Bonus Post: Flashback -- September 25, 2010

Setting up the reception hall the day before:

Rehearsal:

Rehearsal Dinner:

Getting ready Saturday morning:

Pictures before the ceremony:

Pictures after the ceremony:

Reception:

The car:

September 15-22

Bryan has been approved to work at home on an ad hoc basis.  He thinks this could transition to a permanent work-from-home fairly easily, which would be nice if/when we decide to move.  For now, though, he's still working at work because it's less distracting.  :)

I've got a job with a real live paying orchestra.  I made Lima's sub list, and they need me for the October concert.  :)

The girls and I have been taking advantage of the beautiful weather to go for walks every day.  When we get back, Gretchen and I sit on the steps while Olivia plays with her bike, car, and slide.  If I time things right then she gets 15-20 minutes before Bryan comes home (for lunch or for the day).

We got together with Steph and her kids to make baby food on Thursday.  We were as productive as possible considering that there were 4 kids running around (well, two running and two sitting/laying).  Our freezers are now well stocked with flavored ice cubes.  :)

If you look on the right sidebar, you may notice that I've added a "videos" section under the blog archive.  I'm adding all the family videos to a vimeo album so that you can re-watch them without searching out specific posts.

Other than that, this week has been pretty uneventful.  I'm hoping to get a bonus post up this Wednesday, so look for that.

Pictures and Video:

September 8-15

Some men compliment their wives: "You look nice today, dear."  Bryan compliments me, but not in the same way.  Nothing so boring as "that dress looks good on you."  No, the compliment that I got the other day was said half to himself in a congratulatory tone: "I got such a good specimen."

Olivia's favorite song to sing to herself is "Are You Sleeping?"  She's actually quite easy to understand, at least for the first and last lines.

And speaking of Olivia's singing, she enjoys singing along with her CDs in the car.  They've got lots of kid songs with repetitive bits that she can pick up on.  One song in particular, Alice the Camel, is very repetitive until the end.  Alice the Camel has 5 humps, Alice the Camel has 4 humps, etc, all the way down to Alice the Camel has no humps.  Olivia can't be bothered to wait for the ending, though, so as soon as the song starts playing, she blurts out (SPOILER ALERT), "It's a horse!  Mommy, the camel is a horse!"

In the movie Men in Black, Will Smith's character delivers an alien baby.  As he looks at the little squid creature, he says, "You know, it's actually kind of..." (baby spits in his face) "...cute."  I realized this week that Gretchen is that creature.  Check out the video starting at 1:45 and you'll see what I mean.  Or watch the whole clip; it's only 2 minutes long.  :)

The girls and I headed east for a few days to visit Justine and William while Joseph was gone on business.  We hung out and made applesauce.  Justine had a sauce maker machine that she borrowed from a friend, and once we got that all put together correctly (she received it incorrectly assembled), smushing apples was a breeze.  Side note:  I own a similar machine that I hadn't used yet.  I now know that it works great, and I'm super excited that I own it.  :)  Unfortunately, our second batch of applesauce had issues (lack of headspace combined with plastic rings is a bad plan for canning) AND we ran out of time to finish the last half bushel.  We did make some pretty tasty apple butter, although that took longer than expected as well.  Fun times were had all around, and the cousins enjoyed playing together.  And we got tasty applesauce to boot.  :)

One thing I decided during the trip to Pennsylvania was that someone need to devise a way to refuel cars mid-drive.  I'm envisioning something similar to fighter jets refueling mid-flight.  Both girls had settled into afternoon naps after a brief snack at a rest stop.  I was hoping my tank of gas would make it all the way to Justine's house, but about half an hour out we were getting pretty empty.  I stopped to fill up and suddenly had two awake babies.  :-/

Gretchen can roll from front to back now.  At least, I assume that's what is happening when I put her down on her back, find her a bit later on her stomach (old news), and then come by even later and find her on her back again.  No one has actually witnessed the rolling, but Justine and I both saw the changes in position.

