Seattle for Thanksgiving

*Warning: this is a long one, cause its been a few weeks in the making. :)

Well, actually I'm glad to be home for a while. You can only live out of a suitcase for so long. From Ottawa, Canada, to Taipei, Taiwan, to Seattle, Washington, all in a little over a month. I was home for a total of 7 days. Enough time to find subs for my CTR 8 class and do laundry. Mark and I spent Sat cleaning the house. It was in shambles. Everything was out of place cause we didn't have time to put it back where it belonged. I still need to vacuum, cause with Fall, so do the leaves, and there are bits of leaves all over the place. How does that happen when we take our shoes off at the door?

We're slowing adjusting back into a regular sleeping schedule. But I think I'm the one with it bad. I'm up late and can't get motivated in the day. Mark seems fine. Evan sleeps late, but he'll sleep 12 hours.

Speaking of sleep... We've lowered Evan's crib and took one side of the crib bars off to transition him to a 'big boy' bed. His crib is up against the foot of twin bed also in his room, so he really only had about 1.5 ft of a gap to get off his crib. So, I figure he's got a 10% chance of falling out of bed during the night.

The other day Mark checked on him before he left for work, and woke me up to see what had happened to Evan. Evan had either fallen out of his bed or crawled down from his bed and was sound asleep on the floor in the middle of the room! I figured he's obviously tired enough to sleep on the floor, I'll just let him sleep, leave the door open so when he wakes he can just walk out to find me. Well, hours goes by and he's still on the floor asleep. So at about 1pm I decide that this was getting ridiculous, and went to wake him up by taking pictures of him. No wakey wakey.
Lucy came bounding in his room and licked him. Still asleep! So, I talk to him to wake him. I should have videotaped this, cause he opens his eyes and just starts yakking to me like we were in the middle of a conversation! Then he gets up, still talking, walks over to his bed, and pointing to it, jabbers on, probably telling me about how he fell out of bed and found the floor to be much more comfortable than his bed and that I should have just let him sleep on the floor from the beginning!

I haven't found him asleep on the floor since, but it's nice that he can climb out of bed himself, open his door, walk down the hall, open my door, and come wake me.

Thanksgiving was good. I'm working on putting together a family history book for a family reunion later this year. And I was glad to get a lot of scanning of old photos done and collecting personal histories.

Mark and I even got a lot of our Christmas gifts out to family early, so that's a big check off my list of To-do's.

It's always too short of time when we're home, and never get to do everything we wanted or spend enough time with everyone. Oh well. While everyone was in town, my family got together to take a family portrait. I tried to get Evan to nap before, but he had other plans. He was in a good mood when we got to the studio, but they were swamped with other photo sessions that we had to wait almost an hour. That put Evan at his limit. And then the photographer lady scared Evan with a giant black foam block to sit on, it was all down hill after that. Evan didn't want anything to do with the lady or sitting. We managed to take 3 pictures. Figures that as soon as we leave, Evan's smiling, walking around and not tired. sheesh. I haven't seen the proofs, so I hope there was one good one. Maybe I'll have to photoshop a smile in
for Evan and myself.

I got my haircut and colored out there. I went to the same place I got my hair cut last time, but found out they'd switched owners. I should have asked first why the lady the cut my hair last time wasn't there cause my haircut and color isn't what I expected. There was a bit of misunderstanding too. The Vietnamese lady thought I wanted to dye my whole head when I just wanted highlights, so that tee'd her off. But I didn't care, it's my hair, lets get this straight! So I showed them what color highlights I was thinking, brown slightly red, and I don't think they were really listening to me or maybe they didn't care to match it closely, cause they came out with this bowl of bright red paste. I thought maybe it's just the dye, cause it was the case when I dyed it brown before.