Thought this was pretty funny....nothing like a new diet plan!
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
A visit from Megan, Derek, and Allie
We had visitors from the cities over the weekend. My classmate from med school, Megan Gladen, her husband, Derek, and (most importantly) their two-year-old, Allie came for a visit! Julia was just elated to have somebody to play with for the whole weekend!!!Julia and Allie are sharing a cookie. Julia is smiling for the camera, Allie can't because her mouth is too full of cookie....
Yes, it rained all weekend, but that didn't stop us! We gave the girls umbrellas and set out for a walk in the rain.
Morton Salt commercial, anyone?
Wet feet
The girls found a wet monarch butterfly in the UMD parking lot and are examining it very carefully. And NO, they did not decapitate it or rip the wings off!!!! It actually stayed whole, and when they were done looking at it, Julia gently put it in the grass. THIS is the difference between little girls and little boys.... A butterfly would never survive two two-year-old little boys....
As if there wasn't enough fun to be had already, Julia found a "swimming pool," which is actually a run-off basin for the huge parking lot. She begged to "go swimming, mama???" Natually, since her papa was nowhere to be found, I allowed her to go in, and took pictures. We got a good laugh.
Soon, the jeans were saturated and slowing her down...so off they went. At least I made her stay in the diaper.
No commando today.
Soon enough, Allie was in the water, too. Megan made the comment that we were two physicians standing in a cold, wet parking lot, allowing our two-year-olds to play in a big pool of run-off.
....a picture of health!
Of course, a bath was in order. A vertical bath.
...I have no idea why this picture did this. I have a love-hate relationship with this computer, and I have to pick my battles. The rest of the pics came out right, so I will just pretend that everything looks just fine. :)
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
hooray for computer skills...
Hi-
To start things off on a good foot, I would like to share my excitement with you: I just figured out how to post more than one picture at a time on the blog. You got it...I don't have to sit there and click every minute or two while I wait for each individual picture to upload. Now, I can pick up to EIGHT of them and then come back to the blog in five minutes and they are all there!!! Yippeee!!! (Ok...now you can stop laughing at me. I am pretty sure most other bloggers out there have already made my discovery, but give me some slack and share in my joy.)
Here are a few shots of the girls (and one of Mike that I probably should have deleted and that probably will be deleted when he reads the blog...) We spent the weekend cleaning up the house and also spent some time at a friend's house. The girls are such a joy. I miss staying at home with them, so when I get the chance, I skip doing everything around the hosue and just play with them. Tonight we decided to go to the UMD parking lot and play with Julia's bike. Mary had a stroller ride. What a fun time it was....except for when Mommy was on the phone with grandma Beth and Julia escaped to explore the huge, fenced-in air conditioner for the entire campus. Getting her out of there was a treat.....
Here's Julia hanging out in a papasan chair. I think we need to get her a bigger t-shirt.
I love this one....she looks just a little bit evil. Deliciously evil...
Riding a trike...
Here are some pics of Miss Mary. She likes the camera, and we were bored.
Mike's gonna kill me for this one.....
To start things off on a good foot, I would like to share my excitement with you: I just figured out how to post more than one picture at a time on the blog. You got it...I don't have to sit there and click every minute or two while I wait for each individual picture to upload. Now, I can pick up to EIGHT of them and then come back to the blog in five minutes and they are all there!!! Yippeee!!! (Ok...now you can stop laughing at me. I am pretty sure most other bloggers out there have already made my discovery, but give me some slack and share in my joy.)
Here are a few shots of the girls (and one of Mike that I probably should have deleted and that probably will be deleted when he reads the blog...) We spent the weekend cleaning up the house and also spent some time at a friend's house. The girls are such a joy. I miss staying at home with them, so when I get the chance, I skip doing everything around the hosue and just play with them. Tonight we decided to go to the UMD parking lot and play with Julia's bike. Mary had a stroller ride. What a fun time it was....except for when Mommy was on the phone with grandma Beth and Julia escaped to explore the huge, fenced-in air conditioner for the entire campus. Getting her out of there was a treat.....
Here's Julia hanging out in a papasan chair. I think we need to get her a bigger t-shirt.
I love this one....she looks just a little bit evil. Deliciously evil...
Riding a trike...
Here are some pics of Miss Mary. She likes the camera, and we were bored.
Mike's gonna kill me for this one.....
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Our littlest girl is already three months old!
Mary is growing like a little weed. She has almost outgrown her 3-6 months clothing...and she just turned the big "3 months" on Saturday. What an overachiever. Her current interests include "tanning up big girl" (standing excercises), batting at her toys that hang above her head, and giving kisses...with her tongue. She also longs for mama and papa to let her sample the watermelon when we're eating some. I can't believe how big she is already. It seems like only yesterday that I was desperately mowing the lawn....
