No, I'm at a Toyota Dealership." I groaned. I didn't even want to think about his pickup having problems too! He informed me that when he tried to leave for church that morning, he couldn't get out of first gear, and there was a problem with the transmission. When I asked how much that would cost, he told me it would be around $1500. "Oh no!" was all I could think to reply. I believe I said that more than once, each time more emphatically. After listening to me for a few seconds, he quietly added, "April Fool's." I cannot explain the wave of relief that overcame me after I heard those words! After having car problems with the Focus, I was about ready to cry from the news of his car. I thought maybe we wouldn't be able to have this baby after all--maybe we would have to postpone the birth for a little while. :) I was nearly to the point of crying out of shock, and then nearly to the point of crying from relief! And then I had to admit that he got me pretty good. But I deserved it because a few months ago I did something similar to him concerning my car. I think we're even now, maybe.

About an hour ago, I drove back from Sioux Falls after playing my final South Dakota Symphony concert of the season--they have one more big one, but unfortunately I can't play for it. I was pretty sad after finishing up the concert, even though this was one of the hardest of the season. We played a trombone concerto by Christopher Rouse. This piece was one of the most difficult pieces of music I've ever played--the conductor had said it was also one of the most difficult he had ever conducted. The tricky part was not necessarily learning the notes or playing at a breakneck speed. The difficulty was in the rhythm and changing meter. It's similar to some Stravinsky music, like Rite of Spring, where you change meters a lot. But the difference here was that the meter didn't just change from 3/4 to 4/4 to 5/4, etc., but from 5/16 to 7/16 to 10/16 to 2/4 to 11/16 to 3/4... As I started practicing for it, I thought I could not possibly learn it, and for sure not learn it in time. Fortunately, I did, but it took a lot of work. I was actually enjoying it by the time we played it for the children's concerts today. I didn't think I'd get to that point. Anyway, enough about that. My main point is how sad I was at the end of the concert because I won't be playing next season either because of the baby. I think it will be too much, at least for the first half of the season and more stressful than I'd like it to be. I'll just have to find some occasional playing opportunities closer to home next year, I guess. I am considering trying out for the Minnesota Opera Orchestra. Some of my friends play in the orchestra. In fact, this year there was a group of nursing moms who would go to the dressing room during breaks to pump together. So, apparently, I would fit right in. We'll see how it all pans out.

The car

2007-03-29T10:07:00.000-07:00

Well, after having $600 worth of work done on our car, it should now be safe for Ezra and me to take our trip to Sioux Falls. Apparently the problem had something to do with the spark plugs or something. I don't know--I'm nowhere near being a car expert. But we also had to have a power steering fluid flush (around $100) and a coolant flush (around $100), and in order to find out what the original problem was, they had to do a diagnostic test (around $140). The test was not conclusive, and so then they had to let the car set for awhile and cool off to see if it would act up again, which it finally did. Once they figured out the problem, fixing that ran $240, so all in all, we're pretty close to $600. It just hurts to spend that amount of money on the car, but I guess it's necessary. At least now I know Ezra and I will be safe on the road to Sioux Falls and I'll be able to play for this concert so that I can pay for the car. :( What an ordeal.

John was wonderful this morning. The alarm didn't go off, and I woke up at 6:30, needing to leave the house in 15 minutes with Ezra changed, dressed and fed. So, John offered to just stay home with Ezra until I dropped the car off and found out how long it would be until they were done with it. Then, after got dropped off at home, he even stayed long enough for me to take a shower--how wonderful. I'm so lucky to have such a sweet, giving husband!

Long day

2007-03-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

This has been my day so far. I got up and had breakfast with John and then took him to work--that was the highlight of my day. When I got home, I attempted to clean the kitchen, practice for a concert this weekend, and make some food while Ezra clung to me and cried and whined and otherwise begged for my attention. This makes me sound like a terrible mother, as if I give no attention to him. In my defense, I did stop frequently to read him books, hold him, change his diaper and give him hugs. Apparently today he just hated my practicing and didn't want me to do anything other than play with him or hold him. Anyway, getting back to my day... Around noon, I decided to drive to downtown Minneapolis to pick up my bow from getting a rehair. On the way, I discovered that my car problems were getting worse and that I would have to have the car fixed before leaving town tomorrow. After picking up the bow, which was an ordeal in itself--carrying my bag, violin and squirmy little boy, who insisted on being carried, in the rain to the violin shop--I drove to the dealership only to find that they would not even be able to look at the car until tomorrow morning. So, I got back in my car, drove home, called John for advice and sat and cried. Then, after he talked some sense into me, I got out of the car, went inside and called the dealership to see if they could look at my car first thing in the morning, which they can, thankfully! I admit that I may have exaggerated a few things just make the story a little better, but I do hope that I don't have another day like this in quite some time--it just makes me tired thinking about it.

Stacking blocks

2007-03-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised by this, but everyday I see a change in Ezra from baby to toddler to little boy. This evening was a good example. Ezra wanted to play with his new camping chair, and John asked him to put his blocks away before taking the chair out. So, he dutifully carried them back two at a time and stacked them in their place. He even stacked them all in one stack on top of the pile. That doesn't mean, however, that he's lost all of his toddler ways (i.e. whining, throwing and hitting when he's mad, etc.) But he sure is a sweet little boy!

Fat lip

2007-03-26T18:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the fat lip that Ezra got today while playing outside, and two pics of Ezra "smiling".

First post

2007-03-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

What a gorgeous day it is outside today! It's finally up in the 70s! Ezra and I went outside for a while this morning since it was so beautiful. I sat and read a magazine and he played in the yard, got dirty, and learned how to recover from a fall and a fat lip. Later we had lunch with John in a park in downtown St. Paul, and Ezra ran around there too.

This past Saturday, Tracy Keizer and I hosted a baby shower for Angela Kroeze-Visser and to the left is my favorite picture of it. Ezra spent most of his time on Angela's lap or next to her on the couch. John and I have been trying to tell Ezra about the baby in Mama's tummy, so he is fairly familiar with the idea. But he got a little screwed up with Angela, pointing at her boob and saying "Baby."