….the weather is so yummy outside.  Bright and sunny and in the 40’s!  Seriously, I’m not joking.  I LOVE fall.  I LOVE weather like this.

I think I might just have to change the blog colors to match. Maybe I’ll go look for a new skin now.

So today was the day…of Madeline’s 1st haircut. Well, bang trim.

Pardon the crappy camera phone picture and her squinting. I was so pleasantly surprised that she sat still and actually smiled at the stylist. Usually she is a ball of crank around new people. But she was WAY more interested in the animals on the haircut cape than this crazy woman wielding scissors at her head. I’m so thankful too - her hair was always in her eyes and she was forever ripping out her rubber bands!

Do you think she looks boyish?

Oh and lookie…minus the location and rsvp info… I made this for Mads’ party.  Can you believe she’s already turning 1?

Claire had a SERIOUS case of the Mondays this morning when I dropped her off at preschool. She was screaming and crying “MOMMY DON’T LEAVE ME” which is just SO unlike her. I’m hoping she’s not coming down with what Madeline has.

Miss Madeline is still recovering from her ear infection. I really don’t have much confidence that it’s actually gone, even though she’s been on antibiotics for 8 days now. Sigh. I’m hoping she’s not going the way of the Claire in terms of infections. She has a cold too. Aaah the change in seasons.

A little something hilarious about Madeline. On Thursday of last week, day care called me and said she was really miserable and still pulling at her ear, so I went and picked her up, hoping she would take a decent afternoon nap at home. We got home and I snuggled with her for a little bit and then put her up in bed. She babbled to herself for about 20 minutes, not crying, just “talking” to her Gigi (stuffed Giraffe) and Eeyore. I figured after 20 minutes she wasn’t going to sleep so I went up there and the little snot had both arms out of her shirt and somehow managed to take her pants off and was trying to remove her diaper. It was so funny! I wanted to run and get the camera but I figured by the time I went downstairs and located it she would be screaming her head off. Little Houdini she is.

I’m caving in and getting her bangs cut tomorrow. She rips every rubber band/barrette/bow out of her hair so it’s always sticking in her eyes. She has such straight hair with absolutely no wave in it (thanks to her mommy) so I can even brush it to the side and gel it there. So, she will have bangs. Oh well!

I will post a hilarious picture of Claire from this weekend…she was playing dress up…..and well, let’s just say this picture will be blackmail for when she’s 16 and going on her 1st date.

This is going to seem like a really random post, but just bear with me.

Last spring I spent an entire day cleaning out the garage. I pulled everything out, swept it, even washed the garage floor with dawn to get the oil spots out. You could have eaten dinner off the floor it was so clean. (Ok maybe not) Now just a few short months later, every time I pull into the garage I have the UGH this is SO disorganized feeling. The thing of it is, we have these lovely cabinets where we could store “stuff”, but they are disorganized too.

So while I was enjoying my sandwich today at lunch I started to search for a garage storage system. Some of these are so wicked cool, but I think they’re really designed for more workshop like spaces than for my garage. Hhmph.

Who has ideas about garage organization that they can send my way?

It’s been way too long since I’ve posted. Aargh. Sorry about that folks! I know you readers are just dying to know what’s going on in our lives.

So here goes!

I’m going to go backwards because well, I can. This week is parent helper week at Claire’s school. Since her school is connected to a university, the students go home on fall break and the parents get to come in and help out. Yesterday morning was our day and since Jonathan had to be in court, I got to spend 3 hours in preschool. I can’t tell you how much fun and how totally exhausting it was. I really have a huge appreciation for people who teach preschool and kindergarten. My sister who is a teacher always says that it takes a really special person to teach kindergarten…those kids are just wired differently than older ones. Well she’s so right. I do have to say though, wow…3 year olds can be so much fun. One little boy, Leo came up to me, tugged on my shirt and had two tractor books and said “Claire’s Mommy, can you read these to me?” Claire was watching cautiously in case my undivided attention to her got usurped, but she was a little too busy doing the lacing cards to care that Leo got a turn. Anyway, he climbed into my lap and we read his tractor books. By the time I was finished there were 4 little kids trying to squish up against me as close as possible to read. I think we read 19 stories before Mrs. Lewis informed me “Mrs. Watson, it is now time for the children to do their activity. Please stand up and have them put their toys away.” Yes Ma’am. I heard a lot of “Mrs. Watson, please do not sit on the children’s chairs…Mrs. Watson, please help Marco get his shoes back on….Mrs. Watson, please stand in the hallway until all the children get back from the bathroom.” Hopefully next semester I’ll have a little better idea what the protocol is for the 3 year old room! It was so fun though. It’s nice to interact with the kids that Claire considers her friends…..and she told me that “Wyatt and Claire are best friends” so I of course had to check him out. Ha! She did really well when I left and had a good happy afternoon.

I could really see the difference between Claire and some of the “older” 3’s. Some of the children are 6 months or more older than her and the differences in vocabulary were staggering. I was surprised to find my outgoing and excitable child a little timid at school, but I was pleased to see how polite she is to the other children and her teachers. I’m happy to see that it’s not an act — a couple of the college students have told me that she is VERY polite when I’m not around.

Madeline has another ear infection. Yucky. Jonathan took her to urgent care on Sunday night and the nurses were impressed that a Daddy was there with his little girl. Awww. He took her during my birthday party with my family because I didn’t want her to be miserable all night.

