Timmmbbberrr!!!

Except no one actually says that when a tree falls on it's own. We were all inside today when we heard a big crash. A tree had fallen in the backyard across the deck (where we actually had all been just minutes before). It was a holly tree whose bottom part I guess was kind of rotten or something so the big wind we had today just knocked it over.
So I've been working on a bed in the backyard. I think it's finally finished (assuming everything lives). Here's the progression: first you have to imagine all the contents of these five GIANT trash bags are...
...covering everthing in this bed:
I got it all cleared out, and Matt bagged it for me.
Then Mom and I went and picked out more plants for it. There was already an azalia bush and a gardenia bush that had survived our complete lack of care, but there was still a lot of space for more plants. We got two hibiscus bushes and some marigolds. The marigolds are hard to see in the pictures, but they're this beautiful dark red/orange color.

Here are some absolutely gorgeous/precious/cute/beautiful pictures of Joanna:
Watching Daddy trim down the hedges.

I wanted to get a picture of this ensemble on Joanna, but she wouldn't stand up for me. Gran had to help. I love this outfit and the little shoes -- so grown-up!
After Wal-Mart. She's clutching my wallet and the receipt. Funny little girl.
This is after rubbing some kind of food in her hair to make it stick up. I love the face.
Interesting (to me) things about Joanna at almost 13 months old.

• She has stood independently a few times for a few seconds at a time.
• The child LOVES to dance. Sometimes her little bottom even anticipates the music before it comes on. If she's standing, her bottom sways back and forth. If she's sitting, her whole body goes up and down. It is soooooo cute!
• Sleep is not going so well for us these days. She's fighting it a little at night, which is unusual, and she's waking up very early. If we're lucky, she'll take two 30 minute naps during the day. If we're not so lucky, it's just one. Yuck.
• I love her, but she is frankly grumpy a lot (lack of sleep, maybe?) and very clingy. It's a good thing she only weighs a little over 16 pounds.
• I pulled out some warm weather outftits from last summer/fall that I think are going to fit her again this warm season, including her swim suit! Why am I still buying clothes for this child? ('cause they're so cute!)
• Joanna's been alive for almost 13 months, but she's had her first cold, fever, and injury all in the last 3 weeks. Bizarre..or maybe not.

I'm sure there are more, but my mind is wandering. Stop by and visit -- see the amazing Joanna in person. She'll love the company. I bore her, I think.

Gardening vs. Yard Work

What's the difference? I guess they're basically the same thing, but "gardening" evokes an image of playing in the dirt and beautiful flowers where "yard work" brings a picture of rakes and shovels with sweaty brows and piles of leaves and debris. I think I'm currently working on the latter, with visions of gardening in the near future. Our back yard is a mess and for some reason, I'm suddening addicted to getting it beautiful. I have spring fever! We have this one huge bed within a little "copse" of three trees surrounded by lush monkey grass. It has a gardenia bush, a small azalia plant, and lots and lots and lots of weeds, debris, and horrible nasty prickly vine things. I've been obsessed the past couple of days of clearing out all the leaves, pine needles, and prickly vines. I want the nice little bushes to be free to grow and be beautiful. I'm also trying to pay attention to whether the bed is in full sun, partial sun, or shade so I know what kind of plants to add to it. I think I'll add some kind of flowering bushes. Once I finish this project, there's lots more ugly backyard to tackle. I find weeding and clearing the junk out very cathartic. I of course put on gloves; I even had to swap my gardening gloves for Matt's work gloves for the prickly vines. They are horrible!
Joanna's been helping me some; she'll sit in her stroller for a little while, as long as there's plenty of snacks and a drink. I'm looking forward to when she can be outside with me just walking around. She's gets bored pretty fast in her stroller, and I get tired of holding her (and she gets tired of being held). I have visions of my sweet little daughter padding around in her tennis shoes, helping me play in the dirt and water the flowers (or maybe she's eating the dirt and pulling up the flowers -- hard to tell).
Sorry this post has no pictures. I will try to bring my camera outside tomorrow and capture the progress of our backyard. Matt's supposed to help me bag some of the junk I pulled out of the bed -- yea!

Bed head and gardening

I guess it's not technically bed head if the child goes to bed with the funky hair -- I guess that's "bath head." I sort of figured it would flatten out overnight. It didn't. I think this picture of sweet Joanna this morning is hilarious. I know I mentioned this in the last post, but Joanna definitely has her first cold. She has the whole snotty nose, congestion, bark of a seal thing going on. She was actually a pretty happy baby today. It doesn't seem to be a really bad cold (of course I don't have it, so what do I know), and Joanna is being a real trooper. This sure hasn't been her month though: first injury, first fever, first cold. Yuck.

Spring has sprung in our front yard. I know it's not technically spring yet, but hello people I live in Houston -- it's getting hot! My mom and I planted impatiens today. We cleared out the beds, mixed in good dirt and stuff, and put the plants in. I'm so excited -- we finally have done something to our yard after living here for 15 months! (I have excuses if you want to hear them.) Here's our newly beautiful "landscaping:"

Red impatiens where there used to be dead leaves, purple cabbage stuff, and who knows what else. I hope they do well here!!

White impatiens where there used to be even more dead leaves and some non-thriving rose plants. We transplanted the roses to a more sunny place -- I hope they survive. We also ripped out some dying monkey grass that was surrounding this bed on the front. We may end up putting some kind of brick or stone around it, but for now...We were originally going to plant the ferns in the ground, but decided to hang one and put one on a little bench -- I like how it creates some "levels" on the porch.

Nothing too much interesting here.

