Hanging Around

This is Asha's favorite past time and it drives me crazy. It doesn't help that Big Brother thinks it's hilarious and helps her do it. This was yesterday. She piles the pillows from our bed up so she can reach the bar that goes over our bed. She just loves to hang and swing there at least until today.

This is what we caught her doing today. She didn't need much encouragement from brother either. She just needed his help to hang on to the bar and she did the rest. Big Brother is very impressed by little sis if you can't tell. His opinion is that she needs to play football because she's so strong. My opinion is that she'll be good at gymnastics if she keeps practicing as much as she does at home.

That's my little dare devil gymnast!!

Finally Pictures!!

I haven't taken or posted any pictures because Asha has been sick and just not up to having her picture taken. Sitting and watching football in the cold just didn't agree with her and she ended up with a cold.

So here are the pictures I've taken this weekend.

I just thought this picture was really cute!! I don't think I've ever taken an open mouth smile picture like this before and I love it!!

This is Asha and her papa at Dakota's football game last night. I think she was the warmest person there. You know it's Fall when you have to dress like it's winter to go to a football game. Atleast in WI that's how it works.

Ok these next pictures I absolutely love!!! These pictures will show why I enrolled Asha for gymnastics.

She was trying to open our bedroom door and thought this was the correct way to do it. Once she started she had so much fun she kept doing this all day.

Eventually we had to make her stop because I think she made the door handle loose.

So as you can see I really mean that the girl hangs on everything. Nothing is safe in our house from her hanging on it not even door handles. LOL

Family Cook Book

I've revamped my idea for the Family Recipe Box after I got my Family Fun Magazine in the mail. I'm going to do a Cook Book instead of recipe boxes for the kids.

I don't know if any of you get the Family Fun Magazine but there was a section in there pretty much talking about what I wanted to do and they had a website where you could get a template/layout for recipe cards but they were full pages instead of small cards. The website is www.smilebox.com . The templates/layouts show up as a postcard that you can type on but when you download the template/layout/postcard it gives you the option to print once you have all your information on it. The thing I like best is that you can add pictures to the recipe card so you can have a picture of who the recipe was passed down from or who's favorite recipe it is.

Then when you print them out you just put them in a binder that maybe the kids could decorate. I think that would be pretty cool when they grow up to see their art work on the cook book and their kids would probably think it was cool too when it's passed down to them. A binder would probably last longer than a recipe box anyway and keep everything together better.

Just thought I would pass on the revamped idea if anyone is interested.

How Do You Know When.....

YOUR ADDICTED TO EBAY???

I guess when your walking down the hall with the box dropped off from the Fed Ex guy and your daughter yells "Asha's Got Mail!!" because you've ordered her soooo many things from ebay.

I innocently started looking on ebay for leotards for Asha for her gymnastics class and once I discovered all the cute clothes out there for her I just can't help myself. I am a bidding maniac.

She does have cute clothes though so I guess it's worth it right? wink wink

Family Recipe Box

I'm not sure if I blogged about this before or not and I don't feel like looking so if I have consider this a post for all of my new readers.

A friend of mine gave me a great keepsake idea for my kids. The conversation started with me telling her about Mamma D wishing she had some kind of family heirloom that she could pass down to Asha. The idea is a family recipe box. She saw it on a tv show and what you do is take a recipe card or stationary and write the recipes that mean something to you or people in your family. You can put the story of the recipe and who/where it came from on the back along with a picture of the person the recipe originated with or who passed it down. I thought this was just amazing seeing how Mamma D is part Jamaican and would have some amazing Jamaican recipes for Asha. I told her about the idea and she really liked it but like I said in my previous post she is extremely busy and I don't know when she will get around to passing down her recipes. I am really excited about it though and excited to make Asha's recipe box.

I think it will mean alot to her to see that her birthmom put something like that together for her and to see other people in her birthmom's family and to know a little bit of their history.

I thought I would share with all of you and maybe start something that our kids would find very special some day.

Mamma D

Well I got an e-mail from Mamma D today and she is fine. She had a really rough month and hadn't checked her e-mail since some time in August she said.

She had gotten sick and working 10 to 12 hour days. It's got to be so hard being a single parent and working those kinds of hours.

See I'm just a silly worrier. She said she has not stopped thinking about us and caring about us she's just had it rough.

Please pray for her and the kids. She's been having a rough few years and she is just such a good person and needs a break from all the bad stuff that keeps happening.

THANKS!!

Big Brothers Are Great!!

We are truly blessed that Asha and Dakota get along so well. Dakota is over the moon in love with his little sister and she the same. She cries when he goes to his mom's for the weekend and she always has to make sure that he goes wherever we go. She is always saying "Come on Coey (Cody)". They play wonderfully together and there have only been a few times in the last 2 1/2 years that Dakota had lost his cool with her. It was this summer actually and we were doing alot of traveling and they were both not happy to be stuck in the backseat for so long with eachother.

I'm an only child so it is wonderful for me to see them so close and to get along so well. Dakota has pictures of Asha all over his room and he even spends his own money to buy her things. Some days their closeness is even a problem because he would rather play with her some days than do anything else like oh let's say chores or homework. It always brings a smile to my face how patient he is with her.

It's actually pretty funny because Asha has the 2 men of the house wrapped around her little finger. Dakota jumps pretty much whenever she wants something even though he's been told not to give into her whinning/fits. He hates to see her unhappy.

Well here are some pictures I took yesterday of them together.

Here he is helping her shoot a basket. Asha loves anything that Dakota does so she loves basketball and soccer. She wants to do what he is doing.You can't really see him in this picture but he is holding her up so she can shoot the basket herself.

