New New New!

I know! So cool! Looks like she's looking at the camera...and spitting.

Life has been pretty busy of late. Brandon now has a job! He works for First Source as a conduit between patients and hospitals, mostly dealing with Medicare and MediCal. It's not the most exciting thing, but he's still in the process of getting enough cases to keep him busy. We are living in Hayward, California and are super happy to be here. We have a pretty nice 2 bedroom apartment that is within walking distance of a Target (YAY!), a Joann Fabrics (which is very important to me), the library (love to read for free), and the most fantastic park ever. For about $6 you can ride the carosel, the small train that goes around the park, visit the bouncy house, go to the petting zoo and ride a pony!! Maggie is still a bit small for most of that, but the playground is great (and that part's free) and it's a half block from our apartment. I am very excited to spend much of the summer there.

Maggie is growing up so fast! Not literally, because she's about 8 months behind, size wise. She's almost 20 months old and still too small for a few 12 month cloths. But she is SO smart! In just the past few days she has started saying words for real, like more than one syllable! She says "bay sa baaaoow" that's baseball, and "caneee" = candy (what we call fruit snacks) She'll just pick a word out of what she hears and say it, usually the one that the most emphasis was put on in the sentance. She loves explatives, if we swore we would be in big trouble, but she'll just sit there and say OH MAAAAAAN! over and over again. It's SO CUTE! Oh! and she can say her name now! Starting like 2 days ago, she switched from calling her self ma ma to maaa geeeeeee.

She is getting all around the house now, into the cupboards (which she could open and bang closed for hours - I usually have to stop her because I get a headache from the constant slamming) pulling DVDs off the shelves, into the bathroom cupboards (luckily not the toilet - yet), turning on and off the Xbox because it makes a ding everytime she touches the button...yea we love that, playing with her toys, which she can differentiate between. She'll ask for specific different things, which I think is incredible! She just cruzes along the walls and chairs and couches and tables exploring everything around her. If you can't tell, I am enchanted by the strides my daughter is taking. She's just so amazing, and the sweetest little girl EVER! Sadly this does not extend to her sleeping habits or very small palate. Luckily I am great at taking naps and the things she does like to eat are at least semi healthy. Milk (like a quarter gallon a day!), apples, chips, pretzels, graham crackers, some cereals, popcorn

and anything sweet or chocolatey. Yes, she is my daughter. In the late evenings she's taken to asking for brownies or ice cream. Curse my sweet tooth, but at least she's getting calories so that she'll grow bigger...Sadly this means I am also getting calories.

I have been working on that though. Not so much the not eating sweets, because I've tried that, and all it does is make me cranky. There are plenty of other good things I can do to be healthy, that won't make be angry at the world for taking away something I love. So we got a Kinect for the Xbox for Christmas and since then I have worked out 3 times a week and since I'm bothering to exercise, it gives me more incentive to eat healthier foods so that my efforts and sweating is not going to waste. I have lost 8 pounds and I have more energy. Which is being combatted by the lack of sleep thanks to Maggie, but I guess it's all equaling out. I am proud of myself, having made it into March while still keeping my new year's resolution to exercise more, though to be truthful, there was about a 2 week break when we were moving and didn't have our stuff set up, but moving is quite a bit of exercise its self. So I feel good.

I am keeping myself busy by trying to start a business at etsy.com. I think the name will be Maggie's Closet, and I'm going to make little girl dresses and skirts and probably skirts for women too (see post of last summer when I made a purple one for myself). I love sewing, we all know that runs in the family - on both sides for me, and I want to make some money to fund my crafting habits. I am also an unofficial wedding planner to Brandon's brother. It was a lot of fun to talk with my future sister-in-law and bouce ideas off each other and help her plan out her reception. I have also taken charge of making the wedding cake. Kendra did mine, so I'm just following in her footsteps and hope mine turns out as well as hers. I am hoping to get some more practice in the month or so before the wedding. I'll be heading up to Washington again about a week before the wedding (April 16th) so that I can help with the set up and preparations. I really love doing this stuff, so all you teeny cousins, when you get married in 10 or 20 years, know that I am here to help with your weddings. (Jason, Garet and Trais I will except your applications within the next few years, I won't make you guys wait).

We have been lucky enough to be recruited here by Brandon's cousin Jon and wife Jenna - who is wonderfully crafty and fantastically spiritual, therefore a great friend (Jenna's step mom is actually Brandon's boss), so we even have some friends here. They have a little 2 year old girl that loves to play with Maggie. Maggie is not a big fan of Katelyn though, I think she knows that when little hands are touching her they are not as gentle and sometimes take her toys from her. She's gotten better the more we are around them though. We've yet to see how she does in nursery...we want to wait until she can walk so she can at least hold her own against all the crazy kids.

Speaking of church, our ward seems great! Today was our second week and we've been very welcomed by everyone. We got to meet with the Bishop last week and got our records trasferred over by the end of the day. There are younger moms in the ward that get together and have play groups at parks, which is good to get Maggie and I out and socializing. The samoan ward in the stake actually meets right after ours, so as we are getting out, they are coming in and Brandon has very much enjoyed being able to speak with Samoans again. We were even luck enough to be assigned talks today on personal revelation(mine) and prayer(Brandon's). He of course managed to finish his fantastic talk in less than an hour (broken up by looking at cars and furniture on craig's list) and I took like 3 days. I'm still not totally satisfied as I got so much information that I think it came out a bit disjointed, but I learned so much that I think it works out.

We're super greatful to be here and excited to start a new chapter in our lives (Being grown ups? A real job? Potential to being in one place for more than a year or so? Weird but fantastically thrilling.)