Pictures of my kids, mostly asleep

Liam was pretending to be asleep. I can back five minutes later and he was really asleep.

Alana was confused by Christmas ribbons.

Alana kept escaping from her room and refusing to take a nap. Eventually she curled up in our bed and crashed.

Liam is obessed with Mariokart lately. You can see the wheel under his arm.

She's sleeping on the Elmo sofa that's bent backwards. She's also got her foot propped up on the wall.

Found her like this one morning.

Random nap.

And of course, she keeps sleeping in the closet.

We're alive!

Sorry about the silence for the past while. We've been trying to settle in. The house we renting is great, but it needed a lot of painting and tlc since it hasn't been lived for a year. The fun part has been rooting out all the spiders that have taken up residence (Seattle spiders-yikes, they're huge).

The trip was not so fun. The truck had a power problem on day two, Alana got sick and threw up all over me in a Chinese restaurant in Baker City, the same restaurant that caused Justin and I and also poor Mike and Risa to have food poisoning, I stopped taking all my meds and went off the deep end, and the kids have stopped having a regular sleep schedule.

When we got to the house, Alana walked into the house, looked around, wandered back to the garage and buckled herself back into her car seat. It took a few weeks to convince her that we're staying here.

Since we're been here though, things have calmed down a little and been enjoying the wonderful weather. It's rained a little bit for the past month, but it only rains on average 5 days in July. I take this as more proof that Stephenie Meyer did absolutely no research as it's actually quite sunny June through September and on the summer solstice has nearly 17 hours of sunlight. It's been a nice 65 degrees most of the time, the highest we've gotten so far is about 78.

We've done a few fun things. Justin and I took the kids down to the Ballard locks to watch the water being pumped into and out of Lake Union and the salmon ladders. The fish didn't want to co-operate and we didn't see any of them jump. We also have been a few of the million parks around here (seriously, there's a ton). There's also a local YMCA that we've joined that has a fun pool. I have plans to do more in the next few months especially we live 5 miles from the zoo.

I expected things to be way more expensive here. On average, some things will be a little more expensive, but there are actually several things that are a lot less like seafood and chicken. Also since so many stores set their prices nationally, many things that we've bought cost the same here as Utah. I also figured out that since we've moved to a state that has no income tax and there's no tax on food in King County, we're actually paying less in taxes than we did in Utah (which has a @$#% flat tax and rescinded the lower tax on food). I drive a lot less here since everything I need is within a three mile radius. I also can do a lot more comparison shopping since I have two grocery stores within walking distance and four more I can drive to in less than five minutes.

All in all, I like it a lot better here than Utah. I haven't missed it at all and every so often here's some crap that happens like this that makes me thankful everyday that I don't live there anymore.

On the other hand....No, there is no other hand

50 points if you know where the title of this post came from

So last week I posted about some of the things I'm excited about in our upcoming move to Seattle (this Saturday, YAY!). Here's a post on the flip side: Things That I'm NOT Going To Miss About Utah. What? That's not the flip side? Eh, I don't really care.

UDOT. Enough said.

Snow. While I like white Christmases, I don't like snow starting in October and ending.....well, I'll let you know when it finally ends this year.

Hot summers. This is made worse by the fact I don't sweat, I RASH like crazy.

Annual winter/spring smog. I have to keep a bag in the car because I *literally* get sick sometimes when I leave the house.

The city that I live in. Let's face it, it sucks.

The school district. One of the reasons I pushed for the move so much was because Liam will be entering school soon. The Alpine school district bites, especially for special need kids.

Mountains. They make me feel very claustrophobic. Weird I know.

Mormon culture. Utah people are odd and xenophobic.

The Right Wingers that run this state. While I know there will be Republicans in Washington but Utah ranked third most conservative state in US (the first two were tied). The ones that especially piss me off are the ones that ASSume that since I don't agree with them, I must be stupid/uninformed/emotional. And then (since most of them are Mormon) when I get mad about THEIR rudeness, they'll quote a 2006 conference talk by Elder Bednar about choosing not to be offended and that "I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive...." This does nothing to piss me off less. Apparently I'm not allowed to get offended when YOU say something rude and offensive. Rant over.

Xeroscaping. I hate looking at brown and gray. It's depressing.

