It's been a busy few weeks here. Here are some pictures:

Maya got sick, but Dave helped her feel better with tissues and Sesame Street songs on YouTube:

Then she got better and we took a day trip to NJ and hung out with Grandpa:

Then it was time for her 2nd haircut :)

Then it was Dave's birthday!!!!!!!!!!! Hooray :) I made a cake after enlisting some recipe advice from my brilliant baking friend, Sarita:

But for real, who cares about the human goings on when we have a bunch of little babies here. In all honesty, while I've done the whole baby rodents thing a bunch of times, not everyone has. It's really pretty crazy to watch how quickly they grow.

There will end up being 8 white ones and 1 black one. Here is the black one, 1 full day old, barely pigmented:

Pile on a dinner plate (for perspective's sake):

See the difference in the size & coloring (5 days old)

When you lay them so that they are touching each other, they just instantly fall asleep. Here are all 9 of them (one head is underneath the pink guy all the way to the left) sleeping in my hand.

Doctor update: Maya saw her ENT today (again, he's a fantastic doctor). She seems to always have ear issues (fluid, pressure is off, failing routine hearing tests---but then passing the very sophisticated ones). All of these issues, combined with her speech delay, might justify putting ear tubes in. We'll go back next month to check her ears and decide tubes or no tubes.

Oh brother.

So, for those of you who might not know our pet situation, we have 2 snakes, Ramona & Kona. (and 2 rabbits, who aren't part of this story). Both are ball pythons, both are somewhere around 4-5 ft long (it's hard to measure snakes, and who really cares, anyway). Dave brought home 2 rats on Monday night for the snakes (circle of life, my friends). Kona ate right away, Ramona wouldn't eat. Weird. She's never done that before.

We put the rat in its own little cage. Dave dealt with him, because rats have too much personality for me to feed to snakes without getting sad (mice, ok, rats, not so much). Tuesday night he tries again, Ramona won't eat. We feed the rat more, joke about our new pet.

This morning I go into the spare room (where the rabbits, snake, and our rat friend reside) and hear a weird high pitch noise. For a tiny fraction of a second I think one of the rabbits is having some sort of respiratory issue and then I think "O. M. G. I know that sound" . . .






Yes, those are babies. Apparently, Ramona is a humatitarian (rodentitarian?) and wouldn't eat a very pregnant momma. We moved mom & babies to a larger cage tonight and counted 9 babies.

Pile o' babies:

One baby, with woodchip:


Two babies:


PS: The glove was for two reasons: 1. Some first time moms are sensitive to human scent on a baby. 2. Some anxious moms will attack a human hand. Neither one proved to be an issue.

Other projects

Besides the paintings and new couches, we started a bunch of other projects over break:

-Dave made a fantastic shadowbox using old Scrabble tiles (we got a new set for Christmas):

-We uploaded, cleaned out, organized and ordered 1,320 pictures from Kodak.com. Yes, one thousand three hundred twenty. (That's typed out for emphasis). Some of these are fairly recent:

(fingerpainting this fall)

Some are older:

(first haircut in August)

Some are really old:

(first day home from the hospital, June 2008)

Some are super duper old (like my baby shower, April 2008). That's about as far back as we go. Who wants to come slap these things into albums?

For perspective's sake

So the back story to the painting is that Dave and I wanted to find some art for the apartment. Someone in his family joked over brunch "Oh, why don't you just paint it?" Ha ha ha. Good one. We went browsing for art here and there and found nada.

That same night, we watched the movie "My kid could paint that" (fantastic movie, btw). I had never seen anyone really paint before and kept thinking "Hmm, maybe we could do that". The idea was something big and abstract, to go over the couch.

Somehow that idea evolved into 4 paintings: 1. Something big and abstract. 2-4 Smaller paintings that were more still-life-ish (but not realistic) for the kitchen. I found something I liked for the first canvas, drew a grid on it, drew a grid on the canvas, sketched the design, and painted. Just basically created my own paint-by-numbers.

And now it's inished, for real. We debated on whether to leave the backgroun blank or paint it, I compromised by doing both----a white mini-border, a purple-ish frame. The picture is from my cell phone, so it's not ideal but I'll put nice ones up when they're all done. We picked the next painting to copy last night :)

(more info to come soon, but I've got to stick this here for now)

Mini-break update

Christmas break has come to an end :( It was so nice to have Dave home for a while, and we got a ton of projects done over break . . . so much so that I can only do a mini-update now:

1. We saw Santa:


2. We decorated (and then promptly undecorated so as to get the new furniture in, see #4)


3. We dressed up:


4. We got new couches. The other ones made you lean to the side when you sat on them. Despite our best reconstructive efforts, it was time for them to go. These ones recline . . . our gut reaction was that reclining couches might be a little low class, but our bodies' reaction was that they are fantastic. Here are Dave & Maya on the loveseat: (The loveseat has 2 separate recliners and the couch has two more. If you'd like to come put your feet on you can email me to get on the waiting list.)

You'll just have to wait for more :)

I'm not a performing monkey. Well, not all the time.

I need to take pictures of our Christmas decorations, this is the best time of year :)
For now:

Too cold to swing?! It's never too cold to swing!

She watches a Signing Time video (which is supposed to help teach/reinforce sign language) once a day. Yesterday her gate was open and I think she was worried that I would trap her if she wandered into the gated area. So she watched her video from wayyyy across the living room.



Maya loves her new chair, passed on from cousins Collin & Emerson. She climbs right up, but needs to practice getting down gracefully:

If you are here because you recently got our holiday card---fess up. Did you understand it? We've had a shocking number of people (more than 0) say:

"Oh, your card was cute! It was funny that you put 3 crying pictures . . ."

and then I have to say

"Yeah, because the inside is that song lyric, you know 'it's the most wonderful time of the year' . . . get it? Like she cries all of the other parts of the year except for now?"

(pause)

"OHhhhhh . . . I get it"

Sigh. I thought it was fairly obvious. Maybe next year we'll have to do a test audience. Or include a back that explains the card :) I have to update on Maya's new tricks, but for now here are a few pictures. Oh, and we're getting our tree tonight!!!!!!!!!!!!!! December is the best :)


Working hard:



Hardly working:


Just hanging: