gijasue's blog

Here’s a scrap book page that I recently made of A’s lost teeth. I’ve been getting into digital scrapbooking lately. It’s really quite fun.

I always liked the idea of doing paper scrappbooking before but never had the patience to sit down with all of the junk I’ve got, lay it all out and figure out what goes where — well, I actually did a few pages here and there when A was a baby — but it was hard to lay it out and then put it all away again.

I did digital scrapping before but I never had the money to buy the really expensive software or the expensive digital sets so what I did was pretty sorry (at least it seemed that way to me).

Last year I got it into my head to make digital photo books online and I was quite pleased with the results. Unfortunately, it’s not cheap and I was still looking for something that could record some of the everyday stuff without spending a fortune.

At Christmas I was impressed by how my sister has kept up with her daughter’s life by digital scrapping and I determined that I would give digital scrapping another try … so I went out and bought a book.

This worked for a little while … I made a few pages for friends of ours that were going away. I thought they were OK but I still wasn’t satisfied.

But then I found ScrapGirls.com.

If you are looking for some cheap (or even free!) tutorials and graphics to use in scrapping, this is the place! They send out a newsletter 5 days a week with 2 freebies and lots of info and ideas so you don’t even have to buy anything if you don’t want to.

And this is good for me. I have a tendancy to get excited in the beginning but then forget about it in a little while but these guys won’t let you.

Anyway, this is a page I made with their products and I love it. Great papers and embellishments for a great price.

Enought of the advertisement. I just hope to be able to show you all some more the the pages I’ve done.

Here I am, after almost seven month, breaking the silence. Not that I meant to be silent, but it was just hard to write with everything else going on in my life.

Many things have happened in those months, one of them was that my writing contract expired mid-Dec. Since then, the powers that be have no chosen to renew it or hire anyone else. I don’t know why they’ve done this — they have yet to even contact me whatsoever. But, the upshot of this is that I’ve got much more time on my hands.

So, I’m trying to get organized (it only took me a month and a half of being out of work) and do some of the things I should have or meant to be doing before. One of them is writing in my blog. Some of the others are keeping a regular exercise schedule, sticking to a better diet, keeping up with the housework and going to a Bible study.

For those of you not in my family, here are some of the things that have been going on in my life in the last seven months.

– My daughter started Kindergarten, unfortunately we also found out that she may have ADHD. We’re now going to a Dr. who specializes in this and working out what we can do to help her.

– A. turned 5.

– We took our first family trip to Berlin in Oct. J. had been there up until about 6 months before the wall fell so this was a quite different Berlin than the one that he had known.
– We also went home for two weeks over the holidays to catch up with our families and spend lots of money on books and buying clothes for A. It was also very good for A. to meet many of her cousins and reconnect with the family that she already remembers. Now she wants to go back to the States and live near Grammy and Pop Pops.

– We also had a Valentine’s Tea Party for A. the Sunday before Valentine’s day. She loves them and it’s a great way for her to connect to her friends that she doesn’t see outside of school or church.

Many other little things happened but things are moving along. J. still does a lot of business trips — the most recent ones have been to Armenia and Albainia — not exactly the best tourist destinations but he got me some nice gifts.

On everyday stuff, this year had been a no snow year in Garmisch and it is beautiful but still very odd. But I’m not complaining because it’s allowed me to run more than any other winter here.
I’m hoping to keep everyone updated from now on — at least until I start working again — then we’ll see.

A. read a book today. Of course, it was with my help since she’s still learning her lowercase letters, but she still did it!

Recently we borrowed a Seasame Street learning to read video from the library. A.’s been wanting to watch it every day for the past five or six days. Tonight, she saw it again.

Up until today, she didn’t seem to want to try to read. But tonight in her bath tub she was putting together letters (she has a bathtub alphabet) and sounding them out. Of course, she doesn’t know how to spell, so she made a few nonsense words. So I told her that she could help me read her book before bed tonight.

I picked out a few short, almost baby books of hers that she hasn’t read in a while. The first book she chose to read was Kipper’s Opposites. At first she didn’t remember the book so well, so she was really sounding out the letters and figuring out the words by herself. After a few pages she started to remember and read them without sounding them out, but it was so good that she was excited about it and getting the idea, I didn’t want to slow her down and make her feel like reading wasn’t fun.

She also read Blue Hat, Green Hat and, of course, this was much easier for her because it was just colors and clothes, which she knew (and it was all in capital letters). And she always gets such a kick out of the turkey and his OOPS. This one was actually so easy for her that she almost sounded like she’s been reading for a while (but I knew it was only because she knew the book well and her colors and clothes).

