Happy Halloween 2008

When I grew up in Utah and Halloween came, there was usually a 50% chance that snow would be on the ground to scurry over in one's costume to get the highly sought after candy so coveted by kids. I remember being in my costume and knowing that wearing a coat would of course ruin the whole look. I suppose as a kid, you overlook such details and risk freezing especially knowing that there is a pillow sack full of candy at the end of the night. So when the sun would set and the temperature would drop into the 40's, it was a mad dash to see how fast one could go around the neighborhood, smile nice a big and make it back home before the candy froze.

Fast forward thirty some odd years......and today in South Texas as the A/C hums on, it is hard to get that Fall feeling in the air. No leaves to rake - only palm trees. It was 85 degrees here today with the sun shining brightly. We took some pictures of Brenden's first Halloween. His costume is a cute onesie - works for me!Family portrait:

And never one to disappoint, his diaper leaked and we had to give him a bath - he loves eating the bath toys.

Dave Gets Winged Again

Dave's training has finally come to an end (insert applause here)! On Tuesday, October 28th he had his last fight in Kingsville, Texas. His last flight was a three plane dogfight where he got to fly solo(no instructor) and battle it out in the sky. At the end of his last flight, he got doused with water by his squadron mates as he got out of the plane(called a Wet Down). Then the squadron XO gave him an new name patch to symbolize his new wings and the completion his training at Kingsville. The video will explain it better. He was originally winged in 2000.

His official winging ceremony will be on November 7th. Hopefully we will find out what the future holds in the next few days. We are waiting very impatiently to find out what type of aircraft he will be flying next and where we will be going. Stay tuned for that as I am sure it will warrant a post of some sort. Enjoy the video:

Joe Cool

Dave's sister Katherine bought Brenden this outfit and at the time of my baby shower, it seemed SO big. Sized nine months. Would our baby ever be that big? My friend Jen bought him the OH so cute socks that look like tennis shoes and we got him the sunglasses last week (completely by chance that they are red too). Well just shy of his six month birthday... he has almost outgrown the outfit but damn he looks cute in it! Completely gratuitous pictures - but here you go!

Here is one without the sunglasses on so you can see his baby blues:

and of course a close up of the socks.. worth a view:

Alright I couldn't help myself

Because Beth and Jen both did the celebrity collage look-alikes by MyHeritage my curiosity got the best of me. I am only sharing the results with you all because I was quite "impressed" with whom I apparently look similar to. Take a look:



I never thought of myself as looking like Jensen Ackles (who the hell is that)? I also have never seen an Asian influence on my face either. Very humorous! There was actually Matthew Perry in the mix too but I only shared 61% similarity with him. Who knew Brittany Murphy and I shared so much?

Tag you are it!

I have been tagged by my friends Beth and Jen so now it's your turn y'all! The rules are shown above so read on. I also read on Beth's website that she added a rule from her niece's website that had her posting the fourth picture from the fourth folder in her Pictures folder. I took a gander at what I had and it's the image below. A nice professional picture done of my proud baby at Cuyamaca Community College in El Cajon, California. Quite smashing if I do say so myself but I have always been fond of that project.
Seven random/weird facts about myself:

1. I love the smell of paper especially newly printed paper in books or magazines. I think it started in elementary school when I used to love to smell the mimeographed sheets the teacher would hand out. Remember those? O.K O.K I am old to some people reading this (really at 38?? - I guess so..) The purple ink would smell awesome to me. I also love smelling laundry and gasoline - the old gasoline with lead in it. What can I say? Good thing I didn't get into 'huffing' as a kid!

2. If I were independently wealthy and didn't have to work, I would love to spend my time restoring vintage cars and traveling to odd places in the world. When I was a kid, I always wanted an MG Midget convertible in blue. I still do. Too bad they stopped making them in 1976.

3. For years my favorite color was blue but now it's green. Simple as that.

4. I am terribly allergic to mosquito/spider bites and bee stings. Living in Africa and South Texas has made me very aware of that special part of me.

5. When I went into college, I was going to go into Pre-Med and become an M.D. like my father. I soon realized I would be miserable doing that and not designing buildings. I consider myself lucky to have found out in my freshman year what I really did want to do for a living instead of changing majors multiple times.

6. France and Italy are my favorite places I have visited. So much culture and great food/wine. Fortunately for me, my parents took me there multiple times. Unfortunately for me, now I am grown up and would have to pay my own way which isn't going to happen anytime soon. Bummer.

7. Not a random or weird fact but I am so happy I met David and we were compatible. He completed my life. Cliche as it sounds - but nonetheless true.

I am supposed to tag seven random people but most of the followers of my blog have already been tagged except Krystal, and Nicolette The rest of the readers don't have blogs.

