The escalator

I don't know what it is, but I have a REALLY hard time committing to one step on the escalator. Even more so, when I've got Hannah, purse, huge umbrella, and shopping bag in my arms, and I'm wearing rain boots.
I am pretty sure that I looked like this today at Macy's. But with arms full.

I think of Buddy everytime I ride the escalator. So grateful to the patient shoppers who watched me "pick my step" today!
Christmas is almost here...

too much shopping?

it's raining, but Hannah and I are out and about these days. she loves the rain, wearing her rain coat, and watching the drops on the car windows.
today, we were out doing some christmas/grocery shopping. (no, not at the same place.)
naturally, grocery shopping comes last so i can get the cold stuff home and straight in the fridge. well, i thought it would be more efficient if i shopped at ralph's closer to the mall, instead of our normal vons. but, that store is huge, beautiful, and SO DIFFERENT than my beloved vons. i was totally lost, and it took me so long to find what i was looking for. hannah amused herself with all the goodies in the cart, cuddled with the sweater on my arm, and oops! went to sleep in the cart.
this has never happened before.
not sure whether i should be embarrassed, proud, or a little bit of both, i, of course whipped out the camera.


one lady looked at her, and said, "It's because she is too tired." wow. as if i didn't feel guilty enough already that she wasn't home napping in her own bed. another looked at her, laughed, and called her son over to look. "I remember those days!" she said. her son looked pretty normal, so I didn't feel so bad anymore. i love having Hannah with me.
she continued to sleep as i shopped, checked out, shielded her from the rain, unloaded groceries, put her in her bed, and put away the groceries. She continues to sleep even as I type. Is she still wearing that adorable rain coat? Yes. I couldn't get it off of her.

Can you figure it out?

 

Hannah is becoming quite chatty... we just don't know what she's saying sometimes.
It's a good thing her cousin Elizabeth gets it.

Ok... any guesses on this one?
I know one day we will have this all figured out... and it will be so funny that we didn't understand her, but several times this weekend, she kept trying to say this to us, and we could not figure it out!

Christmas Card Photo Shoot 2010

Perhaps you received our Christmas card in the mail by now. (Hope so!) I love mail on any given day, but during Christmas, I WAIT for the mail truck like a little kid waiting for ice cream. Seriously... I am at the computer with the front window open... waiting!!!
I love it!!
So much has happened this year, it was hard to pick one image that kind of summed it up. It was also hard for us to pick a time to sit down as a family and get our picture taken!
Here's the "behind the scenes" tour of our Christmas card:
I thought about making a collage, one picture for every month of the year:

 

I also thought of just having a cute one of Hannah, but it was hard to get her to stay still:



Or Hannah and Gus together:





And then they needed a break.

It turns out Gus poses for pictures better than Hannah. He's always been such a good looking dog. And he knows it, so he's kind of a ham. And, he's a good sport about those antlers. Every year. Good boy.


Hannah's not much of a "cheeser" yet! She would rather take the pictures herself. Here's a few of me, and the Christmas tree, while I was trying to teach her how to pose for a shot. Surprisingly, she looks at the screen on the back of the camera, and her aim is not too bad! But she comes in a little close on the head shots. Note to self: Perhaps a good idea to put makeup on "just in case" every day now!

And then, finally, I just started clicking away while she played, and there was the moment:

She's not looking, nor is she even smiling, but that's what Christmas is all about, isn't it, folks?
While I had spent all this time trying to drum up a sweet jolly image, she's all about the right stuff. Totally touched my heart. Wishing you all the same kind of sweet, simple moments this Christmas!

And the Christmas tree is up!

I had a sweet little helper:


She only broke one. It was in the bottom of the box of unbreakables. In an instant, she gleefully snatched it up,"Ooooohh!" and bowled it across the kitchen tile! Sad moment.
Then she said "Uh-oh!" and ran to the other room!

Here's our little Christmas corner:

advent. 2010.

Christmastime is here... (Hooray!)

One of the best parts of Christmas for me, is actually the weeks leading UP to the big day. I LOVE Advent. Advent Calendars (I left mine up until August last year!), Advent wreaths, Advent sermons, and just the whole season of preparing my heart and home for Christmas!
Though we were ready, Advent got off to a rough start here at the Nourse casa. Hannah got croup on November 29. I had to call in sick the next day... and it has been a VERY LONG week ever since! I came down with the flu hard on December 1. It was awful, but brief! Thank God for the support of my parents, who came over in a flash to take care of Hannah, and pack us all up to get to the walk-in clinic like 2 minutes before it closed! I took a magic pill and the puking stopped...though I was very weak and out of it the whole next day, and all I ate was clear soup! Thankfully Micah was home for most of the day!
So, Advent Calendar thus far:
December 1: Listen to your favorite Christmas music. Vince Guaraldi Trio. The Nutcracker is a close second!
December 2: Donate some food to your local food bank. Ok, it's set aside, but we were all sick that day.