:)
:)
Sunday, August 31, 2008
1200 miles
Hello out there!
We are home again. The last week in the Sprengeler household has been quite eventful, albeit long and rather arduous. Mike and I took a week off and drove all over rural MN looking at potential practice locations. 1200 miles later, we are finally home. Before the week started, we had already checked out Grand Rapids, Park Rapids, and Staples. We are blessed to have such willing grandparents, aunties, and uncles to watch our kiddos while we drove all over the place, visited hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and towns, and spent some time with some truly great people. Monday was Ortonville, Tuesday was Paynesville, Wednesday was Mora, Thursday was Perham, and Friday was Long Prairie.
All in all, we were really excited and impressed with rural folks. They are such nice, generous, down-to-earth people. I am thrilled that we have jobs that can go anywhere...even a tiny town in the "middle of nowhere." Now we just have to decide. I think we will probably take a second look at a few places and have our minds made up by Christmastime. Now I have to sit and write out a million thank you cards for all the tours, homemade dinners, gifts, etc. Perham even babysat Mary for us while we toured!
...and if that wasn't enough to do in a week of craziness...we decided to make Saturday our annual trip to the State Fair. The camera died before we got in, so I sadly don't have any pictures. We did make it eight hours with Julia, who actually fell asleep in her stroller while sitting up, with her head drooping forward onto a metal bar. It was pretty funny. The new food at the fair this year (which I did not buy) was "chocolate covered bacon on a stick." Ew. I wonder if it was breaded....
We didn't get the bucket of Sweet Martha's cookies and do the Moo Booth (all you can drink milk) this year because it was just TOO crowded...but we did manage to eat:
Kettle Corn
Foot Long Hot Dog
a TWO foot long HUGE corn dog (whoa...)
Frozen Apple cider
a Gyro thingy
Deep Fried Candy Bar on a stick
Frozen Coffee thing
Mini Donuts
Fresh Potato Chips (a bowl the size of your head...)
...and FOUR things of cheese curds between six of us, plus Julia.
ugh...I should never do things like making lists of the crap I ate at the fair. That couldn't be a healthy move. So much for the postpartum dieting.... ;-)
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Back to the grindstone....
Well, here's an interesting story for all of you out there in blogland...
This week marks my first week back at work. As sad as it is, I have to face the fact that my maternity leave is over and I have to work again. However, as I am reflecting back on the last eleven weeks of my life, I am reminded of a few happenings that make me glad to be back in the hospital and not in my living room with two small children. The following story and photo date back to a couple of weeks ago. I was going to skip putting this one on the blog, but looking back, I have decided that it needs to get posted cause it's just too funny...and it would be a crime not to share it with you.
It all started with an ambitious mommy. I decided to run out to WalMart to buy some quilt binding for the quilt we had made for the LIC auction. So, for the first (and only...) time ever, I took both girls out alone into retail land. We arrived at WalMart and found what we needed. Julia walked beside the cart, Mary was content in her car seat. Julia only ran away once or twice, and we made it out OK. This is where I should have quit while I was ahead. But NO....I had to think, "Well, they're being pretty good! I should reward Julia with a trip to see the Thomas the Train set at Barnes and Noble."
So, we stopped by the mall and went in. I took the girls over to the play area where the Thomas set is. There were a LOT of moms there with their kids (way more than usual), and I had to sit on a shelving stool in the corner to feed Mary her bottle. I watched Julia out of the corner of my eye. A few moments after Mary began to eat, Julia disappeared to the other side of the children's section. As I was trying to mobilize myself while feeding Mary, a yuppie-ish, thin, stern-looking, million-dollar outfit wearing mom came over to me and said, "your child is over there."
"Well," I thought, "Julia must be amusing herself somehow." I thanked the lady. She did not look pleased.
Minutes later, I was dragging Mary in our huge double stroller across the children's section to find Julia. Unbeknownst to me, it was the "Tuesdays at 11:00" story hour. There is a stage with little benches around it for the story hour. The whole kids' reading area at B&N was decorated in a state fair theme, complete with little stuffed animals in paper fences, carnival rides made out of tinker toys, and game booths made out of tagboard. It was really neat, and it looked like the storyteller was about to begin. Then, I saw Julia. She was up on the stage, grabbing as many of the little stuffed fair animals as her arms would hold. The little horses and the chickens had been abducted from their made-up pens and held ransom by my two-year-old. If that's not bad enough, Julia had an audience. Not just any audience, but an audience of forty-something mothers of two perfect children dressed in babyGAP clothes with patent leather shoes and sweater vests. They were all sitting perfectly on their little benches, waiting for the story to begin. Behind them sat their mothers with their Starbucks coffee, glaring at my daughter like she was the ............
