3/14 - Pie Day

In honor of the fake holiday Pie Day, when we picked Lizzie up from daycare on 3/14 I said we might make a pie. Without missing a beat she pointed at me and, while moving her pointer finger up and down for emphasis said, "We can go to the store and get strawberries and take them home and put them in the pie and make the pie and it will be sooooooooo yummy for me."

So that's what we did.

Here Lizzie is helping make the pie:

And here's Lizzie being Lizzie:

Hey, it does snow in Rexburg

After a disgustingly mild winter we got a fair amount of snow on the ground yesterday and today, and Lizzie wasn't about to let the opportunity for snowman construction pass. 

And, her snowman building skills are coming along nicely.  She rolled this one entirely by herself:

Until it got a little too big.

At some point, Lizzie and I joked about building a snow puppy instead of a snowman, so we had to give it a try.  Lizzie seemed to like it:

So much so that she gave it a hug that ended up in a beheading:

Building snowmen is hard work:

But there's always a little bit of energy left for snow angels:

The snowman family:

Joe had a birthday last month

We will get this up to some sort of up-to-date status at some point (probably just as the baby is born and any semblance of control in our lives disappears completely).

Here are a couple quick pics of Lizzie helping to decorate some cupcakes and helping to open the presents.  She's a great helper.

It's a BOY!!!

I'd publish the proof, but that may be too graphic for sensitive eyes. :) Plus, the cd of ultrasound pics is way across the room and why would I want to get up off the couch?

I guess that Bernat jacquard floral baby blanket I started knitting a month or so ago isn't going to be for this baby. The yarn looked so enticing at the time and I've been thinking girl ever since. Wrong. Sorry buddy- we'll work something out between now and your arrival. And I'll stop referring to you as she. Luckily your hearing is still developing so you shouldn't be too put out.

Hope you all have a great week! We will be discussing names and starting to think about scrounging up a boy wardrobe.  One thing we don't have to worry about obtaining: superhero toys. Yup, we already had a lifetime supply of those even before Lizzie came along. That's just how we roll around here.

Lizzie Birthday Pics!

She turned the big 0-3!  Over a month ago...but hey, better late than never.

A magnetic fishing game, puzzles and books, and getting to camp out in her new princess tent (which she sometimes asks that we put a superhero blanket over so it can be a superhero tent).  What a day!

Anyone Still Out There?

Considering our track record, there's really no reason you should still be frequenting at our blog, unless you're family and have to spend eternity with us anyway, or you're a really good friend who isn't deterred by long lapses in communication.

However, here we are, ready to give an update on our lives.

We survived our first semester teaching full-time, both with a 4-course, 2-prep load. To translate, we were both teaching 2 sections of 2 courses. Joe taught intro writing courses, which amounted to about 3000 pages of grading across the semester. Emily taught intro psych and cognitive psych. Our main survival technique was staying one step ahead of the students. For Emily, who had a 7:45am class MWF (who thought that was a good idea?), this meant many early mornings finishing lecture preps. Joe always seemed better at staying on top of things before classes, but he struggled to stay on top of the grading after classes.

Emily is impregnated. ETA of baby is late June. The first trimester was tiring and offered mid- to low-level nausea on a regular basis. Heartburn, aching hips, and restless legs have already made appearances. The second trimester has been more even keel and we all look forward to the gender identification ultrasound Feb. 6. Despite these minor complaints, we are super happy to see our family grow.

Joe is the editor of a book on essays about Superman. Feel free to add this to your own growing library of academic inquiries into super heroes and comic books (you all have one, right?). You can also feel good knowing you're contributing about .0000001% to our annual income, or something like that. Jokes aside, Joe has worked hard on this and there are negotiations for creating a series of essay collections on different superheroes.

Lizzie is amazing (she's a 3-year-old and does the good and bad things that come with the age, but she just brings so much happiness and fun into our lives that it makes up for the hours trying to get her to eat a decent dinner or clean up after herself or... the list could go on). We feel pretty blessed to have her as our daughter. She has quite the imagination. Given her thorough indoctrination into princesses and superheroes, she often creates fascinating ideas.  She once informed us the cardboard box she was in was a robot princess cage. She loves to play Rapunzel by attaching a scarf to her head with a headband and then perching on our bed (the tower) and calling down to Flynn Rider (dad) to come up. She enjoys books and being read to, although she is sometimes frustrated she can't read herself. While she knows the ABCs verbally, we are still working on identifying letters by sight and sound. If only she would sit still long enough to be taught!

We'll try to get some pictures up here soon so you can see what a three-year-old Lizzie looks like.

Lizzie reads The Night Before Christmas