Last to get em, last to lose em

Maya finally lost her first tooth yesterday. It seems like the tooth has been loose for several months - it's got to be a record. Maya has a dentist appointment next week so it's been loose for 6 months. I remember the dentist mentioning that it was loose at her last checkup. We've heard a lot of detail from Maya on how loose the tooth is and what she can or can't bite into and times she was having so much fun thinking or doing other things that she forgot about the loose tooth. Seriously. I was more ready for it to come out that she was. She didn't get her first tooth until she was 14 months old. Her teeth like to take their sweet old time doing whatever they are going to do.

It's been dangling in her mouth for a few days. We thought it was going to come out on Tuesday night, but it was a false alarm. Yesterday we went to the pool with our friends. One of them is an oral surgeon resident. When we got there I said that he should just yank it out. He'll called Maya over and said: Hey Maya! Show me your loose tooth. She opened up and he reached right in and yanked it out. Thank you very much, Mike!

Maya was very excited. She put it in a safe place in our pool bag (after showing all the kids) so she wouldn't lose it. She put it under he pillow for the tooth fairy. Unfortunately, the Tooth Fairy was a no show last night. She'd better come tonight or else I don't think Maya will be able to hold back the tears of disappointment. She was very brave this morning and blinked back her tears while picking out cereal for breakfast before school.

The one next to it is loose. I'll start taking bets on how long it'll take for this next one to fall out. Maybe the dentist will just pull it out when we go.

What the . . !

There is just something wrong with looking up the bus schedule for the new school year at the new elementary school and seeing that the pickup time is 6:48 AM!!!! That means we have to leave the house a little after 6:30 AM to walk down to the stop and wait. No 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10-year-old should be walking down the street in the dark morning hours to wait for a bus while the high school students sleep in and get picked up around 9 am. It just isn't right!!!

I think this year we'll be driving to school in the morning. At least then we don't have to leave the house til 7:15.

The usual

My birthday

Last month I hit the big 3-0. I'm still waiting for my breakdown, but so far it isn't so bad. Through med school and residency, I haven't bothered to really get my hopes up for anything or even bother to make plans because we have no control over Matt's schedule. This year I made plans. I had a babysitter lined up and planned a yummy dinner and all. (Normally I just ignore the day.) Unfortunately Matt got stuck in the OR with heart cases so he didn't get home until after midnight. So much for my plans. Cancelled the babysitter and didn't know what to do with the food. Should I bother preparing it? Maya and Luke have very little appetites. Luckily, I have a good friend down the street who came to my rescue. She brought me my favorite Jamba after I got the news from Matt that he wouldn't be home in time. Then, since her husband was working all night at the hospital as well, we banded together and made dinner and we and all our kids ate together. They even stayed and sang me Happy Birthday. Not that Matt didn't try. The night before, he made my birthday cake so I wouldn't have to make my own.

Lighting the candles on my cake, which Luke blew out immediately after I finished lighting them.

*A little side note. I'm reluctant to post these pictures of me. I'm still in the process of losing the baby weight. But I should be proud. I gain 65 lbs with each pregnancy, so I literally have to work my butt off after the baby's born. Seth is 4 months old and I'm down 55 lbs. Not too shabby. I still have work to do, but I'll take a moment and pat myself on the back.

Having a little fun with the camera and winding up to blow out the candles.

~WARNING: This next section is pretty cheesy!~
So now that I'm 30, I look back on where I've come from and what I've done with my life thus far. I was raised in a big family. I have 10 brothers and sisters. I don't know how my parents did it. But I wouldn't change it for the world. I love having 6 brothers (5 of them older than me) and 4 sisters. In a family like that you always have someone to play with. We could go out in our yard and play any sport we wanted to. They kept me out of trouble as well. I was on swim team and track team in high school. I still jump in the pool and swim laps a couple times a week and love a good workout at the gym. I sang a lot in high school, and I still do now (in the privacy of my own home) when my kids request their night night songs. My mom taught me piano and now I'm a piano teacher myself. For me - music is therapy. Some people might say I married young ( a month before I turned 21) but I've loved every minute of it. 9 years (4 kids, 4 states/7 moves, BYU, 4 years of med school, 3 years internship/residency, all kinds of church callings) later and I feel blessed to have experienced it all. Some of it's been difficult or sad, but there have been so many more happy moments. I'm healthy, my kids and husband are healthy and we all get to be together everyday (kind of). The only thing I wish I could change is that we were closer to family. Oh well, I guess I can't have everything.

Seth's First Haircut

Before

(4 months and a day old - 7/26/09)

As you can see, Seth was starting to get shaggy. Not a "missionary appropriate" hairstyle. His Dad was ready to trim around the ears when I walked in our room. I suggested it was time for a full on cut. We pulled out the clippers and there you have it.

After

I think he looks handsome, but I was sad for a few days. I felt like the haircut made him look older and took away some of his "baby-ness".

And We're Back

So, Matt and I have had a couple of weeks where things just weren't really going all that smoothly. Matt had a few days where he'd lost his wedding ring after a jog and lost his wallet somewhere between work and home, and a few frustrating days at work. He found his ring (he'd put it in a random drawer before going on a jog/swimming) and his wallet (it had fallen out of his bag outside the hospital and a good samaritan turned it in, money and all), and the work stuff blew over (lame boss at an outside hospital Matt was rotating at for the month). Then I had a day where the computer just stopped working, the vacuum stopped working while I was using it, and then Luke got a bloody, fat lip when he face planted on our floor - all while Matt's working crazy long days during this rotation. Luke's lip healed, the vacuum magically started working again (I think it had over heated - I was doing some serious cleaning; moving the couches and all). But, the computer decided not to work. I called one of my electrical engineer brothers. Basically, our hard drive died. This was 2 weeks ago. Next decision: buy a new computer or try and save money and hope putting in a new hard drive ourselves works. We went the less expensive route.
The pain about a new hard drive is that you are starting completely from scratch - no operating system, processors, drivers, or programs - NOTHING. We had to reinstall everything and slowly discover what we needed to find and download. We reinstalled windows. Got the basics going. Then we tried to get online - we had no local area network driver on the hard drive. That took us a few days to get figured out. finally we hooked up our wireless card to the desktop and got online that way and downloaded a driver. Finally we have internet again. But no sound. We've spent the last few days trying to figure out how to get sound. A computer is pretty sad with no sound, no music. We drove to a specialty computer store to buy a sound card today. Stuck that to the mother board and put the installation disk in. It wouldn't work and kept causing the computer to freeze up. So Matt took it out. He was getting a few things at Walmart tonight and decided to check out their sound cards. He came home and installed it and we have sound again! Thank you Walmart! You never let us down!
So - we think we're pretty much up and running again. We have a lot of programs to reinstall on the computer, but we're in pretty good shape for now.
Thank goodness for our external hard drive which backed up all our files every night. Our pictures and music are safe and we don't have to spend $200+ to try and retrieve them from our broken hard drive.
Anywho - this post has been much more longwinded than I was planning. Computer's been driving me nuts the past few weeks, but I think we're back. Picture posts might take me a few days because I need to trust my computer again, but hopefully they'll be posted soon.