a quick update for those who might not know: our family has changed quite significantly this past year-my sister amy and her two children are living with us now, which brings the adult count in the house to three, and the kid count in the house to four...until october. cuz we're having another babaaaaaaaay! woo hoo. i'm due 10/10/10, and yes, it's another girl! apparently geoff+molly=baby girls. we're excited, and so are all the kids. i am also very glad that we have a house with a finished basement....i hope the old lady who lived in a shoe had a finished basement in that shoe.
we've chosen the baby's name, so for all three of my regular readers, you get the sneak peek-yee haw! her name will be kajsa molly archibald. for those of you who aren't fluent swedish speakers, the name kajsa is pronounced "kai-sah". no i don't speak swedish either, but we've liked this name for a long time (it was a serious contender when we were choosing georgia's name). i've received mixed feedback from those i've told it to thus far, (ranging from, "oh what a beautiful name, i love it!", to "sounds like a made up utah name to me!" but we are 100% sure this is the baby's name, and we 100% don't care if people don't like it. so, kajsa it is! i'm sure she will encounter plenty of people with even more "unique" names than hers, given the baby names i've heard recently (pixel, pepper, brayley....) so i'm not super worried about it. besides, any kid of ours will have naturally good self esteem, right? :)
other than baby news, there has been plenty of excitement to keep us busy around here--if you count various illnesses as excitement. it seems like we've all been taking turns getting sick. this weekend it was geoff and quinn's turn-georgie got in on the action by deciding to sprout her 2 year molars a little early-so i got to play nursemaid today. i don't think i'd make a good nurse in real life, but when my patients are so adorably pathetic, i don't mind.
geoff also attempted to take a continuing education course in chicago this weekend (right before his stomach bug decided to show up-wah) so i had the kids and house to myself on friday and saturday...quinn had already taken to the couch like a lump, poor thing, so georgie and i did some mama projects. really, georgie tortured the cat and i indulged in some serious de-crapification. i don't know that anyone but me would notice but seriously how many sippy cups does one family need?!! especially since none of the tops matched any of the bottoms. gone gone gone. also cleared out: about 50,000 scribbled up coloring books, a sad sad excuse of a pillow-it might be older than our marriage, honestly-and, the saddest one of all, a record player.
this was my mom's record player. except that i never actually saw her use it. and i owned exactly three records. and the entire time i've owned it (coming up on six years) it has needed a needle replacement....goodbye, record player! (and the 3 records too) i've been contemplating getting rid of that thing since about five minutes after i brought it home. not sure why it took me so long--which brings me to the biggest accomplishment of the entire weekend: the PINK SHOEBOX OF DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
alright kids, hop into your Way Back Machines, because it's time to go down memory lane....all the way back to 1996. which my dear friend nancy pointed out was fifteen years ago. FIFTEEN. i am officially old.
so in 1996, nancy and i embarked on a fantastic adventure in moscow russia--we went over there and taught english as a second language to young children. we were there for 5 months, then did some travelling through europe afterward. one of the best times of my life, for sure. definitely one of my formative experiences, and such a great way to get out of my comfort zone. and oh yes, the pictures. i took approximately 899,994 pictures. which i then came home and developed on the "free doubles day" at my friendly walgreens. (remember having to get pictures developed? i might as well get out the geritol right now!) after looking through the pictures several times and even LABELING the envelopes by month (so sophisticated, my organizational system!) i shoved all bajillion envelopes into a pink shoebox and....then did nothing. for fifteen years.
of course, my intention was always to put them in an album and to appropriately label the pictures with heartwarming stories and touching details. i never deluded myself into thinking i would make a scrapbook with metro passes glued onto the pages and stickers saying cute phrases in scrolly cyrillic lettering....i'm just not a scrapbooking kind of chick-BUT, for fifteen years, i never so much as opened the box. it just seemed so overwhelming and not something i'd ever have the time to do. UNTIL NOW!!! cue the dramatic music, folks--i did it!
the funniest thing is that once i finally opened the shoebox, it hardly took me any time at all--i sat with a trashcan by my side and quickly got rid of all the doubles (except for a few that i knew i'd want to send to nancy). it was so gratifying to reduce the stack by 50% so quickly that i just wanted to keep going--what a pathetic thing to get so excited about, right!?
then i went through the stack again and it was immediately apparent which shots were important enough to hang on to and which weren't. something about being 15 years removed from the situation. :) so i ended up with 2 big envelopes of pictures, which i've since sorted out a little further into smaller categories-i'm getting an album THIS WEEK and sticking them in there, labelling them with what few bits of information remain in my sad 34 year old brain, and then i'm DONE! i even put the doubles in the mail for nancy already...i thought if i didn't do it right away, i might wait another 15 years. :)
it took me about 30 minutes to do what i've been avoiding for fifteen years. i'm really going to try hard to remember that then next time i'm tempted to put something off. does anyone need a really old pink shoebox?
