Hey there- if you've somehow stumbled across this page, you may not know a whole lot about me (you know, besides what's on my userinfo). Here's a quick catch-up:

I'm an adopted only child (well, if that sentence didn't scare you away, read on).

I grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, with my excellent parents, one cat, and one dog. I was/am a bookwormy nerdish type. I became a Christian when I was in junior high. I didn't really get it until college, and am still learning more and more about God, and dealing with being a Christian in a very different environment than what I started out in :) I met the man I eventually married when I was a senior in highschool. I was a townie, but I went to college at the University of Illinois. I worked at Philmont, a national Boy Scout camp in the summers, teaching highschool-age boys how to backpack. It was one of the best things I've ever done. I majored in journalism. Carl and I got married on June 14, 2003 between my junior and senior years of college. Around this time, there was a lot of drama, with my friends, with my church, with my college parachurch ministry... it was just a tough time. But it made our marriage stronger, I think.

Anyway, I graduated. I had a series of less-than-great jobs, but they all had some redeeming quality. I worked at a camping goods store for nearly a year, and met some awesome people. Then I had a series of part-time jobs: Subbing at the schools I grew up in, working at a community weekly newspaper, working at the local nature center as a camp counselor or a receptionist. I got to feed and play with owls and small children ;) My good friends started getting married and getting pregnant. I helped write a book edited by my former boss from the weekly paper. Carl (my husband) and I settled into post-college life- we bought a house, and I finally got a full-time job in my field, working for a textbook publisher. Life was good.

Then, things got all wacky :)

We found out in spring of 2006 that I had PCOS, and would likely have a pretty tough time getting pregnant and/or carrying a baby to term. We decided to wait until I got back from a backpacking trip at Philmont that summer to start trying to have kids.

In early 2007, Carl accepted a job with a company in Seattle, and so we packed up our belongings, said goodbye to our friends and the hometown I'd spent the last 25 years of my life in, and headed west. It took five days in the middle of February, one visit to a yak ranch (owned by my mom's cousin), and we made it out to Seattle. I worked for an online investment magazine in Bellevue for a while. Fortunately, I have sinced moved on to bigger and better things, and am now working for the University of Washington, which I'm loving!

In May/June 2007, we found out we were pregnant. And then we found out it was twins. And, around seven weeks, we found out that we were going to miscarry, which we did exactly two weeks later. We had another miscarriage in April 2008, but found out after the fact- the second one was a lot easier. We're now pregnant for the third time, and have gotten a lot farther with this pregnancy, praise God. We're due June 11, 2009, and I'm enjoying the snot out of pregnancy itself, though I'm still working through some of the fear and grief that came with the dashed hopes of the previous pregnancy.

ETA: We gave birth to Catelyn Jean on June 7th, 2009. She's been an amazingly good and easy baby, and we're very blessed to be her parents. :)

ETA: We recently found out we're pregnant with our second! Another girl :D We're both shocked and excited, and a little overwhelmed by all the changes. We also bought a house, in the Ravenna/Wedgwood neighborhood up here, and did a ton of remodeling, all while juggling the pregnancy, a 9-month-old, two full-time jobs, and a caregiver transition. Whew, am I ever glad that's over with! :)

ETA: Julia Melodie joined our family on August 26, 2010. She's got the most beautiful big blue eyes, and we've taken to calling her "Bug." :)

Meanwhile, we're still figuring out the ups and downs of life in Seattle, enjoying making new friends, and making lots of long-distance phonecalls.

I'm sure I'm forgetting important stuff, but I think that about covers it. If you have things to add- please comment!

One of the funnier parts about summer in Seattle is that all of a sudden, people start crawling out of the caves they've been hiding in during monsoon season, and voila, suddenly I'm running into people I know on the street and at the park. It's kind of cool and kind of disconcerting. :)

Yesterday, I was having lunch with my boss and an old coworker, and this girl was sitting next to us and called my name. Lo and behold, she was a friend of the girl whose baby shower I went to about a week ago. In the course of chatting, I mentioned the stand-up paddle yoga class, and it sounds like she might be doing a lot of stand up paddling... so I friended her on Facebook and perhaps we shall get together sometime this summer. But weird! So weird to just run into people like that!

Except that it happened again today- I was at compulsivelyme's daughter's birthday party, and saw a guy I sorta know from church there with his toddler (not in a Che t-shirt today, but still recognizable), and then our good friends that introduced us to surfing walked up outta nowhere. That was pretty cool, because I got to introduce them to indighost, but it was also a little sad, because I keep thinking I should do stuff with them and then talking myself out of it (like, seriously, I almost called them this morning and then decided to be lazy and go back to bed instead). Still- I need to get a second lifejacket and then perhaps we'll be able to convince them to go out and have a little stand-up-paddle toddler playdate :)

Carl has been playing a ridiculous amount of Diablo 3, sometimes with indighost's husband- last night, apparently between when they went to bed and the next time her husband got online, Carl had leveled up three or four times :) I am pretty sure that happened when I was watching the girls this morning, but it's possible it happened last night after I went to bed. I was wiped- four hours of hot tub and two ciders and I was literally falling asleep at my computer. Unheard of. Still tired and headachey today, but the Excedrin finally kicked in, and also tons of sunshine.

