March 24th - March 28th

Some one just found her fingers!
Daddy, your huge arm is squishing my face.
Progression: about to get sad...

...super sad...

...getting less sad...

...oh look, a toy.

Cutest mommy and buns ever!

Kisses!

Daddy doesn't have any milk.

But he does have kisses!

All the cool babies are sporting onsies and tennis shoes with frilly socks.

It's great except for the cold legs.

Daddy I don't want to walk anymore!

Eat your heart out mommy, I get to poop on daddy's head.

Daddy daughter bonding time, it's about time.

Just before she hits herself in the face with the rattle.

TTTHHHHBBBBBB!!!!!

Hey, who said you could take my picture!?!?!?!

*captions proudly brought to you by daddy.

Going back 2 months...

I figured I should post some pictures of our daughter on here. I'm the worst blog slacker ever.

March 23rd, Kara gets her very first bottle and does very well with it for most of the time.


Mmmmm, milk.

"Oh snap, where's my bottle?"

"Seriously Daddy, I WANT MY BOTTLE BACK!"

March 24th, what a little stretchie.

Mrs. Chunker Beans

Show 'em the whites of your eyes Kara.

Wow, she looks pretty excited.

Miss Fuzzy Head's hair is just starting to grow back in this picture.

Awwww, my heart.

That's one full diaper.

Cutie Buns

One of her 2 fists are ALWAYS in her mouth.

"Hmmmm, lemme think about that. Yes, yes I would like some milk."

Chowing down on Mommy's drawstring on her sweatshirt.

Happy little Kara Faith

"I ROCK!!!!"

Can't quite get that fist in there.

Cutie love bug.

Xtreme sports presents - Fish diving

Dean here.

~

So, ever since my birthday last week I've had to acknowledge that 27 is the age that senility begins to set..........................................oh yeah, in.

~

I had another experience yesterday that made me quote one of my favorite shows, 'D'oh'.

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While mopping the floor cleaning up the ash from my last great mistake we were cooking a pizza in the oven, thank you Papa Murphy's. So, being the caring diligent husband I grab a couple of plates to get chelle started on some cheesy bread while the pizza is cooking. I wish I'd used paper plates is all I can say. Apparently hand-eye-coordination also goes down hill at 27. As I'm turning to put the plate on the counter I smash it through our fish's, Optimus Prime, bowl. Not just a tap mind you, I took a chunk out of the bowl.
~

Suddenly half a gallon (it wasn't a full gallon because I'd just used half a gallon of his water to water my tomato plant) of fish water is gushing off the counter onto the freshly mopped floor, taking our fish on a ride the equivalent of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, sans barrel.

*not actually Optimus Prime, but he looks the same. But if our fish dies don't try to replace him honey, I'll know.

So after he spends a couple seconds skimming through the sheet of water on the floor I'm able to get him into a glass filled with good water (the last Betta we had here in Iowa survived a week before the crud in the water killed him). Now a pint glass on our desk is his temporary home until a new home is found. But, at least he's still alive and he looks happy.

~

And on the plus side, we now don't have to clean underneath our oven or our fridge when we move.

NOW it's funny, but not last night...

My best friends today:

Why would Clorox wipes be my best friends you ask? Let me take you back about 21 hours ago....

It was Honig's 27th birthday on the 20th of this month and he loves getting all the "Free birthday appetizer" emails, they're pretty much the highlight of his birthday and he looks forward to getting them all year long. So last night we decided to go Biaggi's, a nice Italian restaurant, so he could use a birthday freebie there. All is well, we're having fun watching Kara go nuts over the spoon we let her play with, and we're laughing and trying to decide what we're going to do this summer for fun. Midway through dinner my phone rings and I see it's our next door neighbor. I am not one for answering phone calls at the table during dinner at restaurants, I think it's pretty rude, so I just let it go to voicemail and figured I'd just check the message when we were on our way home. So we continue on with dinner and eat their divine chicken goat cheese pizza (heavenly!), and then it's time for dessert. We're looking over the dessert menu and we're about to decide when Kara starts to get crabby and is not amused by her spoon anymore. Here's how the conversation went:

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honig: "Grab her bottle. She's hungry. It's in the diaper bag."

chelle: "No it's not. Didn't you grab it?"

honig: "No, I thought you did."

chelle: "No, you were the one warming it on the stove. FREAK! IS IT STILL ON THE STOVE???? PLEASE TELL ME YOU TURNED THE STOVE OFF!!!!!"

