Prison Visit

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to go with some friends to Solitude to stay in a condo for a couple of nights. Tom had to work so we decided to take Morgan to my mom's house for her first sleepover at grandma's without mom. She did great! She didn't even cry when I left her in their car with them. It was a fun break for me and fun for my family to have Morgan to themselves.

They took Morgan to Idaho on Saturday and I came back separately. They stayed for a few days and we got to do some fun things.

The first night we roasted marshmallows in our back yard and made s'mores. That's my kind of camping, by the way.On Monday we had lunch at Donnie Mac's Trailer Park Cuisine where I ordered Morgan her first root beer. I had it all planned out that we would never order mac and cheese, chicken nuggets or soda for her at a restaurant but guess what we ordered for her... mac and cheese and root beer.After lunch we went to the Old State Penitentiary where prisoners were housed from the 1800's to the 1970's. It was interesting and I'm glad we went while we live here.

Morganisms

• Each new phase with Morgan is better than the last. Her personality is really developing and I think she is going to be quite the girly girl. She loves pretending to put on makeup and to brush her hair.
  
• She did her hair in this picture (put the headband in). I was very proud.
• We have been reading books to help her learn what the names of things are. In one of them there is a red apple. Well, one morning when Tom was packing an apple for lunch, Morgan saw him and said, "bapple." Tom was so proud of her that he rewarded her with the apple, which she munched on all day and ended up eating about half of it.
• She is a picky eater right now but when she finds something she likes, she wants to get everything on the plate. I think this one happened to be hot dog juice and grease. Mmmm.
• I bought an episode of Barney at a garage sale and she LOVES it. Whenever I ask her if she wants to watch Barney she smiles and squeals (I never thought I would watch Barney but when it makes her so excited I can't help it). In this picture she decided she wanted to relax in the pillows to watch her show.
• Yesterday I took her to my exercise class and she watched us do sprints after the teacher said "ready, set, go." Later in the day we watched her say "ray, se, go" and start running. It was so so cute. She also says "go" when she wants me to spray her with water, swing while we're walking, or pretty much anything else fun.
  
• I love getting hugs from this little girl. When we ask for a hug a lot of times she will say, "mmmm," and rest her head on our shoulder. Sometimes she surprises us with hugs from the back while we are sitting down. She will come up behind us and put her arms around us.
  
• She can make sounds for animals. Cow - boo, sometimes moo. Horse - neigh, neigh, neigh. Kitty cat - meow. Dog - she puts her tongue down her chin and starts panting.
  
• She smells things. When we smell the lavender bushes in our front yard she sniffs and says, "mmmm," like it smells really good.
  
• She also says "mmmm" when she tastes something really yummy.
  
• Lately she has been taking the best naps. Until now they were about 45 minutes, twice a day. Now she'll sometimes take two two hour naps. Yesterday she took one long 3 to 4 hour nap. It is wonderful!
  
• She almost always sleeps through the night and when she doesn't it is usually because she lost her Binky so one of us will go to her room and put it back in her mouth. One night I couldn't find it so I picked her up and said, "where's your Binky?" She just said, "ginky."

Lets Go To The Movies

There is a movie theater around here that plays PG movies on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings at 10 AM for free so we went one day to see Jimmy Neutron.

This is Morgan for the first twenty minutes. Then she decided she wanted to explore so she took off down our row and tried to drink another kid's drink. I took her to the bottom of the stairs and she climbed to the top. I got tired of trying to watch a movie I didn't want to watch so we went to the park instead.
We both had a lot more fun. Morgan is not afraid to go down the slide by herself and she loves the swings too.

It's Always Fun When Nana Comes

We had so much fun when Nana came for the weekend at the end of July. We went to downtown Boise to try to go to a Basque festival. After an hour of walking around where it was supposed to be, someone told us that it was at the fair grounds that day but was at the place downtown for the rest of the week. We went to the fairgrounds, paid $5 each, then realized that the lines for food were so long we would starve if we didn't die of heat exhaustion first so we got our money back and went to the Mexican restaurant across the street.

I only took a couple of pictures but we had fun swimming, talking and shopping. Nana helped us pick out a coffee table for our sitting room.

Morgan loved having her here (so did Tom and I) and we can't wait until next time.

Someone asked me if it's degrading to have my kid on a leash. To which I answered that I'd rather have a kid on a leash than a kid running in the street and hit by a car or kidnapped. She doesn't want to be held all the time and it gives her some freedom.

Still Alive

I bet you all think I'm dead after the last post. Well you can stop worrying. I'm not. I'm actually a little embarrassed to say that I just had a stupid UTI but it wiped me out. I really wondered if I was going to die. Anyway, again, I'm not. I'm all better and I will be posting some things to make up for the time I didn't.

What's Up With Me

About 16 months into my mission I decided to take Thanksgiving day and go to a tanning bed (which wasn't a big deal because my companion was Hispanic and wasn't accustomed to celebrating the day anyway) to get ready for my return home. I found the only one open and walked into the slightly dirty, dark, Vietnamese owned shop and signed up for thirty minutes of UV exposure. If you have never fake-baked before, this is an amount of time reserved for the already dark people and since I had been in nylons and long skirts for 16 months, this was not me.

I left the place feeling fine, but by morning, I couldn't get up to exercise because I was so sick with fever and nausea due to the sunburn that had crept in overnight. When I looked in the mirror I noticed that my obviously red body had a long white line about the width of a tanning bed bulb from my shoulder to my foot. Funny, one of the bulbs was not working that day. That bulb turned out to be my saving grace though.

For the past week I have felt the same way I did the morning after the tanning bed experience. It started with aches and fever. Then turned to chills, vomiting, trouble breathing, now coughing. I went to Urgent Care on Sunday and the doctor told me to go to the ER because he thought it might be my appendix. Well, I'm no doctor but I knew my lower right quadrant of my abdomen wasn't in that kind of pain but I went anyway. We waited for an hour and a half before I decided to just leave and go home to sleep.

I slept for about 16 of the next 24 hours and the breathing pain went away. Today I woke up with a fever again and decided to call a family doctor -- who got me in. They did a urine sample, drew blood and sent me to have a chest x-ray. I have to go back Thursday to find out the results though. He thinks I might have pneumonia, maybe. He gave me an Rx and I started taking meds today. Yeah! Hopefully we find something out. I'm missing summer!

Morgan has learned to throw things away. So far she had disposed of her toothbrush and a sippy cup. She also took my lip gloss and rubbed the tip around her mouth without trying to eat it. That's my girl.

Thank you, ward friends, for helping me out with her for the past 5 days. I am so grateful for you and all that you have done for me.

Prom Night!

There's this new place in Boise called Mystique. It's a place to go for dinner and a magic show. Only a group of 18 or fewer people can go at one time.

Anyway, Tom and I weren't sure the market in Boise was conducive to a place like Mystique so we bought VIP tickets and got our good friends, Angela and Kim, to go with us before they close down due to lack of patrons.

I have a couple of my high school dance dresses hanging in my closet so I told Angela that we should dress up in them when we go. I gave her my homecoming dress and I wore my prom dress -- which still fits, yeah!

So there we were, all 1997-ish, I with my puff sleeves (Anne of Green Gables would be proud), Angela in a dress that I still think is cool, and we went on our date.

It was so great. We had a 5 star, four course dinner. Tom and I had crab encrusted fillet (I'm drooling for some now). After dinner -- oh, we were the only ones in our room this session -- our magician magically appeared and put on a fantastic show.

It really was so much fun. I hope they stay in business. If you live or are ever in Boise you need to go to Mystique and Epi's. Those are my two musts to do here.