New Ways to clean...

Way back in June 2008 I posted that I would no longer use cleaning supplies like fantastic but instead I would try to use environmentally friendly stuff. So in Jan. my cleaning supplies finally ran out (you may be thinking that either my house is a sty or I had a lot to use up). Not having much extra time on my hands I did a quick search online for cleaning alternatives and vinegar and water kept popping up. Since I had to clean the house that day, didn't want to buy anything and had lots of vinegar I decided to give it a whirl. I've been using a vinegar water mix for a couple of weeks now and it seems to be working???? Who really knows, I can't see the germs, bacteria that may be festering on my counter tops and toilets but hey it looks clean. If anyone has any environmentally cleaning products let me know. I have to say it feels good squiring water and vinegar instead of chemicals.

10 months

Callia is changing way too quickly. This month she:
-bum scoots around the house
-goes to the edge of the stairs and gives and big grin when I say no
-she is eating everything we eat - she has eaten a jam sandwich, curry, chili, rice, melon, cheese etc.
-she weighs in at 16lbs 6oz
-has the best funny face that she usually makes while eating
-has a new cry/scream when she isn't getting the attention she wants
-loves buttons and jewelry
-often scoots to the car bin and looks thru them
-has had a couple of fights with Christian
-"helps" when getting dressed
-dances to music
-says - dadda, mamma, hi ya (of course none of these mean anything)
-waves bye when going up to sleep
-only chewed on two pieces of lego so far
Though she still has no teeth - which makes her eating skills quite amazing. I saw my cousin's newborn just last week and it really made me realize how big Callia is. (sniff) I'm now at the point where I could hold a newborn for somebody and love it since my baby is growing up so quickly. Callia is so good and easy going. We all love her to bits!

Errrrrr!

I don't get it. We've had our place up for sale since Sept. We weren't really planning on it -it just kinda happened. We had said that we would wait for Callia to be a year but we didn't. Wished we had. She is now almost one and our place is still up for sale. We had an offer this weekend and we accepted it. They wanted possession by April 2 so we moved fast -found a house we loved - it was the perfect size, layout and location so we put an offer on it. The catch was that it was out of our price range by about 40 grand however, it needed a lot of work done to it - about that much probably so we thought we would put in a one time offer. Our realtor didn't really hold out much hope - I felt (for some reason) that it would work out and guess what, it did. On Mon (today is Wed) we wrote the offer and it was accepted. EVerything was to be completed by next week - our house would be completed in one week and the offer on the other house would be completed in 9 days and we would move in at the beg. of April. Which was perfect timing since Callia would be turning one and we could have a big fam. party (finally) at our house. HOwver, it is not going to happen. The people who wanted to buy our place lied about their finances and last night everything fell thru. IT sucks!! We thought this was the right thing b/c of how everything was coming together - the timing seemed perfect - our financing was way better then expected but I guess it wasn't the right thing. I am so tired of not knowing what's going on. I'm so tired of waiting for someone to offer us something. I am tired of wondering if there will be the perfect house out there for us. Most of all I'm so disappointed that we have spent almost all of Callia's first year having this unknown hanging around our necks. On the whole it hasn't made a diff. to how much time we've spent with her but there have been days when I've had to clean like mad and ignore her and the other kids. Anyways, I"ll stop now. Nothing much more to say except that I don't get it and that I'm tired of it all.

A Deal for you!