(I'm about to have a coronary because I'm picturing our entire house burned to the ground and is just a pile of smoldering cinders at this point)

honig: "No, I thought you turned it off. I'm sorry, I'm sorry! What should we do? Do you want to get dessert to go?"

(At that point I about grab the butter knife and impale him in the heart because I can't believe he's concerned with whether or not we're going to get dessert because I'm positive we're going to be able to see a towering funnel of smoke from our house all the way across town when we step outside of Biaggi's to go home.)

chelle: "ARE YOU FREAKING CRAZY? NO WE'RE NOT GETTING DESSERT! WE NEED TO LEAVE NOW!"

honig: "Ok ok, I'm sorry I'm sorry! It was an accident. I thought you got it. I'll go get the van and you pay and I'll pick you up outside."

chelle: "FINE! GO!"

~

Our waiter happens to walk by right after Honig left, and I threw my debit card at him and told him I needed him to go take care of our check right this second because we have to leave right away. Then he felt it was his business to know why we needed to leave and I just told him we left our stove on and I needed him to go run our card right now and mr. man decided he needed to ask HOW we knew it was on, so the not so nice side of chelle came out because I needed to get out of there immediately and I didn't want to play 20 questions with him so I told him it's not his concern and it doesn't matter but I needed him to go process my bill right now. At least that got results. So as soon as he came back with my card and I scratched a signature on the ticket, I all but ran through the restaurant and out the front doors to get in the van.

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I'm not going to lie, the drive home was a bit of a tense one because I was pretty angry Honig had left the bottle on the stove and we had been gone over an hour by this point. He called our friend Jeff that lives 2 buildings down and had him break into our house through our front windows to see if anything was on fire and to see what was going on. Jeff called us back when we were about 5 minutes away from home and said there was nothing but ashes in the pan and our house was filled with smoke and all of our smoke detectors were going off. Great, just great. So we pull up infront of our house and all but jump out of the van and I can smell the burning all the way from the street. Thankfully Jeff had opened up all the windows to let it start to air out but holy cow, it stunk to high heaven. Kara and I were in there maybe 30 seconds because I wanted to see the "damage" and then I grabbed her and told honig the smell was just too bad and that Kara shouldn't be around that. So I had to go to WalMart to buy more bottles, and just kill time. I ended up back at home in the back parking lot feeding Kara in the back seat of the van and watching The Office on the dvd player in the van. Honig came out and we both agreed that it was way too strong of a smell for Kara to sleep there so Kara and I ended up sleeping on our air mattress in the front room at our neighbors house who are moving in a couple of days. I slept maybe 2 hours the entire night because Kara tosses her head from side to side so much while she sleeps that it wakes me up everytime she does it, and then she decided since she wasn't in her crib that she wanted to wake up at 3AM to eat which she never ever does. I fed her and got her back to sleep and I just took cat naps where I could inbetween her thrashing her head around. We are still too paranoid of parents to leave our baby with someone for long periods of time, yeah yeah I know we need to get out for a date as just honig and I and blah blah blah, I've heard the lecture and we'll do it when we're good and ready, so I stayed over there with her because we weren't comfortable with leaving her in our neighbors front room on an air mattress when our neighbor was asleep upstairs and wouldn't hear Kara if she was crying or rolled over and we also didn't like the option of me going home to clean our house 4 doors down while having our neighbors back door unlocked with our baby asleep in their front room. Not kosher with me. So honig was a stellar husband and stayed up until 2AM cleaning and vacuuming over and over to try to get the smell out of some stuff. And then he got up at 5:30 AM to vacuum upstairs since he didn't want to wake up our neighbors by vacuuming right next to their room in the middle of the night.

