I told you I still had a lot to catch up on... so here goes.
I LOVE my new job. I'm still working on a short and easy phrase to describe what I do - but basically I use my reporting and analytical skills to support the product management group at a bank. I provide information that allows us to track the success of promotions and campaigns and gain insight into customer behaviors. It is part nerdy technical stuff (databases and queries) and part detective work and it's awesome! In my previous job I was a little more senior, at this job I am the newbie on an all woman team and I am thrilled to have strong, bright, caring mentors in my life. It is good for me to be quiet and learn stuff! Everyday I fall more and more in love with the new house. Just little things like how easy it is to unload the dishwasher because the kitchen is more efficiently laid out and listening to the frogs on the back porch each night. I'm not sure what the deal is but the new house is inundated with frogs each evening. Luckily I love frogs, because otherwise it could be kind of freaky, I mean they literally cover the windows and driveway at night (like the movie the The Birds, only they don't attack us! )
It is something about how I am wired that I just tend to think that work is work and fun is fun. It started early in my life, when I was a Brownie (which is the little little girl version of Girl Scouts) and our leader tried to make us pick up pecans in her yard as a purportedly educational outdoor activity. I was highly sceptical. Between the picking up of pecans and being made fun of for wearing a uniform from Goodwill (it was polyester and like ten years out of date) Brownies really wasn't all I had hoped it would be. But I digress. .. Where I'm heading with all this is that because of how I am, it always sort of surprises me how much my children totally enjoy "chores". By children I guess I mean mostly Jacob since Bella still gets excited over ceiling fans and tufts of dog fur. When Bella's highchair began to seem more like a biology experiment than a sanitary place to sit I decided we needed to take it out back and hose it down. I guess this was just out of the ordinary enough that both Bella and Jacob were delighted. The uber gross high chair - 
OK, so maybe she doesn't exactly appear "delighted" in this photo, but trust me, she was having fun only it was kind of hot and we are several light years away from having any resemblence of shade in our new yard.
This one is an example of how when kids and dogs "help" you clean something then you kind of have to go back and do it all over again when they aren't looking because otherwise it would be all covered in dog hair and grass which may or may not be better than the bits of yogurt and turkey and peas that it was covered in with to start with.
One of the activities was a craft project where the kids had these golden goblets that they could decorate with all kinds of jewels and stickers and such. Jacob, in his typical quirky way, decided he wanted to decorate the inside of his goblet. I was very impressed with his creativity. As a Mom there is a part of me that sometimes wishes that he would just do what all the other kids do. I fret over his shyness and how he always does everything his own way. Funny, isn't the goal to try and raise kids that think for themselves and know their own minds rather than just following what every other kid does? I always say that I'm "working with him" on interacting more but you know really I think I just need to work on me instead. Work on worrying less and just enjoying the kid that God made him to be. 
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