The last book was The Foot Book and this was a little more difficult. After the other two, I think she thought she could read really easily from memory but she didn’t remember all of the parts. I didn’t push her, though, because she was already getting frustrated when I corrected her a few times.

She was so excited that she had a hard time getting to sleep. She kept talking about wanting to go and make her own words and sound them out. I was just so happy that she wanted to do this that I could hardly scold her.

It’s so interesting how you can see the light bulb go on in a child’s head. About three months ago, about the time we had been here for a year, she went back to painting actual people and scenes.

You see, she had drawn potato head people (that’s what I call them because they are just a circle with arms and legs, two eyes and a mouth) a few months after she turned two, but then about a month after we got here, her painting had turned into blobs and there was nothing recognizable in them, they were just a mess of paint

I had thought that maybe this was her way of showing her trauma over the move to Germany, since she had never shown it in any other way. (Just a side note: today she also told me that she wants to stay in this house forever. This, after almost a year of her saying that she didn’t like this house as much as the one we just left.)
Then, she started painting and drawing people and scenes and her art work at the childcare and at home just proliferated. She was drawing all the time. A month later, two months ago, she started showing a real interest in drawing letters. I encouraged her to write her name on toys she wanted in Christmas catalogs. Now, she can write almost every letter fairly well. She’s still working on recognizing and writing the lower case letters, but that’s fine with me.

And the reading thing came out of the blue, too. We had gotten a reading DVD, about two years ago, that she likes quite a lot and watches often, but she never really wanted to read until now. Who knows why? I’m just happy that she wants to.

Another good thing to go along with this is that I recently found out that she’ll be able to go to kindergarten next year because the cutoff is Oct. 31. Everyone had told me that it was Sept. 31 and I was worried that she’d get bored doing another year in childcare. But now I don’t have to worry about that either.

It has begun.

This weekend we started a kind of allowance for A. She got some money for cleaning up the living room and some for cleaning up her room. Of course, they were such disasters that we had to help direct her where to put everything because it was just to large and long of a task for her to do all on her own. But, she did very well.

Usually she loses interest in about one minute and walks away. The interest she had in getting some money, kept her on task for as long as it took.

Then we went out and bought her a cute little gold piggie bank (probably one of the cutest I’ve ever seen). We told her that she was to put half of her money in the piggy bank and the other half can be her spending money. She was OK with that because she just loved putting the money in the bank. We also gave half of it in coins so it made it more fun for her to put it in the bank.

And today at Children’s church, she even gave some of it to Jesus. She was so happy to have her own money to do that, she was showing it off to everyone.

So, I guess we’ll see how it goes from now on. I think it may slow down her requests for toys at the store when she sees her money go so fast. At least that’s what I’m hoping. And I hope she learns the right way to save money and how to enjoy what spending money she has and not spend it on worthless things, like I did as a kid. Only time will tell.

Tonight we went out to the “moving food” place. That’s A.’s name for the sushi place that we go to every so often. The reason it’s called a moving food place should be fairly obvious, but for those of you who don’t get it, it’s one of those places where the food goes around on a conveyer belt.
It actually may not be the best sushi ever, but it’s basically the only sushi place that I know of around here. I didn’t eat sushi enough before I got here to really know the difference between average and great sushi. It was just too expensive where I lived in Maryland, and when I lived in Korea, they had there own way of doing food wrapped in rice and seaweed (it was called Kimbab: Kim, meaning seaweed and bab, meaning rice — simple but explanatory). I think it was much better in Korea, even if it was simpler, and it was a heck of a lot cheaper.

Anyway, it’s good enough in my opinion (I’m sure some sushi snobs around here would say something different) and the best part of it is, we don’t have to wait for the food. When you have a pre-schooler, that makes such a difference. No whining about being hungry or when will the food come or having any low bloodsugar tantrums. And when it comes, well, A. just loves it. She can see it moving over to where she’s sitting, she can choose what she wants and she can pick it up herself. Entertainment and a meal, all in one fell swoop.
OK. I know a lot of you might be saying, what kid likes sushi? Now, I have to say that A. doesn’t like the sushi as it is. But take off the fish or push out the veggies and what do you have? Rice or rice and seaweed. It’s one of her favorite things. Add a little soy sauce and she’s right there.

Yes, it is a little weird that she likes rice and seaweed but, we had left Korea less than a year before she was born and we still ate a lot of our rice wrapped in seaweed. We even went to a Korea restaurant every so often while we were in the states. She likes picking up her rice with seaweed and for her it’s a normal thing.

