Language leaps and bounds

It seems that all of a sudden, Jenna's vocabulary is growing exponentially. She does a whole lot of jabbering, and a lot of what she says is undecipherable, but she is definitely trying to repeat many more words. She still either resists saying 'Mama', or it just comes out with a 'da' or a 'ga' sound. She understands a lot of what we say to her, and if we ask her where something is (such as our belly buttons, her bee mobile, specific toys, the dogs, or her tongue) she responds correctly every time.

She loves reading her books. We read the same three favorite books about a dozen times each every day! One of her books has flaps with pictures. For the longest time, she's been so focused on opening every single flap and then turning the pages as quickly as possible. Then she started taking the time to point out the ladybugs. Now, she can find the sun, the dog, the stars, and a few other things.

She also recognizes and verbalizes her words for airplane, bird (she giggles like crazy at birds!), and tree. She's even doing a lot more pointing and saying 'da!' at different things. Before having this empty slate to teach, I never really thought about how much there is to learn. Everything we look at has a name, a color, a texture, sometimes a sound.... Now it seems like there isn't enough time in the day to satisfy Jenna's curiosity about everything around her.

To wrap it up in a neat little package: Jenna is an incredible kid. My love for her grows every single day. I thought she was fantastic when she was a tiny little baby, but this just keeps getting better. She's fun to be around and I'm proud to be related to her. It's a bummer that she goes to bed so early at night, but I look forward to waking up every day to see her.

Progress

We picked up our first batch of siding this weekend, and Frank has started installing it! This is such an exciting step. Our house is looking more and more on the outside like a home than just a never-ending construction project. The color - Ivy Green - is darker than I was expecting, but I love it. Frank originally wanted a light beige, I was leaning more towards the darker blue-grey. We agreed on a light grey, but when Frank went to order it, he had a last-minute change of heart. He thought it would be too light with our white trim, so he suggested the Ivy Green. I supported that change immediately!

Since the picture was taken, he's finished the section around the round-top window. It's beautiful. I can't wait to see what it looks like when I come home tomorrow afternoon!

He's been working so incredibly hard on the house lately. He's either working on window trim, the siding, the soffits, chainsawing/chopping wood, anything to keep making progress. He starts working by about 8:30 every morning, and doesn't stop till about 10:00 at night.

From time to time, I think about the things I wish he did differently or how I wish he was more like someone else's husband or whatever. I just need to knock this off. If he was as critical of me as I often am of him, I would be devastated.
I am lucky to have such a hardworking man who loves me and absolutely adores our daughter. Sure, there may be room for improvement, but who couldn't make themselves better? I married him for the man he is, not the man I could mold him into. He is a very good and decent man. I am grateful for what I have.

Snoring

Our dogs have a problem with snoring. Actually, we have a problem with their snoring. I don't know if it's all that extra Labrador skin around their necks that impedes clear breathing when they curl up for a snooze or what. Lucy more so than Niagra. And Lucy is a sound sleeper. Usually Frank can snap his fingers to get her attention and wake her up. Occasionally we have to quietly coax her out of her REM sleep by saying, "Lucy - wanna get it?" or "Lucy, bring it!" or some other phrase that brings sheer joy to her when she's awake.

The other day, Frank and I were napping (one of the most lovely summer afternoon treats!). I woke up first, as I usually do. I love this time - when the dogs, my husband, and my daughter are all sleeping. I just laid there in Frank's arms relishing the peacefulness. He was sleeping so soundly. They all were. I was watching Frank sleep, his jaw slack as he was mouth-breathing very deep breaths. Then he started snoring. Quietly at first, gradually getting louder. He snapped his fingers, and I giggled. In a groggy voice he hissed, "Lucy!"

I whispered, "Why did you say 'Lucy'?"

"Because she was snoring."

"That was you!"

"..."

He tried to make sense of this in his half-asleep brain. I just thought it was cute that he couldn't tell his sounds from the dog's.

The injustice of trying to live green

The last time I was out of town and shopped at Whole Foods, I picked up a couple of their canvas bags. I was sick of the never-ending crinkling mass of plastic bags that rolled around my kitchen like tumbleweeds. And I had that guilty pull at my soul, you know the one where you realize that it's up to YOU to do something to help the environment? Yep, that was a biggie.

I've been shopping with them for a while now. I haven't used a plastic bag since, and I love it. I feel good about it, and I was relishing the 10 cent discount I got every time I bought groceries at Fred Meyer. I noticed a few weeks ago that they started selling their own small canvas bags for a dollar. What a great idea, and I was thrilled that they were selling so quickly. Oddly, I've never seen a shopper actually using the bags, but I'm sure they must.