Aridness. It's too @#$$%^@# dry here.

This is not a comprehensive list of the things I will not miss about Utah; it's just the least offensive ones. I've turned off the comments because I'm sure I've pissed off someone (see paragraph re: Elder Bednar's talk) and I don't really care what you think. If you're someone to bitch about this list, chances are you are among the reasons I will not be missing Utah.

Things I look forward to in Seattle

Rain. I'll probably get sick of it, but I like rain.

Fresh seafood. The only thing you can get around here is mutant trout from Utah Lake.

The kids being in separate rooms. Then hopefully they will sleep a little better and not tear their room to bits every morning.

A fenced backyard. With no deer running around to strafe the ground.

Furniture buying. I'm excited to have my OWN furniture that is not whatever we could scrounge up while we were in college.

No having to drive forever to get to anything. The closest decent grocery store is 10 minutes through some very nasty construction; Target, Costco, and frankly anything else is 15 minutes plus. The freeway currently takes 30 minutes to get to.

Asians. The area we're moving to is 22% Asian.

I knew I wasn't that creative

Today Google informed me that if he was still alive, Roger Hargreaves would be celebrating his 76th birthday today. Hargreaves is the author of the Mr. Men and Little Miss books. I LOVED these books when I was in Singapore, but when I moved here, no one knew what I was talking about so I started to believe that I had imagined the whole thing. Nice to know that I wasn't crazy.

Hargreaves also inspired me to write my own story about the Heart Family and two siblings named "Sweet" Heart and "Black" Heart. Sweet Heart was a little goody-two-shoes and Black Heart was a criminal (not so) mastermind who often got into trouble leading to cardiac arrest from their uncle "Brave" Heart. Give me a break, I was 10.

Amusing things-geek edition

Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen

So I was ready for a change (other than moving to another state and possibly trying to start my own business) and I decided the best way to do that was to cut my hair.

Let me explain about me hair. I have alternated between having long, silk tresses and making terrible, terrible hair choices. I had long hair until I was 11. I cut it in a blunt cut to about mid-back (that one wasn't so bad). Two years later I cut it up to my shoulders (that was bad). Then I grew it out again. Got it layered which was okay, but had way to many layers around my moon shaped face. Grew it out again until it was lower back and evened out the layers. I had it long from my last year of high school until I got married three years later. It was long and spiral curled at my wedding, which would have looked gorgeous if it hadn't POURED. Donated it to Locks of Love shortly after marriage. Stupid hair person grabbed the whole ponytail and CHOPPED it up to my chin. 18 inches gone in two seconds-I cried. Grew it out a little bit. Then PERMED and dyed it RED. Both really bad mistakes. Grew, and grew, and grew it out again. Dyed it back to black (which looked really funny because it was kind of purplish) and cut off the by this time very fried ends. Forgot about it while I was pregnant. It grew in the meantime over the next four years to this:

My hair isn't stringy normally, it was just wet in this picture. Click on the pic to see that it's past my butt.

So I went with my sister in law to this really cute stylist, Leanne in Orem. She's Japanese so she knows how to deal with Asian hair. Asian hair is more coarse than Caucasian, the shaft is completely round (which is why Asian hair is usually stick straight) and while sometimes not thick, usually has a lot of body. The problem that I have is that stylists try to cut my hair and then just hairspray things like the bangs in place. I wanted to get a lot of layers, but not too choppy and I still wanted longer overall length. I also didn't want a lot of layers around my face, which is really popular with Asians right now, because I didn't want to look like a mushroom. I'm not that great at explaining hair stuff, so I brought some pictures and Leanne seemed to understand what I was trying to get at. I sat down, and she made the initial cut (the hair that is going to Lock of Love) and handed me a foot long ponytail. I was very proud of myself- I didn't cry this time. Leanne is still finishing the salon in her basement, so we had our haircuts in her kitchen and there wasn't a mirror to watch. So after a lot of blind faith and prayer I looked and saw this:

I have a few dark spots on my chin from some recent acne. Anyone know of any good products to take care of that?

I LOVE it. It's exactly what I wanted despite my crappy explaining skills. Here's the back:

It's a little bit shorter than what I want now, but it'll grow quickly. My head feels about 10 pounds lighter and I'm now going to save a fortune on shampoo and conditioner. Yay!