Squeaker: bear fetus

Today my mom spoke in church on teaching your children about the Sabbath and told a story of finding me, Sarah, and Melyssa when we were small children in our loft playroom with all our dolls, stuffed animals, and Barbies lined up, teaching them Sunday school. Eli's face immediately brightened, and he leaned over and whispered, "Mom, can I do that when we get home?!?" Well, he did.

Asher is just about walking. He will take 4 or 5 steps at a time throughout the day, but crawling is still his main way to get somewhere quickly. Eric put him to bed tonight just as he does every night, the only difference was, Brandt was asleep in Asher's room on the spare bed. (Brandt and Eli share a room and Asher has his own). Eric came downstairs, and we kept hearing Asher on the monitor making all kinds of noise, which escalated until he became very upset. He usually just lays down and goes to sleep on his own. After Eric went up a couple of times to try to get him to settle down, we realized that he was trying to talk to sleeping Brandt and was getting frustrated at not getting a response. Well, he became loud enough that Brandt woke up (and will be awake very late now thanks to a nap from 5-7:30). Once Brandt was out of the room, he went right to sleep!

Brandt is the Professional Pretender of our family. We rarely go somewhere that he doesn't bring a pet along. His pets are all named and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some are pretty typical, like his little red beanie baby chicken named "Fire-breathing Chicken." Others are several K-nex pieces made into a row and given a name like,"Pock." One that has really stuck around along time near the top of Brandt's Favorite Pets List is "Squeaker." We're not sure what Squeaker is exactly; Brandt thinks he's a squirrel. When Rick saw him he asked, "What's this supposed to be, a bear fetus?"

Yesterday was a successful day for me . I ran the 5.6 mile route from Trak Shak in just over 42 minutes--a new record for me running it without people faster to push me. Counting my warm-up and cool-down, I went 58 minutes. I think the temperature went up about 20 degrees during my run. Oh, and my new shoes felt great. The next success I had was finding a great deal on a new t.v. Brandt poked the on button with a stick on our old one and managed to disable the whole thing--not even the remote worked. We went without one for a week (other than our tv in the workout room that has to warm-up before the picture gets somewhat clear), and decided to start shopping around on Friday night when we went out on a date. Well, the one I bought Saturday morning cost 30-50% less than every other one we saw of the same size. We got a deal b/c it had been a floor model and didn't have a remote (we can get a universal). Plus, it has a dvd player built in, which we also had to replace b/c our old one died two weeks ago. Hopefully tomorrow Eric will get it hung on the wall and out of reach of little children!