there will be no pictures, but it will still be news

my title is not just a title for title's sake. i don't have any new photos to upload (yet).

so, here's the skinny:

pete: finished his 3rd (of 4) semesters of mba school. had 6 second round interviews. got 3 job offers. will be taking one of those three, which will be with bank of america. it's based out of charlotte, where we hope to end up. but...he may not get assigned there (geographic flexibility and all). we'll keep you updated on that. now, he can concentrate on his last semester of school and whatever else he wants to do.

izzy: this kid can say just about anything and everything now, which is so much fun and can be quite alarming too. we've been lucky i've cleaned up my potty mouth. she's become quite picky with her food, but she still eats fairly healthy. she's a pro with utensils. and she loves salad with oil and vinegar. her new loves are fairies, princesses and all her new babies she gets to put in her new dollhouse. she still likes to dance, but it has evolved from shaking her butt side-to-side to very dainty ballerina moves. not sure where she picked it up, but it's really funny.

me: so i was 3/4 done with the knitted patchwork blanket and then ended up hating it and unraveling it. so...i still have a slew of yarn that sits. i need some new motivation and some stick-to-it-iveness. perhaps the new year. i finished a couple of christmas projects that i wanted to do, but not everything. guess i gotta start earlier next year. like july, i think. i have sewing, going back to yoga, and babies on the brain (no, i am not pregnant...yet). maybe i will accomplish some of that for 2011?

audi.

i may roll my eyes, but i do want another one

so the past couple of months have been hectic in our home. pete has been ultra busy with school, info sessions, meetings, being a t.a., AND looking for a job after school is done in april. he is gone A LOT. people said the first year of mba school is s'posed to be the hardest, but they were liars. yeah. you heard me. well...maybe they just had it easier trying to land an offer from a company. pete has been doing great though. he's had a lot of interviews, and he landed 5 flybacks, with another yet to be scheduled. he's at his third now. the first 2 were "no"s. boo to them. they're missing out.

in the meantime, i have been trying to finish a patchwork knitted blanket with all my scrap yarn i've had for years. i'm tempted to start another knitting project that may be beyond my abilities and time, but i really would like to try. i also want to get working on a couple sewing projects before christmas. i'm also doing some major cleaning in different parts of the house, and reorganizing. i'm cleaning out things that i never use or never wear and trying to sell or donate them. we returned our leased camry recently, and we got a mini-van. i have also been working slowly on some geneaology work for my family. i was lucky to randomly find a relative on facebook (yes, it's good for more than just wasting time) and got some information on the names of my grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents on my mom's side. so yeah, we've been busy.

with all these projects and tasks and obligations, we really really want another one of these:



wanna know what she said the other day? pete asked her what she thought of something, and she said "oh yeah. it's pretty cool." geez! i wants me another baby. not gonna lie. i have baby envy.

how to cope

i'm not stating. i'm asking.

so i told you months ago that izzy has been a contrarian lately (how can i convey that in a halloween costume?), and nothing has changed. if she's mad at us, she will take a normally well-loved stuffed toy and chuck it. but then she screams for it as if we were the dastardly ones that threw it. or she asks for something and then say "no ____!" it's quite frustrating. i've tried firmly explaining how annoying this is, but she screams at me to stop. guh! point izzy.

since she is 2.5 years old now, she has had tantrums galore. half the time, i feel i can handle it and really do handle it. it's been a combo of timeouts, firm stares and walking away. of course, this is only do-able at home and with her safety in mind. i've also tried reasoning with her when she is screaming unintelligible rants, but she just ends up screaming over me now. so...point izzy.

one of the most dangerous things she does now is run around in parking lots trying to get away from me, as if i silently initiated a chase game by looking at her. it scares me so bad that i bark at her to stop, which i'm sure totally makes me look like "one of those moms." meanwhile, she just laughs. duh for points.

oh yeah. she has smacked me in the face a few times too. horribly shocking and infuriating, because i myself have never done that to someone. at least, not that i know of.

so i beg you experienced moms and successful moms and knowledgeable nannies/sitters--how do i get my child to listen to me? am i experiencing a phase, or is my kid just out-right naughty? i'll be eating chocolate waiting for your advice.

i've been told (and so has someone else)

so i've been m.i.a. on the blogosphere for a long, long time. i have no excuse. i don't have a pressing job or active lifestyle. in fact, i do the same thing most days--shower, eat, hang out with izzy, run minor errands, cook, clean up messes. oh yeah, i watch t.v. and waste time on facebook too. don't judge. i'm admitting i am a slug.

i guess i'll give you a brief rundown of one particular life event of late.

mid-august: pack up seattle apartment. *we do not check out with landlord, because he happens to be out of town. (this foreshadowing.) return to utah from seattle summer internship

late-august: got ripped off by seattle slumlord on deposit fee. he claimed we did not clean and left the apartment "soiled beyond normal wear and tear." bunch of crock. fought on phone. then, finally agreed to send someone over to clean to get the rest of deposit back.

