wish you could see/hear what i do

right now samira is still sleeping (unheardof) and p is laying on the carpet in the play room eating one of the birds on the birdbath toy he loves. the house is quiet and still picked up from last night. i am thinking we should start keeping the kids up late and then we can sleep in!

thanksgiving this year was more like "turkey day" than ever before for me. i should try to explain that. kent played at an indoor water park in Gurnee IL on thanksgiving day. which is, of course, fine because we like work! but that meant i was at my mom's with little back up. p took a nap and didn't wake up until everyone was at dinner. then we went down to join the fam at the table and p didn't want anything to do with sitting in his chair to eat. so i ate about three bites of turkey and two pieces of sweet potato and the table was cleared. now anyone who knows me knows that i can afford to skip a meal but on a day that is centered around food it's not really fun to go home thinking i might drive through burger king!

the highlight of my weekend was definitely time spent with kent and our friends. rose came home for a surprise visit and we were feeling very special bc she spent a block of time with us on her short trip. we are looking forward to seeing her and the family over the christmas break. samira really misses sam lees ( she uses his full name all the time). she won't want him to go when they're here. she has been asking a lot of questions that test her dad and me and our ability to spin things. questions like, "why did daryn leave michigan city? If marley grows up too much will she even remember me when i see her again?" these past few months have been filled with people in and out of her life and she is working hard at trying to make sense of all of it.

pierce is so much fun. fun is the word we are using to describe it anyway. he is adventurous and he climbs on everything. it's hard to imagine the things we should be protecting him from but he always finds them and shows them to us. we are so happy that he and his sis get along so well.

we had a great dinner last night that was not wasted on chasing around a small or screaming child. my sister is great with pierce and so she stayed home with him while we went out with friends. this morning samira told her sito she got to go the restaurant because she had good behavior in the store. it's possible we are on overload with the explanation of things. i'm going ot work on that. someday.

and finally, i have to admit i am a little sad bc i failed to get our christmas cards out before i received one. i'll try again next year.

samira sleeps over

so samira stayed at steven and liz's last night and then she is going to church with them this morning and back home sometime later on. yesterday she informed kent and me that, if they asked her to, she would go ahead and stay at the sawaya house forever, after all, they don't have a little girl.

to which i replied that she is my little girl and it's not my fault that they don't have a little girl of their own and she said "mom, that's not nice." since she did not call me before bedtime, i called her and she was making cookies and eating dinner and deciding on a color of frosting. she sounded somewhat interested in talking to me but then remembered she was having way more fun with steven.

when we went up to bed i asked kent to make sure we had a phone upstairs and that the ringer was on just in case she wanted to come home in the middle of the night. that did not happen. i'm pretty sure she would make good on the staying-forever-if-asked deal!



yesterday was a sad day. we said goodbye to our friends for a while. gwen and jeff and the kids left for utah this morning where they will stay so that they can be together again. anyone that knows me knows that i was not cut out for single parenting so watching gwen parent both the little girls has been a good lesson.

we got to hang out for a while yesterday, after trick or treating together on friday night. that was also a good time.

leila is getting so big and it seems to be happening very quickly. she's just a little more than four weeks old and it's hard to imagine my kids as tiny as she is now. p and mira love to be around leila and we are lucky that sam and jess don't mind the cousins all over the little babe!

looking forward to a victorious election day soon. i seriously cannot imagine losing this election. i even got to chat with some canvass-ers yesterday in the coffee shop in michigan city and they seemed hopeful but seriously motivated to stay on the voters right up until the last moments of tuesday. which is also what i will be doing. i am working at the Dem office in LP on tuesday from 3-? to help out in the last few hours. then planning our move to canada if we live in four more years of republican regime.

go green