December 3: Write a letter to Santa. She actually did that today. We went to the Laguna Hills Community Center for Breakfast with Santa. We kicked it off with pictures with Santa (she totally cried), ate a delicious pancake breakfast with scrambled eggs (her favorite!) and sausage, and then headed out to write a letter to Santa. She did a good job. :)


December 4: Put up some Christmas decorations.

So, many of our decorations are already up. The lights were first. Micah loves putting them up in the dark. On the roof. So dangerous and I pray so hard. This year, Hannah was out with us, and that may be how she got sick. Who knows. We had her all bundled up, but she was bouncing around like crazy in her bouncy swing. (She still loves that thing!)
Anyhow, as we have been cooped up sick in here, the decorations are even more special to see through Hannah's eyes this year. She has loves pointing all of these out to me: the pillow on the door, her Little People Nativity Set (she already knows who Baby Jesus is!), her Christmas tea set, and the Elf on the shelf. She thinks he's hilarious, and when she can get her hands on him, she hides him in various cupboards of her play kitchen. The tree is not up yet. Perhaps tomorrow. We have to take the feet off of the small couch to move it into the front room, so there is room for the Christmas tree in our teeny living room!
And so, that's the beginning of Advent around here!

With great results in mind...

It's almost time to get back to work after a nice long break. I always get kind of worked up before getting back into the swing of things... right now I am grading a stack of papers. Grammar quizzes to be exact. Grammar quizzes are my least favorite part of teaching Spanish, because I am always correcting tons of teeny errors over and over...and I can get really discouraged.
I love to distract myself with the screen saver that randomly puts up images stored in our computer. Frustrated after a round of "tough-to-grade-because-I-need-to-reteach-this-NOW" quizzes, I looked up to see this picture:

I love fortune cookies, and their random messages, and you can actually find several around our house for this reason. Perhaps I'll keep this one on the inside cover of my gradebook, as it was a great reminder today. Ok now, so keeping great results in mind, I press on, and get ready for the next week!

El Día de Acción de Gracias

Raising a bilingual child has presented some interesting challenges for me. One of the main ones is talking about food: not because I grew up talking about food and its preparation solely in English, but actually because there are so many different names for foods. Like many different names for the same food. Like turkey. Or the same word, for many different foods, like cranberries and blueberries.

It's hard enough to help students deal with this in the classroom, but what's a mom supposed to do to keep from confusing the little one at home? Just pick one and go with it.

My first year teaching, I was so excited when my Spanish 1 class started learning about foods just before Thanksgiving... perfect timing, I thought! I made a fun lesson about Thanksgiving foods, and students would tell me which ones they liked, and we would all have a great time speaking in Spanish! Until, I was blindsided by Thanksgiving vocabulary, like turkey, cranberries, and potatoes... it can be kind of confusing.
Let's start with turkey, as that is the most obvious:
There are like 4 different ways to say it, as far as I've heard:
pavo- pretty standard
guajolote - México
chompipe - Costa Rica and other parts of Central America
chumpe - El Salvador (this one is altogether new to me... I just found it doing some research today on SpanglishBaby.com)

Cranberries surprised me. When I looked it up, it came up "arándano", which is really fun to say, but, I was sure that was the word for blueberry. I looked that one up again, and yes, blueberry is also "arándano". Though I use both words at home with Hannah, this has always confused me, until today, when I found on Spanglish baby that they may also be called "arándanos agrios" (sour), or more obviously, "arándanos rojos" (red). Oh. Ok! Still arándanos though. "Finding the correct term in Spanish for any type of berry in English can be difficult, mainly because some of these varieties don't really exist in Spanish-speaking countries" (SpanglishBaby) That makes sense.


Mashed potatoes. My favorite Thanksgiving food. That was a logical one: puré de papas. Pureed potatoes. That makes sense. And sweet potatoes? I had always used "batatas", having learned that word from a teacher of Spanish origin... but then I learned that they are also called "boniatos" (actually a Cuban word) which was a new favorite way to say it, because it's easy to remember like Bonnie! Turns out I can also call them "camotes" (in most parts of Latin America) . We've been talking about sweet potatoes a LOT around here. They were always one of Hannah's favorite purees. And we call them boniatos. :)

Pick your words and use them today!
¡Feliz Día de Acción de Gracias!

Perspective.