So as I started the checkout at the U-Scan on Tuesday, my routine was the same. I entered the code for the bag refund, and started scanning and bagging my items one by... WTF?? My 10-cent credit was reversed! I finished my scanning and then asked the young man who was manning the U-Scan station. He told me that they don't do the refund any more. I asked, "Oh really? When did that start?"

"Ever since they started selling the Fred Meyer canvas bags, a few months ago," he said.

"But I shop here or at the other store almost every day, and I've always gotten the refund... even as recently as yesterday!"

"Hmmm... that's bad."

"So let me get this right. I can't get the refund any more because my bag doesn't say Fred Meyer on it?"

"Uh huh. The only way to get the discount is to use the Fred Meyer canvas bag, or to reuse the Fred Meyer paper or plastic bags."

"That's lame. So totally lame."

"Yeah."

I was so aggravated and disappointed at that point, I was ready to get out of the store. One of my fellow U-Scanners came up to me and told me I should talk to the store manager about it. I kind of laughed at her, saying that I knew it wouldn't do any good. She said, "It might."

I left the store, did a couple of other errands, and I still couldn't stop thinking about this. So I went back to the store. I asked to speak to the store manager, and was told that he was out of the store till Thursday. I am going to go in and talk to the manager this afternoon. Not that I actually expect anything to change, but I don't want to let this go without a fight.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

UPDATE:
I was told that the store manager hadn't shown up for work today. Awesome. At least the customer service clerk offered to summon over the assistant manager to talk with me. I explained everything to him, and he wasn't even clear on what the store policy is. After conferring with the operations manager, he said that on a corporate level the refund is being discontinued. But on the local level, the stores will continue to offer the refund. He apologized very sincerely, and assured me that the checkout staff would be given correct information. I left the store feeling good. I'm glad I voiced my concerns, and I'm proud of myself for doing something instead of just grumbling to myself.

Midnight Sun Run recap

I was so excited all day Saturday. We all woke up early, at least earlier than we usually do on weekends. We brought Jenna into bed with us when she woke up, and she got so very close to dozing off. But that's not something she's likely to ever do when there's a possibility of playing instead!

Finally, Frank and I relented and we got up and got ready. We headed into town for breakfast, then we drove out to Eielson Air Force Base for their annual open house. We got to walk through the mid-air refueling planes, looked into a B-1, and walked through a huge cargo plane. There was an incredible demonstration by four F-16s, complete with distant 'explosions'! It was such a fun outing, even the machine gun-toting soldiers at the entry to the tarmac as they waved the metal-detector wands over everyone were friendly.

We went home and decided to take a nap to rest up for the late night ahead of us. When we woke up, we felt rested, and I was getting so excited for the race! Jenna had her dinner, then a bath, and got into her pajamas (I figured she'd sleep through the race and would just slide into her crib when we returned home around midnight). I started getting nervous on our drive to town. I haven't run since before I was pregnant, although we do walk as a family every day. I knew I could do the distance, but I wanted to do it quickly, despite not being in good enough shape. At the start area, I went near the back of the pack, not wanting to get in anyone's way with the stroller. That turned out to be a big mistake. There were so many people walking, that it was two miles into the race before I could get around enough people to have some breathing room. By this point, I had unbuckled Jenna in the stroller. Twice she had twisted her body and gotten stuck on her tummy with the belt up under her arms. Since the stroller has a huge flat area and the secure screen covering, I wasn't worried about her getting hurt. She was thrilled with the freedom! She stood and looked at me, she practiced her headstands (even with a foot up in the air!), she reclined and played with toys, and then she'd sit nicely and watch the crowds cheer us as we passed by.

I ran the next four miles and felt great. I wasn't speedy, and it was hard. I've never run while pushing a kid in a stroller, so I got a much better workout than I was hoping for! I felt great at the end, definitely proud of what I had accomplished.

Jenna went right to sleep when we got home, she's such a good girl. Frank and I showered, ate a snack, and watched a fascinating show on PBS about an archeology dig for an ancient marsupial hunter in Australia. We had no idea that we missed such interesting shows wasting so much time sleeping!

My quadriceps were a little tight on Sunday, they were squealing yesterday, and they're finally getting better today. I'm looking forward to running again, I just need to figure out a schedule that I can stick to.

