A Long Time Coming

Please excuse me for my Blogophere absence. Life has gotten in the way.

I keep having this bad dream. And in this dream I'm trying to get my family dressed nicely and have everyone's hair done and have everyone look at the camera and smile for a family Christmas picture! And then I wake up and I realize it's not a dream! Aaack! I've been stuggling with the elusive family picture for months. When we had grandparents around for Halloween (you know, someone to snap the shot) I thought it was too early to take a Christmas picture. So I didn't worry about doing one. And then I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, it was Thanksgiving! I made plans with my mother-in-law for the Friday after Thanksgiving. We were going to drive to a pretty place that would be a great backdrop for our photo. I even had semi-matching outfits for the family (hey, that's a big step for me), so I was prepared. But then, the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving, Sammie had a dog incident at our church small group and ended up in the ER getting stitches in her lip! Poor baby! Her lip was all torn up on the inside and swollen, and she had other scratches on her face! I'm not going to put up a picture of her face because it's just too sad. So Sammie had a beat up face but I decided to go through with the pictures anyway. We had the clothes, we had the pretty location, we had the photographer. We needed to get this thing done. But then on Friday it rained. Bleh.

I think the problem is that I want a pretty background for our family picture. We live in Monterey, for crying out loud! One of the prettiest places EV-ER! But I'm too cheap to pay someone to take our pictures and whenever we have guests, we end up doing something else. Who wants to spend all day getting everyone ready for a picture, and then driving somewhere to take the picture? Does it take everyone else this long to figure out a family photo? It's a lot of work making sure everyone looks good and has decent clothes on! This is too much stress for me. I can handle year long deployments and childbirth without meds, but getting my family ready for a picture? Arrgh!

Today we drove to Carmel to take our own family picture. We would put our camera on a tripod on the hood of the car and hope for the best. This picture captures Sammie's attitude about family picture taking.Jim took a few of me with the girls which turned out pretty cute. I mean, at least I'm looking at the camera and Sam is sorta smiling and the lighting is good. Reese looks like she's asleep, but whatever. Then a nice lady offered to take our family picture. And she stood too far away, so the flash didn't reach us, so the pictures turned out dark. I had to zoom in a lot on this one. If you get this picture in a Christmas card from us, it's because we never got around to getting a better picture taken. Just pretend you didn't see it on the blog first! I guess it's not too bad except that Reese isn't looking at the camera at all and Sammie is a grump. I guess the crashing waves and barking dogs were more exciting than the strange lady taking our picture from the street. Oh well.

Why is it the best pictures of Sammie smiling are the ones I took of her going potty on the toilet? Look! Her smile is great! And her hair looks great too! (I don't know why this picture won't load properly, but it won't turn horizontaly.Even though that is how it's saved. Another argh)

I guess I have a few pictures of the girls smiling. Or at least looking cute. Here are some we took before church a few weeks ago. And another one of Reese yesterday morning.

Maybe tomorrow when we are dressed nicely for church I can try again for a family pic. But I really want it taken outside with natural lighting. I wonder if the church parking lot counts as a nice background? Maybe we can stand next to a really cool car or something.

Life is Good

My cute matching girls(cute outfits courtesy of Grandma Sue)

It's been awhile since I've posted anything. Wow, how is that for stating the obvious. Gotta get back in blog posting mode. What do my friends and family want updates about? Over the past few months we've gotten settled into our home, have made friends and met neighbors, and have gotten to see our families quite a bit. That about wraps it up, but here are a few more details.

Jim:: Jim is just wrapping up his 1st quarter here at NPS. He has finals in another week or two. He has his own office in the math department so he has a place to hang out and get homework done in between classes. This is very cool, because I think the math guys are the only ones that get their own offices. Everyone else has to go to the library or something. Jim just went to West Point over labor day for a kind of "New Instructor in the Math Dept." sort of orientation. He attended briefings about the math department and being an instructor, but the main brief that I was concerned about was the Housing Brief! Looks like new housing is being built for us as we speak. Hopefully it will be finished by the time the Childresses get there so that they can save some spots for us and the Golbys. Jim said we might need a third kid to qualify for the new housing though. I think we should get some clarification on that.

Joni: I've been making friends and doing mom things. I've met some great neighbors up the street. Sonya has three kids and one of them is a girl Sammie's age. We like to go up there after afternoon naps to ride bikes in their driveway. Through Sonya I've met some other nice ladies that have a playgroup. I am now an official member of the playgroup because I took my turn hosting today. I started MOPs at our church here and have gone to one meeting so far. It is really nice to just attend and not be on the steering team. I'm sure I'll get more involved later, but for now, it's great to be a regular attendee. The other day I took my girls to a local park after running errands and I ran into two ladies from my new playgroup and my table leader from MOPs. Whoa! I felt so important being the lady at the park who knew people instead of the lady at the park who, well, didn't know people. You know what I mean.

