Apparently this is a post about hats

Okay, so now I really ought to start writing again.  Recording the memorable/everyday events of our family.  So I'm starting today.  Here goes!!

Yesterday was my mom's birthday.  I used to always tell people she was turning 21 again, but now that I'm 25, it's getting harder and harder to convince people of that. ;)

The important thing isn't that yesterday was Mom's birthday - it was that she flew to Austin to come visit us!!  She was going to come on Halloween and stay for a week, but at the last minute she decided she'd rather come later in the month.  It actually turned out really well, because Mace started crawling a few weeks ago. :)  I'm pretty sure that makes Mom's trip so much more exciting and fun, to have a crawling grandbaby. <3

We picked up Mom from the airport, then went to Mark's new job downtown, then ate dinner at the taco food truck by Mark's work (SO SO GOOD), then went over to 6th Street to look at hats at The Hat Box.  Mark has been asking me for weeks about getting a new hat from that place.  He has a coworker who, apparently, wears *amazing hats* and he got them all from The Hat Box.  Mark had a famous hat for a few years, but then we last it at Disneyland last year.  Funny coincidence: It was a hat we bought from the Indiana Jones store, and we lost it 3 years later on the Indiana Jones ride. :(

Old hat:

Carmen wearing Mark's hat!

New hat:

Mace wearing Mark's hat!  ... why do I not have any pictures of Mark in his own hats?!

We actually bought two new hats for Mark, but I only have a picture of this one.  The other one looks a bit more like the old hat.  Now I'm going to go on a hat tangent ... hats are big in Mark's family.  Sort of.  His brother, James, tends to wear hats and looks good in them.  We might get him a hat for Christmas (I doubt James will read this. phew.)  Mark's dad tends to wear fisherman hats.  But I don't have a picture of it.  Maybe some day!

I guess Mark looks really good in hats.  I'm just ... not used to them.  I don't wear hats.  Dang.  He's right.  He looks good in hats.  I should stop encouraging him to dress like a bum.  I'm such a boring t-shirt and jeans-type girl.

Jorgen's wedding, February 2011

Okay, maybe he doesn't always look great in hats.  But that doesn't stop him from always trying them on.

From our Mexico cruise in February 2010.  He tried on my cousin Emery's hat.

Taken some time in ... 2007?  One of our poor newlywed dates to DI where we bought a $35 couch.

Hm, somehow this turned into an entry about hats!  Okay!  So anyway, Mark got some nice new expensive hats last night as his Christmas present.

Today, I went to the gym in the morning to let Mom have some quiet time to get ready for the day.  All week long, Mace has been clingy and has cried (loudly!) the whole time I've been gone ... Usually the people in the gym day care try to let me work out for at least an hour if my baby is fussy, but this week has been so bad they've called me back after 20 minutes. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday.  I had an appointment with a personal trainer last week who gave me a list of things to do, and this week I learned to immediately hit the machines fast and hard, because I'd probably only have 20 minutes to work out.  Hah! But then today, he was pretty cheerful and I got a whole hour in!  I was able to do all of the lifting I wanted to do, and I even got some time on the elliptical to read my Book Club book (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  When I came back to the day care to pick my kids up (I wanted to go home and keep my mom company), Mace had just fallen asleep in the swing.  Aww~ <3

Mace took a ridiculously long nap in the afternoon, and when he finally woke up we went shopping with Mom on a Christmas quest to find an elf to do the "elf on a shelf" thing.  I hadn't really heard of this until a few years ago, when a friend of a friend posted pictures on her Livejournal of this weird cute little Christmas elf.  Apparently it's like a little gnome you hide around the house at Christmas time, and the kids get excited trying to figure out where the elf is hiding.  We couldn't find an elf, so Carmen picked out a Christmas puppy.  Close enough. ;)

Then we went to the mall to ride on the carousel and walk around.  There's a little kids' play area by the carousel and Carmen likes to go play with the little kids.  Since Mace is crawling, I set him out on the floor and let him watch the bigger kids play.  He is kind of a road block, and other moms are constantly telling their kids to watch out for the baby and be careful.  I'm not sure if I'm being helpful (now they are more aware of other people when they are playing!) or if I'm being annoying (why the eff is that weirdo mom letting her baby potentially get run over by packs of 3-year-olds?!) but I don't care if a little kid runs over Mace.  It will make up for the fact that he doesn't have a whole bunch of older siblings to maul him!  He only has Carmen!

It was really funny to watch the kids play at the mall.  They ran around in circles screaming, "AAAAUUUGGGHH IT'S THE BABY MONSTER!  HE IS GOING TO GET US!" and they would run away, as Mace smiled at them and got up on his hands and knees and rocked back and forth.  He didn't really want to go anywhere, so he just spun around in circles, watching kids and smiling, then occasionally coming over to Mom or me to gnaw on our shoes.  Oh, baby Mace, how I love you.

