Babysoroos

A few new pictures…

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We got snow again a few days ago. This is certainly an unusual winter in the Pacific Northwest. This time, we were able to get out and play in it a bit more — Ben was much more interested in it than he was just a month and a half ago. We even built a snowman! A small snowman, because the snow was so very powdery it didn’t stick together well, but one with a hat and a face and buttons and all that. Identifiably a snowman.

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Eric’s family joined us for Christmas again this year, since we obviously weren’t traveling anywhere at this stage of pregnancy. We had a wonderful, relaxed holiday. Ben greatly enjoyed having grandparents and aunts here to read to him and build train tracks for him. He received some wonderful gifts, but not enough stuff to overwhelm him, for which we are grateful. He had lots of fun opening presents, though — whether they were his or not. 🙂

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Pictures from last night, at 36 weeks 2 days.

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I’m 35 weeks today. These pictures are from last night. Obviously, Eric is still playing with lighting techniques. 🙂

…or roughly thereabouts, Ben fell asleep at the table during his afternoon snack. He rarely naps anymore, so this was something of a shock. And I don’t think he’s ever fallen asleep at the table before! Naturally, our first reaction was to take pictures, and then to move him to the bed. 🙂

Oh, and the title…. is one of Ben’s favorite things to say these days. Apparently he was very busy “las’ week, half hour ago,” doing all sorts of things!

And also, sorry for the gap in posting. Between a 2.5 day power outage (due to this storm) and the resulting computer network chaos at our house, I’m only now able to actually get to the photos to be able to upload them. More pictures coming soon of the 35 week belly and the Christmas tree.

Eric’s been experimenting with lighting effects, so of course I’ve been modeling. We got these ones last night.

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We’ve had quite an interesting few days!

Rain on Sunday turned to snow, and by mid-afternoon it was lying. We lost power around 3pm. We ventured out for a while to see how widespread it was, and discovered it was basically 10 houses on our lane and that was it. So we ordered pizza for dinner, and when Eric went to pick it up, the downtown area had just lost power too. It came back on at about 7pm, and Ben’s joyful reaction when the lights came back on was “We can open the fridge!” (Oh, how he misses opening the fridge and getting things out when we tape it shut. 🙂 But he does understand that the “electricity is broken” and we cannot open the fridge, and he’s generally pretty good about it.)

Power went off again at 5am on Monday morning. And it was still snowing. Power came back a little before 8am, but went off again at 9:30. Still snowing. Came back around 1pm, but went off again at 3:45pm. Still snowing.

That outage lasted for about 33 hours. We didn’t have power again til about 1:30am Wednesday.

The snow stopped some time on Monday night, we ended up with maybe 8″ or so, and Tuesday was a bright sunny gorgeous freezing cold day. It felt like we were living in a ski lodge. The temperature was down in the mid-twenties.

We’ve been comfortable enough — we have a gas fireplace that heats the living areas, and because of the open loft layout of our house, also heats the bedroom. We have lots of candles and we have a propane camping stove, so really, we’ve been doing alright. The most difficult thing to deal with was getting to be hot water — the water heater is electric, so we were using the hot water sparingly, just enough to take the chill off when washing hands, hoping to make it last. It just barely did. And then today Eric realised we have an on-demand gas water heater in his office. 🙂 So as long as we have propane out there, we can even take showers if the need arises.

There’s another storm coming in tonight, according to the forecast, but it’s looking milder. Maybe another 2″ of snow. We sort of expect to lose power again, but maybe we won’t. It’s not too worrisome though, at least now we know we can handle it. 🙂

And once December gets here, it’s supposed to warm up a little, perhaps it’ll be more typical Northwest weather….just wet.

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The day after Thanksgiving, instead of going shopping like many people do, we like to honor Buy Nothing Day. Over the years, that evolved into Make Something Day, and last year, we decided to start our own new family tradition of making Christmas ornaments on that day. That means we get new and meaningful Christmas ornaments to add to our collection every year, we get to explore whatever craft idea seems age-appropriate for the kids, and we sort of kick off our holiday season with a day spent together being creative and goofy.

This year, we decided to bake inedible cookies and decorate them with glue and glitter and paint. Ben was involved at every stage of the process, and was way more focused than I expected him to be. He sat and happily played with glue and glitter for probably over an hour. He created his own little works of art which will hang with pride on our tree this year.

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