Just Another Weekly Update...

The past week has been pretty standard for us. Since my last post on Monday afternoon, I am happy to report that we all survived the stomach virus and everyone is feeling normal again. We all went back to work and daycare on Tuesday, so the rest of the week proceeded as usual.

Sarah had a good week. No accidents to report, so that always makes for a good week as far as daycare goes. She brought home lots of art projects from the week, and she played outside on the playground a good bit as well. And of course, she had her weekly session of preschool music on Wednesday. This weekend she spent the day Saturday with Duane while I enjoyed some girl time with some friends. They went shopping at the mall and then went swinging at the park.

As far as her latest skills and development, she is continuing to bring so much joy to our lives with her little personality! Recently, she has become OBSESSED with the Baby Einstein series of videos (we call them "movies" around our house). Every day, she insists on watching at least 2 of her movies, and if it is a weekend, we basically watch movies all day long! She does have a good attention span for them, I'll give her that much. She just loves the puppets and she enjoys dancing around to the music that goes along with the movies. She is actually learning a good bit from them, so I guess it could be worse. She tries to repeat the words that she learns on the movies, and she is getting slightly better at recognizing the parts of the boody (thanks to Baby da Vinci). She has also learned quite a few more animal sounds. Initially we worked on the cow, the sheep, and the duck. She has mastered those, and has also added the dog and the bird sounds. The dog sounds like "oof-oof" (she can't do the "w" sound) and the bird is "twee-twee." She is getting pretty good at using "mama" and "dada" correctly these days. The past couple of weeks, she has really started using the word "baby" alot, and she uses it correctly and in context. This weekend, she added "juice" and "cheese" to her vocabulary. These words sound almost identical when she says them, and I won't even attempt to spell them out phonetically for you, but she uses them appropriately and we know what she means when we hear them. Sarah has also become quite the little helper around the house. She is good about picking up her toys after herself, she LOVES to put her dirty clothes in the hamper in her room, and she also enjoys throwing trash away in the trash can.

As for the lives of Allison and Duane, well...our updates are not nearly as exciting as Sarah's! My piece of good news is that I was offered an on-site interview at the CRO company in Durham, so I am really excited and hopeful that this will work out for me! I will be interviewing Friday, Feb. 22nd, so I will not have any job updates until that time. This weekend Duane and I actually went out to dinner without Sarah! Our friends Paul and Kim offered to babysit Sarah while we went out for an adult dinner at The Village Tavern on Saturday night. Sarah actually went to bed before we even left the house for our dinner, so at least it was not too stressful for Paul and Kim...maybe they'll be willing to babysit again sometime if Sarah is always that easy to manage! At any rate, it was nice to get out for some time together for a bit, so hopefully we will be able to do things like that more often now that Sarah is getting older.

The upcoming week won't be much different than most others. Sarah has a Valentine's Day party on Thursday, so we will spend some evenings this week working on making Valentines for all of her classmates. Saturday evening we are supposed to be going over to another couple's house for a little Valentine's get-together. I think there will be 4 or 5 couples there, and we are all bringing the kids so they can play together while we all visit. Otherwise, it is just work as usual for us.

Hope everyone has a great week and a Happy Valentine's Day!