In Search of Myself

How we watch t.v.

(with a captive audience)

Dude

Is it just me, or does he look REALLY grown-up in these pictures?
(excuse my computer desk clutter, LOL.  It's the only place I have to put anything.)

Robots

The movie "Robots" (the Disney one) came out when I was in college, but I just now saw it for the first time this past weekend.  Jake and I watched it on Friday, and it made me laugh SO hard.  It's SO FUNNY!!!  Great message, too.

But dude.  Jake is SUCh a worry-er.  All though the movie he kept asking questions -- why's he doing that?  what's gonna happen?  why's he being mean?  are they going to be ok?  I know it's hard for a kid to just be patient to see what's going to happen, but it was seriously the entire movie, question after question.  And he had this look on his face like he was sad and confused.  But he did love the movie!

We watched it again on Saturday, and he was better that time -- except he was fixating on the fact that the main guy missed his parents and that his parents were sad that he was gone.  I was sitting at the table, scrapbooking, and Jake asked me "why his mom so sad?" from the couch.  I told Jake that the guy needed to go out into the world and get a job and make something of himself, and that's just what people do, and that his mom was sad to not have him around, but she was proud of him for going.  Then I made the mistake of saying "When you get older and you go to college, I'll miss you because you'll be away at school, but you'll be having fun and it's something you need to do."

You know that face that a baby makes when he's about to cry?  When they first look upset, then their face scrunches, then there's a moment of silence, then a wail?  Yeah, that's what happened.

He started crying and saying he didn't want to go to college and doesn't ever want to leave me.  I ran over to the couch and picked him up and said it's ok, he doesn't have to go for a long long time.  Then he said he doesn't want to go at all -- so I said "yeah, ok, you don't have to go."  (He IS going to college, just maybe close to home.  heh.)  So I sat with Jake on my lap and my arms around him for the whole rest of the movie and we cuddled under a blanket together so he would feel better.  Poor kid.  LOL.

I'M DONE WITH THE PET BOOK!

These are the last two pages.  We DO have more pics of the dogs (hardly any of the cat!!!) but you have to stop somewhere.  Jake's excited about the pages he's seen so far, so I  want to go ahead and send off for the book.

I have the images in a folder called JAKE on our desktop at home.  Jake knows how to double click on it, then double click on an image and use the arrow keys to look at the pics he wants.  I'm pretty sure he'll be better at computers than I am, in about a year.

Jake & Lucy, Sept. '06

I'm making progress on the pet book!  I rock.  :)

and here's a pic from when we first got her.  Two more pages, and I'm declaring the book DONE.  LOL

What we did on Saturday

Jake and I spent a lot of quality time together over the weekend, and it mostly consisted of us just hanging out at home (which was nice, actually.)  It was a REALLY pretty day on Saturday, so after sleeping in and not bothering to change out of our p.j.'s, we played in our back yard for a while.  Good stuff.

oh, and if we're being honest?  Jake was wearing that orange pug shirt on Friday, too -- it's his favorite shirt, and he didn't want to take it off.  So I didn't make him.  (Yes, we eventually got dressed that afternoon to go out to lunch with my mom.)

Pets pages

Jake's pet book is coming along nicely -- I only have a few more pages to make before I can order it from Shutterfly!  yay!  (I'm making a 4x4 book for him, for right now.)  Here are two new pages:

The first one is a scraplift of Manda Bean, the second, of Cori (at www.digishoptalk.com)

TONS of new layouts

I made LOTS of scrapbook pages this weekend!  I so totally rock.  LOL.  Here are my two favorites (which are scraplifts):

I posted ALL of the new ones over at my Layouts by the Numbers blog -- click here to see.

Me in 1984

Well first, these pictures got me thinking about what I wrote on the page -- just how much time I spent on that stage in the 14 years I lived in Montana.  The auditoriums at the high school and middle school were the only ones in town, so that's where we had everything -- piano recitals, community Easter services, any kind of production (I was in R&H's Cinderella here, and played the piano for Pirates of Penzance here), and wow, so many choir concerts I've lost track.

The other thing that was weird, to me, is that I'm only about a year older here than Jake is now.  I was 5 and a half when I started Kindergarten -- so I'm feeling pretty good about not starting Jake this year, when he would turn 5 a month into the school year.  He can start when he's been 5 for a while.  :)

Learning to write

Jake still colors and doodles pretty much like a two-year old (which is fine . . . he can do what he wants, LOL) but he's doing pretty good learning how to write letters.  He can write almost all the letters of the alphabet -- sometimes he needs prompting, like reminding him where to start and which direction to go.  But he's doing really good.  After Christmas, he sat and wrote his name on like 15 thank-you cards -- it took over a week, but he did it.

As you can see from the picture, he doesn't quite get the spatial stuff.  He doesn't write words with the letters in a row.  He asks me how to spell his friends' names, and writes the letters ALL over the place.  If I write blocks with boxes for him to write one letter a piece in, he can write them all in a row -- but they're still drastically different sizes.  It will come with time.  (If you look at the red letters, you can see where he spelled his name)  But he's having fun, and he's learning letters, so that's all I care about.