~

Our neighbors said our smoke alarms had been going off for over 45 minutes by the time we got home and there is a fine layer of ash all over EVERYTHING in our house that was exposed. And we also have to wash all of our clothes and blankets because the smell permeated into all fabric. So now our house has a faint smell of polycarbonate from the bottle, silicone from the nipple, burned breastmilk, and charred teflon from the pan but at least it's no where near as bad as last night. We've had fans going nonstop since we got home last night.

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So THAT'S why Clorox wipes are my best friends today.

Maybe I will...

Courtesy of my local Dollar tree parking lot 2 weeks ago:

Nothing screams Davenport, Iowa like having the words "Boobs" and "Ta-Ta's" on a pink VW Beetle.

*I fully support getting mammograms. Can't wait to get the old squisharoo myself.

Worst day ever...

Wow, I don't think I could be more behind on blogging. I'll do a feeble attempt at playing catch up but I make no promises....

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So we arrived home from our bus ride from Hades at 4:30PM on Sunday the 8th of March and we were pooped. We took the worlds best nap, and then did as little as possible for the rest of the night. Honig had to go to school the next morning, and I spent all day on the phone with our insurance agent and also trying to find a car for us to buy with no luck. And then around 6 PM I got the worst phone call of my life and the one that we all dread that will come sometime during our lives, my Mom had just been admitted to the hospital and she had a bleed on her brain and it didn't look like there would be a positive outcome. Short story of it is that we thought she'd had an aneurysm but it turned out to be a hemorrhagic CVA, basically an unstoppable and untreatable stroke. That whole night was a barrage of phone calls and endless tears, and some of my wonderful friends came over to offer support and help with Kara while Dean and I tried to get some things done around the house. I slept maybe an hour that night because I was waiting for the phone call from my sister saying that Mom had actually passed away. My Mom actually lived hours and hours longer than what she should have by all medical definition, and I wholeheartedly believe it's because my sister was supposed to be by her side when she passed away, and it took short of a miracle for my sister to make it there from Cedar City, UT but she did get to be there with my Mom for the last 3 hours of her life and had the privilege of holding her hand while she passed away. Maybe aside from losing a spouse or a child, nothing hurts as much as losing your Mom.

~

So we flew out to Salt Lake City the next afternoon to go be with family up in Pocatello, and to help with planning funeral arrangements. It was nice to be around my siblings again and that really made it easier. And Honig was a phenomenal support and pretty much took care of Kara the entire week so that I could do whatever I needed to with going through my Mom's belongings and everything.

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My Mom's funeral was beautiful and she looked AMAZING! She had this little half smile and she looked so peaceful. At one point I was looking at her in her casket and I just had this vision of her suddenly opening up her eyes and jumping up and saying "JUST KIDDING!" and doing a tap dance in her casket and then jumping out and then we all go down the road to Toelle's and Mom gets a disgusting Ironport and milk and we all get flakey milkshakes. Hey, a girl in mourning can have wishful thinking if she wants!

Crying/reading on the airplane to SLC.

Playing "discreetly change a poopy baby on my lap" game on the airplane.

Sleepy Buns.

At the cemetary after going to the funeral home to pick out Mom's casket. I pushed Jenny and Sisterpants, the 2 that are crouching down, over and down into the snow right after this was taken.

Nakey sleepy time for Miss Buns.

Jenny's and Deone's butts.

Having some fun at Mom's house reminiscing.

Debbie (not our biological sister but basically a sister), Jenny, Pants, Kim, Cory, me, screaming Kara, Honig, and cousin Lisa in the purple.

My brudda Jeff chillin like a villain. And Jenny hoarding all the Whoppers.

I will eat her jowels right off her face.

She is still 90% her Daddy.

Story telling and prop game time. I know, we should be mourning but we needed to have some fun too. It's how we roll.

They were about peeing their pants laughing.

Sweet little Kara Faith.