My daughter is not a drug addict. Promise.

Whenever my daughter wants a cracker, she follows me to the pantry and says "Crack? Crack?" I can't be the only one who finds this hilarious.

This is only one of the many fun things she likes to say. When I'm not paying attention to her, she follows me around, tugging on my leg and moaning "I know, I know". It took me a while to realize she does that because whenever she falls down or hurts herself, that's what I say to comfort her. Also, she likes to say stairs. Since our house is now three levels, we do a lot of stairs. And no matter what her woes are, if you say, "Want to go upstairs?" or "Want to go downstairs?", she perks right up and runs to them and points and says "Stairs? Stairs?" It's pretty darned melt your heart adorable. If I do say so myself. Don't get me started on her animal sounds. Maybe I'm just feeling extra amiable towards her since this whole new no-fight napping thing. She can pretty much do whatever she wants after learning that skill. Little manipulator.

Hey. I just realized I live here.

This is the first time I've ever moved into a place with the intention of staying for several years at minimum. It's kind of a weird feeling. I'm thinking to myself, I could unpack the college books that have been in boxes the last three years and put them on a bookcase. I have to actually find a place for every knick-knack I own, or what's the point in having it? I should go through the junk drawers that have followed me from my freshman year of college and never really been thoroughly cleaned out. It's kind of a relief. All of the stuff I've held onto in hopes it might be useful someday has met their time of judgment. Step up and prove your value or get thrown out in the dumpster. Tough love. At least, that's the plan. I'll probably still hold onto everything I did in seventh grade. For sentimental reasons. I'm such a wuss.

I declare victory.

I have arrived.

My daughter took two naps today. Without fighting me. I just laid her down when she got cranky and she went to sleep with no wailing. No screaming.

I officially rock. My mad parenting skills have obviously caught up with me. I'll be cooking myself a delicious dinner to celebrate. If my cooking skills can keep up with my parenting awesomeness.

The good old days

So I was looking at my old high school yearbook last night. (That's so old, because I graduated five years ago, but whatever.) Besides becoming convinced once again that someone should have taken pity on me and given me a fashion makeover, I was able to relive all the geeky activities and goofy friendships of my senior year. And I realized I've been lying to people when I told them I had no desire to ever return to high school. I thought that was true. College was much better to me, and a lot more fun. But I made some good friends in high school that I don't really get to see much anymore, and I realized it wouldn't be so bad to go back and relive the glory days. Don't get me wrong. I don't miss it enough to go to my five year reunion. I'd rather be in California. But enough that maybe I'll quit pretending my life began in college. At least if all the people who wrote about how horrible BYU would be in my yearbook will admit it didn't work out that badly for me.

Ode to having the gas on

There are a lot of cool things you can do with hot water. Like dishes, laundry, taking hot showers, giving your kid a warm bath. Little stuff that makes the world better. And after a brief, dismal ten minutes of blackout after Jessie tried hooking up the dryer, when I thought I would be spending the night in utter darkness without air conditioning, we managed to get back both power and drying capability. So all is right with the world, and I have clean clothes. I know you were worried.

Read at your own risk.

So, if you're looking for sunshine and roses and happy stories, go read another blog. It's been quite the fun week, and I can't decide which to rant about:

- My demon former landlord who is OCD about cleaning apartments and is charging us by the hour to go back over everything I did because it screamed filthy to her. The woman took apart the sinks to find hair we missed and yelled at us for not unscrewing the vents in the ceiling and cleaning them out. BYU wasn't this picky. Phooey on you, landlady. Keep it up and I'll kidnap you, drive you to Antimony, and leave you there.

-Speaking of which, Antimony was as lovely as ever. We were there all of twelve hours when our brand new tent snapped. In two places. For no apparent reason. Also, on the way down the mountain, our car hit the same rock that punched a hole in our oil pan last year, and we're now leaking antifreeze. At least we made it home. Never again, oh Antimony. There's a reason it's located right next to Hell's Backbone.

-The cold showers we've been taking since we moved in. And now our gas is finally on, and I don't have the upper body strength to turn the valve and partake of the goodness. I knew I should be hitting the gym. Curse my wimpiness.

-Madeline didn't like moving. Or camping. For the past three days, she has been clingy 24/7, throwing kicking and screaming fits whenever you tell her no, and refusing to nap when she is tired. I'm sure our first impression at our new ward was fantastic. Especially when the lesson is on reverence and respect and removing screaming children from sacrament meeting. At least they'll remember us.

