Merry Christmas Everybody!

Merry Christmas, everyone! From the three Sprengelers of Duluth, we pray that you had a great Christmas and continue to celebrate in the weeks to come. I always love how some radio stations play Christmas music all December long. I also experience a big let down on Dec 26th, because those same radio stations decide to go back to the everyday music at midnight. I jumped in my car this morning expecting some Nat King Cole or something...and instead I was innundated with Queen. Oh well.

Here are a few Christmas pictures to share.

As any toddler would, Julia loved presents. Her favorite part was ripping the bow off and shredding it into little bits. Thanks to everyone who sent or gave us gifts. Sorry we had to miss the big Riesgraf gathering, but my being on call necessiated our staying home. Thank God I had just enough time to leave the hospital and go to Christmas church, eat the nummy dinner Mike made us, and open gifts with Julia. (I got paged back to the hospital about two seconds after we put her to bed.) Amazing how that stuff works out.)
Julia loved her new Noah's Ark toy. She takes pride in feeding all the animals. After dinner, she helped herself to some leftovers and was found to be "feeding....num num" to a pair of little plastic monkeys....

We love Christmas!
the Christmas dress. Julia did the classic "little girl thing" on Christmas Eve....lift up her dress and show her panties and diaper to everybody. I guess it's fun to do that. If I had a big poofy dress like hers, I"d be tempted to flail it all around, too.

Getting things ready for Christmas

Julia's list of stuff to get ready for Christmas:

1. Christmas cards. Need to decorate the envelopes.


2. Pants, chair, and floor must also be decorated. Use stickers left over from Christmas cards.

3. Taste-test cookie dough to make sure it is up to my exacting specifications. Use measuring spoon.

4. Relax and enjoy ice-cold milk while Papa makes the cookies. Then eat finished cookies.

Medicine....

Oh I feel guilty....our special little internet blog is suffering on my behalf. Don't give up on us!

I'll just drop a note to say that we're all still alive and well....although the fridge is empty, the laundry pile has reached the ceiling, and we have yet to get the Christmas cards out. Have no fear...my big streak of call nights slows down come Monday.

One piece of great news: I have finally figured out sodium homeostasis. Get this: if you are dried out (dehydrated), it is probably because your kidneys are losing too much salt....and your sodium is LOW....and you actually need SALT (and some water)! THAT is why I had a coke and a bag of ruffles (with ridges) for lunch today. Ha!

tune in next week for some more nerd talk......
-S

Jesus!

A funny thing happened today. We were decorating our tree for Christmas and Julia helped us. It was a fun time...she loved helping and got very excited. She does this thing now where she'll just start dancing around for no reason, even when there's no music playing. It's really cute!

Anyways, we went over to a friend's house earlier this evening and Julia, who was sitting on my lap, began pointing at a Santa Claus doll on the top of a bookshelf. She got really excited and jumped up and down (right on my bladder, mind you)....I could tell she wanted to say something and just couldn't get it out. Finally, the words came to her: "JESUS, JESUS, JESUS!!!" She shrieked.... It was true. My daughter was pointing at a Santa Claus and thought HE was Jesus. Our friends got a good laugh. This one is going down in the books. I guess she is a wise girl. Jesus was also a Jolly Man who brought good tidings to the earth. However, when he comes back to earth, I don't think it will be in a sleigh......
Julia puts ornaments on the tree. She noticed that there were popcorn and cranberry strings on the tree, too. So, being the brilliant little girl that she is, she decided to take the popcorn we were eating and throw big handfulls of that on the tree, too. I guess I couldn't blame her. It looked pretty cool when she was done!

SNOW!!!!!

Well, it came! On Saturday, we got 20 inches of snow. What a great blizzard. Not as ridiculous as the four feet of last year, which is nice. I am happy to say that a measly twenty inches is very manageable compared to what we got last March. The snow couldn't have come at a better time. I happened to be on internal medicine call, and came home in the evening for supper just as the snow started really falling. Two hours later when they tried to call me in, I was snowed in!!!!! YAY!!!! I managed patients from home and turfed the admits to the hospitalist. Jesus loves me. I slept ten hours that night. :)

Pictured here is our new pride and joy...I finally caved and let Mike go and buy a snowblower. He drove it...and drove it...and drove it. Our neighbors are tickled pink about the whole deal.
Psymuhn looks rather serious for this shot. I think he was thinking about the leftovers in his dish that was hidden under the cupboard....
Miss Julia has a few hundred tastes of the fresh snow. And yes, we had the talk about the yellow snow......
Mmmmmmmmmmm.....