Anyway! I have to start getting myself ready for yet another outing- my coworker's birthday is tonight and she's having dinner at 8:30 downtown somewhere. I have to look up the dinner location and get myself presentable enough to go out with a bunch of twentysomethings. ;)

1. We officially have Catelyn and Julia signed up for a daycare in the U-District for August 1. I am excited, but apprehensive... however, I have a much better gut feeling about this place than I did about the other. The teachers seem very caring, and I was beyond thrilled that they have a male childcare worker in the room Julia will be in. It's so unusual to find that, but I think it's really important for kids to know that guys can be nurturers/caregivers, too. They're two blocks from my work, so I am super-stoked that there will be a shorter day for them, and that I can go peek in on them or get to them quickly if I need to.

2. Speaking of gender roles, the other day, Catelyn was drawing a rainbow and said "I like rainbows, but some people don't like rainbows" in a very ominous voice. I asked her "Who doesn't like rainbows?" And she said "Boys don't like rainbows, but I do." I told her that was silly and that boys like rainbows, too.

I posted about this on Facebook, with my slight horror at her having picked this up from who-knows-where (like the dad at the bookstore wondering how his kids knew who Spongebob was) and have been inundated with encouragement and good ideas for teaching Catelyn about boys and girls since then. And, in addition, two of my friends' boys have (already!) made drawings of rainbows for Catelyn, which I just think is pretty much the cutest thing ever (maybe because Catelyn can't really draw yet!).

( Drawing 1 of 2 )

3. The spa is still awesome :) I had a really good time tonight with my two friends. It's always relaxing and totally worth it to just go and soak and laze around and have some downtime sans kids. I'm so glad Carl was happy to watch the girls tonight, and am feeling even way-less-stressed than I was yesterday. Let the holiday weekend commence!

Well, we got some good news at work that meant that I am suddenly a million times less stressed. But in the effort of chilling out, I scheduled a spa date with some friends for tomorrow afternoon. Yay! I am so excited.

I also put a ton of stuff on the calendar this morning- which was mostly due to the surfing community group from church sending their schedule out. I am stoked! I have something surfing-related going on nearly every week between June 1 and Sept. 29th. And the weekends that I'm not doing either a surf trip or a surfing yoga class, I am going camping :) This summer is going to rock! :)

On the downside, I've been really lame about keeping up with hot yoga. Carl's volleyball schedule shifted, and I can't seem to find another good night to fit it in :-/ That's part of why I've been walking so much- I was starting to feel really sedentary. The walking's been good for me- I can do it after I put the girls down. The downside is that I don't have anyone to do it with, and I feel weird calling people to chat on the phone with me while I'm doing laps around the park at 9 p.m.

Last night, I walked over to Wayward Coffee around 9:45 on the suggestion of a friend (since there don't seem to be many late-night coffeeshops close by our neighborhood), and that was a good, long walk. I'm glad that Seattle feels more than safe enough to take a walk that long at that time of night- at least on the lighted streets. Amusingly, I spyed (though didn't say hi) a coworker wandering out to get a paper? or look at the newspaper box... around 10:30, which was totally odd :) Not that my being out wandering the streets wasn't totally odd itself, so... anyway.

Oh! So, one of the projects I finished (which decreased my stress level- yay getting it out the door!) was this subsite, of which I find the timeline to be the most interesting.

Oh- and speaking of work- the guy who was my boss's boss's boss (I think) from when I *started* this journal came to visit my workplace today to talk about trends in continuing education. I was really impressed with both his speech and his memory for details. When I was working under him, it was for Allerton Park. It's been almost ten years, right, because that was the summer Carl and I got married. Anyway, he was totally telling my boss' boss' boss' boss about when the park was given to the U of I, and how far it was from campus. I couldn't have told you either of those things, so hat's off to him! :) Anyway, it was lovely to see him again, and it sounds like he's doing a great job where he's at now :)

Julia just climbed out of her crib.

O_O

Catelyn never did that, and probably still wouldn't. I don't even know what to do. EEK.

First, she started tearing her diapers off, which means we've reverted to Fuzzibunz, because she can't get the snaps off. We're potty training, as best we can, with having to potty train two at the same time.

But dang, dudes, we just moved them into the same room together! Ahhhhh.