And there are other things she likes to eat there. They have their version of chicken fingers and she absolutely loves the rice chips. And they usually have sliced oranges or some kind of fruit bowl going around almost the whole time and she tears into them, too. Sometimes there’s other things that she’ll try but the novelty of the moving food covers for the lack of variety in the food she likes.
Overall, it’s a win-win situation for us. Yeah, it maybe a little on the pricey side but the convenience and speed of this place covers a lot of other faults it may have. I think the “moving food place” is moving on up to a spot at the top of our favorite places to eat list.

We finally made it to ballet class. This is something that A. has wanted for a long time. Yes, she’s a tomboy but she still loves to be a girl.

It actually took longer to get her to the class then I imagined.

The class started last week. And we went. Unfortunately, it was one of those, “if anything bad could happen, it did” kind of times.

To begin with, I had no idea where this class was supposed to be held. I had asked the woman who set this up to let me follow her. Sounds easy, right?

Well, we weren’t the only ones following her and it ended up that I had to go around the block twice to find a parking spot. By the time I found one, far enough away for A. to get cold walking back, they were long gone and I had no idea where this class was supposed to be held.

I picked A. up to keep her warm (since she was fussing about being cold), and, muttering under my breath, started looking around for any building that looked like it might have a ballet class held in it. As I was walking across the road, I slipped on an icy patch and A. went down in front of me and hit the icy sidewalk with her head.

Needless to say, I was freaked out, especially since she began to cry very loudly (something she rarely does and only when she’s hurt pretty bad). I didn’t see any blood or feel any big lumps. We went back to the car then and I called my husband who found an e-mail with the address in it. So, although A. said she wanted to go home, I dragged her to the house just to see if she would be interested once she got there.

That was a no go. She wanted nothing to do with it and kept trying to go to sleep, which worried me because I thought she might have a concussion. So we went home.

Luckily, we didn’t need to take her to the hospital and later I found a bruise on her back, near her hip that may have been where she hit before she hit her head.

Anyway, back to today.

She was finally ready to go back and give it a try. We got there in time and everything was fine as she played with some of the girls before the class started. Until she fell on her chin. Being the “beautiful and graceful ballerina” that she already is, she was spinning on the floor and fell smack on her face.

She cried pretty hard then, and I thought it would be a repeat of last week. But she surprised me. After a few minutes, she got up off of my lap and went back to playing until the class started. I was pretty happy.

I left then, a request from the teacher, and she was still fine when I came back.

It wasn’t until we were eating supper that J. noticed a bruise under her chin and when she lifted it, you could see that she had a good size bruise with a quarter inch cut in the middle.

All I can say is that I’m happy I didn’t see the cut before, because I would have been more worried about her and babied her more than I did. I’m just so happy that she’s a trooper and I know now that she wasn’t crying over nothing when she fell.

I’m also happy that she likes this. She’s begged out of the skiing classes they have here and not wanted to do other activities with the other kids, so I’m happy she found one she likes and it can nurish the little girl in her instead of making her more of a tomboy. She already has enough of that in her.

This weekend didn’t quite turn out as expected. I had planned on driving to Heidelberg on Friday to meet J. there, do some shopping, eat some wonderful Korean food, and head back home. Apparently A. had ideas, other than mine, as to what was going to happen.

Friday started out as any other day, except we had a little more time on our hands since I wasn’t planning on leaving until 11 that morning. A. had breakfast and was killing time watching a movie on TV. She seemed to be doing fine as I stepped into the shower. When I stepped out of the shower, it was a different story.

I house was quiet (the movie had ended before I got into the shower) and I didn’t see her as I looked around but I figured she was involved with things, so I went to dry my hair.

When I came back out to get her to brush her teeth, I found her lying on the floor in the living room, saying that she didn’t want to move. From then on, things went quickly from bad to worse.

At the time, when I asked her to come to the bathroom, I just thought she was being lazy, but a few minutes later when she wanted to lay on the floor so I could put her pants on, I knew something was up. By the time I had come back upstairs from taking the trash out, she had fallen asleep on the bathroom rug, and I knew the trip was off.

Before putting her into bed, I took her temperature. It was 102.5. Now, I was pretty worried.

She’s been sick before, but it’s been a long time since she had a real fever.

The rest of the day was spent with her laying either on her bed or the couch, refusing to eat or drink almost everything. I finally managed to get her to choke down a cheese stick but even her favorite, bread and butter, was left to harden on a paper towel.