...after the baby sleeps

After Julia went to bed tonight, daddy and mommy had a quiet house...and some time alone.... What better idea that to have some family craft time?

We had to take a picture of the "fruits" of our labor. Ah yes, we spent an hour making a popcorn cranberry chain. I think we ate more popcorn than we strung. And then it was bed at 9:30. Whoa. I remember in college when 9:30 pm was quite literally the middle of my afternoon. And stringing cranberries? Well, yeah...I probably would have done that in college...if I had a cranberry martini or something to go with it.

I'm going to blame this early bedtime and excellent choice of activities on our current (and concurrent) viral illnesses that are Julia's latest present to us from daycare. (Mike closed his eyes for this picture because he's feeling self-conscious about his pink eye.)
I don't have that one.........yet.

Guess What

(May 2008)

A Saturday off!!!!!!!!!

Hi Everybody!
I had Saturday off! That meant daddy could get some projects done and Julia and I could have some quality time together. We started out our day by making Daddy some pancakes while he was in the shower. Julia shakes some cinnamon into the batter. If you look closely, you'll see that Julia is already wearing pancake batter on her new jammies. She loves to eat batter.....who doesn't?After breakfast, Julia and I went to Cub to buy a turkey. (Grandma Beth and Grandpa Dick are making the trip to Duluth for thanksgiving dinner!) Then, it was PETCO....our free zoo....where Julia gawked at the turtles and parrots. Her favorite animals: the mice. She was fascinated that seven of them can all run on the excercise wheel at the same time.

After we got home, Julia took a THREE AND A HALF hour nap!!!!! (mommy and daddy had no intention of waking her up). She woke up just in time to "help" me knead the bread for supper. We had homemade chicken noodle soup, which Julia fondly calls, "noosoop."

Then, after dinner, it was dancing! Julia is quite the dancer...here she gets down to "Baby Beluga," her current tune of choice. What's up, G?
Julia is jammin...

Mommy is catching up....

I apologize....I have been a delinquent blogger. Furthermore, I have no recent pictures of my child to upload to this thing. Before I start telling myself that I am a negligent parent, I must remember that I have hundreds of pictures of Juila plastered on this website...and a thousand more photos (some of them incriminating.....;) on the hard drive. So, here's what we've been up to in the Sprengeler household. I also must promise this: later this week, we'll be posting a picture that you will certainly get a kick out of. I promise!

FRIDAY
Friday was the day before my birthday, and since I was on call on the actual BirthDay, we celebrated the night before. We went to Red Lobster (YAY for cash back bonus gift cards!) and ate some seafood. I didn't know what to order, and I knew Julia was hungry, so we got the "all you can eat" shrimp special. Good thing I did! As soon as the food came, Julia's cute little brown eyes turned into little red daggers: "SHRIMPY SHRIMPY SHRIMPY SHRIMPY!!!!!"

What little toddler doesn't adore.....shrimp? By the time I got her plate loaded up with shrimp scampi, she was already helping herself to the fried shrimp on my plate. I gave up cutting them in half. It was good enough to pull off their tails before Juila-zilla gobbled them up. The waitress came back two minutes later to refill our drinks and noticed that my entire order of shrimp was gone. I think I had about two, which isn't much when you're eating "shrimp." The clincher: when the waitress said "hi" to Julia, all Julia could say (with a mouth full of shrimp, mind you) was "more." Needless to say, we got our money's worth that night.

After that, we went to this indoor arcade down the street to play some games. Julia discovered DDR. (Dance Dance revolution, a Nintendo game where you follow cues from the TV and dance to a songg...for those of you who haven't had the pleasure). She jumped right up on the stage and started Jammin. She was bobbing her whole body with the beat and occassionally would shake her little diapered butt for us. I have NO IDEA where she learned that. (Perhaps daycare? Miss Barb, her teacher, is not likely the guilty party....) At any rate, Julia had a crowd of teenagers watching her Jam! If you have ever been to an arcade and seen those little asian people doing amazing moves on DDR and there are a million people standing around gawking....you can get an idea for the audience this girl could generate.

