Celebrating Independence

So, Kyle doesn’t sleep like he used to.  (He was awesome up to about four months old.)  Most of the time he’s still pretty good, but sometimes he just seems bent on getting up time after time after time.  When things start to get desperate, we will resort to physical barriers to discourage getting up.  In a word (or two?): baby-gate.

Last night, though, for the first time to my knowledge, Kyle realized that he is not quite a baby and, therefore, is capable of climbing right over this little puppy.  Dang.  Well, since it was the first time he’d ever done it, I thought raising the bar a bit might be enough to hold him off for now.  Thus we have:

Now, perhaps you look at that picture and immediately see the flaw.  Don’t get me wrong, I did too.  But I thought, maybe, just MAYBE, Kyle wouldn’t.  I went to my computer, and a minute later I heard some grunting.  I came back and was not at all surprised to see Kyle’s head and shoulders (but not knees and toes) squirming beneath the gate.  Shucks.  All right; how about a happy medium?

With the subterranean route out of the question, Kyle simply went back to his overland route, hopping over this new obstacle in moments.  Grrrrr.  So, now I’m getting really annoyed.  It’s late; it’s about Kyle’s twelfth time getting out of bed; and I don’t know what to do.  Or do I?  It will be a pain, but…… it just might work:

Looking at my work, I half smile.  This will certainly hold him.  Of course, now even I can’t through the door.  When he inevitably screams his head off in a few minutes, I’ll have to take the top gate down to go and in comfort him, but at least it will buy me a little time.  I leave the room, only to hear that telltale grunting a few moments later.  “Oh wow,” I thought, “he’s trying to squeeze under it again, isn’t he?”  I walked over to see his efforts and arrived just in time to…… catch him as he hurled his body OVER the top gate!!!  I couldn’t believe it.  The little rascal.  It was at this point that I told Tiffany the whole story and removed all the useless gates.  I guess we’ll have to try reasoning with him or something. 

So anyway, yeah, happy Independence Day!

My Name is Tiffany and I’m a Couch Potato to 5k Quitter

(Or “Why I’ve Been So Boring Lately”)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About a month and a half ago this special lady told me about a running program for non-runners called Couch Potato to 5k.  She said she hated running until she got into it using the program.  “She hated running!” I thought to myself, “that’s just like me!”  so I decided to give it a try.  It went really well for the first four weeks or so, until I hit a stumbling block.  I would be jogging for around 7.5 minutes and suddenly go lightheaded and need to sit down, I would be hot and miserable, sweating more than I think I ever have, breathing heavily, and go home and take a nap.  Around the same time, the power sequences in my weekly yoga class I teach suddenly started to make me forget what I was teaching.  Wow.   “Tiffany, you fat lardo!”  I thought, “What’s your problem!  You can’t even run for eight minutes without having major issues?  You’re the most unhealthy, unfit person EVER!”  Until eight days ago when the cause of my issues were suddenly explained to me through the happy medium of a pregnancy test.  That’s right…I’m (five weeks and three days) pregnant!  I’ve abandoned couch potato… for some nice power walking instead!   So far, the story of this pregnancy is exhaustion, hunger, and paranoia.  Everyday at 10:15 like clockwork, I am ready for a nice long nap (on wednesdays, playgroup instead, where I sit around like a zombie.  I think Aubrey has noticed).  And I’ve been really paranoid that I’ll miscarry, which is why the public announcement has waited until now (still early, but Karon reminded me yesterday of my pregnancy philosophy, tell early and let them mourn with you if you miscarry).  We’re really excited!

Wheeler Farm

Wheeler Farm

Karon and I took the kids to Wheeler Farm today and it was awesome!  It’s like five times better than the farm at Thanksgiving Point AND it’s free (decidedly farther away though) !  There were great old buildings for the kids to explore, a tree house, farm equipment to climb all over, and this great old knotted tree to climb on with a pretend house next to it.  I’m thinking the tree with the house kept the kids entertained for around an hour and a half!

My Son Thinks So Highly of Me

So, this morning, we’re lying in bed, and of course Kyle has brought a box of Kix cereal.  Kyle shared some with Tiffany, and then decided I’d like a taste.  So, he pulled out a single ball of Kix and called in sing-song fashion:

“Heeere, daddy daddy.  Heeere, daddy daddy.”