Oh the memories..

of Ocean Beach, California Oktoberfest. It's where David and I met for the first time and also the reason we gave Brenden his middle name of October - alright, we thought about spelling it with a 'k' but we thought he might be teased enough with the middle name of October so we went easy on him... how nice of us.

O.k now where were we?? Oh yes... David and I met there for the first time in 2003 and never looked back. It was a day to remember and a date that.. well.. lasted for two days!

What a great concept to have an Oktoberfest in a beach town. How much further can you get from the snow capped mountains of Bavaria? How about 70 degrees and sunshine? Yep sounds great to me! Really it's just another excuse to drink beer in Ocean Beach at 11:00 a.m but not feel like an alcoholic because it's under the guise of a festival. What a wonderful concept I must say. I miss that.

Oh yes...the world famous Sausage Toss ~ WOW ~ My personal favorite is the huge inflatable obstacle course that is melting hot on your skin when you try to slide down the thing. Jen, David and I all competed with one another that year with our shoes off half drunk on Heffeveisen -Ahhh yes good times indeed. Maybe next year? Are you in Jen?

Baby Phat

I know we have discussed Brenden's....em...er.. girth before but so far it's been hard for me to capture the detailed pudginess of his hands and feet on film. I was playing around with the camera today and I captured a short video that has a good shot of his fingers or Vienna sausages as I call them attempting to put the pacifier back into his mouth. Now I know, I know babies are supposed to be pudgy. It's the only time in our lives that people oh and ah about how many skin folds we have. Better enjoy it while you can kid cause it can get brutal when you grow up.

While not as evident as the video, here is a picture of his feet - SO cute how even the tops of his feet are pudgy!

Of course I need to end the post with a cute picture of the whole package (note the thigh fold):as well as a close up - I can't help myself.

VIVA baby phat!

First time at the beach!

The weather finally cooled off to 85 degrees with a lower humidity so today we decided to pack the dogs and baby up and head to the beach. We used to take the dogs each weekend and let 'em run loose up and down the beach while we walked a few miles up until I was 38 weeks pregnant. All that changed when we had the baby because the trusty Land Rover that we used to haul sandy, dirty dogs is a 1998 model with no airbags and a backseat that is too small for one dog to lay on let alone an infant car seat. I sucked it up and said we could all pile in my new(er) X3. Something that I have hesitated in doing (hey a girl has to have one nice thing in life, no?) With sheets and towels covering the leather, we were off!!

The great thing about the beaches in Corpus are: you have the place to yourself and the water is bath temperature. The bad things about the beaches here are: they are official roadways for cars/trucks to drive on them and people don't give a damn about trash on them so it's a real treat to see any and everything you can imagine laying there waiting for someone to give a damn and clean up. Sadly it doesn't happen though.

That said, we kept Brenden in the (new larger weight capacity) infant carrier and lathered him up with 50 SPF baby sunscreen and walked for a while. It was a great day~

On the left.... Me and B enjoying the sand and sea. Yes I am holding my aching back can you see how chunky his legs are?



Below.. Dave is really great about doing the self portrait picture of us but this was the first time we had a third image to think of...not bad though!
Alright Mr. DeMille I am ready for my close up....I promise he had more fun than what it looks like in the pic below. I think so at least?


Whoa whatta long day...it's nap time. I wish I could have the smell-a-vision on the blog to enlighten you all on how great the car smelled with wet, sandy, farty dogs in the car.. but I will let your imagination run wild with that one.

Something I find too funny

Let me know if any of you out there can relate to this:

Have you noticed how when the child is being sweet and well behaved, it is ‘our’ child, but when the child is being an asshole, it suddenly becomes ‘your’ child.

“Do you know what YOUR child did today??” or “Your child has just spilt juice all over the floor” Or our personal favourite: “Your child has just pooped in his nappy”. A poopy child is never ours, always yours.

But there are occasions when it is neither ‘our’ nor ‘your’, but ‘my’. And that is when your partner is disciplining your child. Ok, so maybe you don’t say it out loud, but in your head you are yelling, “HEY YOU MEAN BASTARD, DON’T YOU DARE YELL AT MY CHILD LIKE THAT”.

Of course, two seconds later you want to murder the little buggers yourself, but hey, only you can yell at your children. Your yelling is appropriate and necessary, his yelling is mean and ag shame, now he has made them cry.

That is probably both the joy and the burden of single parenting – you might not have occasion to hand the poopy bum over, but you also don’t have anyone yelling at YOUR kids.

Now please could you go clean up that juice on the kitchen floor that YOUR child spilt!

Yea.. I thought you would find it as amusing as I did :-).

Time flies... or does it?