SATURDAY
Well, we did manage to make it to Target even while I was on call. Julia picked out a pair of purple boots and refused to take them off for the remainder of the weekend. We also learned to avoid the toy section at all costs.....

SUNDAY
This morning was Sunday school and church. Julia was being "active" during the service, so I held her and started pointing things out at the altar like the big picture of Jesus, the candles, the pastor, etc. I thought I had done and OK job...she paid attention for five whole minutes. When we were done, she pointed up toward the front of church and said, "Jesus....love you!" (Mommy smiled).... Anyways, after this divine and beautiful moment, I took her up to communion. When we were sitting at the rail and pastor Franck came to give us the host, Julia pointed at him and said, "Jesus...Jesus...Jesus!" Oh dear. He took it in stride, blessed her, and went along his merry way. We have some work to do.

Today, after Juila's nap, we took a trip to the Menard's in west Duluth. Our Menards is notably the largest Menard's in the world! Wow! What a claim. Daddy was very excited. He had a whole list of things to get and it was my job to babysit. Julia noticed the "Christmas Land" display they had set up.....aisles and aisles of Christmas stuff. They had a kids play area with (I am serious) a kid-sized plastic roller coaster thing. Julia discovered it and fearlessly jumped into the car and off she went. It was all fine and dandy until she drove her roller coaster car into an unsuspecting eight year old boy. I'm sure he was fine, but I'll never know...he ran off screaming in terror. I feel kind of bad about that.

I threw Julia into a plastic demo wagon and we went looking for Christmas lights to put on the outside of our house. We don't have any outside outlets, so Mike was trying to figure out a way to rig up an extension cord from the lone outlet in the garage. Julia was trying to be helpful and was grabbing any lights she could find. I was putting away some of her discoveries when I saw it: solar-powered Christmas lights! No outlet needed! We were sold.

Sunday night at our house means pizza and TV (Veggie Tales; Rack, Shack, and Benny) and then bed. Well, that was for Julia...Mommy and Daddy uploaded a couple episodes of Desperate Housewives while she slept.....

Have a good day everybody. I'll get a picture or two up later this week!

Rosie's Wedding

Last Saturday, we drove down to "da cities" for a friend's wedding. Rosie Daak, our buddy from college, married Andy Olson. We had a naughty toddler at the wedding (think "Pretty! Pretty! Hot!! Hot!!" in the middle of the ceremony) and a hilarious toddler at the reception. We as a family love dancing. Perhaps we should start partying with the college kids in town on SAturday nights. We could go out dancing...the three of us...and scare all the scantily clad drunken college coeds off the dance floor. Ok...I was getting side-tracked. Here are some pictures from the wedding. Thanks, Joy, for the use of your camera. We forgot ours in Duluth. :)

Julia is rockin out on the dance floor. She likes to find her own spot on the floor and get down with the beat.....Julia and Joy.
Our family dances to Love Shack
Julia Jams down another piece of cake. At our table, we ate our cake so fast that the waitresses thought they had missed us! So, they brought another round of cake without realizing we were having a second helping. ha ha ha. Good thing round #2 was chocolate!

Pew!

We had great plans to make Julia into something a little more feminine for Halloween this year. Daddy would make a cute princess outfit or something. There would be pink and fluff....or something. That was the plan until we found this skunk suit at half price. It was just too fitting to pass up. She is such a little stink bomb. It was meant to be. Besides, Julia loved her skunk suit. She wore it willingly and danced around the living room after we put it on.

We went trick-or-treating with Julia and she lasted over an hour! We actually ended up coming home because Mommy and Daddy were freezing. Julia, on the other hand, just kept shrieking, "Treeeeeeeeeat!!! Haweeeeeeeen!!!" And shaking her arms vigorously. I think Julia deserves an award for "most holiday spirit" this Halloween. It was pretty much the best evening of her life, thus far. Not bad for eighteen months....Mommy and stinky baby
Julia and Sawyer, our little neighbor boy. We went trick or treating with him and his twin brother, Aidan, for about twenty minutes before they got sick of it.

Julia likes to steal Sawyer's toys....and he doesn't really fight back. Quite the relationship if you ask me! In this photo, you can see Julia contemplating how she is going to steal that baby bottle from his clutches.
and yes....she did.