So, there's all my ranting in one post, for your enjoyment. Let us commiserate, and tomorrow I'll write about how wonderful it is to own my own home and stuff. After I spend a little more time unpacking boxes and trying to impose order on the chaos. Maybe I'll just boycott life and spend time watching some wonderfully stupid and utterly useless drama on the Bachelorette. Because choosing your life long partner (read: fling of six months) from a flock of fame hungry single men is way more difficult than my life.

Today we buy a house, for tomorrow we move.

Well, it's about five hours from being official. We're going to go spend a ton of money that isn't ours, and move all our stuff again, and see if we can traumatize Madeline or if she really just doesn't care where she is as long as you give her crackers and free reign of the universe. Every time we've gone to the new house, she camps out in her soon to be new room, on some poor little girl's bed, and stares at the giant mirrors on her new closet and talks to herself. So I'm pretty optimistic. Jessie, on the other hand, might not adapt so well. His commute will go from 1.5 minutes to 10-15, and he's really not a commuter. I'll give him some crackers and juice and maybe some chocolate, and I'm sure he'll come around.

Anywho, we really are actually excited for the move. We'll have a lot more space and the ability to paint our walls neon orange if we wanted to, and let me tell you, we have been wanting to. I'm really excited for our giant pantry, a new dishwasher that maybe washes dishes, a fenced backyard with grass to let Madeline run wild in, a playground around the corner for the same purpose, and my own master bathroom and walk in closet. Jessie's excited for the non existant sound system and new tv he plans to put in the basement and getting lots of money from the government for having the audacity to purchase a home. Madeline is excited to unpack boxes for real. So happy 24th of July. We'll be organizing our socks and baking goods. Whoopee!

A few words about moving and that little place I like to call Purgatory

Greetings, earthlings. Things are going well with the whole house buying thing, which means we'll probably be moving in a week and a half. For the third time in a year and a half. Awesome, no? I finally found some boxes and have managed to DI/trash approximately three items from our apartment, so things are progressing nicely. Madeline is nearly as good at unpacking as I am at packing, so we're both working hard. Although I'm winning by about a dozen boxes at the moment. And Jessie disassembled his weight set, so we're both finally getting some exercise. (Kidding, Jessie. You know we already get exercise chasing Madeline around at church.)

So, this is our plan for the next two weeks: pack, do homework, repeat. Move all our junk. Clean our apartment. Go camping for three days. Smart of us, eh? Then we can come home to a nice, new, house full of boxes with all our dirty camping gear. If we ever get home. Because we're going to...please hold back your cries of dismay...a little place called Antimony. You know, that town in the middle of nowhere. That eats people. And cars. I'm starting to think the place is cursed. So I was pretty adamant that we move before we go down there, in case we get kidnapped by aliens and don't make it back in time to let the new renters take over our apartment. I tried to start an underground family coup to change the location of our annual camping trip, but was pretty much overruled by people singing about tradition.

(And let's just remember how well that worked out for this guy:)

So, Antimony, I'm giving you one more shot. You've stolen my dignity, my time, my sanity, and my car. If you take my firstborn, that's it. We're camping in Yellowstone from now on.

I am doing stuff. I promise.

Hi. It's me. Remember me?

We've been busy, as promised. We spent last weekend at the ever popular Lundstrom reunion, stuffing ourselves on good food and exercising more than we have in the past month. We survived dodgeball, soccer, and fireworks without any major injuries. Which is sort of a feat at the Lundstrom reunion. (I credit this achievement to the lack of the traditional male morning basketball game.)It was good to see all the relatives we never see, and take a break from life, the universe and everything. Also, it was good to see Logan again. I don't go up as often now that I'm a pseudo Utah county girl, and have a husband who abhors long journeys by car. And a one year old who thinks any ride over ten minutes is a long journey.

But now we're back, and pretending to be busy again. We found some renters for our apartment, so it's official: we better buy a house or we'll be homeless. I've packed about three boxes full of books and realized I need a lot more boxes and a lot more motivation. Anyone with ideas on how to obtain either are hereby referred to our suggestions box. So, that's about how things are going. We'll see if we make any significant progress on being productive, and alert you immediately.