Moving.

For a variety of reasons.

New blog here.

Please update bookmarks, links, etc.

Why yes, I am growing an alien.

Why do you ask?





**please note, this is a long video. not very dial-up friendly**

Happy Birthday!

Yes, we know it's not her birthday yet, but it's the only time that would work for a party. She was so very excited that finally it is time for her "happy birthday." And she got to blow out the candles and she got to open the presents.

It was pretty hot yesterday, so we got out the pool. In retrospect, we probably should've filled it more than 2 hours before the party, but the icy well water didn't deter the kids too much.

The only reason I was able to get these pictures of Katie by herself was that she was the last kid in, and trying to entice the others to come back. She wanted to play with them, but she really didn't want to get out of the pool.

Here's a small taste of what it looked like about 10 minutes earlier. 8 kids in & out of the pool. (#9 is still too small for pool playing.) Splashing and having a great time.

We did eventually make them get out and eat some food, and then they were off again, though they'd warmed up enough that they (except Katie, of course) didn't want to get back in the pool again.

After supper, it was time for cake. Our friend Mel made the cake, and she did a fantastic job. Katie was thrilled.

Not quite as thrilled that she had to wait to blow out her candles, but she seemed to get a kick out of everyone singing to her. According to cousin D. Katie has 8 boyfriends because of how many tries it took to get the candles out. Katie is claiming that she's 3 and she hasn't blown out candles before.

Then it was time for presents. 9 kids in the room, including 2 other 3 (or nearly 3) year olds. She did get a couple open before the situation dissolved into utter chaos.

I didn't manage to get a video of her reactions, though they were great. There was too much other noise going on.
Trey figured that his present was the only one she needed to open.

All in all, it was a great day. We all had a great time, the kids played hard and I'm sure slept as soundly as mine did. It was a beautiful warm day, but got just a touch overcast about half an hour before everyone showed up, so it cooled off a little and wasn't so bright in our eyes. And the mosquitoes were in hiding, which was a fantastic contrast to last year, when we all got eaten alive.

In the home office.

You all need to see what a hardship it is for the man of the house to work from home.

Brutal, I tell you.
He doesn't take coffee breaks, he has to have snuggle breaks instead.

New puppy!

Not ours though! No way am I that crazy. Our friends got an 8 week old German Shepherd puppy a few days ago, and today they had to be away from home all day and asked if he could come stay with us so he wouldn't be so lonely.

Isn't he cute?

We took him outside to play for a bit. A tired dog is a good dog, so they say.

I think we broke him.
He didn't know which way to go. Chase Bailey? Chase Katie? Stay with me? It was pretty funny. He was so worn out.

Bailey couldn't figure out why he was yapping at her so much, and the cats were not impressed. They hid until long after he went home.
Here's what my lap looks like tonight.

Mooch doesn't snuggle with me very often (I think she's afraid I'll put her outside), but Remy is a permanent fixture these days. If I'm sitting down, he wants to be on me. He had to go to the vet last week because he had a bladder blockage, and they kept him for 2 days. I'm not sure if it was just traumatic for him, or if he thought he'd been abandoned again, but he will hardly let me leave his sight. Not that I mind too much, he's a good lap warmer and he doesn't complain when I need to shift positions.

Reminiscing

My little girl will be 3 in less than 3 weeks. How is it possible that she's already almost 3? When people ask her how old she is now, she says "I be 3 for my birthday." Of course, when someone says, "how are you doing?" She says, "I'm Katie."

I'm tempted to recreate this, but I'm not sure how the belly would like it.
June '06, of course.

This one is definitely reproducible. Soon.

No, I wasn't talking about this shot either. But seriously, irresistible.
June '07

May '07

May '07 again. This was taken at Andrew's cousin's wedding. They now have a lovely daughter who Katie really enjoyed playing with at the recent family reunion.

May '08.
Has it really been that long since I took this picture?! She doesn't ask for "ears" anymore when she wants to listen to music, but she is forever telling me to "make the song bigger!" Heaven help us when she's a teenager.

May '08 again.

August '07. Those pants still fit around her bum. But only because she's trying very hard to be potty trained and we packed all the diapers away into storage. The pants are very, very short.

These pants had to be put away temporarily, because the snap is too hard for her to undo by herself. (Pay no attention to the lunch spilled on her shirt.)

And, really, irresistible again. I dare you not to smile back.

First things first.

We planted a bunch of the garden. Still a bit more to do, but I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get to it tomorrow. Katie tried to help, then she had to stop and "dump the garden out of her shoes."

Then she had to stop and have a little rest with our friend who is visiting.

That was Thursday. Friday, Katie and I went to the zoo with some friends and had a fantastic time.

"A train for our very own? Thank you!"

I didn't get a ton of pictures, because you just try getting a pair of almost-3-year-olds to hold still long enough for a camera to focus.

But we did get a few. The elephant actually takes (accompanied) walks around the zoo, apparently. We saw her from a ways away, but by the time we got there, she'd already been led back in her enclosure.

They couldn't get their big heads through this railing to see her better. But they really wanted to.

She got to go on a pony ride again. There are about 7 horses there, but she managed to get the same one as last year.

Apparently this horse has different speeds according to how heavy the child is. Katie is a lightweight, so she got a nice, slow ride.