As we got ready for bed that night, she had a coughing fit that turned into a puking fit. It was not the last for the night.

At least she didn’t throw up again until J. came home at 11 that night, but once she got started, she had to get up every two hours (or less) to puke or dry heave some more.

Around midnight, I decided to sleep with her for the rest of the night. Neither of us got much sleep. I think A. was in one of those fever induced sleepless states. Her breath was fast and her body was still but she answered me when I whispered and was upset when I occationally left go of her hand.

Today, she woke up and seemed to be better, but within the hour, her fever had gone up again and she lay motionless on the couch. Sometimes she slept, other times just watched the TV.

Most of the time I reach for the pain reliever/fever reducer as soon as A. feels warm and acts sick, but I had waited this time. I had hoped that the fever would burn the virus out and it would go away soon, but by noon it had been more than 24 hours since she the fever had started and it seemed to be getting worse. I gave her Tylenol and, as usual, she was back to normal for a few hours, she even ate some stuff. By dinner the fever was back again, but she got some more Tylenol and felt better. She’s been fine since she went to bed.

Although I mildly regret missing my shopping trip and having a chance to get out, I’m glad that I was able to stay home and relax and take care of A. when she needed it. I still love being a mom when the occasion calls for me to go all out.

Well, it’s time to get down to writing again. I hope that my new job as a journalist for an Army newspaper doesn’t dampen my desire to write in my blog. I guess only time will tell.

Since a lot has been going on recently, I think it would be easiest to start at where I left off in my old blog. That would be A. turning four and me about to go to a marathon. I think I’ll start with the girl.

So much has happened with her in the last year that it’s hard to know where to start. First thing, we moved over to Germany about two weeks after her third birthday. It was hard for her to understand the concept of having a new house when we kept moving to new places. In the beginning she thought the hotel we stayed in for a few days before leaving was our new house. Then when we got here, we lived in temporary quarters for a month. Finally, we moved into our permanent aparment but by that time she had decided that she wanted to go back to our “broken house” (the house in Maryland). That was her word for it, since everything had been moved out of it and we told her we couldn’t live in it any more. It was also hard for her to understand, at first, why we couldn’t just drive to go see Grammy and Pop Pops like we used to. This had been her first airplane ride and she hadn’t grasped the whole concept yet.

But, over time she started to get it. And she accepted the changes. There were other things about this new place that interested her much more. The main thing was the “playpark.” This is what she calls her childcare because the playground is right out front. When we first arrived, we had no car and had to walk past the park to do and get everything. She had a hard time understanding that she couldn’t just go and play at this playground any time she wanted. She didn’t understand that Mommy and Daddy had to pay for it, since she had never gone to any childcare center before. But, after she started going there regularly, this wasn’t such a problem.

Some of the changes that happened over the year, were the regular progression of childhood. One of the big things is that she’s finally potty trained (Thank you, Lord). The only time she has problems is when she’s playing too much and doesn’t want to stop to go to the bathroom. She’s also changed in little ways, such as getting herself into her car seat and handing us the seatbelt to put in. She can pretty much dress herself now (she only needs help when her pants are too tight … mostly because of the big butt and thighs she inherited from her mom!).

Lately, she’s been incredibly interested in drawing. She draws everything, people, animals, trees, you name it. And she can write ALEX even though if you call her Alex, she’ll tell you that her name is Alexandra. I guess eventually she’ll be able to write it all.

She also grasps some grammer concepts such as, to make words into past tense, you have to add an ‘ed.’ In the beginning, she’d argue with me when I corrected her about verbs that were irregular. But now she just accepts it and picks it up. I think this has to do with the stories we read to her. She knows that some of them are different because she hears them in the stories.

And, of course, she’s also grown in the past year. She’s had a couple of grown spirts (the pants that were two inches too long, are now almost short) but the most noticeable was a month or so ago. Everyone was commenting on it. I think it’s partly because she’s running around more (she goes to a childcare where they go outside three or four times a day) and she hasn’t gained much weight with her height gains. Her legs are noticeably less chubby and you can actually see her wrists instead of a roll of fat. Not that she’s thin or anything, just becoming less of a baby.

Although, I have to say that she’ll always be my baby. But, she’s growing up. And, although she’s always been social (she’ll walk up to anyone on the street), she’s learning how to be more politely social. And that’s nice.

There’s so much more that’s happening but I can list it all now. I’ll try to keep you updated on anything new that she comes up with. For now, I’m happy to see the kind of person she’s becoming. I see a bit of me in her, but it’s always tempered with a bit of Joe. And that’s the way it should be.