Peri is Having a Good Time

So! Since coming to Spokane, we've been going out and doing a lot of things with Peri, and she's been having a great time! And because words are boring, I'll just put up some pictures!

Cheese Face!

 So the lighting was bad when I took these pictures, but these are pictures of the kitchen mat, which Peri has claimed as her own favorite play toy. It's really gross, but she has so much fun with it I just can't tell her no.

She wraps herself up in it.

She drags it around with her.

And she tries to wrap other people up in it too (ew). But since no one will let her wrap them up in it, she puts it on the cat instead. You can barely see Puppy in these pictures, but he's curled up next to the vent.

One time she also got the mat over her horse and managed to climb up on it too. She used it as a saddle blanket while she rode her pony. It was the funniest thing! I went to get the camera, but she stopped before I could get a picture. Bummer.


 It also snowed a couple mornings ago, and we took the time to go out before breakfast and play in it! It was Peri's first time really tromping around in the snow (we've gone on sled rides and stuff, but she never wanted to actually play in it) and she had a blast!

Down the stairs.

The moment she realized there was a camera involved.

She is a sucker for cameras.

Tromping around.

More tromping.

Getting right down in the snow.

She didn't try to eat it though.

Gary also looking like a cheeseball.

We also built her very first snowman! She helped! This was the only picture I was able to get of it because the batteries decided to die right then. Go figure.

 Peri and I also did a couple crafts! We were at JoAnn's, and she really liked this hat, so we bought some glitter and feathers to jazz it up a little when we got home. She had so much fun with her glue and glitter, but she promptly took the feathers off, so I guess she didn't like how they looked on her hat.

She wears it while watching Caillou. Peri looooves Caillou.

Then we did another craft the next day, and she decided that feathers looked much better on paper than on hats.

She liked doing the paper craft so much that we had to do two! We both really like how this one came out. It's so shiny and sparkly and colorful! They are both hanging on the fridge right now.

We also decided to walk to River Front Park (it's about an hour or so walk from our house) one Saturday just for fun. We called up my sister Sarah and she brought her husband and the cousins over so we could walk there together. Peri got to sit in her stroller, but the rest of us walked. It was a bit colder than we thought, since there was quite a bit of wind. And since we had the small children walking, it took a while to get to the halfway point, Mission Park. We decided to call it a day and stopped at Mission Park to play instead. I think this Saturday we will start at Mission Park and go to River Front Park from there, and hopefully it will be a little warmer out then! Though it snowed again a couple mornings ago, so probably not.

Anyways, since the kids were tired of walking, and it was still a bit cold, we decided to take the bus home instead. It was Peri's first time on a bus, and she did really well! I think she had a lot of fun. It was a really good Saturday to spend with family! If only we had remembered to take a camera though.

A Long Overdue Update

So it's been awhile since I've made a blog post. Our life has been a bit hectic, having moved twice in 3 months time. It was not fun. I think most everyone who reads this blog knows already that after 4 weeks of working at his new job, Gary got fired without any warning, or in our minds, reason. It was sad, and dumb, and really heartbreaking for our family. So after only three months living in a place we were beginning to love, we had to move back in with our family. Which is especially disheartening to a family who have been out on their own more or less.

However we refuse to be too discouraged, as this change has been a blessing too. It has pushed Gary to really pursue one of the other courses of action we were considering: going back to school. At first (before he got a job) Gary was just going to get a masters in mechanical engineering, or perhaps slide on over to civil engineering, but after thinking about it for a while, we decided that if he were going to go back to school, he was going to go back for something that he could truly love, and that, he decided, was furniture design.

This is going to be a bit of a switch, since Gary has never had any art classes (why don't they make engineers take art classes? It would only make sense if they want engineers to be able to think creatively), so he'll have a lot of first and second year classes to complete. But he'll get to skip all those lame history and literature and feelings classes that they make you take at university. I get the desire for a well-rounded education, but we go to college to specialize, so why do they waste so much time making us take classes that we don't need for our specializations and end up forgetting all about anyway. The whole thing is silly and makes higher education much more expensive than it needs to be. Okay end rant.

Back to Gary. Gary is going to apply to school for furniture design, and he's been working very hard making some art to submit with his application. I've been helping him a bit by giving him art exercises to do to get the creative juices flowing. So far he's doing pretty good. Peri and I are both very proud of him.

Meanwhile, he's also working on doing a bit of renovation to our family basement. It's really beginning to take shape and one room is very close to being done! Just a few more steps to go and then we have a nice updated room to sleep in! yay! Doing the second room is going to be very complicated though, but hopefully it can be done very quickly so we can have two rooms to sleep in instead of one! It is very cramped with all three of us in one room.

Otherwise it's been great being with family. Peri adores her cousins and is so happy to get to play with them. I think that will be another post though, as this one is pretty long all ready.