The Evil Genius and Her Plan

So how was your weekend? Ours was pretty good. We didn't really have a whole lot going on, which was nice because we kind of got to relax. At one point Chris was playing with Samantha and I managed to get a picture of her never-before-seen "I have an evil plan" face. I think maybe the evil plan was to throw up on Chris' face, seeing as he was holding her over his head when it happened.

Finally she fits in the shirts Kiera got her for the baby shower! Ignore the fact that she looks like she could be a girl or a boy and focus on the message on her shirt. So true...
In honor of Kiera really really really liking the cow jacket I have changed the main blog picture to one of Samantha in her cow jacket.
Oh, and our new Target is open now! I can't believe I forgot about that until right now. It's not a super Target, but that's okay, I still love it. The baby section is a million times better than the one at Wal Mart. We got some diapers there yesterday and they were about $4 cheaper than going to Wal Mart. That was including some coupons, but they were still cheaper before the coupons anyway. Chris thinks Target is lame because they don't sell guns, they don't have an outdoor section, and they don't have an automotive section. He says that's why men will never like Target better than Wal Mart. I guess he isn't going shopping with me anymore then, because I'm going to Target!

Bath Time!

We had a fun bath tonight, and so I thought I'd share some nudie baby pictures with you. Sammy can almost sit up on her own. We aren't going to practice doing it alone in the tub though, not a smart idea.
I just realized how gross our tub looks. Oh well, I'm going to post the pictures anyway.

Seriously? Who does that?

We managed to get downtown for the Good Morning America shoot today, and I've got to say it was pretty neat. We didn't even come close to getting on TV, but the band was pretty good and it's cool to be able to say we were there.On to more interesting news, and the reason I gave this post that title....
The crazy woman with the bunny ears was there too! Most of you don't know this story, so get comfortable. I'm going to share it with you.
About a month ago Chris took all three of the dogs rollerblading on one of the bike trails behind our house (yes, occasionally we do call him Cesar Milan). At some point he decided to take a rest and sit on one of the benches the city is so hospitable to provide on these trails. While he is resting a woman comes riding up on her bike (I think he said there was a man with her, but he is not important to the story), and starts saying in a high pitched girly voice "Oh! Look at the puppies! I have to stop and pet the puppies!" or something to that effect.
Our dogs are NOT puppies. This is a picture of them from Christmas 2008:
Katie (light yellow) is an 80 pound bulldozer. Mocha (light brown) is a 60 pound jumping bean (literally anything will spook this dog). Bandit (Husky) is a 40 pound fluff ball, and the sweetest one out of the three. Regardless, they are fully grown dogs - not puppies.
Okay, so this nut bag gets off her bike and goes up to our dogs to pet them. Apparently she didn't even ask Chris if they're friendly or if it was okay to pet them. Katie and Bandit surged forward for the attention and Mocha tried to run away. Rabbit Ears asks Chris if maybe Mocha was scared of her helmet. He said "Yeah, probably".
She proceeded to take off the helmet, squat down and make kissy faces at the dogs. Mocha still wanted nothing to do with her, but the other two must have thought it was the kissing booth at the carnival. They went to town and started licking her face. I guess she enjoyed it, because she just allowed them to lick her face and her mouth and kissed them right back. I don't think Chris let her in on the secret that Katie likes to 'recycle' the poop in our backyard, but I don't think that would have stopped her anyway.
Back to Good Morning America. Rabbit Ears was there on her bike this morning!

We left after the first downtown shoot, but I've been told they did another one where they focused on the bike riders downtown. Many people have told me old Rabbit Ears was right in the middle of it all. Man oh man, I promise you, she does not represent the general population of Cedar Falls!

Good Morning Vietnam!...I mean America!

Hahaha! I crack myself up. That was a good title.
Anyway....
I just found out today from our friend Alicia that Good Morning America is going to be on the Parkade in downtown Cedar Falls tomorrow morning. Just in case you didn't know, we live in Cedar Falls. I'm thinking that we're going to get up early tomorrow, grab some coffee, and head downtown to be a part of the chaos.
If you get a chance you should tune in to GMA tomorrow and watch to see if we show up on TV!

Banana Poop

I made an important discovery today. It seems that the little black stringy things I found in Samantha's poopy diaper are in fact what bananas look like coming out "the other end". I've got to say until I figured that out I was worried that my baby was infected with some alien form of stringy black worms.
Why do they not tell you these things when you take your baby home from the hospital? That seems like an easy thing to warn new parents about, and it definitely would have helped to avoid some unnecessary worrying on my part.
I'm going to go do some research to find out what other lovely surprises my daughter's bottom will be presenting me every time she experiences a new food.

Weekends are never long enough

Is the weekend already almost over? It just flew by way to quickly.
I took Samantha down to the park today and she got her first taste of the swings. When I say taste I mean she sat in a swing, not that she ate it. She thought about it, but I didn't let her.

Other than the walk to the park we pretty much just stayed around the house today. It's kind of becoming our Sunday ritual to spread the blanket out in the living room, surround ourselves with toys, and watch Baby Einstein. The Baby Einstein DVD's drive Chris nuts, but I like the music and occasionally Samantha will glance up when something really colorful or bright comes on the screen. There are so many more pictures that I want to post, but I'm going to just put all of them on the webshots page. There is a link to it on the right hand column of this blog. Just click on the link and take a look at the 5 Month Old folder.
Looking at these pictures again I'm realizing that she has really taken a liking to chewing on her Link-a-Doo rings. I hope that doesn't mean the teething monster is coming soon...
By the way, Samantha weighs just about 13 pounds now! We finally got ourselves a digital scale, so I can weigh her without having to go to the doctor's office. She has almost doubled her birth weight. And to think, one of the nurses at the hospital when she was born said that she would most likely double her birth weight by the time she was 2 months old. Good thing I wasn't too worried about that!

