They're famous

My mother-in-law Susanne Scheppmann is a writer and speaker with Proverbs 31, a ministry dedicated to helping and serving women. Proverbs 31 also has a monthly magazine (which I don't get). My friend Laurie called on Monday and said she had just gone out to her mailbox when she noticed who else on the cover of this month's magazine but Emily and Bri! I was pretty thrilled. I still haven't seen the magazine but my father-in-law posted this picture on facebook:

The girls are now famous and will be signing autographs. . . . as soon as they can write :)

Girls, Girls, Girls

It's the strangest thing -- almost all of our friends have little girls. This is the kid make-up of our small group at church: 2 girls, 2 girls, 3 girls, 2 girls, 1 boy, 2 girls. And that's not even counting several other good friends with just girls as well. It's almost freaky. Fun for the girls (and moms) but in 10 years they sure are going to be fighting over those few boys!

The other day I had two friends over who (surprise, surprise) also have 2 girls each. Here was lunchtime, I thought it was just the cutest picture. I only wish Heidi could've been here, then we could've added her 2 girls to the mix as well.

Mom, I know you are so impressed that you see peas on the plate. Even more surprising was that I even ate a few. However, you can see my girls are already chowing down on the rolls, they're no dummies (and unfortunately got their mom's love of bread.)

Here are the older 3. And the younger 3 girls are all within 3 months of each other.

These girls are going to have a blast growing up together. We better start preparing for a lot of giggling and girly stuff, though!

Happy Birthday, Bella!

Our baby is 7 years old today! Well, I guess that would be 49 in dog years. Probably even older for a St. Bernard. We got her when she was 8 weeks old and she looked like a furry raccoon. Here's the night we got her in March 2002 (for Jeremy's birthday).

Here are some pictures from when she was a baby. There were 9 puppies in the litter, we got one of two girls.Even though we complain about her a lot, we've had lots of great times with her. She's been a wonderful dog. She is a "gentle giant" and so gentle with the girls.

Happy Birthday, Bella. We hope to have many more years together. (that sounds like she is going to read this or something.)

Scrapbook Retreat

Some of you have been asking, yes, my weekend was WONDERFUL! I went on my first-ever weekend scrapbook retreat and had the best time. Jeremy came home at noon on Friday so I headed on up to North Branch, which is only about 40 minutes away. A group of us from church had rented out a house specifically designed for scrapbook retreats. This is what we did all weekend: scrapbooked, ate, scrapbooked, slept, ate, scrapbooked, ate, scrapbooked, ate, scrapbooked, slept, ate, scrapbooked, ate, and scrapbooked. If you're not a scrapbooker it probably sounds like a real drag. But it was so fun. We stayed up late, slept in, talked and laughed a lot, lounged around in PJ's and slippers, ate too much, and actually made some progress on our scrapbooks. I am now to June 2008 on the family book, Emily's book, and Bri's book. We all shared the meals so that was a breeze. And of course there were way too many snacks sitting out at all times.

You are also probably wondering if Jeremy survived watching the girls that long. Amazingly enough, he did! He made a couple trips to the McDonald's playland, visited some friends, and even got the girls to church on Sunday! The two best things for me was that he wasn't even crabby about it and the house was actually clean when I got home! Thank you, honey, I can't tell you what a great weekend it was.

Does this look like fun or what? :)

Yesterday

This was my day yesterday:

5:00 a.m. -- woke up to St. Bernard breathing by my bedside, got up to let her out.
5:10 -- St. Bernard did not want to come back inside. She was running the fenceline and sniffing under the deck, I was pretty sure she saw a rabbit.
5:20 -- saw said dog crawl out from under our deck (our deck is only about a foot off the ground, mind you, and I had no idea Bella could even fit under there.)
5:25 -- dog still refused to come inside, I decided to go back to bed.
6:00 -- heard Bella barking to come in, I let her in and went back to bed again.

7:30 a.m. -- typical morning, girls up and fed, cleaning up, playing.

9:30 a.m. -- happened to notice dead rabbit in yard. Now Bella's early morning activities were all so clear. Decided to wait until husband got home to deal with dead rabbit.

