Right now, Cora is sitting on our bed, paging through the hymnbook, and singing. It's pretty cute. She makes musical sounds quite a bit, which makes me very happy. I've played my flute and guitar for her a few times in the past week, and I think she likes it. She really likes playing my guitar herself.
In this picture, she's showing off how she can stack a bunch of Legoes together. She's made stacks of up to 8. Sometimes she has trouble lining them up right and gets frustrated. I have to remind myself that it's developing her fine motor skills and her patience so I don't go help her.

Last Thursday was Josh's class Halloween party. (Though this picture is actually from the ward party.) Cora and I went for an assembly in the morning, then ran some errands, then came back for lunch and stayed the rest of the day. At the assembly, they had a teacher costume contest. Since our costumes all went together, we all went up.
Josh chased me (holding Cora) onto the stage, and I hid behind the principal. It was fun. :D We ended up winning first place! The prize was a Starbucks gift card. At first I was bummed because I thought we couldn't use it, but then I remembered that they have cocoa and cider. Now all we need is for the weather to stay cool enough for that!

The rest of the day was lots of fun. Josh's students loooved having Cora there. We played games, some educational and some just for fun. After school they had a Fall Festival, which we stayed and helped out with. We ended up being there until almost 8, which meant that Cora was up
past her bedtime on a day where she didn't take a nap. Needless to say, she fell asleep on the way home. We were pretty tired, too, so we just put all the stuff from the party on the couch.

The next morning, while I was on the computer, Cora got ahold of the orange yarn we had used for a craft at the party. This picture was the result. She can reach almost anything on the couch and a lot of stuff on the kitchen table, if we leave it too close to the edge. No more shoving stuff to the side of the table so we can eat dinner! We'll actually have to clean it off!

We bought these pumpkins to use for an activity, planning to carve one or two later and cook the others. We never did carve them. But here's a very cute picture of Cora bouncing on them. We never had time to go to a pumpkin patch, so this is the closest picture you're going to get, Grandmas!


This picture is also from the ward Halloween party. We ended up just eating some hot dogs and talking for a little while. They had some carnival games, but there were just too many people to make it worthwhile to take Cora through. They would have been too hard for her, anyways. We left before trunk-or-treating because we wanted to be able to go without hitting any kids in the parking lot. So that's all we did for Halloween. I'm looking forward to next year, when Cora's older and Halloween doesn't fall on a Sunday.

Did you notice how my hair was in rollers for my costume? This is how it looked Sunday morning after I had slept on the rollers. I thought that combing it would relax the curls, and it did a bit, but then they just got tangled up together. My hair was VERY poofy. It reminded me of pictures of my mom in the 80s. Josh took a video of me combing my hair, but no still pictures. Sorry.

Josh is still very busy with school. It's gotten a lot better than it was at the beginning of the year, though. He still has to spend a lot of time planning, but not as much as he used to. I help him as much as I can. I'm still Activity Days leader, and having fun with it. Last week I had to bring Cora along with me because Josh had conferences after school, and the girls were thrilled. An acquaintance from BYU has designed a Finnish phrase course as part of her Master's in Education, and she needed people to give feedback on it, so I've been working on that this week. It's really fun to review Finnish. I need to keep it up.

Well, it's time to start dinner! Cora's hungry!

Stewart news

We're getting excited for Halloween! I am, at least. I got this shirt for a dollar at Target. I couldn't resist. I put a "Happy Halloween" banner and a bat garland on our dining room wall, and orange lights across the fireplace. I have some cobwebs and little plastic ghosts that I still need to put up. I'm working on making our costumes. I finally got the thread I needed on Monday, but haven't had time to work on them since then. Tuesday was Activity Days, so I was planning for that, and I've been helping Josh label his books for school. We had already leveled them, but now they've started a new system which includes getting points for the books they read. We're also having a competition--the 17 students against Josh and me to see who gets the most points. It's fun to compete. :D



Last week Cora and I got a ride to the ward playgroup at a park. Here's Cora playing with her friend Zach, who's a month or so older than her. It was actually a little chilly in the morning, so I put a jacket on her. In the sun, though, it got warm, so I was glad it was a jacket I could take off and not a long-sleeved shirt. I'm terrified that I'm turning into a Texan because 50 degrees feels chilly to me. Yikes!


