Christmas in Flagstaff

After a day and a half (plus 2 hours for an interstate-closing wreck) drive, Hannah and I arrived in Flagstaff to hang out with my parents. Andy flew to Phoenix the next day to check out the Ultimate stores there, so I drove down the next evening and we got to spend the night away - on our own! We've only done this three times since Hannah was born, and we're scheming to see how we can do it more often...

Some highlights of the trip were 8 inches of new snow in Flag to cross-country ski and snowshoe in, mild Phoenix weather to run in (with flowers - in December!), lots of fun Baba and Nammy time for Hannah, and the first-ever performance by the Doggett family trio at the UU Church of Flagstaff's Christmas Eve service!

1st order of business - cookie decorating

The great gingerbread house project while I was in Phoenix.

Singing her way through a favorite book.

New Christmas Eve duds, thanks to Nammy.

Hannah's comment on the photo - "Daddy doesn't have fancy clothes."

Look what Santa brought!

Muggin' with Baba.

Fun Christmas morning.

Nap in the warm sun. No, Hannah did not actually nap, but I can't believe she was still for the photo!

House-to-be

First, the obligatory fun photos of Hannah. Not terribly flattering of me, but Hannah's having fun.

We have passed the end of our rescission period on our to-be-built house, so work has started and we're on the way to being homeowners again! Here are some photos of the new foundation and the interior of another home in the neighborhood with the same floorplan. Kitchen cabinets and counter will be the same, but tile is different throughout. Should you care to see more, the builder is Markel homes and the floorplan is the Flatiron. They've made some minor changes in the plan, and ours is a 3-car garage, but you should be able to find the floorplan somewhere on that site if you search around enough.

Little singer

Bedtime was a little rough this evening, but eventually Hannah went down fine after a second try at story and song time and some extra hugs. Just a few minutes after we closed the door, she started singing to herself. Hannah was singing herself to sleep with "Frosty the snowman (with the correct interval eeked out, mind you) was a great big happy soul." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so I did a bit of each.

Words

We're thoroughly enjoying Hannah's words these days. She had been substituting a ya or wa sound for L for a long time, and we decided to see if we could get her to fix it. So we practiced a few times - mostly in the car - and heard lots of "la-wa", and "luh, luh, wuv." Then rather suddenly, it worked.

So now she says these really exaggerated L's in her words, and it's hilarious. "Ba-lue," "Llongmont," "Aunt Ca-laire." I'll try to capture some on video soon. We even have L's where Y's belong, which makes for "lellow" and the like. Add this to our recent favorites - "rasnaut" (restaurant) and "overgirls" (overalls) and you have frequent giggles from the parents. Very fun.

Halloween 2009

Along came a spider...

Photo stories

Toast. Food of the gods.

Braids like Mama's for hiking.

Hannah's awesome spider costume. My mom was nice enough to offer to make one because she knew I wouldn't have time this year. Hannah loves it!

To top last post's snow report - we got 22 inches this past Wednesday and Thursday. Hannah and I had a fun snow day Thursday snowshoeing with friends, followed by a huge lunch to make up for 3 1/2 miles in the snow with a 32lb kid on my back!

Sledding this afternoon. After yesterday's attempt when we got all suited up and Hannah decided she doesn't like sledding, she decided to try again today. Of course we got to the neighborhood hill and she tried to bail again. I pretty much physically forced her into the sled with me and she was hooked from the first run - she even giggled through our first wipe out! Daddy joined us and we kept going until the sun went down.

Snow!

Not only did it snow on the night of October 9th, but it didn't completely melt for over two days. In Texas, I was still running in just shorts and a sports bra in October! I did run that Sunday, but it was a very short and very cold 29 degree run.

Here are some fun photos of Hannah modeling two versions of a firefighter man helmet this weekend. Check out the undies! She's not accident-proof yet, but she's doing pretty well. She's getting little-kid legs - almost no thigh roll left!

She's pretty mad at me for this one - or maybe at my students. This is my "choir ball" and it recently returned to my classroom. Just one more instance of having to share Mama, and Mama's toys, with the school kids.