I abandoned Mary and grabbed Julia from the stage, which instantly caused a blood-curdling scream and a tantrum from my darling oldest daughter. I took her back to the corner and told her that if she didn't shape up, we would go home. That was my second mistake: I should have skipped the bargaining phase and gone straight to the "strap the toddler in her carseat and drive straight home: phase. I think I was weak because now Mary was wailing from the stroller...she was hungry and her dinner had been rudely interrupted twice now. I left her for another minute, went up on the stage, and replaced the stuffed animals to their temporary homes.
Then, I took the girls down to the other side of the children's section by the trains. It took me several minutes because I had to push the conversion van-sized double stroller across a crowded room again. Julia said that she didn't want to listen to a story and that she wanted to play with trains. So, I sat down again to feed Mary. This lasted two seconds. Julia ran back across the children's section AGAIN...and I had to drag Mary back across, this time abandoning our stroller and still feeding the infant. When I got back to the stage, the story lady was reading a story to the kids...and I stopped in horror when I saw what my kid was doing: she had grabbed a book on her way over and was standing on her tippy toes in front of the story teller, "reading" a different book aloud, trying to overpower the storyteller lady. I am not kidding. Now, imagine the looks I was getting from the yuppie patrol in the audience.....
I did what I had to do. I put my beautiful innocent infant on the floor. I ran up to the stage and scooped up my terrible twos toddler...who promptly had an enormous fit and turned her body into a screaming, wrything wet noodle. I dragged her across the kids' section, leaving Mary where she was, alone on the floor. I had to drape Julia across the stroller becasue she wouldn't sit up (wet noodle thing again). I went back and grabbed Mary, who was also screaming (now her bottle had been ripped from her grasp three times). On my way out of the children's section, I tried to put away all of the merchandise that had made its way into our stroller.
As we were leaving the store, I noticed one more piece of merchandise in our stroller: a pink book with a bunny on the front. Oh great, another kids book. Just what we need. I also noticed it had a clearance sticker for five bucks. I thought, "I am rather high-profile at the moment with these screaming kids....I can't just throw it onto a display...I'd better buy it or they will never let me back in here."
So, I went up to the cashier and threw the book on the counter. He was young and rather good-looking. He immediately asked me if I wanted a gift receipt. I told him "no...it's for us." I should have known something was amiss when he shot me a really weird look and then a tiny little smirk. What was this cashier-boy thinking? I have two screaming kids and I want to get out of here and get home....just take my credit card and let me run home!!!
Well, he handed me the book and out we went. I threw it in the back of the car, and after I got home and banished Julia to her bed, I went back out to the car to get the kids book that she had selected. This is what I had purchased:
If you can't read the little grey fine print, it says, "How to Walk, Talk, Tease, and Please like a playboy bunny." AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!
Anybody want a free book?
This week marks my first week back at work. As sad as it is, I have to face the fact that my maternity leave is over and I have to work again. However, as I am reflecting back on the last eleven weeks of my life, I am reminded of a few happenings that make me glad to be back in the hospital and not in my living room with two small children. The following story and photo date back to a couple of weeks ago. I was going to skip putting this one on the blog, but looking back, I have decided that it needs to get posted cause it's just too funny...and it would be a crime not to share it with you.
It all started with an ambitious mommy. I decided to run out to WalMart to buy some quilt binding for the quilt we had made for the LIC auction. So, for the first (and only...) time ever, I took both girls out alone into retail land. We arrived at WalMart and found what we needed. Julia walked beside the cart, Mary was content in her car seat. Julia only ran away once or twice, and we made it out OK. This is where I should have quit while I was ahead. But NO....I had to think, "Well, they're being pretty good! I should reward Julia with a trip to see the Thomas the Train set at Barnes and Noble."
So, we stopped by the mall and went in. I took the girls over to the play area where the Thomas set is. There were a LOT of moms there with their kids (way more than usual), and I had to sit on a shelving stool in the corner to feed Mary her bottle. I watched Julia out of the corner of my eye. A few moments after Mary began to eat, Julia disappeared to the other side of the children's section. As I was trying to mobilize myself while feeding Mary, a yuppie-ish, thin, stern-looking, million-dollar outfit wearing mom came over to me and said, "your child is over there."
"Well," I thought, "Julia must be amusing herself somehow." I thanked the lady. She did not look pleased.