There were horses next to the park, which Cora LOVED! One of the moms was helping the kids find grass to feed the horses, and Cora kept just sticking her whole fist through the fence. I'm glad the horses didn't bite it! We need to go to the zoo with her. There are tons of dogs in the neighborhood where we go on walks, and Cora always gets really excited when they bark at us. Then she gets mad at me when I walk past them.






Can't you tell how much she loves the swings? She really does, once they get moving. She loves the slide, too. I have to watch her carefully when she climbs up on the playground equipment because she tries to walk down the slide. :D Then when she gets down to the bottom, she tries to climb back up. Silly girl.







Here's Cora and Daddy playing peekaboo on the bed. Cora loves playing on our bed. If I need to do stuff on the computer, I can stick her on the bed with a few toys and she entertains herself well.





Whenever I get out the videocamera, Cora always wants to watch the videos on it. I took a video of them playing peekaboo, and then we watched the other ones, too. I tried uploading the videos on the library computers, but it didn't work. I think they've made it so you can't open any programs through the USB ports, and our camera has its own software. So I'll have to figure out some other way to share the videos with you guys.


We finally got her a front-facing car seat! She's been playing in it all week. Her legs have been a little crammed in her infant seat for a while. She got to use it for the first time today, and as soon as I buckled her in, she kicked her feet happily, as though she was thinking "Hooray, I finally have legroom!"

Other happy things from the last few weeks:
~Josh gave Cora her stuffed dog while he was changing her diaper and woofed, and she woofed back. She hasn't done it again since, though.
~She's finally saying "Mama" again! If I'm in my room (which is blocked off), she'll stand at the gate and say it over and over until I come get her.
~Josh taught her how to make my guitar tuner light up by singing into it, so whenever she gets ahold of it, she'll turn it on and sing. Singing before she can really talk!
~At lunch one day, Cora was doing something (probably dropping stuff on the floor), and I shook my head and said "No, no." Then she vigorously nodded "yes!"
~I've been using a few signs with her, and she's finally starting to pick them up. She started signing "milk" a couple days ago, and today she also signed "more." I got a book from the library that talks about signing, so I'm hoping to learn more to teach her. I've had several moms tell me that it helped tame the terrible twos because their kids were able to say what they wanted.

So that's what's up with us.

It's a miracle!

Monday morning, I opened the sliding glass door to put Cora's diaper in the diaper pail, and I felt a most wonderful sensation--cool air!!!!! We got a cold front, so at night it's been getting to 60 degrees, and today the high is only 87, with very little humidity! Fall is finally coming! (yes, it's very sad that 87 is fall weather, but this is the South).

And along with fall comes football! Here's Cora and Daddy watching football together. It's always very cute. We've been keeping up with the Cougars, and it's been a little depressing(they're 1-3 now), but we're optimistic about Jake Heaps as the QB. He's already pretty good, and experience can only help.

Daddy's not the only one teaching Cora bad habits. I made cookies last Wednesday, and taught Cora the noble art of snitching. That's my favorite part of baking. I only baked two or three pans at the time (I can't remember now how many it was) because I had to get working on dinner, fully intending to bake the rest of the dough. Well, that never happened. I've eaten most of it, with a little help from Cora and Josh. Whenever I open the fridge, Cora tries to get into it. She was doing that before the cookie dough was in there, though.

For about two weeks, Cora has been reaching for the doorknob. She knows it leads to outside, and she loves to go outside. In fact, twice on Saturday she ran outside when I was putting the trash out in front of the door, and I had to chase her down in my PJ's. Anyways, last Wednesday I heard her playing with the door, looked up, and saw that she was trying to put one of my keys in the door! All this time she's been watching me open the door, and now she's figured out what keys are for! Smarty pants! It was the car key, but still.

Cora's first Play-doh adventure. She only tried to eat it once. She didn't really do anything with it, except squish it a little, which is all I expected. She enjoyed watching me makes balls and snakes, though. We only played with it for five minutes or so.


