Easter!

Too frustrated about how long it took just to get these pictures spaced out correctly (not to mention the incorrect order) to blog about how awesome our Easter was this year. I'll come back and edit this later. For now just enjoy the pictures. I will say how grateful I am for the atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and though that wasn't captured in these pics, it is definitely the best part about Easter.

DEtourist...yo.

The video on American Express Travel's site of Dave and my trip to Venice and Barcelona. Forgive the rap, I hope it is apparent that I was genuinely embarrassed. We had SO MUCH FUN! Thanks AmEx travel and Crispin Porter.

Picture Blog

Penny got out of the bath and demanded to wear these shoes, and this skirt, no shirt. Then she walked to the front door and said "ok, go go." She learned to pick her nose.

I made some bows, thanks Jamie.

I painted a table for Penny's room.

The chair has since been painted pink.

Waking up from a nap.

Body Parts

Poor Penny. She thinks bows are part of her body. Today while we were sitting eating lunch Penny decided to start naming body parts. Mid-bite she pointed to her eyes and said "eyes", then she pointed to her nose and said "nose", she pointed to her mouth and said "mouth", and finally she pointed to her hair and said "bows".

Consider me 5/7ths clean!

I did a cleanse/detox this week. I am always really skeptical of these things but a couple of my friends did it and said they felt great afterwards. I'm usually up for feeling great so I thought I'd give it a try. I felt really un-great for the first two days (and actually cheated on night 2 by having a bowl of cereal) but by the third day I was feeling great and so healthy. I only did 5 of the seven days because I felt another day of red meat was too expensive for me and I pretty much felt detox-ed enough by day five. If you're feeling up to the challenge here is the detox:

DAY 1: Fruit only.

DAY 2: Vegetables only. Raw or plain steamed, you can end the day with a baked potato topped with some butter.

DAY 3: Fruit and vegetables. Now it gets exciting. (No potato today).

DAY 4: Bananas and skim milk. You can eat up to 8 bananas. I actually thought this day was pretty satisyfing and delicious. I just ate the bananas sliced up in the milk like a bowl of cereal.

DAY 5: Red meat and potatoes. Up to 20 oz of meat (no ground beef).

DAY 6: Red meat and vegetables. You can have up to 2-3 steaks this day!

DAY 7: Brown rice and vegetables.

Again, I only went up to day five but I do feel really good. Especially after the hamburger and fries at Johnny Rockets tonight to celebrate being so healthy. Sometimes in Winter you can just start to feel so shluppy so this was a really nice way to challenge my body and feel fresh. I had enough energy to work out every day too! Let me know if you give it a try!

Posted by Jessica

Winter can be fun.

It contains my birthday, which is a great thing about winter, and that was lots of fun. Dave bought me rock climbing gear and in the morning we went rock climbing. Then in the afternoon we went into the city to see Toy Story on Ice (which unfortunately we only have one [non-digital] picture of, the 18 dollar one that Disney lured us in to). Then at night we had a sitter and went back into the city to eat dinner and see Interpol at the House of Blues. It was an awesome birthday. Thanks Dave!

Then on Pres Day Dave went cross-country skiing at a ski track near our house and reported back that there were actually lots of people out pulling kids behind them in Pulks. Dave and I have been wanting to go cross-country skiing in Vermont so I thought I'd try taking Penny out for a test run... Everything was going great until it came time for her to get in the pulk. She screamed and kicked and twisted and I almost gave up when another mother came by and suggested we just stuff her in there and zip it up and maybe she'd enjoy it once I got going. We did, and after about 30 seconds she stopped crying and resigned herself to her situation. After about 2 minutes she fell asleep leaving me to ski freely for an hour. Then when she woke up she was super happy and wanted to keep skiing.

So it sounds like we've been having lots of fun, and we have, but the rest of the time we just play in our apartment waiting for the snow to melt...please melt.

Here's lots of pics to make up for the recent dearth.

Playing at the park on a nice winter's day.Me, looking rough on the ski track.P, enjoying her snooze in the pulk.And her wake-up...