I thought I was having a hard day.
Overwhelmed by my own to-do list, and my email inbox. Turns out we have termites. Our dog needs to be licensed (for the last 5 years). Oh, and take him to the vet for his shots and whatever is making him stink so. Our busy toddler seems to be making a steady stream of poopy diapers. And needs to get to the pediatrician for some lactose intolerance, her two year old shots, and to make sure her speech is progressing ok. The last day of school before Thanksgiving break is tomorrow and I am desperately reviewing plans over and over to make sure that I can properly harness their inevitable craziness (not going to happen).

That all quickly got put into perspective.
I was taking a few minutes just to decompress and check fun stuff like Prince William and Kate Middleton's engagement, and Facebook, and I stumbled upon this entry on my friend Sara's blog.
And my heart changed. My worries pale in comparison to the suffering that people are going through every day in this world.
I am living in a bubble, and it just totally popped. Though I don't have words to describe how this makes me feel, all I can say is that I am praying.
Things like this should not happen in the world.
It haunts me that a mother has lost her child. It makes my heart ache that my friends are grieving the loss of this little life, too. I can't shake it from my mind, because her challenge keeps ringing in my head:

"Be sad. Be broken. Feel the weight of the evil, suffering and injustice in the world.

Feel the urgency of love. Hurry. Seek what God would have you do.

Give. Give everything you have because it is not yours to keep. Use whatever God has given you to be his hands in this world."

As the holiday season approaches, I welcome the comforting traditions they bring.
But, my heart remembers these people all over the world that I want to offer comfort to:
A cup of water
Good food
A pair of shoes
The joy of learning
The joy of Christmas
Or maybe all of the above?
I don't know where to start, but we've got to start somewhere. God is moving in my heart, and challenging me about giving this Christmas.
Think about it.
I am thinking.
And praying.

She's two today.

Today was Hannah's second birthday. It's amazing to think that it has already been one year since her first birthday, and two years since the "birth day". I had a bit of deja vu this morning, as I thought I was going to wake up at 5 and get a jump on the day, but instead decided to sleep in until 6:30. At 6:30 I thought, "I've really got to get up now." Which is exactly what I thought on November 14, 2008, just before I got up to go to the bathroom and my water broke. Game on. And it's been a whirlwind ever since. I think last year, I felt more like we had "made it!" more than we were celebrating a birthday... this year, it feels more like Hannah's special day. It has been fun in so many ways, from how I could not sleep last night (like a kid before Christmas!) because I was soo excited to give Hanners her new red wagon, to watching it register to her that maybe, just maybe, all of this fun stuff today is for HER. She started to figure this out at breakfast today, when Uncle Jon told her "Happy Birthday"... she looked at him like, "Everyone keeps saying that to me today!" Birthday is starting to mean fun things to her, like presents and cake. And bounce houses. Yesterday, Hannah went to her cousin Kate's birthday, and was on Cloud 9 because it was an Elmo party, with an Elmo bounce house. It was amazing, and I know she didn't want to go home... she had a blast bouncing around with all of her cousins! Hannah has grown and changed so much in one year, from the wee bitty baby cruising around furniture, to the active toddler who zips around checking out her whole world. It's definitely clear what interests her, and what does not. So we tried to make it a day of favorites for her: blueberry pancakes, swimming fish, birds, a cupcake, and of course, Sesame Street. Today, we started off with her favorite special breakfast at Coco's: the blueberry pancake combo! She only wanted eggs today. Ok. Then, we all headed down to Sea World: Mommy, Daddy, Grandpas and Grandmas, Aunts and Uncles, and Mommy's friends... Hannah is so blessed to have so very many people that love her! How do you put into words a special day like today? You don't. Here's some favorite shots from the day...

Hannah gets her first hair cut.

She's almost two. It's time.

 

We went to a place called First Cut (how appropriate) in the Mission Viejo Mall. I thought Hannah would like it because you get to sit in a rocket ship to get your hair cut. We were off to a great start. They had a cute little doll house to play with, and everything is so colorful!

 

Then she realized she was getting her hair cut. Look at that face. Panic. She did not want to sit in the fun rocket, watch the little tv, or play with the toys. She just sat in mommy's lap and cried.
Now that I know that she's not interested in that fancy stuff, she can go sit in my lap at my salon
This fancy place was good for mommy this time, because they understood how hard I thought it was to cut off some of those ringlets in the back, and they gave us a nice envelope to keep them in until they got to the baby book, and a nice certificate to commemorate the day, and then some styling tips. (I need all the help I can get!)

 

All done, and feeling much better. Isn't she cute?

 

This salon is conveniently located right next to the soft play area. Yay. That was hours of fun.
We also went to the Cheesecake Factory to see Aunt Jules. We missed her, but look who Hannah found on the way out?

Already? Really? I was surprised that she was interested, but it turns out that she just wanted to point at the tree. I decided not to terrorize her by getting her a haircut and visiting Santa all in one day!

my little trooper

Life has been really busy lately.
We are hanging in there, by the grace of God.

Today I was so thankful for Hannah's great attitude. We had LOTS of errands to run today. She read books and ate life cereal in her stroller while I ran all over campus talking to students. Here at this moments, I was so thankful for her little hugs from the Ergo. Such a great Mommy and me moment, I didn't want to forget it.

And goodnight.

This is what Hannah and I look like at about 8:30 every night.
Wish I was still sleeping, but I love catching a little nap just before getting up and finishing the day before bed!

 

I know I always talk about how much I love the color red. But, sometimes, even I pick a different color.
I NEVER get tired of this color. Ever. Fascinates me every day. Love you, Micah, especially your eyes. And I'm so glad that our daughter's eyes are just like yours too!

Fun fall shopping.

I HEART Etsy.
For many reasons.
It's my favorite place to find handmade things I'd love to make for Hannah... but already done, and beautifully so, by someone with even more creativity and skill than I envisioned in the first place.
These items always arrive in my mail (love it! so special to get fun mail!)and quite often lovingly wrapped up in sweet ribbon. Hannah knows when the extra key comes out of the mailbox, something special is in the big mailbox! She loves opening it!
This weekend, it was a sweet crocheted earflap beanie. Pink and brown. She looks delicious, and LOVES wearing it, too! She's definitely a hat girl!
Many of my favorite sellers are also authors of some of my favorite craft blogs, and I love following their creative journeys!
Today, I love Etsy, because as I logged on to convo the seller from my last purchase to tell her that I LOVE the new hat, I found these fall goodies. For babies. So sweet. But Hannah is not a baby anymore. That's sweet and sad all at the same time.



Today, Micah took us out for a special breakfast at Coco's, because he was gone all weekend at a men's retreat, and she's now grown-up enough to color quietly at the table (and even on the table, but it came off with the miraculous baby wipes, thank goodness!) and line up sugar packets to practice counting. No running around the restaurant during the meal... well, until it was time to leave, at least. That's probably because she was too busy eating all of her breakfast favorites: scrambled eggs, blueberry pancakes, and even bacon! (Does she know that's meat? I wonder...maybe she's not a vegetarian after all!) It was precious, and we were so proud, that she was able to enjoy the special moment, eating and learning, rather than fussing and fighting.
Sorry no pictures, we were too busy enjoying the moment!

Back to Etsy. These other goodies were still posted on the site, though they have unfortunately sold. I'm going to have to recreate this Thanksgiving jumper. And put the Autumn wreath on her head. And make her pose in a picture with those felted pumpkins.
Fall is fun!

thank you dr. sears.

my child will now eat more than rice and beans. when she gets to choose.
okay then!
this was the greatest idea ever... p. 254 in the big purple baby book.
i doubt this will fatten her up, but at least now i am confident that she eats enough!

ps- the calculator next to her? it must be better than an ipad. she uses it as a phone. and sometimes as a remote for the TV. the more buttons, the better!

aaahhh. a rainy day.

what a sweet afternoon.
after snuggling with hannah under a quilt and listening to the rain... she dropped off to sleep for almost three hours (as of now).
rain. fernando on the ipod. sleeping baby. cozy time. such a perfect time to snuggle up with tea and a book under the same quilt.
OR, get the grades done for that last test.
Good news is... grades are in.
Even better... Hannah is still snuggled up in bed. Enjoying the rainy afternoon. And now, I'm off to find my book!
Thank you God for some peace and quiet!

Hannah's first baseball game

This post comes a few days late, but Hannah went to her first baseball game on Monday night.
Micah called me at school, all excited because one of his clients had a suite at the Angel Game and had invited us to come along... woohoo! Normally Mondays are strictly reserved for Piyo class, but we just couldn't miss out on this... and I'm glad we didn't!

The view was AMAZING. Totally held Hannah's attention for the first 20 minutes we sat out there. It was REALLY HOT, so we were thankful for the opportunity to duck inside and get something to eat every once in a while.
I've posted some of our favorite pictures from the night, though we missed the shot during Hannah's great bar routine. She was practicing her gymnastics on a hand rail for like, half an hour. You it's your first kid when you watch them do this. At a professional baseball game. In great seats. We were so riveted to this new development, that we couldn't even grab a camera!
Rookies.

ps- Isn't her sippy cup in the cup holder hilarious? Hannah loves cup holders!