Here comes the weekend!

2 1/2 hours until my weekend begins!!! Can you tell I'm excited? I can't wait to get to hang out with Samantha and Chris for 2 days straight. We're going to invite Chris' family over Saturday night to make s'mores (I see pictures for the blog in the future...) and we (or maybe just Chris) will be going to Mike's cabin to cut up the 'twigs' that fell on it last week in the storm.
I found this tremendously hilarious. Last week we obviously had a bit of a wind storm. It seems that Chris' uncle had a tree fall on his cabin. Over the weekend I overheard Chris telling his friend on the phone that Mike had borrowed the chainsaw because "some twigs fell on his cabin." Just a bit of an understatement there.
It looks like all the debris from the storm on our block has been cleaned up. We do have a ton of wood in our driveway now that needs to be split and stacked. Good news for us, we don't have to buy firewood for next winter.
So Samantha has really taken a liking to rolling. She's like a little human steamroller all over the floor. She doesn't get her arm stuck anymore, and she doesn't cry as much when she rolls onto her belly. I guess the next milestone will be sitting up, but we're not in any hurry to get there. It'll happen when she's ready.
Oh, and it's 62° here right now, according to the weather bug on my computer screen. This really makes me wish it was fall. That's actually a great idea! Why don't we just start the fall weather right now and make it last until Halloween? Fall never seems to last long enough, it's always too cold too fast.
Hope you have a great weekend, I'm planning on having a great one myself!

Storm Damage on the Bike Trail

So Samantha and I went on a walk last night to survey the damage from last week's storm on the walking path/bike trail a block from our house. I took a few pictures of the path, but I couldn't get good shots of the trees in the woods. Just imagine what it would look like if a bunch of huge Oak trees exploded, and that's what the pictures would have looked like. I'm sure glad I wasn't taking a walk on this path at 4:00 in the morning on Friday.

Halloween Costume Poll

It's kind of early to be asking this, but I want to start hunting for material.
What should Samantha be for Halloween?

Boo

Yoda









































Or something else? I'm open to suggestions.

Picture Post

There's really no point to this post other than sharing some cute pictures from this weekend.
Tweek's all like "Okay, I'm ready to go on a walk!"

She's getting to be a major drooler... We took over the living room yesterday and played with just about every toy she owns.
Watching a movie with dad.
Chris trying to get her to sleep last night. She thought it would be more fun to scream than to sleep.

More pictures of the storm damage

Okay, my self control did not last. I went out today and took pictures of some of the more severe damage around 18th street. I'll be honest in saying that there are some other pictures I wish I had gotten, but Samantha was in the backseat screaming, so I had to get home.

This is another picture of the trees in our nextdoor neighbor's backyard. You can see it a little better now that it's light out.
And so I don't have to hear about it from Kiera again, here's a picture of the Goo (we call Samantha "Goo" sometimes, just so you aren't confused)

Now that's what you call a storm!

Wow! What a night!
Chris and I woke up around 3:30 to the sound of our weather radio shrieking at us from downstairs. You would think that after the tornado that ripped Parkersburg apart last year we would take our weather radio a little more seriously, you would think. It took that radio going off 3 times before Chris finally dragged himself down there to see what the weather was doing. When he came back upstairs he said we were going to be getting some wild weather, but no tornadoes. Not even 5 minutes later he was looking out our bedroom window and a tsunami hit our neighborhood. There was hail the size of quarters, rain falling by the bucketful (I'm talking the buckets they have in the water parks that dump hundreds of gallons at a time, not the 5 gallon Homer bucket from Home Depot), and wind that seriously reminded me of the typhoon parties we used to have in Japan.

**Side note: I knew some people who would rig bedsheets on laundry carts and 'ride' on them in the parking lot during the typhoons when we were in Kadena (Japan). Not the brightest crayons in the box, but they had a good time when the wind wasn't throwing them onto the pavement. I'm sure they had been drinking, it was the Navy after all.**

Back to our storm.
We went down to the living room right after we lost power to assess the damage. From what we could see none of our trees were contributing to the chaos. A branch from our neighbor's tree had fallen and was blocking our front door, half of a tree across the street had fallen making our road a dead end, and other branches were all over the place in everyone's yard.
The craziest part though was driving through the rest of Cedar Falls after it started to get light out. I swear it looks like 18th street got hit by a tornado. There are huge oak trees that have been ripped straight out of the ground, roots and everything. One of our cousin's next door neighbors lost their garage. Everything that was in the garage is still sitting on the cement slab, but the garage itself was picked up by the wind and thrown about 15 feet over into the other neighbor's garage. I have a hard time believing that the wind alone could do that without a tornado, but maybe it was a really old garage.
Our of respect for the people in our city I did not go gawking and take pictures of the damage to their property. I wanted to, but I have managed to control myself. I did take a few pictures of our street for your viewing pleasure.

It's hard to see, but half of our neighbor's tree fell onto another tree, which in turn split and now half of that tree is broken off too. Crazy, just crazy.