Sienna graduates from aqua babies

Well...aqua babies is over. We made it to 5/8 classes. Sienna was the youngest in the class. She seems to have become more comfortable in the pool in general. The best thing we got out of class was a new friend for both of us (Amy and Drew). They came over last weekend (March 16th) for the first time. Here are a few pictures that "uncle" Mark Walz took of us a few weeks ago.

Grandma Jeanne comes to stay with Sienna - Feb 22-24th

My Mom came to stay with Sienna while Forest and I were in New Orleans. Things went very well. They went to visit Great-Grandma (and others) in Mason, went sledding around the yard and, returned $30 worth of cans to the grocery store and even cleaned house and did laundry! Let's just say that Grandma is the BEST babysitter in history! Here are a few of our favorite pictures.

I am getting sooo spoiled!!





Sienna with Kelsea and Madison
Do you think this is my color?
Mom and Dad go to New Orleans and I'm stuck here in my snowsuit!
Get Down!
I know this fits on here!
So many toys...so little time
Sponges work better for cleaning trays than for eating!
I'm getting better at this!

Weekend of March 7th

I got back from Barcelona on Thursday afternoon -pretty much exhausted. I was back to UM on Friday, but Forest and I were called home (we drove together that day) from daycare at noon because Sienna had a temp of 103. It got up to 105.3 by the time we got to the Dr.'s office. EEEK! The poor kid! You could have fried an egg on her head! She was pretty grumpy and lethargic. The Dr. thought that she might have had an ear infection (hard to tell since she was screaming bloody murder as soon as she saw the Dr.s office - we had just been in for shots 2 weeks ago and she apparently has the ability to form memories now!) in addition to whatever random virus was causing the high temp.

We had a hard time getting her temp down (after an hour on a high dose of Motrin, it only came down to 104.7! ....but we gave her a bath and that seemed to help quite a bit. She did wake up twice Friday night with apparent night terrors. That was just about the freakiest thing I've ever seen! It took a while for us to figure out what it was. I was worried that she was having a seizure or was in extreme pain or something!! Forest actually was who thought it could be a night terror...and that really seemed to fit. Her eyes were open - but she wasn't seeing anything. We even put the cat in front of her and she looked right through him with no expression change at all. This happened twice, once at 9pm and the second time around 10:30pm. Both times, she screamed for 5-10 (felt like an hour) minutes and then just basically stopped and fell asleep again! Crazy! I was afraid it would happen again - but it hasn't...so far..knock on wood.

The rest of the weekend went MUCH better! My Mom came to visit on Saturday evening and Cheryl joined us on Sunday. We spent the day together hanging out, watching Sienna run around and eating great Indian food leftovers from our parent party.

Trip to Barcelona - March 2-6th

I traveled to Spain on March 2nd. CogState asked me to work in a sales booth for them. It was fun to go somewhere so exciting and different, but the trip was not without it problems!

First....did you know that they speak Spanish in Spain? haha Thankfully, I bought a study guide and my high school Spanish came back pretty easily. I managed to get around with a combination of broken Spanish mixed with English and lots and lots of charades!

The worst part about the trip was that our booth actually never made it through customs - so we had to sort of "make" our own from scratch (while not speaking the language) by going to stores and buying things. Keep in mind, that our competitors and the other businesses at the conference had these amazing, and very professionally done displays (some had cocktail tables with candles on them, some had flat screen TVs, several had live plants and flowers!!)...so this was more than a little embarrassing. But...we did the best we could by purchasing a projector and some table cloths and showing slides on the wall of our (bare) booth. We just tried to be very friendly and outgoing and actually made a lot of friends through the process. The booth (or lack thereof) ended up being a pretty good icebreaker!

The best part of the trip was getting a chance to meet Cindy, someone who I have worked with for a year, but never met in person. She is really nice and we had a great time together.

The weather was not cooperative. It was extremely windy and sort of cold (about 50 degrees). The food also left a little to be desired (for me) because I was expecting something more like Mexican food...but there was nothing like that even offered on any menu I saw. Instead, every place had seafood...but not JUST regular seafood...every dish had like 12 kinds of seafood in it (including clams and mussels and octopus and all kind of other chewy things).

I did watch several really good movies on the airplane. I would highly recommend "August Rush" and "Becomming Jane" to anyone who enjoys a good drama.