And then she was tired. Both kids crashed on the ride home.

Katie says her favorite animal at the zoo was the zebra, and he has black stripes and white stripes. Mommy thought this goose was quite interesting. It has beautiful sky-blue eyes.

Since it's almost June.

And the snow seems to have stopped, I guess it's time to put the garden in. Which means that first we have to clean it up. Someone is more than willing to help. And our local hardware store had some little kid-sized tools on sale the other day, so Katie got her own big shovel. She loves it.

Here she is, trying to get Mommy & Bailey to hurry up.

You'll notice also, the kid-sized gardening gloves, courtesy of the same store. They're a touch big, but they have ladybugs on them, and that makes up for the size discrepancy, apparently.

She found this little patch of sand where the mole came up after the turnips last year (that's the only thing it touched!), and wouldn't budge. Not a ton of help that way, but not so much in the way either. She seems to have gotten over her dirt phobia.

Her faithful followers, always on the look out. Then we ate lunch on the deck because it was such a beautiful day. And because she was very, very dirty.

Can't believe I haven't shared some of these.

Somebody got her face painted for the first time. There was another little girl getting a butterfly painted on her face, so we looked at the pictures of options.
Katie decided she wanted to be a tiger.

Of course, she's asked me to put her kitty back every few days since. Here's Mommy's version. The most important part is the "shwishers."

And, every kitty needs a kitty friend that they can brush and snuggle. You can't tell by the picture, but Remy just loves when Katie brushes him.

"Cheese!"

Yesterday, we went to Costco, and the firemen were there with a couple of trucks set up so kids could investigate. They also gave the kids little hats and sticker books. Katie was more than willing to chat with them and have a new hat, but no way was she wanting to get in that big truck. She was just sure that they'd start it while she was in there and the noise would be scary. There were some policemen there with their car as well, and one of them commented on the little "movie star" who didn't want to take off her sunglasses. She wasn't sure why the rest of us thought that was funny.

Of course, you have to wear your new fire hat to feed the horse.

And finally, since I know it's been a long time since the last picture, here I am at 28 weeks, this morning. I think this baby is holding onto my spine, I can't remember things being so squished with Katie. Even if I'm hungry standing up, there is no room for food once I sit down.

We regret to inform you

That we had a fantastic weekend, but we forgot real cameras. So all we have are low-quality cellphone pictures. Better than nothing, right?

Friday and Saturday were spent with a whole bunch of the rest of the Midgett clan. We had a family reunion outside Olds. Much fun was had, stories were told, and we met some fantastic people we hadn't met before. No pictures from there, but if you picture Katie in a sand pit, that's pretty much the gist of it. We had to drag her out of there every time we wanted her out, and we could hardly get her to eat 3 bites of a meal before she was wanting to go back and play.

Sunday, we headed up from there to outside of Rocky Mountain House to go quadding in the foothills with Andrew's cousin, Mark, and his wife, Kim. We had a great time, and Andrew thought to take some pictures with his phone.

We don't have any from starting out, only from mid-ride.
The quads, waiting while we all stretch and take in the view. Off to the right of this picture is a fire-lookout tower. Baseline, if you're interested in that sort of thing. The view is stunning, as well it should be from this elevation. Roughly 1900 meters. By the end of the day, the nearest quad will have been rolled, the furthest will have a flat tire, and the one just this side of the far end will have been flooded. But not by me.

And not by me, because I don't do those things most days, but we're extra careful when we're carrying extra excitement (aka: little kid). We stay on logging roads and well-established trails to minimize our impact on the environment and keep those views spectacular. Katie loves to ride on Mommy's back, but she says Daddy's quad is scary. We switched her for a while when my back got tired, and she wasn't happy about it. We think it's a combination of her being overtired from nap refusal, and the poor girl can't see anything over his shoulders.

On the next peak. We rode up on the back of Andrew's quad from the bigger trail. Didn't want to take all 4 machines up, and it wasn't far. While we were up here, we could look back at the newer fire tower, and we could see on another peak, what looked like a big gazebo. We decided it must've been the old lookout, though it wasn't a tower.

After they dropped Katie and I off at the truck so she could have a bit of a nap, they went up to check it out. Andrew has a book about old fire towers in Alberta, and he's always been fascinated by a story about a man who was in the same tower for so long (20 or 30 years), that he chiseled the last 18 steps out of solid rock. But, he can never remember the name of that lookout, or where it is.

He's not likely to forget now! How funny that we'd just been discussing it, and that's the one they found. And sure enough, 18 steps chiseled into the mountain. Pretty impressive.

The view from there.

And this is what we woke up to on Monday morning. We were optimistic about Andrew's chances of getting called to fight wildfires soon when we spotted 4 fires from that lookout. Not so much after 2 extra feet of snow, things are pretty wet now.

*edit* One quad got drowned when Mark wanted to see why the trail had moved away from a big puddle (this was the only "wreck" Katie and I saw, and she thought it was hilarious. "Silly Uncle!"). Turns out it was because the puddle is deeper than a quad. One tire got blown when someone hit a sharp rock in the trail, and the other quad rolled/tipped on a wonky angle in the trail. No one was hurt, all the quads made it home, and the boys were happily muddy and declared the day a success.