Cora enjoyed this more. I got "What to Expect: The Toddler Years" because I had "What to Expect When You're Expecting" and loved it. It's great because it has all sorts of advice, from health to activities to development. I love it. Anyways, it said that at 13 months, kids can enjoy coloring. So I taped a piece of scratch paper to Cora's table and gave her a few crayons. She took to it very well--I didn't have to demonstrate at all, so every line on the page is hers. It's on our fridge now. Isn't she just so cute?

Life in general is good. School is getting much better for Josh. He's still gone a lot, but the school day itself is less stressful and frustrating, so he's much happier when he is home. He's still only getting 5-6 hours of sleep a night because he has a lot of planning to do, and if he has anything in the evening, like visits with the Elders Quorum Presidency, he gets less.

I've been going to the library on Thursdays for storytime with a lady in our ward. It's been really fun for Cora because she gets to be around other kids, and they have playtime afterwards, and fun for me because I get to get books to read. I'm working on reading books that have won the Newbery award (best book by an American author every year since 1920). Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can upload some videos via the library computers. Cross your fingers!

Miscellaneous

The last few weeks have been just normal. Josh has been really busy with school, since he has to be there ten hours a day, not including the commute or planning. The first week was really tough on both of us, since we barely got to talk to each other the whole week. Josh was always so exhausted when he got home that he barely had energy to get ready for the next day. Since then, we've made sure to talk about our days and spend time together. We've made sure to go on dates every week.
(Here's the little cutie on her first birthday. Doesn't she look so grown up?)
I understand now why my parents were so excited when I turned 11 and could babysit. It's really annoying, having to get a babysitter every week.

Cora's started wanting to spoonfeed herself, which makes quite a mess. But she's getting better. She pretty much eats everything we do. I made alambre the other night (similar to fajitas, but without the spices), and gave her some of the bell peppers, expecting her to make a face. Just like when I gave her a lemon, she surprised me by loving it and wanting more. I made Mexican lasagna last night, and she liked that, too. It makes dinnertime much easier, now that I can just give her some food and she'll eat it, instead of having to feed her myself.




Cora and her "leather boa"
She likes putting stuff around her neck, including this stuffed snake. I dressed her in this cute, girly outfit one day, and when she put the snake on, I thought of a feather boa. Josh came up with the name of leather boa.








This is the reason we got her a push toy for her birthday. Whenever I leave the stroller out, she tries to push it around.

This is kind of a random post, but hopefully enjoyable. We're all well. Cora is learning a lot. We are a happy family!

Links to photo albums

I just posted a bunch of pictures on Facebook over the last few weeks, so here are some links to look at them. The links are public, so you don't have to be on Facebook to see the pictures:

May and June, 2010: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2350964&id=17811451&l=3ed66f0cd2

July to September, 2010 (includes her birthday party!): http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2351001&id=17811451&l=aa097832a2

Don't pass out!

I'm writing two posts only a week apart! It's part of my new effort to have a weekly schedule for myself in which I do more than just read and bum around the house. I have a chore to do every day, as well as scripture study and "personal enrichment/hobby/improving my talents" time.

Anyways, that's enough about me. I know that anyone reading this really wants to read about Cora. Here are some of her recent accomplishments:
-I think she really knows "mama" and "dada"! She doesn't apply them to us exclusively, but I think she does know them.
-She deliberately kicked a ball a few times (tried to get it on video, but then she decided to stop)
-Her first animal sound - an elephant! Josh does a trumpeting sound for an elephant, and she's been copying him for a while, but now she does it independently. If we ask, "What does an elephant say?" or show her a picture of an elephant, she goes "phbbbt" with her lips, which is her version of Josh's sound. It's really cute.
-She talks up a storm, but nobody knows what she's saying. It's still adorable!
-She will put things into containers. I got her to help me clean up her Legoes today! Then she wants to take them out again, but I just stop her at that point.

Other goings on: Josh started the school year today! The day could have been much better, he said--the kids were off the wall today. He's a little stressed about making sure he's prepared enough. We both knew that this was going to be a difficult year, especially since the school day at KIPP goes from 7:30 to 5. But we'll make it.

