PHEW - GLAD THAT WEEK'S OVER

Oh what a week we've had here at the Walker house. Well last Tuesday (our anniversary), I had a wonderful, relaxing time at the spa, then Justin took me to a amazing dinner at Pike's Landing which was so yummy, and then... Our great day was over! Daizy ended up getting injured. She was limping really bad, so we took her to the vet on Wednesday. They took some xrays which showed that her hip was dislocated - the poor thing! They had to knock her out, and after many tries, finally got it back in. $760 later we headed home with a bandaged up, comatose, "three legged" dog. She is on strict "bed rest" for 4-6 weeks and right now has her leg in a sling for 2 weeks. We kept her pretty "high" on pain medication for the first couple of days, but she's seems back to her old self now. I think she's already sick of laying on her bed all day and just wants to go run through the woods. We have to be really careful with her for the next 6 weeks because if her hip pops back out we will have to take her to Anchorage to have surgery where they'll have to put a pin in her hip. So to try an avoid the $1500-2000 that the surgery would cost, not to mention the money we'd have to spend to get us to Anchorage, we're making her take it easy. We have to put her on a leash when she goes outside to do her "business", and since she's three legged and it's icy outside, we have to wrap a towel under her belly and help hold up her back end so she won't slip and fall on her hip. We've been making many visits back and forth to the vet to make sure every thing's healing okay, and as for now things look promising.












And if I didn't have enough to worry about with an injured puppy - I got a call Wednesday night and was asked last minute to teach the Relief Society (class for the adult women at church) lesson on Sunday. Okay so it's seriously been like 10 years since I've taught a lesson at church and I think the last one was to the Sunbeams (2-3 year olds). So let's just say I was a little out of practice. But after a lot of planning, worrying, and a frantic call to my mom to ask for help, I think everything went okay. I was so freakin nervous! I'm pretty sure I was bright red, shaking, and sweating through the first half of the lesson. But by the end I felt pretty comfortable and thanks to a lot of good class participation everything ended up fine. I even had a couple of people come up to me after and say I did a really good job - not sure if they were just being nice, but it was still nice to hear. I also got a new calling at church on Sunday. I am now the Visiting Teaching Coordinator. I'm not really sure what I'm doing, but I'm looking forward to it.

Brianna's doing great. Holy cow she turned 11 months today! Man, where did the time go. She is missing her play pal Daizy though. She'll go up to the baby gate that we have across our bedroom door and talk to her. And every time we get ready to take Daizy outside, as soon as the gate comes down she makes a B line for Daizy's bed.

She used to use Daizy as a pillow, but now has to use her boppy instead. She'll pull the boppy off the couch and then "lounge" - too cute. (They aren't the best pictures cause every time I'd try she'd sit up)

I've also started her on a lot of finger food. Instead of pureeing everything, I'm just chopping it up into little pieces so she can feed herself. She's doing really good at it. I just need to be more patient - It takes forever! After about 15-20 min of her feeding herself, only half of her food gone, she gets bored and just starts playing with the what's on her tray - so sometimes I just end up feeding it to her myself so we can just be done. But she's enjoying some of the foods that she wasn't very fond of before, like peas, carrots and meat. I guress things just taste better when you can put them in your own mouth???

She also found her diaper stacker. She thinks it's a dang fun game to unload it. Needless to say the diaper stacker does not hang on the side of the crib anymore. :)

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY

That's right, not only is March 17th the day of the Irish, it's also Justin & Lisa Day! I am so absolutely, positively, utterly, and completely in LOVE with this man. He is so amazing and I don't deserve him. I am so thankful to have him as my best friend, husband, and father to my children. I am so happy that he picked me to share his life with and that he's going to be mine forever. Simply - I am one lucky girl!

Even though I could go on and on - I don't have time. Well you see that amazing husband of mine just surprised me with a day at the spa! (I actually started crying when I found out - he's so thoughtful.) But he's going to be home soon from work to take care of Brianna so I can leave. What an amazing guy!

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY BABE! I LOVE YOU FOR ALWAYS!!!

GETTING OUT

Justin and I have hit our wall of feeling cooped up. I think I have literally driven him bonkers the past couple of weeks being inside all the time. Luckily I got out of the house one night, but he's overdue on a "boy" day. We're both so ready for spring - but hey were in Alaska so it just keeps snowing and snowing. :( I can't wait until it's warm enough to take Brianna outside and play. At this point even I am looking forward to camping and fishing this summer. Ha, ha, ha!!!

On Thursday some girls from church invited me to go with them to the movies. Justin was a great hubby and volunteered to take care of Brianna for the night. (He actually later admitted that he had a lot of fun with her. :)) We ended up seeing Confessions of a Shopaholic. It was an okay movie, not really my type of thing - it was funny but something that I'd much rather waited to rent. But it was so fun to get out with the girls - I so needed it. The only bad part of the night was when I went to take one of the girls home I got stuck in her driveway. It was snowed like crazy the whole entire day, and we probably shouldn't have even gone anywhere, but we all wanted to get out of the house. So I pull into her driveway, which is absurdly narrow and slipped off to the side and got stuck. Her husband had to come out and help us get out, so I pretty much felt like a dork. I was telling Justin about it when I got home and he's like, why didn't you just put it in 4 wheel drive low? And I told him that I had tried and it just kept beeping at me and I was afraid that I was going to break something. He gives me the "duh" look and says, Yea - it beeps to tell you that it's in 4 low. And then, well I felt like even a bigger dork.

