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.