I officially start my calling as Achievement Days leader next Tuesday, with our beginning-of-school activity. I still don't have the guidebook from the last leader, so I don't really know what my goals are supposed to be. I'm going to have a meeting with the assistants this week. This is a new experience for me; whenever I'm involved in planning something, I'm usually pretty passive. I generally just support others' ideas rather than come up with my own. Now I have to be the one to take the initiative. I think that's probably one major thing I'm supposed to learn from this calling.

Well, it's now 10:40pm, and I had better go to bed.

Arkansas trip

In July we went and visited Josh's sister Rachel and her family in Little Rock. We went to Little Rock Central High School, where the Little Rock Nine started the integration of Arkansas schools. There was a visitor's center where we could read about what happened. They had a lot of courage to ignore the insults and threats that the angry white population screamed at them. It was sad to see the hate, but I'm glad that our country has progressed since then.



Cora and her cousin, Thomas, waiting to see the ducks at the Peabody hotel. There are five ducks that swim in the lobby fountain, and they're brought out in the daily Duck March every morning. Thomas is 3 months older than Cora. They had a lot of fun together.



Here come the ducks!












Here comes the Cora!











Playing together at a church playplace. Cora discovered the joy of slides on this trip. She kept trying to climb up the slide. She always slipped, but she liked that, too.






We all walked over a walking bridge that crosses the Arkansas River. We timed it right so we could watch the sunset as we were walking. We also got to see a really long barge go through the lock.






Cora LOVED Thomas's little kiddy pool. He was in and out of it the whole time, but Cora stayed put. I knew she liked the water, but on this trip I realized she loves it. We also went to a water park, and Cora had a blast in the kiddy pool. She kept wandering around, climbing the slide, playing in the fountains, and so on.
Cora is trying to take Thomas's sippy cup. They both liked each other's cups, and would frequently swap them. Or Thomas would steal Cora's and she would pick up the one he dropped. In the car, Cora was still facing backwards, and Thomas was facing forwards, so they could see each other. They could also steal each other's toys. Eventually Cora just tossed every toy she got into Thomas's seat to save him the trouble of having to take it. It was pretty funny.
No, he's not really drowning her. Cora discovered the fun of putting her face in the water (which she now does every time she takes a bath). And Thomas just liked climbing over her.






Here's the little water baby (with Thomas's cup).
It was a great trip. I was glad to have the chance to get to know Rachel and David better and we had a lot of fun watching Thomas and Cora play.

For more pictures, follow this link!:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2350956&id=17811451&l=200f90346b

Catching up on the last two months

As my beloved little sister pointed out a couple weeks ago, I have not posted in a while. I can say I never have time, but that really would not be true. Cora is very good at taking naps (usually), and there is not a whole lot to clean in an 800 square foot apartment. So I do have lots of spare time. I just have this habit? no, tendency? that's a better word. I have a tendency to forget all the things I want to do with my spare time when I have some spare time. So I make a list. But then I forget to consult my list when I have spare time. And so usually I end up reading. Which is not a bad thing, but sometimes I take it to an extreme.

But I do do other things. The school district we live in offered a twice-weekly Spanish class that I went to. It was really neat and I learned a lot. I've been wanting to learn Spanish ever since we decided to move to Houston (it's one of those things on my list of things to do in my spare time) but never gotten around to it. It has also inspired me to work on maintaining my Finnish, because I definitely don't want Spanish to replace Finnish in my foreign language brain.

I can't remember if I mentioned in my last post, but Cora is walking now, and LOVES it. She loves carrying stuff around with her, and not just toys, either. Her current favorite is the Dr. Seuss book "There's a Wocket in My Pocket." She also loves spatulas, backscratchers, measuring spoons, and tissues (those I always reclaim quickly). She absolutely loves books, too. She'll just sit and turn the pages of her board books, or any other books we happen to leave on the floor. I finally had to move all the books that were on the lower two shelves of our living room bookcase because she kept on pulling them off, even the textbooks that Josh insisted she wouldn't be able to pull off. She hasn't ripped any pages yet, but she does crunch them in her hands. There's a little photo album that she carries around, too, but I haven't put any pictures in it yet. I think she would like them, though. Our screen saver is a slide show of our pictures, and she gets really excited whenever she sees them. She gets especially excited about pictures of herself (go figure).