Minutes later, I was dragging Mary in our huge double stroller across the children's section to find Julia. Unbeknownst to me, it was the "Tuesdays at 11:00" story hour. There is a stage with little benches around it for the story hour. The whole kids' reading area at B&N was decorated in a state fair theme, complete with little stuffed animals in paper fences, carnival rides made out of tinker toys, and game booths made out of tagboard. It was really neat, and it looked like the storyteller was about to begin. Then, I saw Julia. She was up on the stage, grabbing as many of the little stuffed fair animals as her arms would hold. The little horses and the chickens had been abducted from their made-up pens and held ransom by my two-year-old. If that's not bad enough, Julia had an audience. Not just any audience, but an audience of forty-something mothers of two perfect children dressed in babyGAP clothes with patent leather shoes and sweater vests. They were all sitting perfectly on their little benches, waiting for the story to begin. Behind them sat their mothers with their Starbucks coffee, glaring at my daughter like she was the ............
I abandoned Mary and grabbed Julia from the stage, which instantly caused a blood-curdling scream and a tantrum from my darling oldest daughter. I took her back to the corner and told her that if she didn't shape up, we would go home. That was my second mistake: I should have skipped the bargaining phase and gone straight to the "strap the toddler in her carseat and drive straight home: phase. I think I was weak because now Mary was wailing from the stroller...she was hungry and her dinner had been rudely interrupted twice now. I left her for another minute, went up on the stage, and replaced the stuffed animals to their temporary homes.
Then, I took the girls down to the other side of the children's section by the trains. It took me several minutes because I had to push the conversion van-sized double stroller across a crowded room again. Julia said that she didn't want to listen to a story and that she wanted to play with trains. So, I sat down again to feed Mary. This lasted two seconds. Julia ran back across the children's section AGAIN...and I had to drag Mary back across, this time abandoning our stroller and still feeding the infant. When I got back to the stage, the story lady was reading a story to the kids...and I stopped in horror when I saw what my kid was doing: she had grabbed a book on her way over and was standing on her tippy toes in front of the story teller, "reading" a different book aloud, trying to overpower the storyteller lady. I am not kidding. Now, imagine the looks I was getting from the yuppie patrol in the audience.....
I did what I had to do. I put my beautiful innocent infant on the floor. I ran up to the stage and scooped up my terrible twos toddler...who promptly had an enormous fit and turned her body into a screaming, wrything wet noodle. I dragged her across the kids' section, leaving Mary where she was, alone on the floor. I had to drape Julia across the stroller becasue she wouldn't sit up (wet noodle thing again). I went back and grabbed Mary, who was also screaming (now her bottle had been ripped from her grasp three times). On my way out of the children's section, I tried to put away all of the merchandise that had made its way into our stroller.
As we were leaving the store, I noticed one more piece of merchandise in our stroller: a pink book with a bunny on the front. Oh great, another kids book. Just what we need. I also noticed it had a clearance sticker for five bucks. I thought, "I am rather high-profile at the moment with these screaming kids....I can't just throw it onto a display...I'd better buy it or they will never let me back in here."
So, I went up to the cashier and threw the book on the counter. He was young and rather good-looking. He immediately asked me if I wanted a gift receipt. I told him "no...it's for us." I should have known something was amiss when he shot me a really weird look and then a tiny little smirk. What was this cashier-boy thinking? I have two screaming kids and I want to get out of here and get home....just take my credit card and let me run home!!!
Well, he handed me the book and out we went. I threw it in the back of the car, and after I got home and banished Julia to her bed, I went back out to the car to get the kids book that she had selected. This is what I had purchased:
If you can't read the little grey fine print, it says, "How to Walk, Talk, Tease, and Please like a playboy bunny." AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!Anybody want a free book?
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Random fun from the weekend
Papa and Mary enjoy the beach together.
I'm not sure what Mike is doing...perhaps attempting a smile? See the last photo in the blog for comparison....
Beach exploration
Our hedge that we planted a few years ago is finally starting to give us some fruit! The Nanking Cherries are supposed to be bitter...but are sweet enough that you can eat them right off the bush!
Farmer Julia attempts to smile with the sun blasting her in the face........
I think I know where she got this expression from.
I'm not sure what Mike is doing...perhaps attempting a smile? See the last photo in the blog for comparison....
Beach exploration
Our hedge that we planted a few years ago is finally starting to give us some fruit! The Nanking Cherries are supposed to be bitter...but are sweet enough that you can eat them right off the bush!
Farmer Julia attempts to smile with the sun blasting her in the face........I think I know where she got this expression from.
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