I got a cold over the weekend. It sucks.  I always think it when I get sick - your health is so wonderful to have and its something I need to be more thankful for when I have it. -Wendy

This weekend we went to Longview Washington for a huge family birthday party for Nathan’s grandmother Ruth Potter.  She is Nathan’s dad’s mother who remarried after her first husband (Grandpa Spinelli) died due to complication in surgery at a young age.  It was her big 80th birthday and 9 out of her ten kids were there along with tons of grandchildren and great grandchildren.  It was held at the Red Lion Hotel and ended up being a really special experience for everyone there.  There was a slide show that made everyone teary eyed and many people got up and talked about what a great person and mother she is.  I haven’t even known her very long and I was all choked up!!  So it was a great party with LOTS of great food.  I totally ate way too much. I haven’t done that in a really long time.

Nathan is a really good grandson.  He calls her every one or two weeks just to talk.  She use to be a pharmacist back in the day so they end up talking about medicine.  She graduated from University of Washington so Nathan always has to wear a Washington State Pharmacy shirt when she is around just to rial  up the rivalry in good fun.  I hope when I am old and if Nathan goes before me that I get a grandson like him that will call me like he does.

So the last post reminded me that I haven’t shared my adventure of my teeth issues.  I won’t go over the whole story because it will get long.  Basically, I got really bad dry mouth when I was pregnant and that ruins your teeth and I like suger and that didn’t help things.  I went to a dentist that filled areas that were weak and could have been reversed and left the areas that really needed attention to rot.  So I found another dentist when it occurred to me that the other dentist saw me as a money bag and the new dentist is really amazing and I can tell he is a lot more honest.

I’m getting this treatment called HealOzone where they take ozone gas, the same stuff in the atmosphere, and blast it on your tooth.  It arrests the decay and kills all the bacteria so it is squeaky clean, plus your tooth will start to remineralize even harder than it was before.  In my case it will just mean that my fillings won’t be as deep.  It is painless and I have to go in three times (once every two weeks) before I get the fills.  The problem is I don’t think any insurance covers the treatment and its about $75 a tooth.  Since we have no insurance as students I really questioned if this was necessary I  decided it was, only because my teeth are so trashed and I really don’t want to have them get worse.

So in the end we are going to fork over way too much money than I want to think about but I couldn’t let this go till we get out of school.  At that point I don’t think I would have any teeth left.

Isn’t she cute! I love this dress.  She was pretty tired and wouldn’t smile for me.  I have a red gingham skirt that I wore the same day.  It was lots of fun to match with the baby.

We are now all moved into our new apartment and we are almost totally settled in.  However things did not start out as easy as that last sentence may have made it sound.  On Wednesday, the day before we are scheduled to turn in our keys, Nathan gets a call and loses his internship for this summer because the pharmacy lost their biggest client and had to let go of all their interns.  That took us by surprise but I didn’t feel to much stress because there are lots of pharmacies.  Then after we got into our new apartment we found that our cell phones do not get very good signal.  In fact my phone drops almost every call I make but it will cost an arm and a leg to change carriers because we just started a new two year contract.  Then lots of other little things started to go wrong with the apartment, one of which was the front of our silverware drawer that fell off and hit me in the foot.  I won’t go into detail with everything but things were stressful.  Now it seems like everything has pretty much settled down except Nathan still needs a job.  If they had let him go back in January it would have been a lot easier.  At this point everyone had their interns for the summer and finding something is proving to be difficult, he’s pretty much contacted everyone from here to Yakama and almost everyone has told him no.  Luckily he got one call today for an interview on Thursday so I hope it works out.

For the next few days I’m going to be busy getting everything ready for the move so I won’t be posting anything.  We won’t have internet for a while in our new place either so I will only get to post whenever I’m at my in-laws house until we get internet set up there.  I realize I haven’t posted very much in the last few days either so I will make up for it once everything gets set up in Spokane.  I’m pretty sure I’m going to get my cell phone number changed as well.  Hopefully I can get just the area code changed because I still have a Lewiston number and I haven’t lived there for 4 years.

Seeing little flurries outside the window this morning is very depressing.  There are two barbecues scheduled for today but is it going to be warm enough to go?  Thats right, no…

Ahnna fooled us when she slept through the night for the first few months.  We were so thankful she was a sleeper.  Now is a different story especially since it has been getting lighter earlier.  She is up with the sun at 5:30.  The last week she has woken up two or three times at night and decided it is time to get up at 4am.  This morning was the last straw.  So far I’ve been to much of a softy to just let her cry but after her waking up every 2.5 hours, at 4am when she wanted to stay awake I just let her go. I already got up and fed her and changed her diaper so I wouldn’t worry that she was dirty or hungry.  I shut both her door and my door and she cried for 1/2 hour.  It wasn’t as hard or loud as I thought it was going to be.  I got up once to comfort her without picking her up so I’m proud of myself.  Maybe I can start getting her to sleep though the night again now that I can get through her crying for a while.

I looked at the calender yesterday and saw that Ahnna’s shots were today and not Tuesday so we were at the Doctors office waiting to be called back when a few different people started talking and making faces at Ahnna. I think its great fun when people say “oh she is such a doll!” What mother gets enough of that? However there was this old couple that I could tell really wanted to hold her. They made a few comments hinting to it without outright saying it so I didn’t hand her over. I feel kind of bad not letting them hold her but I don’t know them and it didn’t feel natural to say “here you go.” Looking back on it, it probably would have been fine, I just don’t like passing around my kid to just anyone who wants to hold her. I get that paranoid image in my head of someone running off with her.

When most kids get overly tired, they yell and scream and make their parents crazy. Not Ahnna - well she does that for a brief time, and the she gets slap happy (Nathan says she gets that from me). When she is almost asleep and something wakes her up she will kick and giggle until I go in there and put her pacifier in. At that time she will instantly get tired again and go to sleep. When we had stake conference, the Saturday night session lasted until 9:00 and she usually goes to bed at 8:30. She slept on the car ride home and she seemed really knocked out when we got home but I really needed to feed her one last time and change her diaper. Both hadn’t been done for hours. So I carefully started to undress her, trying not to bother her too much. She began to stir like she was getting upset but when I looked over she had a huge smile on her face. She got her second wind and was miss hyper baby until about 11:30. I tried to record her a bit but this brief video hardly does her real mood justice.