I think we have more pictures of the back of her than the front. A skunk waddling down the street. Julia didn't want to be carried.
We were trick-or-treating with Aidan and Sawyer, the twin boys that are Julia's age who live next door. Julia was always first on the doorstep...except she just wanted to explore other people's houses. She would walk right past the candy bowl and waltz into the living room of the unsuspecting candy-givers. I got a nice look at the inside of a lot of our neighbor's houses...
Julia and Daddy cut into the pumpkin.... Five points for mommy and daddy! Notice that Daddy has a butcher knife....and Julia has a spoon!
Ew! Pumpkin guts.

Weekend trip!

A weekend away! This past weekend, I attended a dermatology conference in Brainerd. Julia came with and daddy stayed home to work on a project. I met up with Grandma Beth and Auntie Annie and we spent the weekend in a cabin. There was also a pool with a waterslide. There wasn't a lifeguard on duty, so Julia and I went down the slide over and over again. I had to chase her up the stairs because she would actually get on the slide and attempt to slide away without me if she could. One time, I caught her in the nick of time. She was sitting at the top and pushing off.....I can just see it now: "Eighteen month old child flies off of waterslide and lands in hot tub. Mother is incarcerated for negligent parenting...." Needless to say, there were no pictures taken. We were there for 2 1/2 hours and looked like prunes when we left the pool.

In the cabin, Julia and I got the upstairs area and there were these two tiny little closets that Julia LOVED. The doors were barely three feet high. I didn't know they made tiny little doors. Julia made us knock before we could come into her little baby lair. I wish we had these at our house!
Julia slept on a mattress on the floor. She liked her huge bed.
This is what Daddy does when the ladies are away. He built a "train station" out of Julia's blocks. I think we need to get Daddy some legos.... By the way, the train station lasted eight seconds after I snapped this picture. A little monster came and tore it to shreds....

Eating

Just looking through our most recent photos, I noticed a trend. We have a lot of random pictures of our child....eating. Here is a small selection:

1. At the Olive garden, eating right out of the big salad bowl with Mama (everybody else got the never ending pasta bowl. Julia and I had a never ending salad which was quite fun indeed.) Notice the napkin/straight jacket....2. Eating some spaghetti creation at home (mommy and daddy look TIRED.)
3. CORN! Julia's favorite. She is trying to decide if she should eat the whole cob or just the corn part.
4. My favorite: homemade chocolate pudding. Shortly after this, Julia put the dish on her head, but Papa was having an M.I., so I had to stop her instead of taking a picture. I can't afford to lose him at such a young age..... ;)

Visitors from St. Cloud

This weekend, we had visitors from St. Cloud. Mike's entire family made the trip to Duluth for a visit. It was nice to see them!! Before John, Jenny, and Tim left, we headed to Famous Dave's for some ribs to celebrate Tim's birthday. Julia gnawed on the ribs like she was a wild dog. She growled, gnashed her terrible teeth, rolled her terrible eyes, and showed her terrible claws. (Sound familliar? :)

CORN!!!!! EEEEEEE!!! Julia's favorite. She chewed through two cobs.mommy and her ribs (and a paper towel tucked into her shirt)
Tim's birthday sundae: Julia and Dave helped her eat it up... (This is moments before she dropped a gooey lump of sundae on Timmy's lap.)


Random picture of Julia modeling her leopard print jacket....

A saturday!

Yesterday was a great day. Julia and I spent the morning at Hartley Nature Center, where we went a bit "off the beaten path" and did some hiking. We also did a tiny bit of swimming, but I was too ashamed to take pictures of my daughter wading in the lake in October. Let's just say a great time was had by all. After that, it was home for a nap and then our ceremonial monthly $100 trip to Target. All in all a good day. It was so good, in fact, that we decided to have supper at McDonald's. I kid you not: Julia ate one and one half double cheeseburgers. Whoa.

While we were out walking, Julia decided she wanted to study soils. Although you may think she did, she did not fall down, she laid down on purpose and played in the dirt/soil. She also examined the grade of the gravel and threw some rocks off the path that were obviously "not acceptable."
Here, my nature guide explains why the moss grows on the north side of tress.... She also recommended that I find myself a walking stick.

Ahhh...the monthly trip to target. Julia rode on Daddy's shoulders because the cart was too full to carry her. This time it was diapers, Halloween candy, cleaning supplies, and groceries. I wish we had a super target...then I could save a trip to the grocery store.

Notice the static electricity around J's head.....