In mid-May, we went to Utah and New Mexico for Josh's brother James' wedding. I loved spending time with the family. Cora's the 11th grandchild on that side (with two more on the way now!), so she got to interact with some of her cousins. I think going there helped motivate her to walk more. She had started taking steps a few weeks before that, but definitely preferred crawling. But during that trip, she started walking a lot. Part of it may have been watching her cousins walk, one who's a year older and one 3 months older.

After the wedding in St. George we spent a week in Silver City with Josh's parents and got to see his youngest sister, Anna, graduate from high school. And I got to help my mother-in-law make a quilt! Anna and the other seniors in band wanted to give their director a special gift, since he's retiring. I don't know if Anna volunteered her mom, or if she volunteered herself, but somehow she was assigned to make a quilt for all the seniors to sign. So I got to help, with everything from planning, cutting, and sewing patches together. I didn't get to help sew the front and back pieces together because we had to leave before she did that. But it was a lot of fun to learn how to do that and spend quality time with my mother-in-law! I have really been blessed to have great in-laws. I love being with Josh's family just as much as mine. Josh gets along really well with my family, too.

Oh, I should probably mention that Josh got a job. Yay! We knew he was going to get several offers from Aldine, the district he student taught in, and he also got an offer from a KIPP school. KIPP stands for "Knowledge is Power Program" and is a charter school network focused on helping kids in severe poverty make it to and through college. Josh has been reading about these schools for a couple years, so he wanted to try applying, but he didn't think he had much of a chance to be hired. But he was! He taught summer school for two weeks, and got a $2500 stipend, which should get us through the rest of the summer. Hooray! We've been really blessed to be able to afford to live while we've been almost incomeless for the past 6 months. And now he has 5 weeks off until the nationwide KIPP conference the first week of August.

So what are we going to do with all this spare time? My family (minus my two brothers on missions) is coming Saturday to visit for a few days, and we're planning on going to the beach and the Space Center with them. And playing lots of games, of course. After they leave, we're going to go visit Josh's sister Rachel in Arkansas for a week or so. And then, probably just hang around at home and enjoy being together. And posting on the blog.

Well, I think I'll wrap up for now. I need to go make dinner.

Ways Cora is like a dog

We realized the other day that Cora has a lot in common with a dog.

1. She drools a lot.
2. She goes around on all fours and tries to climb on the furniture.
3. She gets really excited when she sees food or people.
4. She growls and whines.
5. She has her tongue out all the time.
6. She begs for table scraps.
7. She likes to eat socks. (Our dog Jazz did that all the time when he was a puppy.)
8. She chews on everything she finds on the floor.

Some people get a dog instead of having a child; we did both! jk

Disclaimer: This is just to be funny. Cora is and always will be better and cuter than any dog.
P.S. Credit goes mostly to Josh, because he came up with most of these.

At Space Center Houston

Over Spring Break, we went to the Space Center south of Houston. It was really cool! It's normally $20 a person, but we found a deal for half-off tickets if you buy them online, so we got in for $20 total. Woohoo!

Here we are next to an actual landing pod. I can't remember which mission it was from, but it was the real thing.







Touching a real moon rock! I wanted to get the picture with Cora touching it, but she didn't want to keep her hand in there.







This is where the astronauts trained before going up to Skylab, the first American space station. It's called a mock-up. No, that is not a real person; it's just a mannequin.






This is the mock-up for the current space station. We got to take a bus ride to the Johnson Space Center, the actual place where all the scientists work and astronauts train, to see this. We didn't see any astronauts, though. But we did see . . . .





a space suit!









And a mock-up of the space shuttle!
So the tour was pretty awesome.








Then we got to go see a Saturn V rocket, which had all the propulsion to get the astronauts into space. We couldn't tell if it was one that had been used or not, but my guess is it wasn't, because didn't it fall to pieces and crash to the earth? I don't know. It was cool to see, though, and HUGE.





The rocket had a great big long building all to itself. On the wall were descriptions and pictures of all the Apollo missions. So we did learn something, too.