Yesterday wound up being a supremely busy day- I wrote a bit yesterday, but that was before I ran down to Rainier Valley for National Park Family Day and then up to Shoreline for a birthday party, and then back to our house to get the girls down and have tiwonge and his friend over to play Bible trivia.

I know, you guys are totally laughing at me right now, but it was so fun! I miss getting to play board games and I really enjoy trivia games. I thought I would be terrible at the trivia, because Carl and tiwonge both are incredibly smart and have these stores of religious knowledge that I didn't grow up with, I guess? I mean, sure, I was in church a lot, but I never did AWANA, and tiwonge competes in quiz bowl, right? So, I'm pretty much hosed. But it turns out that I was not as bad as I thought I was- some of the questions were SUPER easy (like all of the "quotations" category) and other categories were consistently hard ("places"), but all in all it wound up being really fun. I even managed to correctly answer "Ebenezer" for a place questions (hey, it's not just for Scrooge!), which is only because I know "Be Thou My Vision" so well.

tiwonge also brought a gift for the girls- a book of saints with illuminated illustrations! What a sweet gift :D I totally stole it from the girls and have been reading through it (hermionegsnape, you would be so proud- I finally know the basics of St. Therese of Liseux's background!).
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Because yesterday was so busy, today's been a pretty laid-back one for the girls. We missed church because Carl tried to sleep in, and then I ditched Carl with the girls for an afternoon baby shower, and we've been playing around and watching cartoons and doing laundry ever since. The shower was a lot of fun- and man, the food was *SO* good. I am kind of bummed that the job/general busy-ness has kept me from seeing more of a couple of my friends who are pregnant, but hopefully we'll be able to do more stuff with them this summer.

Speaking of summer, I did finally reserve a cabin at Hobuck Beach for Labor Day. WOOHOO!! :) I haven't gone to that since right after Catelyn was born (that was the one and only surf trip between Catelyn and Julia, right?). So- almost three years? We'll head out on Thursday and come back on Saturday, which should give us enough time to do some Labor Day stuff in town too. PAX is sold out, and Bumbershoot seems like too much with small kids in tow, but maybe someone will have a BBQ.

Meanwhile, in closer news, two of the moms in my PEPs groups planned competing birthday parties! Whoops. We've already RSVPed for the earlier one, but we're close to both families, so I'm kind of bummed about having to turn down the second. I guess we'll see them at the PEPs bday party, but darn. LOLLERSKATES- that is the week of Catelyn's birthday, so I guess it's good I didn't plan anything for us that weekend. I'm still working out what we're going to do with Catelyn and Julia- I have an idea, but need to talk to the place about what their availability is... and I kind of want to do a birthday party in Illinois, since it will be so close to Julia's actual birthday. Which I suppose means I better start looking into booking a place there if we want to do something other than just have people over to my parents' house. Which would be fine, since they have a real yard- but last year, I think we discovered that our house is too small for a joint birthday party, really. I probably should plan a park party again for here, but the weather issue last year makes me hesitant to do it again, since we lost a couple people to the park. *sigh* Birthdays! Why are they so stressful?
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( For reading through all of that, pics from National Park Family Day )

Naturally, the one thing I didn't get photos of was their favorite- a gold panning exhibit put on by the Klondike Gold Rush Nat'l Historic Park- the one in Pioneer Square. They were not very good at panning (nor am I!), but the girls sure had a ball splashing in the water :) It was pretty warm yesterday, though chilly and rainy today.

Well, y'all, it took me two hours to write that up, and we've had dinner and it's almost bedtime. Carl bought Diablo III, so I know what he's doing tonight, and I have an awful lot of laundry to catch up on, probably while watching The Bachelorette. I've skipped the last few seasons because they were boring, but the new bachelorette is one of the girls I actually liked from a million seasons ago- possibly the only contestant that I thought was actually a nice, likeable person the whole time I've watched the show. So, fun night planned! Laundry and The Bachelorette! :)

We went out to Matthew's Beach Park this morning to run some energy off the girls. It was fabulous- nearly no one there when we got there, and such an amazing playground. Julia had a blast chasing the ducks across the grassy field, and Catelyn climbed up a... six or seven foot climbing wall to the top of a play structure. She's awesome :)

Tried to grab some friends to go to Grateful Bread, but were unsuccessful, so we just ate some lunch there and made friends with some kid that was hanging around by the couches where the cool books are. Read some of Aesop's Fables out of a book with lovely woodcut illustrations, which made me want to find some/read them more often to the kids- I forget how charming the really, really old books are- it was all "There was a finely-appointed ox, who by nature of his familial property rights, was taking his morning stroll around the park, when who should appear but a squirrel dressed in a drabby suit..." Cute, cute.