Here they are trying to fly his plane together. She really thought it was pretty cool.

Gymnastics

Asha had her first gymnastics class on Tuesday. She had done gymnastics at the YMCA last year but this place is more professional. Asha already learned more her first class at the new place than she did in 2 months at the YMCA.

She did sooooo good. She listened really well and did what they told her to do. She loved working on the bars. She would hang on the bar and walk her feet up the wall and then the coach would help them to spin around the bar. She didn't want to leave that station she liked it so much. She's always hanging on stuff here. Just today she was playing on her swingset and flipped backwards off of the bars on the swingset. I was so shocked. She had never done that before. I knew we were doing the right thing by signing her up for gymnastics and that just proved it today.

I will post pictures but they all turned out so dark. I though the lighting in there was going to work but she was usually too far away for the flash to work. I'm going to video tape next Tuesday.

I was also worried that she would be the youngest in there but there is another little girl who is about a month younger than her.

This is Asha waiting to get on the trampoline. I have some funny pictures of her beads sticking up in every direction from her jumping but they are too dark to post. :(This is the best one I have of her on the trampoline. She was so funny though. At the end of the trampoline they have thick mats so they don't fall off and hurt themselves and she just kept jumping right to the end of the mats too.

This is her laying on the floor after class. She didn't want to come off the gymnastics floor and when she did she just kind of layed down on the floor. I guess she got a work out.

Sleep..... What's That?

All of a sudden we are having a repeat of July here. Asha won't sleep again. July was an absoltuely horrible month for sleeping and now she is doing it again. No matter what time she goes to bed she is up at the crack of dawn, won't take naps, and sometimes even fights going to bed at night. I know I'm not the only mom having this problem so just wondering what it is that is making all these kids not tired or atleast fighting it so hard. MOMMY NEEDS SLEEP!!

Well of course as I write that I am up instead of going to bed DUH on my part I guess.

Excited here that Asha is starting gymnastics on Tuesday. She's excited as well because she can't wait to wear her leotards. Grandma and Papa came to visit yesterday and she ran to her room and grabbed her favorite leotard and asked Grandma to put it on her. She knows a sucker when she sees on. She's got daddy and brother wrapped around her little finger.


Asha's new accomplishment for the weekend was finally playing with the bubble blowing Curious George doll we bought her a month ago to try and brib her into taking baths. When we first bought it she loved it until we tried to make him blow bubbles. He makes this horrible noise like Darth Vader and it scared the crap out of her so she hasn't touched it since that day. We put him on one of the speakers in the living room and she was fine with that as long as he didn't move from there. She would put little hats on him and poke him with things as long as he didn't move. Well for some reason he was ok to move this weekend and now she won't go anywhere without him. If anyone has the inclination to buy one of these things DON'T. The bubble part doesn't really work and his arm keeps falling off which is really annoying to keep putting back on 50 times a day. This is what we have heard all weekend "Please George arm on, Please George arm on etc..."

Well here are some pictures from the weekend.

This is Asha on daddy's lap. Her most favorite place to be on the weekends when he's home!!

Not the best picture of her but I took this because of the new hairstyle I did on her. It's called a twist out. I had done twists in her hair that lasted almost 2 weeks and when I took them out they were still all twisty and sticking up all cute!!Ok me the big dummy that I am thought I was doing cornrows correctly until I actually watched a video on how to do them. The picture above is my attempt today and they actually look like real cornrows. I always wondered before why mine were so wide and everyone else's cornrows were so narrow. DUH because I was doing it wrong. I am pretty proud of myself and like the real cornrows better than the way I was doing it.

Mamma D

When I look at this beautiful little face I just can't help but to think of Mamma D. I worry about her and think about her every day. I know she is doing fine and getting on with her life now that she's not in Grad school but I still worry. It's even worse when she goes for long periods of time without e-mailing me.

I worry that by getting on with her life that she won't want to have as much contact as we have in the past and that makes me sad for Asha and for myself. Like I have stated she is like the sister I've never had and we truly love her like part of the family.

I can understand if moving on with her life means not having alot of contact with us but I will miss her very much!! I may also just be overreacting like I tend to do. I freak out and then she e-mails me to tell me how insanely busy she's been and then I feel stupid for thinking she was moving away from us. She does have 2 kids in school now and a full time job so it just may be that she is too busy or tired to e-mail.

I just want Asha to grow up knowing her Mamma D and how wonderful she is. I think only good can come from Asha knowing her birthmother and I think Mamma D feels the same.

I'll let you all know if she does contact me. I've been e-mailing her updates as usual but have not heard back from her at all.

Fun Times

We've been having a great end of summer. We are still doing the park thing regularly and there was a fair we took the kids to last night. Asha really is starting to enjoy rides and that is so much fun to watch.


She is still into her pink boots and has been wearing them with everything again. Her new passion is her new leotards for gymnastics. She keeps pulling them out of her drawers and wants us to put them on.

Asha on the carousel at the fair. She never used to like it but the last few times she's really started to smile and laugh and yell "Whee" while on.

Here she is all dressed up for her Great Grandma's birthday party and of course there are the pink boots. We tried VERY hard to talk her into her cute white sandals but it had to be the boots. We get comments every where we go about her boots. Everyone loves them and that makes her want to wear them more.

This is Asha at the school playground. I really love this picture of her even though part of her got a little cut off.

Did you all realize that it's getting darker out earlier? Well the night we took a walk to the school playground I thought we would have plenty of time to get home before dark but I was very wrong. It was almost completely dark out by 8 p.m. We ended up walking home in the dark. So just in case no one has noticed it is getting dark earlier.