Way back before Gretchen was born, I asked for freezer meal recipes and promised 15 bonus points to the person who submitted Bryan's favorite.  The winner of those 15 points is Grandma for her submission of Spaghetti Pie!  Your points have been updated.  A note: We finished eating freezer meals months ago; I just kept forgetting to post the points.  :)

Pictures and Video:

September 1-7

Gretchen is night weaned.  She still has trouble getting to sleep at night, but once she's done fussing and finally asleep then she doesn't need to eat until she gets up for the day.  Actually, by the end of this week she was refusing to nurse during her fussy state (unless it had been about 4 hours), probably because she knows that the only time I nurse her after such a short span is when I'm trying to get her to go back to sleep.  At this point, with the exception of the still-not-as-early-or-consistent-as-I'd-like bedtime, Gretchen's nursing and sleeping habits are almost exactly the same as Olivia's were at 9 months.  She's such an overachiever.  :)

I'm having trouble with videos again.  Someday everything will work.  Maybe.  For now, I've uploaded a video to YouTube.  Since I don't want all the videos of my girls to be open to the public, I made it private and listed the email addresses of people who could see it.  You may have gotten an email or six to that effect.  Sorry about that.  If you can't watch it through this link, then (theoretically) that means I either forgot to add you or used a different address.  If that's the case, leave a comment with the email address that you use to view this blog and I'll add you to the approved list.

Video:  Olivia and Gretchen Dance (youtube)

Update: I found another site, Vimeo, that doesn't require new accounts and such (yay! -- I'm not trying to make everybody open new accounts all over the place just because I'm anti-Facebook, I promise).  All videos are password protected with the password BarhorstBrewed.  Here is the same video on that site:

Video:  Olivia and Gretchen Dance (vimeo)

Let me know which method of sharing you prefer.  I'm leaning towards Vimeo myself.

The FAB Fun Run was a rousing plodding success!  Bryan made a route the night before the run and, not being a runner himself, made it "not boring" enough that everyone needed to carry directions so as to not miss the turns.  :-P  We'll work on that for next year.  Also for next year, we want to have music at the finish line.  I thought of it during the run, but obviously that was too late.  :-P  We had a 10K, a 5K, and an Untrained Mile for interested runners and our official timekeeper (Mom) and her helpers (James, Olivia, Gretchen, and some neighborhood kids) set up a water table and handed out finisher sticks.

Bryan was inspired (shamed?) by our fun run and has decided to begin running once a week.  He was the sole entry into the Untrained Mile and got a hamstring cramp halfway through which required him to stop and stretch before continuing.  Tuesday night, he decided that every Wednesday morning he was going to wake up 15 minutes earlier and run/walk a mile until he can run the whole thing.  Then his training will be complete and he will stop.  :)

We had guests (for the Fun Run, of course!) Sunday and Monday.  Sunday afternoon, we decided to go Putt-Putt golfing with Josef, Alison, and Jillian.  Olivia was excited for about the first hole and a half before she got bored.  Luckily, it's a small area and it wasn't crowded, so she could spend all her time exploring the were periodic interesting holes (with stairs, fences, and ramps) while the rest of us played.

My first audition was last Saturday for a sub position with the Lima Symphony Orchestra.  I found out on Tuesday that I'm on their list!  Hooray!  Now if only it wasn't quite so far away...

One of my tomato plants had two little red tomatoes on Wednesday night.  Nevermind that this was the "Fourth of July" plant (meaning tomatoes were supposed to be ripe in time to use on the fourth of July) or that the tomatoes were only slightly larger than golf balls.  There were tomatoes and they were ripe!  I left them there, thinking Olivia would like to help me pick them the next morning.  I was right.  Thursday morning we walked outside and she picked ...ONE tomato?  What happened to the other one?  I looked, but there was no sign that there had ever even been another tomato.  I know I didn't imagine the second one, though, because we've had 4 green tomatoes for a few weeks now, and only two are left.  So something came along in those 12 hours or so and swiped one of my tomatoes.  :(  Oh well.  The one that we did pick was delicious.  :)

Pictures

August 25-September 1

We've partially fixed the bath problem.  I have a little baby bathtub seat that we used once with Olivia and then put away because it was easier to just plop her little self right in the water.  I rediscovered this seat when rearranging rooms and decided to give it a try with Gretchen.  Baths are now tolerable, at least for long enough that I can get her clean before she gets upset.