Penny being cute above, and totally done with pictures below.
If there's something vaguely familiar about the washed out quality of the pictures, they were all taken with a disposable camera. Im digitally regressing.

Videos are the new Pictures

We've had some craaazy storms here in Boston this winter. Penny likes the snow but she doesn't get her normal excited self in it (like she does for Buzz); she's more a great respecter of snow I think. Luckily for us we have a really steep awesome sledding hill like 30 yards from our apartment right on the frozen Charles. Here is some footage from our sled today...

Penny is just so adorable sometimes I just want to bite her face. Here is her eating spagetti.

This is what I have to live with...

Lucky me. We just got a new (used) Flip Video for our upcoming trip (more to come on that later) and wanted to test it out on Penny. While it doesn't fully capture all of Penny's cuteness it gets pretty close. Good job Flip Video.

3 minutes and 55 seconds in Heaven

I finally made a little Penny slide show. She is the joy of our lives, and we can't believe how quickly it is going by. So cute.

Halloween! Party time! Excellent!

Halloween was the best we've had in years. It was so fun to dress Penny up and take her trick-or-treating. She'd walk from house to house (or car to car), hold up her pumpkin bucket and say "tweat". She especially loved the houses where it was fend for yourself candy. She'd dig around in the bowl, looking like she was going to come up with handfuls of candy, then settle on only one and drop it back in the bowl. So adorable. For trunk-or-treat on Saturday Dave and I were that classic duo Tina Turner and Jim Morrison.

Lots of people said I had a great wig. I didn't. I just have really crappy hair. Then on Halloween we went up to Beacon Hill and went trick or treating with our good friends (who are moving this week--sooo sad) the Jackmans and their baby Noah.

Penny was a mini-celebrity and had to take the escalator to escpae the papparazzi. *

We took the T (boston subway) home and my friend Bethany snapped a pic of this mural from the station. I just thought it was cool.Me and P on the mean streets of Beacon Hill, that guy in the background is not dressed up as a sexy cop, I made the same mistake, he's a real cop.

I can't wait until next year! I already know what we're going to be if we have another kid by then. If we don't, then its back to the drawing board.

*For those of you thinking I was the worst mother ever, this escalator was out of order, aka, temporarily stairs.

Penny's Shrug

My mother-in-law knitted this adorable pink shrug for Penny! Unfortunately its too small for us to share otherwise I'd be stealing it...

Al bintu tasharabu.

That means "the girl eats". I am learning Arabic! I already feel like I can say so much and it is so exciting! I love learning languages. One of my life goals is to speak like five or six languages. I have spanish and now I'm working on Arabic. Next will probably be Italian. I feel like I should learn Chinese but I don't really want to. But I should. Maybe some day.

Pumpkin Fest '10! (Video)

Penny loved walking around and looking at the pumpkins and trying desperately to get lost in the crowd. Is it too early for her to be embarrassed by us?

Pumpkin Fest '10!

On Saturday night we took a spontaneous trip up to the Keene Pumpkin Festival in New Hampshire. It was awesome. I was expecting a couple hundred pumpkins lit in a field on a little farm--not so. They shut down the whole downtown and the streets are lined with shelves of pumpkins. At the very end of the street there was a 60 foot tall tower of pumpkins topped off with a HUGE pumpkin. It was such a great way to get into the fall spirit. I love fall in New England.

This last one is just precious Penny at the Library. Waltham has a great public library and we go there at least twice a week to read and play. She is just so cute I want to punch her in the face, but instead I just kiss her in the face. Lately she loves giving kisses and high-fives, coloring, identifying body parts, and reading all of her books at the same time.

Pikshers.

A couple of weeks ago we had our family pics taken by our good friend Bethany. We took them at the Old North Bridge which is also the site of the "shot heard round the world", which, for those who don't know, is the first shot fired in the revolutionary war! We're so patriotic. Lexington and Concord MA are some of the most beautiful places in the world. So glad we could have our pictures taken there.

Pat--we had some taken of Penny in her white dress and sweater but we only have these few preview pics so far!! We'll get those up soon...