After the tour, we came back to the tourist area and watched a presentation about how astronauts live in space--sleeping, washing, eating, bathing, etc.

Then we got to pose with astronaut helmets!






These helmets were attached to a table by a cord, which obviously wasn't long enough for Josh!

A real post, finally

I do have a reason for my drought. First, I was in Minnesota with my family for a week and a half (This picture is of Cora enjoying the flowers at the Como Zoo's Conservatory in St. Paul with her Grandpa Watts). Josh came just for President's Day weekend, and Cora and I stayed another week. When I got back I was offered a job. There's a used bookstore a block away from our house, and I've been walking there a lot to visit with the owners and read books. When I came back from Minnesota and went to visit the bookstore, and they offered me a job. The only time I'm scheduled to work is Thursday nights from 6-8; other than that, I go in whenever Cora's schedule permits, and I can bring her with me. That is really nice! I usually go for about an hour a day in between her morning and afternoon naps. So that's been keeping me busy.

(Cora playing with Poppy, my sister's rabbit, on my parents' bed)

Then we had Josh's parents and younger sister here for a couple days. It was a lot of fun to spend time with them. I got to know them even better, because Josh was away at school the whole day and it was just Cora and me with them. I'm lucky to have great in-laws. And that Josh fits in well with my family. We're just blessed all around.

Other exciting news: we bought a printer and Josh's parents brought me back my guitar. And my mom sent me a bunch of new music (including lots of Finnish music!). So that's pretty much everything that's been going on for the last month.

Cora is crawling now! She can also get back to sitting after she crawls, which means she can entertain herself for a long time. She loves to come visit me in the kitchen and slap the floor. She has discovered the joys of banging, too. And not long after she started crawling, she figured out how to pull herself to standing. My baby's growing up! She'll be 8 months on April 6.

So now that she's mobile, she can keep herself awake much longer. One day I put her down for a nap, and she played for an hour before finally going to sleep. And this is how she went to sleep! She's flopped over her legs.





I couldn't resist putting this picture in, because she's just so CUTE!! She already has Mommy and Daddy wrapped around both her little fingers.

Utah visit!

I am going to be in Utah next month! Lana, one of my old roommates, is getting married in the Salt Lake Temple, so Cora and I are flying in April 21. I want to spend a day or so in Provo and time with family, too. Let me know if you want to get together!

Cora's in a cute baby photo contest!

Go to this link to vote:

http://www.photowow.com/contest/vote.aspx

You'll have to vote on the other pictures until hers pops up. This is the photo I submitted.

Ranting and Raving

This is RIDICULOUS! I tried to take Cora in for her 6-month well-baby checkup yesterday. We're still on the BYU student health plan, so I called the insurance company to preauthorize her visit. And they said go ahead. So I went to the doctor. Ok, I need to explain something. The student health plan is through DMBA, Deseret Mutual Benefits Administrators, and they've contracted with First Health network to provide service if you go outside the Utah/Idaho area. So when I went to the doctor, they didn't recognize the insurance company, so they called DMBA to make sure we were covered. And they said that DMBA said they didn't cover physicals. What????? I took Cora for all her appointments at the Health Center in Provo no problem! Thinking it might have been a misunderstanding (maybe they thought the appointment was for me, not Cora), I called DMBA today. And they said, "No, we don't routine checkups like that because you can get them at the Health Center." RIDICULOUS! RIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUSRIDICULOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Can you tell I'm a little ticked about this? Haven't they heard of preventative medicine? Actually I think what I'm more ticked about is that they never told us that. They were just like, "oh, yeah, just go through First Health and you'll be fine." Bah! I never would have stayed on the health plan if I knew they weren't going to cover Cora's checkups!v And of course we find this out after paying a $1200 premium for the semester. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

So, if any of you are BYU students on the health plan, do not try to use it if you move somewhere else, especially if you have kids. That probably doesn't apply to many of you, but I just wanted to get that out there.

Cora making faces

Yesterday we noticed that Cora was starting to scrunch her eyes up when she smiled, like Josh does. Today she was doing it constantly, so I took some pictures. I think she's figuring out how to copy our facial expressions, because when I scrunched my eyes up at her she would do it again. It was cute!!