Everything will now come our way

After looking at houses to consider purchasing Dan and I went out to eat with my mom and Dan got this fortune cookie (it actually came with my meal but I was too full to eat it). We thought it was fitting considering we have all sorts of big changes coming. So we had to take a picture of it -right there in the restaurant-probably much to the confusion of waiters and other guests.

We looked at 6 houses today, all in different locations throughout the same school district. We've narrowed it down to two houses. Both quite different. One is older and needs some work, but it's on a canal with a private dock that leads to a large lake. The other is brand new and has a small pond in the back yard. It's such a tough decision to make. The first house is in a wonderful neighborhood tons of kids, 2 beaches, movies on the lake every Saturday night in the summer, playgrounds, two in ground pools, etc....

The other is a nice neighborhood too, but not all the cool stuff. In the end we think we are going with the less nice house so we can get all the amenities. I guess we decided to choose the more fun sounding way of life. Maybe someday we'll get a little boat and will be able to go out boating on the big lake directly from out own dock in the backyard. Sounds pretty nice and like a great way to relax.

WAHOOO!!!!

We finally got a bid on our house!!! I can't believe it, I'm so excited. Tomorrow we're going out to look at a house we went through before that we still like and we are also going to look at several others. Unfortunately we have to make all these big decisions really quick. The perspective buyers want to move in by March 15th. So in that time we have to find a house we like, make an offer, and possible wait for the current owners to move out themselves. It's going to be tight. The house we like the best still has people living in it, only they are down in Florida right now. I just hope that if we decide to buy that house that they can come back from Florida and move everything out in time for us to move all our stuff in before the 15th of March. It's all very scary and exciting.




Is this video clip familiar to you? It's Fiona's current favorite TV show. We've been getting old Reading Rainbow episodes on DVD from the library. It's really fun to watch these again and sooooo much more interesting for us adults than Barney and the likes. She loves LeVar Burton. And it's really funny to hear her say his name and ask where he is whenever he's not on the screen. The thing that's the most frustrating is that at some point after I outgrew reading rainbow they changed the intro to the show. It's not this cute cartoon anymore and the lady singing the theme song has a grating voice. This old original intro was so great. I remember watching this show all the time. You can't beat Reading Rainbow. So much fun information in a small period of time that's perfect for Fiona's attention span. She likes all the animal themed shows the best of course. I think her favorite is when LeVar takes his dog to a doggy birthday party at a real dog restaurant. The episode ends with a group of dogs sitting around the table wearing party hats and eating a dog bone shaped cake. It's really fun being a parent and sharing weird old 80's stuff with your kid and remembering why it was so cool in the first place when you were a kid yourself.

Dancing and Reading

Our new family goal is to get more exercise. We started this evening by dancing along to Moucercise. It was kind of an 80's thing, although there was a Moucercise revival at some point in the 90's with newer Disney songs--we should look into that one too. My mom had my old cassette of Moucercise and the corresponding booklet with dancing instructions and she actually found a CD version somewhere online so we could listen to it. We don't have a tape player anymore. It was tons of fun. Most of the songs are familiar ones from Disney movies. For instance "Step in Time" from Mary Poppins and "I Wanna be Like You-o-o" from Junglebook. In the Junglebook song we pretended to be elephants, bears, snakes, and gorillas with long swaying arms. Hopefully we can find a little time each day to do a couple dances and then we will all feel and look much better. Moucercise is a pretty good workout and Dan said he was feeling it after the first song we danced to.


This is a cool new web page one of the librarians I work with showed me. Fiona and I have been having fun discovering new books and actually being able to read them all the way through, as opposed to Amazon where you only get a few random pages. She loves to be able to point at book covers that look interesting and then we can read them. If she really likes the titles I can add them to our own virtual bookshelf. Pretty cool. Here's one we actually already knew from a story time I recently did about penguins. But Fiona was very excited to see this book on the computer too. Just click on the cover and you can flip through the entire book! If you want to see the book larger you can click on the orange eyes in the upper left corner.




Fiona making Valentine's for her friends at day care. She picked out a cute set with the Littlest Pet Shop characters on it.

We're here too!!

OK, we've been inspired, once again, by the Demkos who recently began their own blog. It looked like lots of fun so here we are too...

So to start off our debut in blog-land, here's a fun video of Fiona being Fiona. This is Fiona and Una the Unicorn (made for Fiona by grandma Connie at Christmas) dancing to Fi's favorite song being sung by Pinkie Pie the pony:



Yes, despite the messy appearance of our house it is still for sale. It's impressive how quickly it can go from very very clean to a complete mess with every kind of toy strewn around and more dishes than should be allowed for just three people.

I'm super excited that I can include videos on this thing and will probably do tons of those, I hope no one's computer explodes as a result. But I know there are grandmas out there who look forward to random little videos.

So here's all about us lately:

Fiona is amazing, I guess that goes without saying coming from a mommy. She's really enjoying daycare, story time at the library, and dance class. She's becoming very good at the forwards and backwards somersaults and she loves bouncing on the trampoline.

Dan's enjoying his weekend work shift still and it's great that we all get to see each other so often. Fi likes having her daddy around so much more.

When daddy is not around Fiona and I spend a good amount of time at the Natural History Museum. We seriously go there every Sunday and spend most of the day. It's the best museum for her right now. Every Sunday they have a live animal show. She's already gotten to pet a skunk, a snake, an iguana, and by mistake a tarantula. She loves seeing the animals outside, especially Jake the turkey and Lucy the otter. Fiona is also fond of the gift shop where she can find any number of soft cuddly animals that she takes up to the counter and hands to the sales lady before I've realized what happened. Fortunately Fiona is very good about giving the animal a kiss and putting it back on the shelf. Unfortunately mommy is sometimes not as good at this and every so often a soft cuddly animal finds it's way to our house.



And now before you go, I'll leave you with a rare moment of tranquility at our house. Picture a tiger, a pink tutu, and Arlo Guthrie. I will say no more and will let the video do all the talking. I hope you, too, have as peaceful and wonderful an evening as this!