Lucky Lady

I have an amazing husband.  This week I got a delivery and inside were the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen.  The note was what got me.  Autumn and I are so lucky to have Dillon.  In two weeks it will be six years since our first date.  I'm so glad that I said yes.

Moolah

This week I got two checks in the mail from Alpine School District for collaboration and CRT results from last year.  It totaled almost $1400. It was a total surprise. I thought that I was going to get about $500 and I had even forgotten about that.  Dillon and I decided to do something fun with the money.  We've been working really hard to save our money lately for grad school, and my intense sense of money guilt was telling me that we should just put the money in the bank, but I know that if we did that it would just get spent on a hundred small things and we wouldn't even really notice that it had been there.  So we decided that we'd spend at least part of it on a trip (I had to satisfy my money guilt by putting most in the bank). I was trying to think of different options and then Southwest came out with an amazing sale: 40% off all of their flights.  So I spent a few hours working out options and looking at a thousand flights and we decided that we're going to San Francisco at the end of January.  It's going to be a blast!  We're going to fly out there and then try to figure out the metro system.  No rental car! That will be an adventure on its own, especially when you add a baby into the mix.  It will be our first big trip with Autumn and it's hard to know exactly how she'll be. She'll be almost 7 months old by then.  That's so crazy how fast time goes.  I'm super excited.  We've been looking up things to do and places to eat because let's face it - when Dillon and I travel it's all about the food.  Any suggestions from those of you who have been San Fran before?

Can't wait to see this...

A little ingenuity

Autumn is getting too strong for her own good. She's in this stage where she'll only sleep well if she's all swaddled up nice and tightly. If she gets even one hand out she'll wake up and won't fall back to sleep. Lately she's been going from this:

To this (in a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes):

And inevitably she'll have one of her hands shoved deep into her mouth and once she starts sucking all hope of sleeping is out the window. No matter how tightly I try to swaddle her she manages to break free through the layers of Velcro. And every day she seems to get faster and better at it. I tried for a few days to get her to sleep with her arms out, but that was a failed project that resulted a few sleepless nights and extremely bloodshot eyes. So I decided that I needed to find a solution. With Dillon's help we came up with the following solution:

Sleeves! I made sleeves out of a pair of baby pants and sewed them onto her little swaddler (her snuggie as we call it) so that she wouldn't be able to get her hands in her mouth anymore. After a three hour nap I came upstairs to see that she still had both arms in.


Success!

Here's Autumn telling you how excited she is about it:

Adios muchacha

Sometimes it's hard being honest. Yesterday UPS dropped off a package from Babies R Us on our porch. It's a power wheels motorized four wheeler toy for a little girl. It was addressed to the people who lived here before us. I don't know where they live now or who they are. I looked up the toy online and it cost $100. It would have been really fun to have for Autumn when she gets a little older. She would have loved it. I could have rationalized that it wasn't my problem that it was sent to the wrong address and just kept it. But I know that if I was in the same situation I would hope that whoever got my package would send it back. That's a lot of money to lose out on. So after being transferred four times to different parts of the Babies R Us customer service line I finally found out that I can just take it back to the UPS store and they'll send it back. I hope it gets to the right people. Moral dilemma averted! I'll miss you Dora.