11:45 a.m. -- letting Emily run around naked (good potty training technique that had been working so far) finally caught up with me. Discovered her pooping on the coffee table.

3:00 p.m. -- Jeremy asked if we wanted to have some friends over for dinner. After they accepted, I got busy cleaning and making dinner.

4:15 p.m. -- As I was busy in the kitchen, I realized the girls were in the upstairs bathroom with the door closed (never a good sign). It had only been about a minute but I decided I better check it out. I discovered Bri standing on the little potty, digging around in Jeremy's drawer, and she had his razor in her mouth. Not the electric one, the straight edge Mach 3 Turbo or whatever it's called. The kind that would not be great to chew on. I instantly put it on a high shelf in the closet, checked for injuries, and she seemed to be fine.

4:17 p.m. -- I noticed some redness around Bri's mouth. My first thought was lipstick since she'd been playing in those drawers, then I realized it was blood. I think she very slightly cut her tongue; luckily it only bled for like a minute. Thank goodness, it could've been MUCH worse. It makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it.

5:15 p.m. -- Friends arrived, we ate dinner, the girls played, got them all put to bed, and had a great night together.

Silly Bri

Bri is getting to be so silly. She talks so much more than Emily did, and has the silliest grin sometimes. Here she's having some fun with horsey (aka Daddy):

I think this is the "bridge" exercise from Wii Fit, but I'm not exactly sure!

I see we have another "stacker" in the family. She thought she was so funny at breakfast yesterday morning:
This afternoon we took the girls to Adventure Park in Blaine, which is basically an indoor playround. It was pretty crazy there (weekend crowd) but they had fun.

After Adventure Park we went to Broadway Pizza, a new one on Hwy 65. We rarely take the girls out to eat (don't want to deal with them getting antsy) so we decided to give it a try. They were intrigued by a toy train that ran on a track around the restaurant and overall were very good. Until all of a sudden Bri decided she was done and didn't want to sit in her highchair anymore. Luckily we were about finished anyway. And one of my former students from Irondale was our waitress, so that was neat.

Snowmen

Man, was it cold today. The high was supposed to be -4 and the low -23. So even though I was dying to get out of the house, we didn't go anywhere. Instead of making real snowmen we made snowman pancakes for dinner. It was a recipe I found in Taste of Home and looked kind of fun. Here they are:They were banana pancakes, and even though I'm not a big fan of banana stuff, they were actually pretty good. I love pancakes so much, I don't usually want to risk changing the "original" flavor. The girls thought they were pretty fun, too. I think they both went for the chocolate chip eyes first and then the Lucky Charm buttons.
I am never creative with food, so if anyone has some more fun ideas like this let me know!

Bri is absolutely crazy in the bath tub. She is always laying down on her back, even if the water is so deep it's practically running into her mouth. She doesn't mind. Then she kicks her legs as hard as she can, making the water fly out of the tub and usually all over mom. I try to discourage excessive splashing but how can you not laugh? Here are the girls in the tub tonight; do they look like sisters or what?

Potty Training update

I have now survived 3 days of potty training. I'm not really sure what to expect but by talking to other friends, I think Emily is doing pretty well. Today was MOMS group at church so it was fun to hear the potty training stories and suggestions from others. And when I picked Emily up from the nursery, her pull-up was actually dry, so they must've taken her to the bathroom and she actually went. I'm sure she didn't go on her own. Either that or she can go a REALLY long time.

Well, mom always told us "no toilet talk" so I better end with that.

Good laughs

My sister-in-law emailed some jokes the other day, these were my two favorites. Hope you get a good laugh.

Saturday morning I got up early, quietly dressed, made my lunch, grabbed the dog, and slipped quietly into the garage. I hooked the boat up to the truck, and proceeded to back out into a torrential downpour. The wind was blowing 50 mph, so I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered that the weather would be bad all day. I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into bed. I cuddled up to my wife's back, now with a different anticipation, and whispered, 'The weather out there is terrible.' My loving wife of 10 years replied, 'Can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that?'

A woman is standing nude, looking in the bedroom mirror. She is not happy with what she sees and says to her husband, 'I feel horrible; I look old, fat and ugly. I really need you to pay me a compliment.' The husband replies, 'Your eyesight's darn near perfect.'