I am, thankfully, feeling much better today than I did yesterday, stress-wise. I used a couple of your suggestions- went on a walk, smelled some lavender, and then drove over and hung out with indighost, who is probably sick of seeing me this week. :) It's nice to have a friend I can just hang out with in the middle of the night again! I missed that.

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to nail down a sitter for tonight- I was planning to get together with tiwonge to play trivia (which I am sure he is going to solidly thump us at), but I think we can have it at our place since my regular-ish teen sitter is busy tonight and our friends close by are going out themselves ;)

Before that, though, we have a kiddy birthday party to attend, and an errand to run, which I should probably go do now... phooey. I want to just sit around on the computer, or lounge around outside all afternoon, perhaps with a (not-sure-how-we-would-make-it) mojito in hand or something. Alas, there is work to do.

As Aesop would say, "We had better bear our troubles bravely than try to escape them."

P.S. One of our friends took his little girl (Julia's age) stand-up paddling today! I think it is about time I rent a paddle board and get out there with the munchkins!

P.P.S. This photo essay is fascinating

Poor Carl came home upset :( Poor guy. He'd tried to call me, but I was busy playing with flubber with the girls, so I didn't get his call. He wound up walking about two miles home, because he got off the bus early because there was a girl on the bus who looked really sad, and he wanted to make sure she was okay.

So he got off the bus extra-early, because he felt like he was supposed to. And then she blew him off :( And then someone else was a jerk to him on the way home.

But what a sweet guy, who just gets off the bus early to talk to random strangers because they look sad. I love him so much :) He's such a sweet guy.

Oy- what a stressful week and a half. I am grouchy about *everything* ever. Not just grouchy, beyond grouchy. Like being rude to my boss grouchy.

I think work has just made me so stressed this week that I am unable to keep all my emotions tamped down enough to be functional. I wrote a whole FB post this morning about how ridiculous childcare in Seattle is, and then dialed it back a notch or 10. Thankfully, about as soon as I got done sending that out, we got an email back from a place that *might* work out! So, I should learn to shut up, I guess.

Hah, I should probably apply that online, too. I'm short-tempered enough today that I'm making grumpy comments about things that make me grumpy all over the place, and then getting more stressed when people don't reply to a grumpy old geezer comment nicely. Heh ;) It's one of those days where I should really know better than to talk about anything online because it's not likely to end well.

What do you guys do to de-stress? I am not sure if I know how to anymore! :) I will try to go on my nightly walk again tonight, and maybe that will help. I hope Carl's in a good mood tonight so our bad moods don't rub off on each other. I don't like having this level of stress for this long :(

I don't have much to write about- work has been stressful, lately, and busy, and that allows less time for reflection. But here's some funny stories for you:

Yesterday, on the way in to work, I walked down past the parking lot and was coming up on the edge of the hotel that's across the street from my work. There was this beautiful African-American woman standing outside the door of the hotel, who I noticed because she had on this amazing kanga (at least- I suspect it was a kanga, I could be wrong). I was trying not to stare and be rude, and she was like "Girl, I saw you walking down the street and that outfit looks adorable on you!" And I was like "Oh! Oh, thanks! Your dress is gorgeous, too- I love the print." They were similar colors, and she mentioned something about that and I said thanks again and went on in to work. Totally made my morning awesome.

Then, this afternoon, while I was pulling out of the same parking lot, a guy was walking down the street and I was contemplating putting the car in reverse to get out of his way, and he waved me on since there was a clearing in the traffic, and said "You go, beautiful!" I was caught off guard, but managed to tell him thank you, since it was kind of him to let me pull out in front of him to go, and he said, "You're welcome, beautiful!"

It's so funny, because I pretty much never- okay, actually never, that I can remember- have gotten complimented on the street by random strangers. And for it to happen twice in two days is ... just weird. Maybe there's some kind of mystical mirage caused by the concrete on that block that makes me look like I've dropped 40 lbs or morphed into a blonde or something.

I mean, not that I'm complaining (or fishing for compliments), but it is *really* unusual. It's cool, though :) I'll take what I can get, right? :)

In other news, I've been watching a little too much Curious George 2, and am in love with this Carbon Leaf song:



(Cheesiest video ever, but only one with the lyrics)

Also, Julia has started saying "I love you too" when she puts her head down on my shoulder for a hug (or a "smoosh" as she calls it). It's so cute- she never says just "I love you" because all I've said to her during hugs for forever is "I love you, too" :) She's adorable.

I cut her hair - gave her some bangs - yesterday. It was kind of a big deal, because I'd been planning to not cut her hair at all ever, but then it got sorta hot, and I got tired of sweeping her bangs out of the way. So, whatever :)

( Before and after )

Not the best job ever, but at least she can see now :)