This past week I thought I would play around with my camera a bit and ended up reformatting the card - not once but twice. I'm not the quickest at times! I wasn't too upset b/c there had been no major events on the card - only day to day stuff - which is still important when you have a babe around. I thought I would try to download a program to get the pictures off of the card - I found one and downloaded a free demo. It worked. It was finding most of the pictures, however, when I went to try to save the pictures onto our computer it was no longer free - the demo was over and I would have to pay 45 or so to buy the program. Well, I thought that I would phone London Drugs to see which way was cheaper - for a one time deal London Drugs would have been cheaper unless they found a thousand pics on my card -though they said they didn't think they would find anything since it had been reformatted, not just deleted. Anyways, I thought I would do a search this time for a completely free program and I found one. It is called MJM Data recovery. It took some playing around b/f it would find complete pictures but once I got it right this program was amazing. It was finding every single picture from Christmas until present day and then it went backwards. I finally stopped it b/c it was taking hours and it had found my pictures that I hadn't saved!!!!! when I stopped it, the program was only 60% done and it had found I think over 700 pictures. London drugs would have cost me tonnes if they had found that many. Anyways, if you ever delete your memory card download this program it works like a charm. the recovered pics. were the same size as usual and even had all the data (time taken, camera, etc) encoded in them.

9months

Callia received the above dress fr. my cousin when she was just born. It is 0-3 months so in the first picture Callia is about 3 or 4 weeks old - and the dress was slightly HUGE on her - I thought that I would try it on her again a couple of weeks ago and that is the second picture. I think the dress fits her better at nine months! It is a little short when standing (not too bad though) and is fine when sitting. I'm glad she was able to wear it again!!

So Miss Callia hasn't changed too much since last month. She isn't crawling but she does manage to push herself around a little bit - she has quite the stretch when reaching for something she really wants. She has no teeth yet she manages to eat pancakes at breakfast (don't worry, no syrup). She hasn't been weighed since b/f Christmas but will be weighed later this week for the next part of the flu shot so I'll up date that then. She LOVES to be upside down. She LOVES to do her funny face. She LOVES yogurt and fruit. She LOVES any type of finger food. She LOVES her mama best!;) She LOVES to play with balls, cars and dolls. She would LOVE to get into the boys lego already - it won't be a good scene in our house when she starts to move b/c we have TONNES of lego. That about sums her up for this month. Oh - she's not eating anymore at 10:30 - kinda nice to be able to go to bed early if I want to - of course that hasn't happened yet.

WEEEE!

Hey there - wow- I can't believe I have a minute to sit down and blog. The house is clean, the youngest are sleeping, Aiden has a friend over and Ethan's at school. The laundry is going, the dishwasher is emptied and dinner is figured out -phew! One thing that has taken up some of my time is our family Christmas gift. We've never bought ourselves a "family" gift b/f but Rich received money fr. work as a recognition for being with his company for 10 years and so with it we bought a Wii. Let me tell you we have so much fun on it! If you're going go to have a gaming system in your house the wii is a great one to have. It gets ya moving, kids and adults can play the same games, it something "active" they can do in the house, and it's fun when people are over (big or little). I received the Wii fit fr. Rich for Christmas so we've been having fun trying to beat each other's top scores. I don't think I'll lose a ton of weight on it but it can get your heart going if you do certain exercises on it and I figure moving a bit is better then just laying on the couch watching TV. I think boys are really geared for playing video games - it's just in them - so I"m glad we have one that gets them running and jumping (our neighbours my disagree a bit!).

Doing something right...

Every parent has those moments where they wonder if the values they want to instil in their children are actually sticking (at least I do) and then every once in a while your child does something that makes you go "Yes, they're getting it" (at least mine do). I had one of those moments tonite. Before Christmas I was feeling a little blah about our kids going to public school and only being exposed to Santa stuff (among other less favourable stuff) - not that I'm opposed to Santa but he's not the true meaning of Christmas. So all of December we talked about the real meaning of Christmas every night at dinner (diff. aspects each night) to counteract everything at school. Well, we had one of those moments (phew, something is sticking) when Ethan handed me some art he had done at school. I asked him about it and he said he had to draw something about Christmas and he - now wait, this is it - drew the manger scene - Mary, Joseph, Jesus, animals and the star. He could have drawn Santa or a tree or reindeer but he chose to draw the nativity - he was the only kid - kinda cool I think.