Time for the Peanut Story.  Once upon a time I learned that it's not very hard to make your own peanut butter.  It is, however, cost prohibitive, especially if you buy Aldi peanut butter like I do.  Having discovered this, I let the matter drop.  Then we went to Traverse City, and mom brought Kroger peanut butter.  As it turns out, Kroger peanut butter is not as sweet as Aldi peanut butter, so when we returned home my Aldi peanut butter was much too sweet for my taste.  Back to my research I went.  Perhaps I could buy peanuts in bulk and get a better price?  After much searching, I found NutStop.com and their raw redskin peanuts for $0.89 a pound.  Excellent.  To get the wholesale price, you have to buy at least 25 pounds of peanuts.  I started looking for people that might also want to make their own peanut butter.  The shipping ends up costing almost as much as the peanuts, so the deal wasn't as great as I wanted it to be.  Then I wondered, does shipping cost less if you buy more peanuts?  It does.  Up to a point.  After checking several price points, I learned that shipping is optimized at 73 pounds of peanuts.  Since it is apparently more ridiculous to me to not get optimized shipping than to have 73 pounds of peanuts show up on my front porch, I decided to order 73 pounds.  Now there are a lot of peanuts sitting in my basement (but they only cost $1.28 a pound after shipping!).  And that is the peanut story.

Gretchen can roll over all the way now, arms and everything.  She actually perfected this last weekend, but I didn't update my already written post to reflect her spectacular talents.  She still doesn't roll front to back, but I'm sure she'll get there.  Back to front is the hard one anyway.

Monday was check-up day, so both girls got weighed and measured.  Gretchen is 14 pounds, 6 ounces and 26 inches long.  Olivia was longer and fatter at the same age.  And speaking of Olivia, she is now 27 pounds and 34.5 inches tall.  Both girls are proportional (I'm not sure why the doctor tells me that every time...) and healthy.

Pictures and Video:

August 18-25

Gretchen news:
-She's in 6-9 month clothes.  I don't remember when that happened with Olivia, but I think it was a little later.  I swapped out all the smaller sizes this week and Gretchen doesn't even look like she's swimming in the bigger stuff.
-She officially has two teeth now.  More potential for biting her thumb when she manages to catch it, but that hasn't bothered her yet.
-Baths are terrible.  It's like James has come again.  Sometimes I can trick her into being accepting of the water, but then she'll move her limbs and instantly be upset again.  The only thing worse than baths is bedtime.
-Bedtime is terrible (you knew that was coming).  She takes a final nap beginning between 4 and 5 and then is determined to be awake forever!  ...Or at least for several hours.  Preferably no less than 4.  I can't even convince her to take another nap sometime in there, so by the time she goes to bed for the night, Gretchen is one tired baby.
-She's a leech.  Olivia held on about as well as a sack of rice when she was being carried.  Gretchen is much more interested in preserving her own skin, so she'll cling like a baby koala to whatever she can grab.  Usually that's my shirt, but every now and again she'll get the back of my arm instead.  :(  Oh, and one Sunday she grabbed on to the communion cloth when it was put under her chin.  That was a fun 30 seconds or so while we all tried to disentangle her clenched fingers.  :)

Olivia news:
-She sings.  This should surprise no one.  The other night, Olivia made up a wonderful head-banging rock song about Oma and Opa.  It went something like this: O-MA!  O-PA!  O-MA!  O-PA!  James!  Omao-PA!  O-MA!  O-PA!  We've also heard songs about the mommy and daddy octopus.
-She's about to lose a fingernail.  She shut her finger in a door a couple of weeks ago and it didn't look so bad at first, but now the nail it probably 98% detached.  Bryan insists that we try to keep it from coming off completely, so we go through copious amounts of band-aids and masking tape in an attempt to keep it covered.
-She doesn't like listening to crying.  Whenever Gretchen is sad, Olivia says, "Don't cry, baby."  This usually starts out gently, but quickly escalates until Gretchen is crying and Olivia is yelling, "Stop!  Don't cry!  No!  Stop cry!  Don't!  Stop, don't cry!"  We also heard a "quiet, baby!" come from Olivia's room one trying night.
-She's good at filling in familiar words and phrases.  If I pause at the right point, Olivia can help read most of her books.  She also does parts of the Lord's Prayer and the Creed.
-She knows some colors.  Olivia will identify things as being yellow, blue, black, and green.  She gets yellow right almost all of the time, but the other three are hit or miss.  She can also say purple, orange, red, and pink, but has to be reminded that those colors exist first.
-She's in full potty-training mode.  Bryan built a little set of steps so that Olivia can get up to the potty and sink by herself.  Since she already knows how to unsnap her own diaper, convincing her to put herself on the potty was pretty easy.  Of course, that means she can also get off by herself, which would be fine if she could put her diaper back ON by herself.  As it is, I generally catch her running around naked (because I have to leave the room when she goes to the bathroom -- there are worse things) and have to recapture her to put a diaper back on.  Next week we're buying some training undies and seeing how that goes.