Potty Training

I am at the end of my first day of potty training and I am exhausted. Emily has a long way to go but overall the first day went pretty well. Could've been better, could've been worse. After a couple accidents, I got Bri down for her nap and Emily and I hung out next to the potty for a couple hours, watching videos and playing games, and drinking lots of juice. After that there were no more accidents until one incident after dinner when I left her unattended for a minute. That's why I'm so exhausted, I feel like I can't leave her alone at all or she'll just go in her underwear! Oh well, it'll come.

Mom asked me today what we did this weekend. I had to think, what DID we do this weekend? I scrapbooked at church Friday night, and on Saturday Jeremy had an appointment, and then we went to some friends' house for dinner. On Sunday afternoon we decided to take the girls sledding at a park we'd seen near Bunker and Hanson. On Jeremy and Emily's first trip down she got a face full of snow, so I don't know if she was too keen on the idea. I took Bri with me and we had a pretty good couple of runs.

Then the girls were done sledding, they had seen the playground next to the sledding hill and wanted nothing more to do with sledding.

Dog Food

On Thursday morning I was getting ready to take the girls over to a friend's house when I heard a noise down below. I came down the stairs to discover the girls making a big mess of the dog food.

Bella was happy, though. She usually never eats dog food that's not in her dish but she must've been hungry that morning. I, of course, was not that happy. I told Emily she needed to start picking up the dog food or we would not be going to Molly's. I went back upstairs to finish getting ready, then I heard more dog food being dumped. This time the whole bucket had been emptied out. Now mom was really not a happy camper. Both girls were confined to their cribs while mom cooled down a bit. After a couple minutes the girls were removed from their cribs to help with the clean-up. And needless to say we did not go to Molly's either. Who knows if Emily really understood the consequences but it was worth a try. Even though usually mom is the one more desperate to get out of the house than the kids!

All day long Emily (who HATES picking up toys) would be very good about picking up, then say, Molly? Nice try. Hmm, I think maybe she did get it. :)

9 years ago today

9 years ago today, I walked into my 6th period Precalculus class at Roseville High School. The principal's secretary met me at the door and told me that the principal needed to talk to me, I assumed about the summer school classes I was teaching. She said she would watch my classroom while I was gone. I went down to Mr. Rygh's office and talked to him for about 10 minutes or so, then headed back up to my classroom. When I opened the door the students were silent (a rare thing when the teacher is gone) and there was a basket on the floor in front of me. Someone said, Read the note in the basket, Ms. Traudt. So I picked up the basket, just stared at the note inside (I was too in shock), then said, What do I do? A student called out, I have something for you, Ms. Traudt. I proceded to walk around the room and collect a rose from each girl and an apple from each boy. "Back at One" by Brian McKnight was playing in the background and after a few minutes I finally noticed our friend Schmitty and Jeremy's brother Darryl, plus another friend Chris Grabowska videotaping. I pretty much knew what was going on at this point but was still in shock. This is the last thing you would expect when you walk in your classroom on a Wednesday afternoon. Especially since Jeremy and I had broken up six months before and we weren't even back together. After I had collected all the roses and apples, Jeremy walked into the classroom, got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him. How could I say no in front of all my students (who I absolutely loved, by the way) ?? :) Needless to say, we didn't do much math that day.

There is much more to the story but I just wanted to give you a glimpse of that wonderful day 9 years ago that totally caught me off guard. Jeremy sure gave those boys in my class a tough act to follow. And he has not stopped since.

Wii fit

Hope you all had a great New Year's! We had some friends over for New Year's Eve and had a lot of fun playing Buzzwords, Loaded Questions, and the Wii. And of course ate too much. Today was a lazy day around the house and Emily had fun imitating us on the Wii Fit. Here she is doing snowboarding and yoga.
I think Emily can do the "Triangle" pose better than we can!
Here are a few pictures of the girls playing in the snow on Tuesday.

Bri just wanted to sit and eat it. . .

while Emily would rather swing.

Doesn't Bella look giant here? I know she's not exactly small, but the depth perception of the picture is funny, comparing her size to the girls.