FIVE months old.. no way! Could it be? Seems like yesterday I was a carefree Architect and we were desperately wishing for a baby. Then again it seems like a decade ago that I was actually practicing architecture ( I quit in March '08). How could that be? While one piece of my life seems like a time warp and the other seems..... well like a David Lynch film (I will leave it to the reader to determine which one is which) is one I can't figure out. I love staying home with the baby but I miss SOOO much the slavery of architecture and the agonizing torture of looking at how much I didn't make at the end of the pay period! It truly is a confusing world I have made for myself.

It hit home for me today when I was driving home from visiting WKMC Architects where I worked for a year. I hadn't been back since Brenden was born and at a lunch today for Krystal's birthday with Mallory (Krystal worked there before Kailani was born and Mallory still works there) it was brought up that maybe I should stop by and say hello to everyone. It was nice actually to walk in and say hi to coworkers - with the exception of one who shall remain nameless. That guy is a Tool of all Tools but alas we won't go into that one~ I saw the drawings on people's desk.. I saw the red lines of a manager with a critical eye to revise. I smelled the ink from the HP printer tirelessly spewing out drawing after drawing. Ahhh.. I felt at home.

Hopefully I will get back into the swing of things after the next move but with the economy looking the way it looks right now it may be a great time to chill with the baby for a few years. Having open ends is something that I have embraced being a Marine wife although it has taken me years to get to that point.

Here is a pic of Brenden and Kailani outside of Landry's where we had lunch. The weather was San Diego nice today without humidity.. ah something to be cherished. We leave Corpus next month without knowing today where we are going. Should make for an interesting November. Stay tuned!

Baby weighings

About three weeks ago for Brenden's four month well baby checkup, I strolled in to the appointment knowing that I had a large baby - I mean he already wears twelve month old clothing but I still wasn't prepared for the Doc to say he was 98% for both weight and height. Oh actually she said > 98% for height. I guess he is off the charts on that one. The stats to be exact were 19.31 lbs for weight and 28" for height. She made sure I understood that the two should correspond and that he looked like a great weight for how tall he was. So naive was I to think that the infant car seat we bought would last the lad at least six months ~ nope afraid not. It's only good until they weigh 22 pounds or 29" in height. It was time to move to the new car seat we bought that he can sit in until he is 80 lbs. Is that next year?
All of this got me remembering when I was in the Peace Corps in Benin, West Africa years ago. Thirteen years ago to be exact. I was a young twenty five year old college grad ready to make a difference but so naive to what the rest of the world is really like. I was in Rural Community Development or RCD as they call it. We... well....ummm....developed rural communities which is a broad definition to say the least. One of the more memorable things I did were baby weighings. One Saturday each month, we would travel by canoe or bush taxi to a remote village and collect the women and babies of that village together for a talk on nutrition for themselves and their infants. When I say 'we' I mean myself and a woman that in french is called a Mere Anamatrice. Translated means Animated Mother. Mere Anamatrices speak whatever local language that is needed for the day depending on where you travel to. In a country where French is the official language, it isn't spoken unless one is lucky enough to be educated and that means very few if any of the remote villagers actually speak French. A stumbling block for a young yovo (white) girl trying to make a difference. The small villages speak their own local language which were I was located was called Fon. With the Mere Anamatrice with me, I could speak French and she would have to translate my speech into Fon. A long process from start to finish because I am thinking of what to say in my head in English then saying it in French and she turns around and speaks Fon with animations (major hand gestures) so that the women understand what the message is. A few translations later, you have a group of women sitting there staring at you and you are REALLY hoping that the Mere got it right. The message was always one of showing what their babies should weigh on the same graph that everyone has seen at their Pediatrician's office. So heartbreaking because almost ninety percent of the babies that we weighed were below the tenth % and most were less than zero %. The cause of this was clearly poor nutrition. Not that the women were doing any thing wrong. They all ate what was available locally which was rice millet. Sounds like it would have some nutrition but it really doesn't. It just fills the belly with some calories but isn't fortified with iron like our rice cereal is here and those calories are empty. It was no surprise to hear the statistics of two out of every three babies dying before they are aged five.
I tried to look for pictures of my time there but I can not find them. Too many moves have displaced them. That was also the time of film cameras and the few rolls of film that I took, I had to send back to the states to get developed and my parents would then be nice enough to send them back to me... all in about three months time. Damn them not being digital! The pictures that I have somewhere though aren't of the horrifically sad things I saw. I don't have any photographs of the baby weighings or the leper colonies or the orphanages where I worked. They were much too emotional to document that way. No, the photos I have are of a vibrantly alive culture that truly celebrates each and every day they are alive. They are smiling in the photos because they are truly happy. Happy to be alive and have what they have - frail infants and all.
I enjoyed my time there~ don't get me wrong. It's just that I was a changed woman after I came home. One that appreciated our opportunities here to thrive into adulthood and beyond. Peace Corps... the toughest job you will ever love (and not forget).