"I'm a big girl now"

Recent afternoon hike at Beaver Meadows in Rocky Mountain. For those of you who are still thinking of visiting - we do this stuff every weekend!!

How many posts begin with thoughts about how big my baby is getting? She's wearing undies!!! Her wonderful Thursday/Friday day care got her to stay dry and use the potty for all that's intended for last week, so we started underwear Friday afternoon. Of course she's had an accident every day, but she's actually doing pretty well. And every time she goes to the bathroom she says "I wear undies now. I'm a big girl." And it's so cute and so unreal that she really is a big girl now.

Besides the potty thing, Hannah's latest obsession is singing, which of course just thrills me! She's learned a lot of new songs at school, and I'm always amazed when she starts singing something that I haven't sung with her in a year, if ever. Her preschool has a music teacher come all three days she's there, which is pretty cool. She also loves to improvise and make up new words or just plain new songs - love it!!

In other news - teaching is going more smoothly than I thought, and I'm no longer so tired every day that I panic about surviving the rest of the school year. Though I am awfully tired every day and I have been staying up way too late.

Sigg - shame on you

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-wasik/sigg-ceo-im-sorry_b_278291.html

I can't believe this has slipped through under the major media radar so far. Apparently the Sigg folks have been enjoying everyone buying their expensive bottles as an alternative to the "bad" plastic bottles with the BPA -all the while keeping quiet about the fact that their bottle's liners have BPA in them!

The Sigg site says only Whole Foods and Wegmans will honor the voluntary exchange (if you bought them there), but word on the street here is that REI (if you're a member - which by the way is so very worth it) and Vitamin Cottage will as well. We're planning on taking ours back to REI, letting Sigg give us free new product, and then never buying their stuff again. Forget mean people - bad people suck!

Changing in blog a bit

I'm going to do the "invite only" thing soon. Seems to be the thing to do lately with my blog friends, and one friend had some rather creepy evidence about people using photos of kids that they'd pulled off blogs for advertising and sometimes creepy stuff. So... if you look at this, please help me out and send me an email at lindseylecuyer@gmail.com or post a comment here so I'll know to send you the invite. Please include your email address, because I may not have them all! I'll probably do the invite in another week.

Thanks, ya'll!

Work

I've been avoiding posting because I'm honestly not sure of the best approach to share something I'm so conflicted about: I'm a full-time working Mama! I had intended to work part time after we moved, partly just to get back into the swing of the work thing and partly because the Boulder area is not a cheap place to live. Thanks to this lovely economy (ugh), that's changed. Back in the spring, we started to get some indicators that Andy's job might not last survive the recession, so I focused my search on something that would pay decently (more than just the money needed for that many hours of child care) and have some health benefits. There were some substantial part-time jobs around, but I couldn't seem to land any of those, so I accepted a full-time teaching job in a nearby town. It was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made and involved a lot of tears and soul searching.

So - I'm now the music teacher at Longmont Estates Elementary School in Longmont, which is about a 30 minute drive north of here. It's a great school - not nearly as racially diverse as the other places where I've worked, but there's some economic diversity, which is more than a lot of schools around here have. The commute is a gorgeous drive through farms with a non-stop view of the Front Range, and I've even got a co-worker who lives close by to carpool with - and she doesn't mind doing the preschool stop! She's also a fellow runner, so we're planning on running a half marathon together in a few weeks.

The really great news is that Andy managed to land a new job - and in this area! He's the new Director of Strategic Planning for Ultimate Electronics, which is based in far north Denver. For those who aren't familiar (they're not in TX, I know), it's a higher-end Best Buy kind of place. He's really excited about having the opportunity to learn how a business like this runs and to work with some really smart and creative people who are running the company.

Hannah seems to be adjusting pretty well to being a full-time preschool/day care kid. She goes to a really great preschool Monday through Wednesday, then I take her up with me to a home day care near my school Thursday and Friday. Gives us a little more time together and means she's in a home a bit during the week, which seems like a good thing after being mostly at home so far.