So .... that was our day.

And here's a picture of my mom ... she and Mace were matching today!  It was not intentional!

Don't you think she looks 21?

Wow.  Writing this was fun.  I think I'll do this more often.

Facebook as a Pseudo-Journal

I have been such a slacker as far as blogging goes for the past few years.  In high school, I kept a LiveJournal (friends-only) and updated several times a week.  I'd come home from school and write.  My friends would read it and we'd interact online.  Then I went to college and I still wrote, but not as much.  Then I got married and I wrote sometimes.  Then I had kids and basically stopped writing.  I think I need to start writing again, but I don't really know where to start.  Ha ha!  Isn't that life! =p

Also, Facebook has kind of ruined my journal-writing.  I can just post something about Carmen or my life and I feel like, "Oh, that's the recording of my life for the day!" .... So I think I end up updating Facebook too much (some people post a million times a day, some people only check Facebook a few times a year, I generally post something daily and put pictures up for my family ... so I'm sure I drive the less-active Facebook people crazy) and never write in a journal/blog.  It's probably because I feel like it's easier to spend a few seconds updating Facebook than it is to spend several minutes writing up a blog post, constantly being interrupted by small children.  I have a hard time stringing coherent thoughts together these days.  It seemed to get better after Carmen was a year or two old.

ANYWAY, LIFE!

So we moved into a house in September.  It's amazing how much breathing room we have now that we've doubled our living space!  Mace is no longer sleeping in the closet, the piano is no longer behind the dining room table and I actually sit down and randomly play it for fun, etc. ;)

Upstairs, there's a loft.  We've dubbed it "Carmen's playroom" and have put all of our games and the kids' toys up there.  We also set up a bed in the back of the play room.  The mattresses we bought for the bunk bed way back when came with box springs, which we've kept for the last 3 years, so when we moved into the house we bought a third mattress and set it up on top of the box springs.  Sweet!!

The nice thing about Carmen having her own play area is that now we can keep the main living areas clean.  Or at least cleaner ... unless I'm doing laundry.  Then it sits all over the floor.

We also now have a two-car garage and two cars!  But only my car fits in the garage because Mark bought a big weight set and set it up in the garage so he can work out in the mornings and give up his gym membership.  I won't give up my membership because I love going to the gym and being able to drop my kids off at the day care.  I go to this super-fancy-schmancy gym (LifeTime Fitness) and if I'm too tired to work out, I can nap/read books/etc on the couch in the fancy-schmancy locker room.  Most gyms are kind of grimy and sweaty and you just go there for a class or whatever and can't wait to leave.  The day care might be kind of sketchy.  But LifeTime's day care is awesome - they have several different sections for the kids (there's a baby area, a place for toddlers and young kids, a computer lab, a covered outdoor play area, a playland-type area with a slide, tables for coloring and crafts, and a basketball court-type place in back with those multicolored padded walls for playing) and I loooooooove all the people in the day care.  It is so worth paying 2-3x what I would pay for a Gold's Gym membership.  I just feel good every time I go, and I WANT to go.

Another thing that has happened since we've moved is Mark has a new job!  He was kind of unhappy with his old job ... he was kind of isolated from his coworkers with the projects he was working on, and his managers didn't communicate with him often and basically had no idea what he was doing.  Mark discovered his values were different from his company's values ... to me, it sounds like he didn't like updating/debugging/working with super-crappy code that was thrown together just to "work" but was impossible to work with/update/add functionality/etc.  Better coding practices would be good in the long term, and if they *didn't* implement good coding practices, they'd be ahead in the field now but far behind in the future because another company could easily enter the market and catch up to and overtake them. ... but ... you know ... I'm not an expert on the software-aided engineering market. ;)

Anyway.  Mark found a job with a small company called DataStax and ended up on a Quality Assurance team ... which ... well ... basically sounds like Mark to a T. ;)  He'd do a better job describing his job than I would.  He gets to work from home, since most of his associations with his coworkers are done through chat.  He goes in to work on Wednesdays because they get free lunch (apparently) and the office is downtown, near 6th street, so the food options are pretty awesome. ;)  He also adores his coworkers because they are nerdy in all the same ways he is.  While he was interviewing, I believe they talked about Dungeons and Dragons characters/campaigns they've done in the past.  OH YES THEY DID.  And they get together and have game nights every so often at the office.

PS. Austin is awesome.  Great food, great music, great people, great culture ... I love it here!!

We spent Thanksgiving in Austin this year, and we are going to spend Christmas alone here, too.  We are kind of remote from our families (my family's in Seattle; Mark's parents moved to Orem last year) but you know what's great about here?  We don't have to deal with the misery of snow!  We'll go to Utah and Washington in the summer when the weather is nicer there, but I think we are going to spend every year trying to pressure our families into coming down here for the holidays. ;)