I've kept my water intake up, which is a huge accomplishment for me. It turns out that I actually like the taste of water when I squeeze in a few drops of lime juice. I've been avoiding the crap snacks (no potato chips!) in favor of fruit, popcorn, and more vegetables.

Readying for a nap together on the couch

As we watched, with stupefied looks on our faces, the nonsense that is Passions.

"Why do people even watch this soap opera crap?"

"I'm not really sure..."

Scene changes from a miniature man doing some goofy dance while some kind of animated demons fly around the screen to a scene with the masked half-man, half-woman character.

"I mean, I'm not at all emotionally attached to any of these characters."

Ah good. Commercial break. And an ad for tonight's episode of Age of Love.

"Not that I'm attached to any of these people either."

"Yeah, but the people on the soap are getting paid to pretend. These people are..."

"Being idiots for free?"

"Yep, that's it."

Our house

Here in Fairbanks, just about anything goes. As long as you're out of the city limits - which is about a 3-mile radius surrounding the Springhill Suites at the heart of downtown - you don't have to follow building code. At. All.

So! Five years ago, we bought a lovely 1.8 acre lot in the highly-coveted hills which are cool in summer, and toasty warm in winter (thanks to the inversion: the colder it is at lower elevations, the warmer it is at our house. In town, it can get down to about -55 in the worst of winter, but we didn't see colder than 25 below.). We're about a 15-minute drive into town, which was absolutely nothing to me when I moved here. But things are so relative, that now driving the 10 minutes from one end of town to another gets me all huffy and impatient if I have to stop for BOTH stoplights. Kidding. There are many more stoplights. But I definitely do get aggravated by the traffic.

We found a houseplan on ePlans, made some modifications to it, and decided to build it. Ourselves. Which doesn't mean we picked the contractors and bossed them around. Nosirree. It meant that we cut the trees where we wanted the driveway and the house site. The Dirt Work guys came in (since the one thing we lacked was heavy machinery) and grubbed these swathes, prepared a nice driveway, dug the hole in the ground for a level foundation, installed the septic, buried the water and fuel tanks... and left.

We blocked out the footer, and had concrete pumped in. We had a load of concrete blocks delivered. About 500, if I remember correctly. One by one, we carried these blocks from the offload pile down to the footer, and began building up the foundation. Since we both work full-time, construction is limited to evenings, weekends, and spare summer time when Frank was off contract. We didn't work through the coldest of winter. There's just no way that anything productive could be done at 20 below. One winter day, though, I drove up just to take a look at the property. As I approached our lot, I saw something that nearly caused me to drive off the road. The two lots adjacent to ours were for sale. The owners decided not to build here, and didn't want to hold onto the lots. We bought them as soon as we could. We now have nearly six acres of birch, poplar, and spruce trees, and no too-close neighbors looking into our yard.

When we ran out of concrete blocks, I started hauling them in my truck, about 20 at a time. We ended up using nearly 650 of them. We mixed the concrete, gravel, sand, and lime when it was time to fill the blocks for a solid foundation. This was completed in the cool fall rain, the second summer.

I had no clue what I had gotten myself into. None. After working my butt off doing things I never imagined I'd do, including assembling and installing a foundation drainpipe, tarring and putting up a plastic moisture barrier all around the foundation, I basically checked out. To this point, that was the hardest work with the smallest return. Frank pretty much took over from here.

Frank built the subfloor and framed the walls for the first and second floors while I worked with a framing company to have our trusses designed and built. When they delivered the trusses and the full-length beam, my eyes turned into saucers again. The beam was graciously installed with the crane, since there's no way we could ever have lifted the massive thing. The trusses, however, were placed by us. Frank perched on the beam, and I ooched my height-fearing self along the top of the framed walls. Then, Frank carried on essentially alone. I can't even itemize everything he did. He did all the electrical, plumbing, and insulation work. He put up the vapor barrier, installed our beautiful custom windows, and put up the drywall. He mudded it, sanded it, and textured it. He installed our tile floors, built our custom tile shower, designed and built our staircase. We had carpet installed in our upstairs living areas and in Jenna's bedroom. We painted the interior together.

Now, there are few things left to do. The siding will arrive this week, and we will install it ourselves. We also have window trim and baseboard trim to complete. Our garage slab has been poured, and we will begin construction on it later in summer.

Next year we'll do exterior landscaping. But until then, this is just about as close to a dream house as I can imagine. Of all the frustrations that come with a project this size, there is nothing so rewarding and heartwarming as living in a house that is exactly the way we've wanted it. We've had some doozies of arguments, but we've stuck together, and are so happy to have our little family in our home.