Just replace “daddy daddy” with ”kitty kitty” or “doggy doggy” and you’ll have a perfect idea of what it sounded like.  Yeah, it was awesome.

Rescue Mission!

I think Kyle just realized a few weeks ago that he has a neighbor, Tyson, who’s only a year older than him!  He’s had a lot of fun playing with Tyson lately and likes to point out Tyson’s house.  Last night they played rescue mission!  By riding their trikes and scooters up and down the sidewalk and putting out fires and eating pretend hot chocolate and “wet raisins in three boxes”.  Kyle can’t take credit for their imaginative play…whenever he plays pretend he cooks dinner!

Happy Early May Bank Holiday (UK, Eire)!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Keck family holiday since 2005

I dug this hole once…

And it looked like this.  I was going to write lots of clever stuff about it, but I’m not that clever.

Meet Our New Houseguests!

It’s been a long time since we’ve posted, with good reason….my computer crashed!  We’ve been working to get everything back on the computer, including my passwords which I was foolish enough not to have kept anywhere but on the computer!  Now that I’m back, I want you to meet our new houseguests…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Isn’t it adorable?  Don’t worry, the mother returned to the nest even though I was up there snooping around!

And here’s the kid…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s our Easter Album…

Easter 09

The little stinker woke up and went straight down stairs to open his easter basket before any of us were awake!

Random Stuff About Turkey

It was SCARY to drive in Istanbul!  Luckily, we were only in a car once.  The driver was only going about 25-30 mph, but we feared for our lives!  The streets are so narrow, only wide enough for one car, and cars would park along the streets, halfway up on the sidewalks, and pedestrians would walk right in front of cars, or people would open their car doors into the street.  We also saw at least three times where two cars would be going opposite ways down this super narrow street, and one would have to back up down the street to let the other car through.  We also witnessed a car run into the potted plants of a restaurant we were in.  We thought we were safe on the sidewalks until a car needed to get by a stopped van they were unloading and a shop owner guided the car up onto the sidewalk straight for us!  We had to take refuge in a doorway!  Interesting, because road safety is actually a warning to travellers in Turkey from the Embassy there.  I can see why!

Also, taxis honked their horns at us all the time!  After awhile we realized that they were honking at as as kind of a “here’s a taxi in case you need one” kind of thing.

Women who wore the hijab head scarves in Turkey looked really beautiful.  They’ve perfected the hijab so that it looks natural, fashionable, like it would be something I would wear as readily as I wear a headband.  I would say about half the women wear the hijab, and to be honest, about half of those who didn’t tended to look cheap, like they would be wearing lots of  bright makeup and stuff.  That being said, the ones who wore the black hijabs that cover their whole body and more of their face, did not strike me as well socialized.

 Whenever Brad wore his windbreaker, people thought we were American, whenever he didn’t, they thought we were German.

We ate so much meat there it was ridiculous.  Kabob was everywhere!  Also, tomatoes and cucumbers were served with every meal including breakfast.  I normally like to eat local but toward the end we went for an Italian place and it was miraculous to not have any meat in our meal.  And I was really wanting to branch out in the veggie department too even though I love tomatoes and cucumbers, you know, carrots, broccoli, peas, greenbeans….but no, just tomatoes and cucumbers.

There’s a rampant scam in Turkey where a shoe shiner drops his brush in front of you and when you pick it up or point it out he thanks you profusely and offers to shine your shoes for free.  But then he charges you when he’s done “for supplies” and gets up in your face about it if you don’t want to pay him.  We thought it wasn’t as rampant as people made it seem because it never happened to us….until our last day there…and it happened twice!…and we were both wearing sneakers at the time.

Sometimes people would ask where we were from in the United States.  When we said “Utah”  we usually got two responses. 1. I don’t know where that is.  or 2. Utah Jazz!  Mehmet Okur!  After awhile, Brad always name dropped Mehmet Okur when he told people we were from Utah.  And there was a Jazz game on tv once while we were there.

There’s probably more, but we’ll have to get to them when we think of them.

We’re Back!

Turkey

And here are our pictures!  I put descriptions under all of the pictures so I’ll save you the long post now!    We had a good time, but we’re glad to be back with our little dude!  We missed him.