Brianna has been going a mile a minute. She's everywhere and anywhere you can think of. She absolutely loves her dog Daizy and is always crawling all over her. Daizy loves it for the most part, except when Bri tries to sit on her head. They are so funny together - Daizy will lay down on her side and then Bri will scooch up and lay on her tummy and she'll just talk and talk. Too cute! She also had found the kitchen cupboards and loves to go through the pots and pans. This weekend she decided to help her daddy cook breakfast by getting every pan out for him. :)

Saturday we went to the Ice Dog hockey game with some friends. Brianna did really good, she had such a fun time watching everything. And she LOVED all the music they played - she was dancing like crazy. The only bad thing was that half way through the game both Bri and our friends little boy were so tired because it was way past their bed times. They both fell asleep for a little bit, but then they scored a goal and they both got woken up. The game was tied and went into double overtime, so we just ended up leaving before the end of the game cause the kiddos had had enough.

I obviously am really bad at taking pictures that you can tell where we are at. These ARE from Bri's first hockey game, even though you can't really tell.

After all the action from the hockey game she was so tired the next day. She woke up, ate, and then fell right back to sleep. She looked pretty pooped.

CHICKEN LITTLE bit gross

We started Bri on meat a couple of days ago. I'm still making her baby food at home, and it was a little bit of a challenge. We started with chicken and the first day she did okay, it's just a weird chalky texture. The second day we struggled a bit. I froze the chicken in ice cube trays, just like I have done her fruit and veggies, but it didn't thaw out the same. When I defrosted it in the microwave it turned into this extremely dry ick. I tried to add some water which didn't do anything, now it just had water in the bottom and dry chicken still on the top. Brianna hated it! She would make this awful face and then scrape the chicken off her tongue with her little fingers and pull it out and hand it to me. I guess I can't really blame her, it was pretty disgusting. I even tried mixing it with some veggies and she still hated it. We only made it through about a fourth of the serving and I didn't want to torture her anymore, so I threw it away. Before I gave up on making meat baby food myself I decided to try again. I thawed a couple of cubes out in the fridge over night and then pureed them again. It worked a lot better, I just have to be careful when heating it up because it sucks out all the moisture really fast. I still don't think Bri really likes it. She'll eat it, but she doesn't look like she's enjoying it very much. I hope I didn't ruin chicken for her forever.

These pics are from the first time she ate the chicken. Even though she looked like she was going to cry the whole time, she actually did pretty good and ate it all up.

In other news we finally joined the real world and bought ourselves a printer. I know, we're so slow at keeping up with the times. But I guess the fact that we just barely purchased our first computer last year (which was second hand), it's not so weird that we just barely bought a printer. I'm pretty excited cause we can now print pictures. And since I'm a total slacker at getting pictures developed this will help out a ton. Hey, maybe I'll even start something crazy like scrapbooking now that I have pictures to do it with! :)

ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT

Well let's see - what have we been up to? First we have been very busy child proofing our house the past week. I know, I know, my child is 10 months old and I should have been more prepared, but holy cow she's into everything!!! And why does everything have to go in their mouths? I know they're curious, and it's fun to find new things, but really - do you have to taste it too??? I'm pretty sure Bri's eaten her fair share of rocks and "stuff" off the floor - cause I've dug out more things that I can count, so who knows how many I've missed. But I think we've got most of our bases covered for the moment. (Even though she finds new things every day that I hadn't realized were going to be a problem). Our only dilemma right now is - How do you leave the dog water out so the dog actually has water to drink and not have your child sticking her hands and face in it constantly? I'm open to any suggestions. :) As of right now we put the dog bowl in the bathroom, gated the bathroom off, and just let the dog in every so often to get a drink.

Justin doing okay. He's super busy at work, which is stressing him out a lot. He's taught the snowmobile course on base a couple of times this past week which I think he enjoys. He's also been working forever trying to fix his own snowmobile and finally got everything working Monday night. He took into work to teach the course on Tuesday and... it wouldn't start. I think it might have been the cold, but needless to say he's pretty frustrated with it at the moment.

I'm doing really good. The Relief Society President Julie Beck came and visited Fairbanks this weekend, so I went to hear her speak on Saturday. It really put things in perspective for me. Basically - I NEED an attitude adjustment. She hit a few key things that I've been really struggling with and I really need to work on. They're just simple things like be happy. Everyone knows that I hate Alaska and want to get out of here as soon as possible. But in her talk she said that we need to remember that our worst day is better than most other women's best day. How true is that? I've realized that I just need to make the best out of the situation and enjoy myself. It's not hard, I just need to do it.

She also touched on being a good mother and wife. She talked about how being a housewife is just like a job and we should treat it like so. Looking back since I've quit my medical assistant job, I think I've done really poor at my housewife job - I'm pretty sure I would have been fired by now if this was the real work field. Cleaning, cooking, taking care of the kids is OUR job. Most of you know I really don't enjoy cooking, I don't know why - I just don't. But I realized that it's MY duty to provide a healthy meal for dinner when my husband gets home. And this doesn't mean thawing out some meat so my husband can cook it on the grill when he gets home. :) It doesn't have to be something fancy every night, it just has to be something. Along with this I've decided that we are going to eat dinner at the kitchen table every night. We are terrible at this and usually eat in front of the tv. But what a change has happened in our house the past three days. It's so much more peaceful, Justin and I get along better, and we actually sit down and really talk to each other at the end of the day. It's been great! Now I know there will be days when there's a pile of dishes left in the sink and we're going to being eating mac 'n cheese - but that's okay. I just need to do the best I can. And I have to admit, I've actually enjoyed cooking the last few meals because I realize how much it has affected the dynamics in our home for the better.

Anyways - I hate posts without pictures, so here's a couple of Miss Brianna letting me know she wants a bath. I was actually in the process of undressing her to go get in the tub when I got a phone call. I put her down on the floor and ran to answer it. When I came back in the room she had crawled under her changing table, where her tub sits, and got right in and was playing. I guess she likes baths, even when there's no water. :)