I haven't taken any pictures to post, so this one's just talk. Joanna has her first little cold. Matt gave it to her. I guess if you're going to get a cold, Daddy's is a pretty good one to get. She's coughing like a little baby seal -- it's so sad :( She's also a little congested, quite tired, and certainly grumpy enough. Her nose isn't runny though, which is really good.

I do not like the time change. I think it's silly to keep moving hours back and forth. Joanna doesn't get it, which means that it makes life HARDER. She already isn't sleeping so well these days. I'm sure it's just a phase of development, but she's soooo tired and clingy. She isn't sleeping long enough at night (I think so, anyway); she wakes up very early and grumpy. Her naps are like 20-25 minutes lately, and she wakes up grumpy and still tired. Today my mom was home and let Joanna sleep on her this morning -- she slept for 1 hour and 15 minutes! It definitely made for a happier Joanna (and Mommy).

We went and got some flowers and plants and soil for our front beds today. Then it proceeded to rain actually every minute of the rest of the day. I'm hoping tomorrow we'll be able to attack those nasty front beds and beautify them. When I say "we" I really mean my mom with me watching and helping with heavy things.

My dad and step-mom are driving down this week. The plan is that they will be here Thurs-Sun or so. I'm very excited for them to come. They haven't seen Joanna since November when we flew up there. She was pretty fun then, but she's really cute these days (except for the tired clingy fussy bits).

Joanna is doing this sort of cute /sort of annoying thing where she reaches her little arms out to you so you'll pick her up. When she does it to other people I think it's really cute. When she does it to me for the the 497th time today, it's kind of annoying. Especially when she's halfway across the room from me and is so paralyzed in her anquish that she can't remember that she knows how to crawl to me very well.

I have a feeling that Joanna's new clingy phase definitely has something to do with being tired, but it also has something to do with the fact that we're weaning and possibly also growing teeth. And getting sick more. Being one is hard work.

Sleeping and voting, but not at the same time.

Joanna's sleeping pattern has changed a bit recently, and I think my body just hasn't caught up yet. I've been staying up too late getting things done, and waking up (too) early because Joanna feels like it, I guess. She's really not waking up that early -- it's a pretty reasonable time, and I don't mind, but I've been feeling sooooo tired the past few days. Finally yesterday when I layed Joanna down at around 2:45 for a nap, I crashed too. I woke up at about 4:00 (!) to this lovely picture: I was expecting to hear Miss Joanna and get up from my nap about 27 minutes after I layed down, but my wonderful mother heard her first and grabbed her. Joanna just needed some snuggling, I guess, and they both fell asleep for a while longer. It was so precious!

Yesterday evening Matt and I headed off to vote in the primary election(to different polling places for different parties!). Joanna came with me and was such a trooper! The line was pretty long, and I had to stand in it twice because I had to fill out a statement of residence. You know, because I moved over A YEAR ago. Oh well.

Happily sitting in the stroller with a snack.

Mommy and Joanna voting for some candidates. We had fun, and I got sooooo many comments on how beautiful, smart, well-behaved, precious, etc. Joanna was!

If your wondering who took this picture: Matt got finished voting in like 5 seconds and went home, so I called him and made him come get the baby after I had to go back to the end of the line. When he got there we were almost done so he and Joanna hung out while I finished.

We left Humble after some shopping...

...and over two hours later got home. It was horrible. It was miserable. But we made it. Laura, Joanna, and I were on a shoe mission in Humble this afternoon and headed home about 3ish. I could see that both the highway and the exit for Kingwood Dr. were backed up, but we decided to stay on the highway. If we had only known... Apparently there was a truck fire on the highway just after the Northpark exit, and the highway, all 4 or so lanes of it had to exit Northpark. I believe it was about 3:30 when we passed the Kingwood Dr. exit. It was about 3:45 when we passed the sign that said "Northpark exit 1 mile." It was about 5:20 when we finally exited at Northpark. I believe many of you know that riding in the car is not one of Joanna's favorite things. Sitting in traffic, hot, with no milk, strapped into her carseat is seriously not one of her favorite things. She was so sweaty by the time we got home (our van does not have air conditioning). She perked up a bit when we got home, but what a really yucky way to spenk two hours! I actually had a couple of magazines in the car, which we read. I took pictures of random things. Laura fed Joanna 8 thousand Cheerios 'till we ran out. We handed Joanna toys and shoes and books which she threw one by one to the floor. We listened to our song play CD. And we sweated. Luckily it was a beautiful day. If we'd been moving, the breeze would have been lovely. Here are my random pictures from the "drive" home:

Yea! We're close, right?

Joanna in the rearview. Tick, tick.
Crossing over Kingwood Dr.

Tick tick tick. Tick tick tick tick.
Finally cried herself to sleep about 5:00.
We can see it!
Almost there!

Here are some pictures of us actually having fun today! We headed to the park because it was soooo beautiful outside and Joanna seemed a little stir crazy.She kept wanting to ride the "quack, quack."Sliding and swinging are fun...She looks so tiny! She really loved swinging all by herself.Laura's head is like a drum.These next few are from Thursday. I just love this little strawberry outfit!"Where's Joanna?"

Much better days.

We've all been doing much better since Tuesday. I woke up Wednesday feeling completely back to normal, and Joanna was acting fine, too. We made it to Bible study, and had fun playing and running errands in the afternoon. Joanna did have a little Tylenol on Wednesday; we're pretty sure her face was hurting. Even though she's pretty discolored between the eyes, she's acting pretty much back to normal today. She even slept 1 1/2 hours for her nap at school today!!! Oh, my goodness!!! I will post some pictures of her healing face and other fun things soon, but now I'm going to go eat girl scout cookies.