An eye to the future

Everything electronic is exploding, or imploding, on me. Our internet, which was free, moved away with our neighbors, leaving our building happily quiet, if unconnected. Then my camera kicked the bucket this weekend. I may have temporarily fixed the problem with a stuck mirror only to wind up with an auto focus issue. Time to start saving up for a replacement for the circa 2004 Canon Rebel EOS. I knew its time was coming. I just was hoping it would hold out for another year. After waiting 5 hours on Friday for the Comcast Tech, I was still without internet this weekend. (Good news, installation - set for Monday - will now be free.) Long story short, my ability to blog has been greatly hindered these past few weeks. I'm using a few minutes at the end of a long Sunday at work to share a few recent videos taken with my phone.

The first video is of Sawyer and Arden looking through my old photo album, which is just a collection of old photos of me, my brother, my parents and Scott. It's one of Sawyer's newest most favorite things to do. Who's this? Who's that? He's fascinated by my baby pictures. And it's fun to trick them. Arden looked at a little photo of me the other day and said: It's ARNEN! Here, Sawyer gets stumped on a photo of Ross with long hair ....



Today's second video is a little diddly of Sawyer playing with his new Doctor's Kit, picked up at the second-hand store. He's moved on from wanting to be a train engineer. At school a few months ago, they had the discovery room set up as a doctor's office. Ever since, Sawyer has been fixated on all things medical. All I can say is that we're hoping he either turns out to be really really smart or a great athlete and gets scholarships or that he decides the train engineer thing wasn't such a bad idea after all. (They're unionized. GREAT benefits.)

Change is afoot

So Scott finally got a job — not a dream job, but a solid job — in property management. He accepted the offer Wednesday and was back to work Monday. I really didn't want to put Arden back into that daycare center where she was before, but the pressure was on to find somebody new in about a day. After calling the entire list (no spots) I'm happy to report that we lucked out with a wonderful babysitter recommended by Sawyer's teacher. A former daycare center employee from Breckenridge, she's Honduran and has 11 month old twin boys that she speaks Spanish to most of the day. Arden is the only other child she watches. Her house is immaculate and she sends us these little sweet text message updates all day long. She makes her own organic baby food and swore to feed my child vegetables at snack time (ha-right!). I called her references and one parent told me she's known as the "baby whisperer" and that she's jealous I get to have her as my nanny. The other reference was her former boss who said she hired Liz to watch her own children. So, I'm feeling pretty good about things. Now we've just got to work out all the new routines and schedules.

First Run

We took Sawyer and Arden downhill skiing for the first time this weekend at SolVista, the little locals mountain located literally across the street from our house in Granby. We've been doing the Nordic lessons every Friday and the kids have really grown comfortable walking around with sticks on the ends of their legs. We had shied away from taking them downhill because it seemed like an overwhelming prospect with two young children. With the days warming as spring approaches, we bit the bullet this weekend and gave it a whirl. First of all, it's FREE for kids to ski under the age of 5 (didn't know that). The little learning hill has a magic carpet that Sawyer quickly learned to use himself and we could just stand at the bottom and watch him do laps (so much easier than I realized). It was easy enough for one person to watch two kids. (We rented skis for Sawyer but skipped renting them for Arden. Her little Nordic strap-on skis didn't have enough slide so she actually had to walk downhill. Being our adrenaline kid, she was not happy about that.) Sawyer's first run was PERFECT. He wasn't scared at all (clearly there's been a kid-swap here). By the third run he was insisting he was ready to go on the chairlift and after two runs on that he wanted to go on the BIG chairlift. All I can say is that apparently we have a Jonny Moseley on our hands.