Personality

Here is our little man at 7 months old! We are enjoying his developing personality - he is mellow and very very happy and giggly unless he sees me making food for him. Then he just screams bloody murder until the spoon is in his mouth.
We are in the midst of our cold weather here. 50s and 60s may not seem that bad but in concrete houses with no heat it is COLD. We bought some small space heaters several years ago and really appreciate them even though we only use them about 2 weeks out of the year! So Ryan has been wearing his brown fleece jacket here 24/7 for awhile.

He as 2 bottom teeth and we can see the top two coming in. He has had more trouble with teething than Layla di so his new talent of sleeping through the night is no where to be found these days. We trust he'll get back to sleeping from 8pm to 7am again soon. He and Layla have also been sick with major coughs and nose junk.

Well I can't end a post on "nose junk" so I'll just say that we are doing okay with the situation with Tom's job. You may remember we had done some construction around the house and built a room in the back part of the yard for the maid. We can't sponsor a maid now so we moved Tom's desk and computer stuff back there right away so he can get some work done. Despite not having his full-time job, he still has plenty to keep him busy at his desk! We are all glad that he can have some quiet space to work.

oops. A bit late on this one...

I thought I had posted this slideshow about our decorating for Christmas ages ago but just realized that I had forgotten to do so. Tom and I just took down all our Christmas stuff yesterday so we are far less festive (= We really enjoyed decorating with Sue!

The comments thing is not working on the slideshow for some reason, so the brief description is that Sue joined us (family friend who now lives in the area. YIPPEE!) to make our occasion much more festive.

Layla decorated all her stuffed animals with these extra plastic balls I had. She lined them all up. It was quite funny because I had hardly gotten started and she seemed to get the idea of decorating right away.

Love the photo of the two of them reading - Layla was being a Christmas fairy (=

Pulling the tree out of storage after 2 years....trying to find a way to get all the dust off of it!

Ryan has 2 bottom teeth now (beginning of December)

I made apple cider both to drink and for the smell - something we always did at our home.

In terribly UN-American Christmas fashion, we had Indian sandwiches for dinner that night (=

New Year! 2011

We did nothing noteworthy to celebrate the new year - we are feeling unsure about what to come and that doesn't incline one to throw a party which was our original plan.

Instead, we stayed home and rolled in the new year with Ryan truly screaming because of new teeth and all of us watching Nanny McPhee in an attempt to distract ourselves!

2010 was certainly a banner year with our move back overseas, the birth of Ryan, my second surgery, Layla starting nursery school, my learning how to mother TWO children at the same time, Tom finding and losing work, and getting our residency visas and border cards! Whew.

We are truly hoping that 2011 will be much less noteworthy (=

Paradox

I've been meaning to post this picture for awhile. This pillow, and what it means, cracks us up! Some family friends gave this to layla for her birthday this fall. The words say "Girl Power". This is coming from a family that is so conservative that the daugther doesn't hardly leave the house if she can help it and who hardly even looks you in the eye. The only rationale I can find for why they would give us this pillow is that Layla has red hair and so does the girl on the pillow. Wierd. I didn't even want Layla to keep the pillow given the attitude of the girl, but I figured I was probably being over-protective (= Layla can't quite get her hands on her hips like this, but she is getting closer to the attitude though!




One fun little story - this morning I had covered Lj up with the big, thick comforter that someone gave us (thank you!) and noticed that her diaper had leaked because of how she was scrunched up. I decided to just leave her there until she woke up since it wouldn't be too much longer. So I was listening carefully for her to wake up as she can wake up VERY cranky if she wets the bed (only really happens at naps when she isn't in a diaper). Anyway, I could hear her rustling around so I went in and she says very matter-of-factly "mama I wet my pajamas. So I took them off and put them in the dirty clothes. I wet my pajamas because I went SO MUCH pee pee that it came out of my diaper! It is a really full diaper!" She is so cute when she is being 'responsible'. She likes to take off her clothes and put them in the laundry (dirty or not!) and also take off her diaper in the morning, put it in the trash can, clean herself off and get dressed all by herself. She has been doing this for about 4 months or so. Maybe longer. Then she walks into the kitchen (i'm usually in there and can't hear her wake up if she is quiet) like she's 15 years old and looking for food! One day she even emptied the diaper can by herself!

The weather is totally cold at night and in the mornings now. We have our fleece pants on, our jackets out, socks on and warm snuggly house shoes to wear. I keep worrying about Ryan - he doesn't really have good warm clothes now! I'm making it work by layering the oddest things together, but it seems silly to buy more warm clothes as the weather will change in probably 2-3 weeks if our memory is correct. We'll see. Needless to say, Layla was a very well dressed baby and Ryan is just too long for all the lovely warm clothes I got from our friend here.

Ugh.

Not really wanting to go into details, but for those of you who haven't heard yet, Tom was let go from his job this week. It was really quite shocking and I'm sure we'll never know the real reason.

We've only had our visas and paperwork for about a month and we are not sure what will happen.

I'll update once we know more. Tom will have one more meeting with the HR guy to see how long they'll let us keep the visas.

Christmas Eve

We had a fun time in the desert for Christmas Eve with our Friday Group friends (=

It's time for baby food again!

It is hard to believe that Ryan is already eating solid food! After stretching him for two weeks on bananas and a couple of avocados and cousa, I FINALLY got myself organized to get the baby food made. Katie came and helped since she has a boy two weeks older than Ryan and we are in the same boat (= We made carrots, potatoes, applesauce and cousa (which is close to zucchini). I filled up all of my 17 containers from Vic (thank you!) and Katie used up my left over milk storage bags since she has a tighter squeeze in her freezer. Hopefully the boys will like all the food! So far Ryan has been fine with what I've given him and he has been eating like crazy and actually weaning himself rather quickly. It has been a race to keep up with him!
He isn't in a full crawl, but he is almost there. He can scoot around everywhere and is up on all fours rocking back and forth. He's just in time to scoot across the room and pull everything out from under the tree.....hasn't happened yet, but I'm betting it will before the tree is down!

Lj wears a headscarf

We were enjoying one of our first trips across the border with our new passes and had lunch with a friend. She had a birthday/christmas package for us (thanks Roger and Claire!). Although Layla doesn't get this fixed just right, you can see how she flips the scarf around - the movement is JUST like what the ladies do 100 times a day. It was so funny to see her makes the same motion! Check out her sweet little face she makes as she does it.....SUCH A POSER! I love the ending - also a very typical moment for her...."I'm done posing and just want to be crazy!"

Tom's Birthday - 42!

Tom's birthday was on Friday, December 3! It was a very low-key day with some fun family time. Exactly what we all needed. (=

She thinks it really is winter....

When Layla goes outside to play these days she is almost always wearing one of her coats - totally zipped up and with the hood on. When she takes it off, she is invariably sweating all over her head. But she insists that she is cold (=

Part of our decision to stay put in our home was to plant some trees to give some shade which is SOOOO important during the summer. We enjoy being outside to water them every day! We have planted four trees outside and Tom lined them up with our neighbor's trees which are the same type of tree. Hopefully we'll live here long enough to see the trees get as large as Abdullah's! Of course, our house is so poorly made it will be totally falling apart at that point, but let's not think about that. We keep seeing more cracks in the floors and walls and hope that we made the right decision to stay (=