We Have a Foundation :)

Thursday, July 31, 2008



We have been very busy lately keeping up with the construction of the house and having my sister Sam with us. Emma calls her "Meem" so I call her Aunt Meem :) They poured our foundation early this week and little changes have been happening ever since. The houses in the neighborhood have been going up really fast once the foundation is poured, so we are super excited for the progress.

As for the girls, we have been enjoying our time going to the pool, eating out at girly places and watching chick flicks. It's great to let loose with a girl again...makes me miss the roomate days! (I'd never thought I'd say that!)

Aunt Sam

Friday, July 25, 2008

I am so excited to have my sister here! She arrived Thursday and is going to be here with us for 3 weeks. She just graduated from high school and is going to BYU-Idaho in the fall, so I'm really happy that she has the time now to spend with me before her life gets really busy. The last time she visited Emma was 7 months old, like in this picture. It took Emma all of an hour to get used to her this time, and already she calls her by name and goes to her for whatever she needs. She's even said her third sentence to her "I get you" haha. Fun times ahead!

So Call Me Chicken

Wednesday, July 16, 2008


Homemade cotton flannel baby wipe












Pins, vinyl covers, diapers (prefolds)













All of the homemade baby wipes I made












And this is where I need your help - what do I do with all of these fleece patches?








Ever since I heard a few cloth diaper fans talk about how great it is, I've secretly wanted to give it a try myself. Why?

1. Emma doesn't have diaper rash, but she has this rash (eczema) where the leg openings of the diaper meet her skin, and I thought that natural fibers might clear that up.

2. I heard that babies who wear cloth diapers potty train faster because they can feel when they're wet and want to be changed.

3. I've always been a do-it-yourself"er" and thought it would be neat to not have to rely on buying diapers and wipes (yeah, and it's cheaper, but that wasn't really my main concern).

4. I have been trying to implement anything "green" in our lives that I can and have been trying to consume less because of rising prices and to do our part in saving energy.

5. I found this website that talks about the basics of cloth diapering and I figured that I could get everything I needed just to try it for a week for about $30.

6. My Grandma and Mom did it, so why couldn't I?

Note to self here. If cloth diapers were so great, disposable ones wouldn't be the mainstream diapering choice!

I lasted 3 full days cloth diapering. Yep, I'm a big chicken. I just knew that I could keep doing it if I wanted to, but that I would eventually quit, so I figured I'd just quit now haha. This was easy, by the way, since Emmanuel didn't want me to do it from the beginning.

So why did I quit?

1. Poop! If your kid has consistently solid BMs, this may not bother you. But washing a messy cloth diaper out in the toilet is just plain shitty.

2. Every time you change your kid's diaper, you get your hands dirty. (And you're scared to death of stabbing them with a pin.) As soon as you take off the vinyl pants, the insides are all wet. The pee distributes all the way up the front and back of the diaper. Then you have to find a place to put it and the wipes so you can do the clean diaper...

3. The soaking unit. Until you wash the diapers, they have to stay soaking in soapy water. For me, this was the breaking point. On day 3 when I went to wash them, I had to try not to puke as I held back the dirty diapers and dumped the soaking water into the toilet. Then, I washed the diapers with bleach and HOT water, and they still smelled icky and one was stained bad, so I washed them twice, on double rinse cycle, just to be sure they were clean. I still don't think I'd ever use those ones as burp cloths or mouth wipers.

So, in conclusion, I'm a chicken, but as long as we can afford it, disposable diapers are my friend and will be with any subsequent children we have.

And since I made the baby wipes to stay within that $30 budget, I have to figure out what to do with the yard of cut-up fleece I never used. I learned after cutting and testing that regular fleece is soft, but NOT absorbent, and that it was cotton fleece I needed to buy. Any ideas on what to do with those rectangles of fleece?

Ground Breaking!

Saturday, July 12, 2008


Whoooo Hooo! Finally the day has come! I never knew plumbing could be so exciting :-)


Don't Leave! No Se Vayan!

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Hey! You are not at the wrong blog. We changed our template and decided to grow up a little bit from the Shreks :)

No estas en el blog equivocado. Nada mas cambiamos el tema de Shrek :)

More Pictures/Family Update

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

We have been having so much fun this summer going to SixFlags. The water park is the greatest. Since it opened days, we've been there sometimes three times a week. Emma gets more brave each time I think. She copies me. If I'm a chicken and don't want to get wet, she won't either. A few times Emmanuel has gotten off work early or taken the day off and those are the best times we have there. Emma knows when she sees the landscaped waterfall at the entrance of SixFlags that we are going to the waterpark and screams, "wa-loo!" (water).

Emmanuel's ankle has been healing slowly, but it has been healing, otherwise we wouldn't be able to go anywhere! Since he's had it supported by a brace of some sort for weeks now, it's a little weak on it's own, but he should make full recovery by the end of the year. Other than that, he has been doing a great job at work and at home. Emma loves him to peices. They have their own dance moves together and games they play, and if Emma wants ice cream (believe it or not) Papi is the one who takes care of that. Yesterday he came home with a pizza in hand and Emma almost jumped out of my arms in excitement to see him and the pizza haha. He is exactly the Dad I imagined he'd be years ago when we were first talking about marriage.

I have been very busy clipping coupons and watching sales at the stores (to save $ for the new house!) as well as cooking and cleaning of course. This morning Emma "helped" me make bannana muffins. I try to suck it up that we're making a HUGE mess and just let her experiment and have fun. The baby is growing a lot now by the look of my tummy, and I'm 6 months preggo already. I can't believe it. I feel great and have had very few complaints. I've been doing a lot of reading about the labor process. I am trying to prepare my mind as much as possible for what's ahead. It is a big change of thinking to go from a c-section in a hospital to a natural un-medicated birth assisted by midwives. But I know I can do it or else I would have switched to and OB/GYN by now!

The foundation for the house should be getting poured any day now. It takes them 3 months to construct, so we are still on schedule for October, but I hope they start soon so that closing doesn't overlap with the arrival of our new baby boy.

Emma is talking in sentences, playing pretend, and is just plain growing up! It makes Emmanuel and I so happy to see her enjoying new experiences like the wave pool at Six Flags and getting stuck in the rain and getting all wet. If she sees a puddle in the parking lot after it's rained, she'll go right to it and sit in it haha. On the indoors she likes to play with blocks and stickers and watch Barney and Dora the Explorer. The other day we went to WalMart and they had Dora's backpack and she recognized it and didn't want to let go of it. We had already decided to buy her a xylophone, so we swtiched it while singing songs or something so she wouldn't cry.















Garrido Visit!

Monday, July 7, 2008





Marina, Rigo, Andy, Emma, Paty eating out














Emma at the wave pool - she's wet b/c it poured!













Emma slurping on papi's ICE CREAM!













The cousins at La Cantera













Paty giving Emma pennies to throw into the wishing well







A big beso (kiss) for Andy!