Heart problems

We took Odin to a dog park today. It's a park that's fully enclosed so you can let your dog off the leash and just let them run around. Odin chased dogs for an hour and passed out on the walk home. It was so cute watching him!

Alyssa went to Urgent Care yesterday and we found out she has something wrong with her heart. It's something to do with an incomplete right bundle branch block or something like that. Just a little electrical malfunction. It's not serious, but it explains why she sometimes has panic-attack symptoms like a high heart rate or feeling dizzy and faint. She's going to wear a monitor for a few weeks and they're going to see what they can do.

Shoes and Bathroom!

Two things awesome happened yesterday. First, Odin fell in love with these great Spiderman velcro shoes that light up in the heels when you walk! He loves 'em. They're so cool. We tried them on and he screamed when we took them away so we had to get them.

Secondly, we got Odin some Pull-ups and we've begun potty training him! Every time I go to the bathroom, he watches. We stand him on a stool and pull 'em down so he can see, and when we're done we pull 'em up. He already associates so many things with what he wants; the fridge with food, the bedroom with toys, etc. So we want him to point to the bathroom door when he needs to go and get the stool if he's ready. It hasn't worked so far, but it's still fun teaching him!

Words and Weening

Odin doesn't nurse at all anymore. He still whines for it sometimes, and claws at Alyssa's shirts, but most of the time you can distract him and he's fine. His favorite food lately is PBJs. He has lots of words, too. He knows that the oven gets hot and he shouldn't touch it. If food is hot, he'll tell you that he can't eat it yet. He says Cool when something cool happens. Bucket is his favorite word right now because we got him a huge toy been and made a game out of cleaning up his room. You can ask him for specific things and he'll fetch them for you. We asked him to put the yellow block in the bucket and he did. Then we asked him to get Alyssa's phone and he brought it to us. Then he was playing with my keys and he lost them and I was looking for them so I asked him to get them and he went and found them for me and brought them to me. When he can't get through a door, he'll ask for keys and if you give them to him, he'll try each one until it works.

I have a beenup2 now. Beenup2 is a service for hosting your photos. It's like an album and it can show you things about the picture, like when it was taken or where. The cool thing is, you send pictures from your phone right as you take them. It's a way of showing your friends and family what you've been up to. Since we don't get the internet much to upload new photos, and I don't always have a camera with me, it's my new way of keeping track. I'll still take pictures with the good camera and put them in the albums we already have, but this I can do more often because I only need my phone. Here's a little badge they generate:

Checkout what I've BeenUp2!

Times have been a little hard lately; because of the move we didn't get our food stamp renewal stuff so we had to fill out the forms late and we still haven't got them (should've gotten them on the 6th). We're surviving. Friends and family are helping us a bit with food but it will be so nice when we don't have to worry about it. We get our financial aid money in 2 weeks or so, so even if we don't get the food stamps for some reason, we'll be able to buy groceries. Plus, we'll have more money this term beause we're both 2nd year at the U of O so we'll be fine. And we'll even have enough money to buy plane tickets so Odin and I can finally meet Alyssa's dad.

Pictures

I haven't uploaded any pictures in a while because I haven't been taking any. But I just noticed this cool new feature a few minutes ago. The web album site we use, Picasa by Google, just added face recognition. You can see a list of people in our pictures here. It's pretty decent technology, but I bet it didn't get all the faces. I used to use the tags to label who was in the pictures, but this was fun too.

For example, here's all the pictures tagged with my brother, and here's all the pictures faced with my brother.

Updates....

Haven't posted in a while so I figured I would.

Odin has got all kinds of words now. He says "ba" for his bottle because we've weened him. He knows "dip" for dipping food in various sauces. He distinctly calls me "dada" now. He's really smart too; he figures stuff out. When he can't get through a door, he says "keys" and he'll take the first key ring he finds and try it on the door. Also, this morning I told him to go find his pants and he went strait to them and tried to put them on!

We're having a bit of trouble with him though; he seems to have hit the terrible twos a little early. He hits people intentionally and when we tell him not to do something, he just laughs and does it intentionally. It doesn't really bug us much, we're dealing with it fine, but its a little concerning. I started putting him in time-outs in his crib and it seems to be teaching him what he can and can't do. He's still really destructive though. He'll get anything out of any drawer or cubboard and play with it, even if it's dangerous. He opens the dishwasher to stand on the door and get up onto the kitchen counter, and we're constantly finding him on top of the dining room table. He takes any chance he gets to pull something off a shelf and throw it all over the floor, and he always goes places he's not supposed to. Plus, he's so fast that if you leave the front door open for only half a second, he'll get out, go up the stairs, and be inches away from the street by the time you catch him.

We're really feeling the hurt from moving now. All our money is gone. Luckily, every bill is payed, and we get our Financial Aid money again at the end of September, so our only problem is that we don't have any "play" money. But we're working on that.

Our band, Odyssey is doing well. Alyssa and Emily have been re-mastering some of the songs and re-recording a few vocals. We're getting reviews on GarageBand and Soundclick. Alyssa is helping me finish a song I wrote on my guitar for the band and they're rehearsing one of Alyssa's new songs. Speaking of which, Alyssa has some new songs up on her page if you care to listen.

We've got all our classes picked out and we're really excited about them. I don't want to get into detail right now but I'll describe them after the first few days of class. We're doing the same thing this term as our last terms; we alternate who has class and who watches Odin. This term, there is one overlap for 2 hours on Fridays but our good friends Ann and Emily are going to come out and watch him when that happens. The bus is literally 20 feet from our front door and it leaves as an express strait to and from school every 10 minutes so we barely have a total of half and our of transit each day, compared to our 2 hours each day when we were going to LCC.

I really like not having the internet, its helped our family grow together better. And I don't mind long posts like this; I think it actually works rather than tons of small posts that don't seem important.