Oh yeah. It was my birthday and my dad’s birthday on Saturday. We celebrated by watching Notre Dame get shut out at home by U$C. Ugh. You know, I think I need to take a break from Notre Dame Stadium. They are 1-4 in the last 5 games that I’ve seen there, 3 of those losses being shutouts. I’m starting to think I’m bad luck. Luckily it was a GORGEOUS day at the stadium, so I wanted to share some of the great pictures.

My Dad & I outside of Howard Hall….

The team wore these HIDEOUS throwback 1977 uniforms. Too bad they didn’t wake up any echoes.

My Dad and I — celebrating the 30th anniversary of my birth. No mocking my sunglasses!! I should have taken a picture of the fantastic haircut that I got….That’s the front…the back is a LOT shorter.

Second what Anne says in her post - an extremely well-thought out piece, as always, by my wife.

-Jonathan

Madeline is at that *great* in between stage of babyhood and toddler hood where I have no idea what to feed her.  She will not eat anything pureed, except yogurt and applesauce, and yet doesn’t really care too much for a lot of finger foods.  It is really frustrating.  The girl can’t eat yogurt and cheerios at every meal!

I’m struggling with what different kinds of toddler food to make her that she’ll eat.  We’ve been on sort of a health kick in our house lately, so I’m not going to do processed toddler meals, ravioli, etc.

For example, last night she had Kashi O’s (which are basically whole grain cheerios), about half a pear cut up (although a lot of it went in her lap not in her mouth) and about two bites of chicken.  It just doesn’t seem like enough to me!

I want to make sure she’s eating a sufficient amount of finger food because she still is not a good sleeper.  Most nights we are up with her at least twice, sometimes more.  I never bought into that whole idea of filling them up before bed so they’ll sleep through the night, but I’m starting to think there is some validity to it.   Now that she’s walking running everywhere, I think she burns off most of what goes in her mouth!

Thoughts?

Oh and on the Claire front, this morning as I was dropping her off at preschool she asked me…Mommy, why don’t you know all the kids names at my new school?  I said, well Claire there are more children at your new school than at your old school.  She looked at me puzzled and said “What???” then ran for breakfast.   Today is her hearing and speech test at school and I’m very interested in the results.  She hasn’t had a hearing test since she’s had her second tube surgery, and we’re both hoping that she doesn’t have any hearing damage from all of the fluid in her ears for so long.  She talks in such a loud voice that I wonder sometimes if she overcompensates for not being able to hear well.  We shall see soon enough!

If your wife / g.f / a.s.o. (alternative significant other), has an Ipod, make SURE she backs it up. It will save you significant ear and neck-ache in the event that it crashes.

I love my iPod. I’ll admit it. It’s probably the coolest little geeky gadget that I’ve ever had.And very recently, I found out how very dependant I am on it…

Flash back to a couple of months ago….my wonderful old workhorse Gateway laptop started running slow. REALLY slow. Being the geek squad that we are at our house, Jonathan and I started running some diagnostics on it to see what the problem was. After an evening of defragging, and file cleanup, we decided to check the hard drive for errors and realized…oh duh, the hard drive is 89% full. But of what…I was stumped. Then I looked down at my scratched iPod and realized…oh…20GB of my 30GB hard drive was being taken up by music.

I decided to move my music to Jonathan’s laptop since he has a much larger hard drive in the hopes of speeding up my poor little Gateway. We had some network problems in our house and it was getting late, so I figured I’d just restore everything using SharePod later, and deleted all the music from my Gateway.

I went to bed…promptly forgot….and left my 20GB of music on my iPod, unsynced to any computer.

Flash forward to last week. I was charging my iPod at work. I disconnected it from the computer and it was dead. I about nearly freaked out. It might not seem like a big deal to you to lose 20GB of music, but this really was most of my music collection. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of CD’s in the past two years and took advantage of a few iTunes gift cards so I had a lot of music that was not on any hard drive that I thought was gone and lost forever.

What was I going to listen to in the car? All of those playlists? All of the veggie tales that keep Claire sane….

Then I took a deep breath and came back to reality (after moping about it for a while and calling Jonathan to whine). I just needed to reset it and although the music was gone, it was still working. Phew.

Most of my music was on my brother’s computer. I forgot that I copied nearly everything over to his portable hard drive months before.

Yesterday I hooked my non-dead iPod back to my trusty Gateway and transferred all the music back from my brother’s portable hard drive.

What this has to do with my family…very little. I just wanted to make a word to the wise that if you have an iPod…back it up. It’ll save you lots of heartache.

I don’t think I post enough (at all?) about what a wonderful relationship I have with my family. (I blame my wife for her hard work on that.) Last night, we started chatting at 9:30 or so, and when we looked up again, it was 11:30. We talked about so much, some of it important, some of it not, but all of it interesting and loving. I feel blessed to have such a great relationship with my wife, and to be able to talk about so much, so openly, with another person.

The same is true of my daughters. Claire and Madeline both have fascinating and different personalities. Those differences are both interesting and instructive, and learning to deal with them only increases the love I feel for both of them. Yes, they can both be difficult and demanding - but I wouldn’t change that for the world now.

–Jonathan

’nuff said.

More later about our great weekend….however I’m sick and really want to go back to bed