Johannah:
-I'm auditioning for two orchestras in the next month.  Lima has openings for subs and Springfield has section positions.  We'll see how those go.  Regardless of the results, my Monday orchestra starts back up tomorrow and I'm pretty excited to be playing regularly again.
-I got a food processor.  Let the peanut butter making commence.  Well, let me buy the peanuts, first, and then it will commence.  For those of you who don't know about the peanut butter project, I'll tell the story next week.  Short version: there are 73 pounds of peanuts in my future.  If you want to buy some for about $1.30 a pound, I will not object.  I have only one rule: I'm not going to ship them, so I'll have to be seeing you in person in order to deliver them.

Bryan:
-Working late has decreased so that he only has to stay late twice a week.  It's been nice to have him home at the normal time again.
-He declared August "get stuff done" month.  We have an ever-growing list taped to the bedroom door that we've been steadily chipping away at.  Bryan's biggest accomplishment was the steps for Olivia, but he's gotten lots of little stuff done, too.

Pictures:

August 11-18

There are some birthday pictures up on the July 28-August 4 post.  We also took a video, but I'm having trouble getting it to upload...

Tim Horton's is up and running.  Just in time for the FAB Fun Run.  In case visiting us and running wasn't enough, there's coffee just down the street.  We can incorporate a stop into the run if need be.  :)

There are a few ladies at the church we go to that tend to tell the same stories every week, pretty much word for word.  I assume it's because they don't remember that we've already heard these stories so many times that we could recite them back.  Or, in the case of one woman who is a native Greek speaker, perhaps these are the only stories she knows in English.  Also, her accent is so thick that the first dozen or so times I heard her stories, I caught a few more details each time.  Thursday I had a new experience.  The Greek woman pulled me aside after church and I knew I was going to hear her favorite story again.  Only this time, she seemed to also forget that I don't speak Greek.  I heard the whole thing in Greek!  She uses the same inflections and hand motions no matter which language she's speaking, so I knew which answers were appropriate.  I felt like I really understood what she was saying.  :)

Google is taking new street view pictures in our neighborhood.  I've now seen four of the street view cameras mounted on cars (splashed with the Google Maps logo, which is how I know what they are) as I walk around.  Does this mean that when the website gets updated I'll be in four places at once?

Olivia can count to ten with a little help.  Actually, she can count to 9, and then puts 30! on the end.  As a stalling/waiting technique, she and I count to thirty a lot, and she says thirty for me when I pause at the end.  Of course, now she thinks 30 comes after 9...  Some days she does better than others with the whole counting thing.  Often she counts like the king in Monty Python: 1, 2, 5!  Oh well.  She also knows that two is more than one, so she sounds very smart when she's talking about seeing two trucks or having two monkeys.  Unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that she doesn't really know how many two is; I'm pretty sure two just means "not one."

My motivation for running has been lacking since I ran the half marathon.  I was afraid that might happen.  I know myself well enough to realize that I need something to work toward in order to keep working.  That's why I don't tend to just walk around the block (or around the mall in the winter).  I need to be going somewhere.  My motivation is certainly not helped by the fact that the days are getting shorter so my morning runs are getting darker.  No one wants to get up when it's still dark out...

Gretchen is a spectacular sleeper.  She's also a great napper.  Unfortunately, she's not so hot at actually falling asleep.  We've been trying to find the optimal bedtime lately, but no matter how early or late it is, she sleeps for 30-60 minutes and then wakes up.  Bryan thought maybe she was taking a nap and then needed to be up for a bit, so we tested that theory.  Her normal naps are at least an hour, though, and she wakes up happy.  This pre-sleep nap is shorter and she wakes up cranky.  She's cranky if we get her up, she's cranky if we leave her down...  She fusses for 1.5-3 hours and then goes down for good.  It's like she knows it's coming, too, so some nights she'll fight the pre-sleep nap as well.  Those of you who were at camp know how well Gretchen goes down for daytime naps: put her down, stuff a pacifier in her mouth, cover her with a blanket, give her something to hold so she doesn't grab the pacifier, and she's good to go.  Light and noise don't bother her and she's similarly unfazed by toddlers peeking over the edge of her bed to see if she's really asleep.  At night time, though, she stiffens her limbs, bites her pacifier, and makes terrible noises that sound like an alien might come bursting out of her belly at any moment.  We're going to keep working on this.  Twenty-five points if you suggest a working solution before I think of it myself.

Pictures and Video: