Recipe Book

T-4 weeks and I'll be in school. The week of August 15, I'll be in school from 8:30-4:30 the whole week. Same for the week of September 5. Did I mention Dave is starting clerkship in earnest August 1? It's hard for me to imagine how busy we are going to be this year. In an attempt to simplify one area of our lives (and to avoid either starvation or eating out all the time), we are making a 2-3 week dinner rotation. This way, there will be no 'what's for dinner?' dilemma. We've come up with a list of about 10 meals that will be in our rotation, and I'm in the process of compiling recipes and corresponding grocery lists. Stay tuned for those.

No More Dance Aerobics

So Thomas seems to be getting worse and worse when it comes to bedtime and sleeping. I'm sure we've probably done this to ourselves, but it has gotten to the point where you have to bounce him while walking around and patting his back, with his soother, sleep sheep, swaddled for like 45 mins before he will go to sleep. And that's after feeding him and bedtime stories. And I'm not doing it anymore. It's ridiculous. Does anyone have any wonderful suggestions of how to get him to go to sleep easier? He's 4 months old now and he still eats every 3 hours all night long - any suggestions on lengthening the time between feeds? Some people purport to have babies younger than him that sleep for upwards of 9 hours at a time. Are they lying? If they are actually being truthful, what is their secret? Is it too young for sleep training? We will be leaving in about a month and he's bound to be thrown off by all the travel and sleeping in new places, etc. Should I not even bother doing this right now?

How lucky am I?

Yesterday was our anniversary. Seems crazy that it's already been 3 years...until I was looking at our wedding photos and we look a lot younger! Anyway, Dave took me out for a delicious Indian feast. (Kim watched Thomas) Great food with terrible service...which is a lot better than great service with terrible food, which is more of the norm here in Calgary. We then watched 'The Social Network' - which we actually watched at Dave's parents' house since they have a big screen tv, the movie was free, and we got free snacks and babysitting service too. Oh and every movie in this city either starts in the hour of 7 or the hour of 10 - so not very convenient times.

Anyhow, Mark Zuckerberg is the same age as us and was a classmate of all the people from my class at Stuy who went to Harvard. And now he's a billionaire. The youngest person to become a billionaire. It's easy to think for a second, wait - what did I do wrong? But then I looked around me and thought, he doesn't have anything. And I wouldn't trade my boys for anything in the world. How lucky am I?

We're not in Kansas (or NY) anymore

Recent fb status update of a friend here in Calgary:

in great falls mt! shop til we drop time!

How sad is that? We live in a place that has worse shopping than Montana. Montana!

Living room update

I realized I haven't posted photos of our living room since it was far from done. So here's the update!

A close-up of the bench that Stew constructed. I did the seats. Lots and lots of storage for junk underneath. The only problem is that the window is really drafty, so it's quite cold on the bench.

Here you can see our refinished buffet. It was in its 'before' state in my last post about our house. Big transformation. And don't you like our floating shelf? You can see the doorway on the left leads to the kitchen and the one on the right leads to the rest of the house.


By the time I took these 5 photos, Thomas was screaming...

Best. Commercial. Ever.

For your enjoyment.

O Tannenbaum, O tannenbaum

We finally got our Christmas tree out of the house on Wednesday night. Thank goodness because it was really starting to feel cramped in our little living room....and because I think the thing was a fire hazard. When Dave took it out front, he said it weighed about 4lbs...and it was a 6' tree. Real dry. Anyway, I had heard on the news that in the month of January, you could put your tree out with your regular garbage and the city would pick it up. So we put it out Wednesday night so it would disappear with our garbage on Thursday morning.

Well lo and behold, we walk our of our house on Thursday morning to find an empty garbage can and our dried out Christmas tree, looking as trashy as ever in front of our house. I don't know why they didn't pick it up. Very annoying. So we figured we would have to harass Dave's dad to come by and pick it up in his pick-up (appropriately named) and take it to whereever you take dead Christmas trees (the dump?). BUT lo and behold, we walked out of our house today and the tree was gone! Yay! But where did it go, you ask? Well as I mentioned in the post below it is super windy today and was all night. But up and down the street I looked and no Christmas tree was to be seen. Oh well.

As we were driving out of our neighborhood, we spotted it, in the front yard our our neighbors about 6 houses down. Is it terrible that I laughed and left it there?