The Samster: Sammie had her third birthday on August 27th! My baby is 3! She had been talking about a turtle cake for about a month, so that's what she got. My version of a turtle cake anyway. I thought it turned out pretty cute.
We gave her some Thomas tracks and trains and a Diego trike and she loves them both. Sam is definitely our tomboy. She also got a stuffed Nemo from my parents and it's her favorite animal right now. We can't go anywhere without it. She even stuffs it into her Diego trike and rides him around. Sometimes this causes a panic, though, when it comes to bedtime and Nemo cannot be found. Then there is a mad dash through the almost decluttered garage to rescue Nemo from the trike. Another interesting thing about Nemo is that he has his own fishfood. This comes in the form of a cute, little Disneyland snowglobe from Grandpa Bob. For some reason she calls her snowglobe "fishfood". The fishfood usually tags along with us so that Nemo can have a snack when he gets tired of playing at the park or something.
Here she is opening up Nemo at breakfast time.Sammie with her Diego bike


The Reesie-Piece: Reese is a very sweet baby. Lots of curls on top and bright blue eyes. She started crawling at 7 months and is already standing on her own at 8 months. I feel that walking will be in her near future. Aack! Reese loves to play and explore but she does it in slow motion, at least compared to Sammie who was like a baby on speed.


The Starling Family as a Whole: We are very blessed to live so close to our families again. We've already had numerous visits from both sets of parents, my aunt Peggy and Grandma Cherry and cousins Jonell and David, my brother Lucas and his daughters, Norah and Avery, and my sister, Erin. We have really enjoyed getting to see everyone. We have gotten to visit with Jim's high school buddy, Joe Webb, and his family, and his other friend, Lydia and her family. Lydia and her husband, Travis, are missionaries in Kenya, so it was great to see them and visit with them about their work. Also, there is a Starling family get-together in a few weekends and we are actually around to make it! We are excited to visit with Jim's family there.

Auntie Erin and the girls

How do you do that?

As I've finally gotten caught up (sorta) reading all of my friends' blogs, I've started to wonder how you guys make your blogs look so cool!

How do you put a fun picture in the heading? How do you change the backgrounds to cute little designs? I'm at a loss! All I can figure out how to do is change my settings from the ones that blogspot already has. Their preset templates or whatever. Please, someone, help me! Maybe I'll get around to making my blog pretty. Someday.

A Flashback and Six Months Old!

Ok, Flashback to our month of leave in June. We had a great day trip to visit the Golbys! What fun! It was great to see them again. The girls got to play together, we got to meet Indy, and the grown ups all got to visit! They have a cute house with a really great backyard. I'm envious because our backyard here is no where near as nice as theirs. But I'm not going to covet the Golby's backyard. Maybe I can work hard enough on our small piece of dirt and rocks and make it as pretty as theirs. They grilled out for us and we had a delicious lunch together. It was fun to talk about old times and about the future when we all meet up at West Point again. Here is proof that we actually met up and hung out because last time in the fall, neither of us had a camera! And here are the girls enjoying a snack in the backyard. They had a great time playing in the Golby's little swimming pool. Sammie loved it because it had a super fun slide! Sorry it took me so long to get this up on my blog!

On July 7th, our little Reese turned six months old!


Hard to believe, but it's true. And each day she is getting cuter. Well, some days she has been super cranky, but now that we are finally getting a good routine down in our new house, things seem to be getting better. She can stay in a sitting position on her own now, and she prefers this method of seeing the world to all others. But beware when she tips over because then she can wiggle and reach her way over to Sammie's dollhouse toys. And boy is Sam protective of her dollhouse stuff. I think Beth can attest to that. We always had to hide the dollhouse in my room when "the boys" (Zeke and Deacon) came over in Oklahoma.

Sam and Reese have been sharing a room since we moved in and so far so good.
They both take an afternoon nap at about the same time which I think is a small miracle. And they both go down for bedtime at 8 together. Usually I get Reese in there first so that she can fall asleep before Sam gets tucked in. And unlike Beth's boys, they actually fall asleep pretty fast. I think it has to do with the age difference though. Reese can't really play with Sam like Deacon can play with Zeke. Although Sam does like to climb into the crib and hang out with Reese after she wakes up from her naps during the day. I'm sure this isn't the safest thing to do, but she knows she needs to get permission before she does it.

Now, the next thing to conquer is Reese sleeping through the night. She started sleeping through the night at about 3 months, but then her schedule got all out of whack with various out of town trips and then an entire month of living in different places with different sounds and different cribs. Anytime she woke up I would feed her so that she wouldn't wake up my parents or Jim's parents. But now we are in our own house, and it's the weekend so I think I'm going to try and let her cry it out tonight and see what happens. It's going to be really sad, I think, and Sam will probably end up on the floor in our room to get away from the screaming...but we'll see. I'm tired of getting up at night, even if its only for 5 or 10 minutes.

Running

Place: Ft.Ord beach with rough, scary waves

Situation: Walking to the beach via a windy, sandy, beach access trail through coastal bluffs. The trail was windy and we couldn't see around the curves, also, the wind was strong and hard to hear over.

Freak Out Moment: Sammie running full force ahead of us around the curves in the trail (we couldn't see her and she's quick), all the way out to the beach, and stopping only about 10 feet from where the waves reached and me frantically chasing behind her and screaming at her to stop. (She probably couldn't hear me, but if she did I don't think she cared).

Me: (after giving her a swat) "Sammie do not run away from me! You need to stop when I say stop!"

Sammie: "But I'm a good runner, mommy!"

Yes you are Sammie, yes you are.

A Side Note to the House Story

After thinking about it, I felt I needed to clarify a few things about my House Story. Not everyone at the Housing Office was uncaring. The lady that we worked with was awesome and felt terrible about the entire mishap. She made sure things got done for us. Also, this is a private company, not a military housing office, so I'm not trying to diss on military housing.

That's all!