Sunday, 11 November, 2001

 Sunny and unseasonably warm

 We have been in our home for almost a month now and it is wonderful.  We love it.  It didn’t take us long to get things unpacked.  We wanted to get the boxes out of here as soon as possible but have spent more time organizing and moving things to more logical places.  Mostly in the kitchen with dishes and silverware.  The silverware has moved drawers three times, but I think things are finally where they will stay.  We have a lot of projects on our list of things to do and a lot that we have already taken care of.  They are things that allow us to organize better, make things last longer, or add a touch of home. 

We enjoy living in Colorado and especially in our new location.  We can watch the sun rise as we lay in bed in the morning (that is if we open the blinds) and we watch it set in the evening out the kitchen and living room windows.  They are usually spectacular and something that we didn’t often see in Utah.  Some of our view will be taken away as houses continue to be built behind us, but we should still have a pretty good view from the upstairs bedrooms.

Both girls are growing and changing–Alicia more obviously, but I do think that Amy just had a growth spurt.  Amy talks a lot more in sentences but there is still a lot I don’t understand.  Usually if I can understand just one word in the sentence, we can get somewhere.  It must be frustrating for her though to not be understood.  There is a park less than a block away and she loves to play on the swings and slide.  She would prefer to play on the toys at the elementary school next to the park, but we don’t during the day.  Because the weather has been so nice lately, we have been able to go play more than if we were experiencing normal temperatures.  Amy loves to watch “Toy Story” and asks to watch Woody usually once a day.  Before we had the tv’s hooked up to the dish, she would watch it usually twice a day and never get tired of it.  I thought she might enjoy the sequel, but it didn’t hold her attention at all.

She and Alicia both went to the doctor on Friday.  Alicia for her four-month check up and immunizations and Amy for her two-year check up.  Both of them are healthy and growing.  Amy now weighs 30.5 pounds and is 35 ½ inches tall.  She is in the 90th percentile.

Alicia is growing so fast.  She was four months last Friday.  She smiles all of the time and has started to laugh a little bit.  She can talk up a storm and gets rather noisy.  I don’t remember Amy talking nearly so much.  Her eyes are kind of hazel or gray but I imagine they will continue to change.  I think that she will be walking earlier than Amy as well since Alicia likes to stand up and will put pressure on her legs.  She now weighs 15 pounds 13.5 ounces and is 25 ½ inches tall.  She too is in the 90th percentile except for her head size, which is in the 60th percentile.  She has taken to sucking her thumb and fingers lately.  It is pretty cute now, but I know that will change as she gets older.  I think it is easier to wean them from a pacifier than to try and get them to stop thumb-sucking, but her new doctor, Dr. Fan, says that it is pretty normal for them to want to suck.

I finally got a treadmill.  I found one on the internet on ebay just as the auction for it was closing.  No one had bid on it so I decided to wait and contact the seller on my own.  It is a True treadmill and we had looked at similar ones in Utah last year.  I offered the seller a little more than she was asking but included shipping in the amount.  I had already checked and it would cost $200-300 dollars just in shipping alone.  I figured if she wanted to sell badly enough she wouldn’t mind taking care of the shipping.  She accepted my offer and said that her husband was going to drive the treadmill here from Vancouver, Washington.  He came the Sunday just after we moved in and I have been working out since.  It is nice to just walk down to the basement to exercise.  It is a good quality, highly rated machine so I hope that it will work without problems for a long time to come.