As for me - I'm doing better than I thought. I do wish that I had more time with Hannah and to take care of house things, but I'm enjoying working more than I thought I would. I think one of the hardest things is feeling like we're constantly on the move. That's a lot of why it took me so long to post this - I feel like there's no free time in our days right now, and I'm physically and emotionally exhausted by the time we get Hannah to bed!

Pretty sure I could ramble about this new life of ours for a lot longer, but there's that whole tired thing going on! So I'll wrap up and include some photos and a video, because really that's why you're here...

On a Labor Day hike out of Wild Basin in Rocky Mountain. Check out the chipmunk moving in on Hannah's peach. I ran into a co-worker a few miles out on the trail!

A kid-free hike the day before I went back to work. We can get to a 10,300 ft. trailhead in about 45 minutes - means you can hike at a pretty high altitude without serious climbing. Come visit!

Button nose makes for a good spoon holder. Are you laughing, Mom?

Playing at the Pearl Street mall.

FYI - I was copying, Hannah, not the other way around. This had been going on for quite a while before we even got out the camera. And the random noise in the background is not a time bomb, just our surprisingly loud sprinkler.

A quiet moment

It's a little long, but there's some counting at the end that's kind of fun.

I dared to look away

Hannah decided that today was a no nap day. I disagreed. So I laid down on the couch for a bit while she played quietly right next to me. A little too quietly...

Thank goodness for washable markers and worn-out berber carpet!

Flagstaff in the summer

No photos of great alpine hikes this time, but I slept later than Hannah every day, so the trip was a success. Hannah had a fabulous time at Baba and Nammy's house, and pitched a bit of a fit about wanting to stay. She grew up a ton in the week we were gone, much to Andy's dismay.

Fun Hannah tricks for the week: Calling my parents Bab and Nam. As in "Hey Bab! Hey Nam!" Building her very own matching block towers - photo to come! Chasing wildlife through the backyard. A fancy dinner out with one very attentive honorary aunt.

Yogurt, revisited

Andy offered to share his yogurt with Hannah this afternoon, and I was amazed at how familiar the scene looked. This is December 2008. Sorry for the sideways - still haven't figured out how to do that on this computer!

For the love of maracas

This is Hannah's latest composition, as performed on a random early morning. This is a slightly forced rendition, though not as fake as the previous video where she kept her teeth clenched the entire time, and a little more entertaining than the first one where she just rolled on the floor for a while. Note the fermata effect on the last note - my little musician. The first version sounded a bit like "Maria", but who am I to give my kid credit for singing tritones at age two?

I love that when I turned on the Gipsy Kings on Sunday afternoon, she started singing the maraca song. Is it possible for someone named Hannah to have a latin flare? If nothing else, it's possible for her to have rockin' bed head.

Wish us luck - and sleep!

Vintage! My old "Ba Boo Boon" t-shirt (now you know my secret nickname from my Dad!) and some crunchy mesh grocery bags. Hannah/Lindsey circa 1977.

Drum roll, please... it's time for the big girl bed. I picked up a little toddler bed from someone off of Craig's list a few weeks ago, and Hannah spotted it in the garage and has been talking about it ever since. So we're taking the plunge tonight. And this is what we have so far.

Yes, that's our baby under there. After all my hard work to make sleep sacks for her so she wouldn't cover herself with the blanket at 1 year, here she is at 2 (and a quarter!), with the blanket pulled all the way up over her head. So now we're doing some blanket rearranging and hoping for a full night's sleep.

Other recent fun - we went on a hike at Chautauqua with Nick, Anna and the kiddos a few weeks ago. The kids had a great time hiking together, and with the exception of Hannah taking a big digger on the downhill, a good time was had by all.

Checking out a fuzzy caterpillar! They all had to walk over every rock on the trail. Not the fastest way to get down, but still fun.

Less fun, but kind of exciting, I guess, is my job search. So now I have full-time teaching offers and have to figure out if I'm ready to go back to work full time or can turn them down and hope for the perfect part-time opportunity to materialize. Ugh. I feel really fortunate to have any job offer right now, but I have this image of the perfect part-time teaching job where I still have time to focus more on Hannah. I have to decide by tomorrow morning - wish me luck.