Seven Quick Takes - Volume 12

*tap, tap tap* Is this thing on?  Is anyone out there?  I know my blog has been super quiet lately (did you hear crickets chirping?)!  Real life flies by at the speed of... well, life! I've been going along for the ride, with little time to take care of things like blogging!  For a quick recap of the past few weeks for us, here's my Quick Takes!

We celebrated Michael's 33rd birthday last week!  He took the day off of work and we went up to the mountains to play disc golf (what else?!).  The course up there was very challenging (disc golf in the mountains, what else could be expected?) but we had a great time as a family, enjoying the beautiful fall weather and each other's company!  Here's the birthday boy man and his boys!

Notice anything different about Isaac in the picture above?  Here's another picture for a closer look:

For a little while, he had been complaining about road signs and various other long-distance things being fuzzy... finally it got to the point where I thought I should probably take him in to get his eyes checked.  Sure enough, he's got his mama's eyes and needed some glasses.  Thankfully, it's not nearly as bad as my eyes, and we're hoping it stays that way!  He loves his new glasses - for one, because he can actually see again (go figure!) and two, several of his friends have glasses, so it's the "in" thing in his crowd.  I'm really happy that he's happy about them!

We've made an official upgrade!  We've enjoyed our wonderfully steady and reliable Suburban for 6 years, but with Rachel joining our family, we had officially maxed it out.  We all fit, but there was no room at all for anyone else, which got tricky at times.  After a few months of casual looking around, we came across a 15-Passenger van that met all of our criteria, and was in our price range!  And it's a pretty fun color, too!

I'm doing something that I swore up and down I'd never do.  No, it's nothing all that terribly exciting, but it has made a big difference - I'm running at night!  Instead of trying to beat Miss Rachel's wake-up time and getting up at insane hours in the morning, I've found it's so much easier to wait until everyone is in bed to hop on the treadmill.  I've always thought it would be way too difficult, because I'm really *not* a night person, but I'm finding it alot more enjoyable, since I don't feel a huge pressure to RUSH or stress about possibly being interrupted.  I had slacked off for about a month, but with some external motivation (training to do a 5K with friends!) and this new adjustment, I'm getting back into a good routine.  And getting to sleep in a little later!

Speaking of Miss Rachel and her sleeping... something has happened to my wonderfully content sleeper!  From the time she was about 6 weeks old, she had been sleeping like a dream - waking only once or twice, often sleeping 10-12 hours straight.  Such joy!  Right around the 6 month mark, though, something changed.  Call it teething (she did get her two bottom ones in), or milestone development (she is crawling everywhere and pulling up on everything!) or separation anxiety, or... whatever it is, it's amounting to NO sleep.  Naps are a struggle, and nighttime sleep goes well for the first few hours, and then she wakes up to nurse and wants to stay awake and hang out.  For an hour or two.  Or three.  In the middle of the night.  Um... that's not working for me!  This has been happening several nights a week for a while, and I'm a little tired (to say the least), and praying we get over this little hitch soon!

Remember that review and giveaway I did for the digital scrapbooking software, MyMemories Suite?  Well, it's become a slight addiction for me.  I think I do at least one page a day, or work on a page, anyway.  I seriously love it!  Besides just really fun scrapbook pages - like this one:

 

I've also realized what neat decorations and gifts I can make!  This has been my latest project - making name pages for each child to go on their doors.  It's been fun to consider each one's personality and tastes while doing it.  Here they are - click to enlarge if you want to see them bigger!

Take a close look at Joel's - we had a compromise we had to work out over it.  He wanted a monster on the page, and I wanted the grasshopper (Michael calls him "Cricket" so a grasshopper was a close fit)... and we both won.  Can you see his monster?  :-)

Anyway, my point is, that the whole digital scrapbooking thing is more than just a way to present photos - it is actually quite versatile! I love it so much that I'm an affiliate for MyMemories now! So, if you order the MyMemories Suite Software, use can use the coupon code STMMMS71850 to save $10 off the software price and get another $10 credit toward stuff in the MyMemories store... and I'll get a little bonus, too!  They also have weekly freebies and fun challenges on their Facebook page, so check them out!  And if you're still hesitant about buying... and have a lot of patience, I'll be doing another giveaway, probably early in the new year!

In all of my free time (hahahahahaha!!) (no, I mean, the several times a day I sit down to nurse the baby, that's about as free as I get), I've been working through some older literature on my Kindle.  Since so many good, older books are available for free, I decided "why not?".  I started with Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, and while I found the storyline not quite to be my style, I was very impressed with the writing.  Most recently I've been absorbed in Les Miserables - I've been reading it for almost a month now and am only 50% of the way through!  Phew!  But it is soooooooo good!  What has really stood out to me the most from both of these stories is the quality of writing, the use of language, the deep character development - things that are hard to come by in many modern novels that seem to be written with much less depth nowadays.  I've gained a new appreciation for what constitutes good writing... as well as an appreciation for the dictionary feature on my Kindle!  My vocabulary has been challenged, and it's been fun to stretch my brain a little.

There you go!  The basic highlights of life in my world.  Forgive me for not being more regular as of late... and thanks for stopping by!