early-sept: slumlord pretends that bro-in-law did not call in time to go clean. stiffs us our arrangement and deposit.

mid-sept: contact BBB and slumlord's property management company. lodged complaint about slumlords cheaty-cheat face. had proof that on inspection checklist that EVERYTHING was ok, so there should not have been a $120 cleaning fee charge. got email from prop. mgr. that we would get our $ back. semi-celebration!

late-sept: received check in mail! ha slumlord! take that!

so i did get an email from said slumlord that he was in the right for charging us, but out of courtesy was gonna give us our $ back. hmmm...if he wanted to be so courteous, he shouldn't have been a jerk when we asked him what he was charging us a cleaning fee for and just given us our $ back when we asked for it initially. my guess is that he wanted to stick it to us one last time (in his own dumb way), even though i know he was told by his boss that it needed to be returned per the proof we had from his check-out inspection.

we are now $120 happier. lesson learned-we will never leave an apartment without having done a physical walk-thru inspection.

is it just mine?

so izzy is a total contrarian lately. much of what she does or says makes no sense. i don't know if it's just her processing the words and concepts or what, but it can get kind of annoying. (*note: i still love my kid. i just think she does lame stuff sometimes.)

for example, she likes to ask pete and i to do something and then gets mad that we do it. so she asks us to sing "twinkle stars" (twinkle, twinkle little star) or "baa baa sheep" a lot lately. but as soon as we do it, she gets mad and tells us to stop. maybe she is not getting mad. i don't know. but she has hit us in the face if we don't stop. it probably doesn't help that we are cracking up.

also, she asks for food that she really doesn't want. she asks me to hold something that she doesn't want me to hold. she knows she has pooped in her diaper, but if i ask her she'll say "no." she says she likes to brush her teeth, but she tries to run away when we help her. she loves dogs, but she is scared to go up to 90% of them (which is fine with me). she cried when aunt maggie or g-ma left our presence, but when they were around she was acting all coy and put off. the list just goes on and on.

i guess i am just gonna have to remember this behavior for when she becomes a teenager. goodness knows, she won't make much more sense then.

what's happening hot stuff

so we've been here a month now, and we've only got a snippet of new news to share. pete is plugging away at his internship, and he is hopefully going to take on some new projects that will bring even more networks and more experience. after all, that is what it is all about.

the ward is great. we're in the seattle first ward, which meets in the magnolia neighborhood. out of all of seattle that i have seen, it is the one that i would love to live in if pete got a job out here (that made millions). we currently live in the first hill neighborhood, which is right next to downtown and capitol hill. i walk practically everyday to things--library, park, grocery store, restaurants. i even made a friend who has a lil' girl izzy's age at the nearby park. we are going to have an accelerated friendship here, but i am excited to have a nearby playmate for the biz. i have a giant list of things for us to see while we are here, so i hope our new friends are game.

i found a gold's within walking distance that i can do yoga at, which is great. i was really afraid to not be able to do yoga the whole summer. the walking is helping me do some exercise, but not enough to stretch out my old teeny muscles. i think i might be getting a little tone from all the walking, but who knows. i haven't been measuring.

our apartment is not the best. it sort of reminds me of my old college apartment (the katy) in provo. they weren't terrible, but they were kind of old and blah. that's what it is like in these apartments. i think these here in seattle are way dirtier though. the location if fabulous though, so i can't really complain too much. it's mostly the bathroom and kitchen which everyone knows is the most important parts of a dwelling (to a woman).

i found a monkey replacement for izzy. he looks a tad different, but he looks the same to her. and she's happy. so that's all that matters.

i did break my passenger mirror on our car, which totally sucked. i drove around for over a week without it, and it was really hard to manage around some of the streets here. stupid thing cost me $200 to order, but it only cost me $10 for the repair. *note: i did not take it to the dealership. they were charging $100 for labor and such. i found a reputable and honest auto repair place in the international district, and the guys spent 10 minutes working on it and charged an awesome price. i also loved it, because all the guys that worked in that auto repair shop were asian or asian-mixes.

well...i'm sure that post was totally boring. oh well. i'll try and be more interesting the next time. maybe.

babies are banned in strollers

well, not "real" babies. that's just what we call stuffed animals or dolls in our house. we have lost not one, but two, babies in only one week of moving to seattle.

i'm not sure if there is some strange vortex that swallows these said babies, but i wish that there was so it would be an easy explanation to why they disappear. i could blame it on the hippies. or the hipsters. there are a lot of them in our neighborhood. or tell her that bad babies go to bad babyland, without hopes of returning. i have yet to be truthful to my child about where her favorite babies, ooh-oohs (monkey) and pony (my little pony, rainbow dash specifically) have gone. thankfully, pony is replaceable. i spent way too much time looking for a limited edition christmas monkey with pacifier released in 2008 made by ganz (webkinz).

here is a last look at what ooh-oohs looked like, in case there is some friend or stranger out there who reads my blog (all 2 of you) and has some crazy ganz connections.



in the meantime, i will scour the intraweb and hope that it pops up for me to blow all my guilt money on.