What have we been up to?

Well that's a pretty easy question.  Nausea, Nausea, and more Nausea.  But there are signs that it may be remitting (knock on wood).  By signs I mean that Angela made it 3 hours today without having to be  lying still with her head in a bowl. We'll take it though.

So what have Christine and I been up to with Angela out of commission-- well we play a lot of doll house (a Little People doll house with a Little People barn).  Fortunate for Christine I'm teaching her to play doll house like a boy, action-adventure style!

Dora and Christine-Doll

First, we are against gender stereotyping our dolls; we are also against species discrimination and discrimination of a doll because it may be height advantaged or disadvantaged (like Dora and Christine-Doll who are the right height for the dollhouse but don't quite fit into the little people furniture) This may be due to the fact that for a while we only had a few properly sized figurines for the doll house and they consisted of a farmer and his farm animals.  Thus we had the animals playing all the roles a normal human doll might be better suited to play. When Nana sent us a new Little People airplane which came with properly sized tourists and flight attendants, Christine fired the tourists and flight attendants on the spot. As an equal-opportunity employing agency, we were proud to hire on a sheep and a pig to be captain and copilot.  Sophie the giraffe was hired as the stewardess.  However, due to her disproportionate size (she takes up the entire cabin) she must enter into through the roof, and the pig and sheep must not fly too rambunctiously because Sophie is top heavy and will fall out.

The usual adventure goes like this.  Dora builds a Lego bridge (The big size lego blocks that are easy to put together but also fall apart very easily) from the roof of the barn to the roof of the house.  Dora is kind of a show-off and runs across the bridge, but when she gets to house roof, the bridge has inevitably collapsed.  Christine then shouts, "Uh-oh Dora roof again!" This is a signal for the rescue team to fly in.  Sheep, Christine-doll, and Sophie are dispatched and the airplane flies to get Dora off the  roof.  The airplane has a special hover feature that allows it to hover over the roof so Dora can climb in.  

Occasionally the airplane is out of commission so we must build a Lego tower.  On a recent adventure, a huge Hello-kitty doll was dispatched to the scene and used her huge pink, beach bucket to climb up to the roof.  

Lately though Christine has wanted in on the action and will attempt to climb the bridge or tower on to the roof herself.  Realizing the instability of the dollhouse, she simply places her foot on the roof, "Uh-oh Christine roof again!"  The adventure team never backs down from a challenge though, sheep was able to successfully lower Christine's foot off of the two-story doll house.

Other doll house innovations have been a lego swimming pool (complete with diving-board and slide) that turns into an elevator complete with a "computer room" compartment for pig, sheep, and Christine-doll to "play the ipad" in.

Over the last few weeks Christine has shown us how sweet and good-natured she is.  There have been a few times that I have had to leave my poor wife by herself.  When she has needed to run into the bathroom, little Christine follows in-toe bringing her her lemon water, her prego pops, and other things she thinks mommy might need.  It is so sweet how fast she has picked up on this.  We have not directly taught her any of these things, but she is quick to say, "Mommy sick. Need medicine."  She will always run in and give her Mommy a hug and prays for her every night.  We truly have the sweetest little girl.  We love her so much.  I only hope this next one will be just like her.

One other memory we want to remember from this time stems from the Little Critter book "The New Baby." Christine loves little critter, and in this book Little Critter's mom brings home the new baby. Little Critter doesn't know what to do with a new baby, he tries to show the baby his games and toys but the baby ignores him, he even tells the baby his best joke. For some reason, Christine fixated on that idea. "Tell joke!" and even made up her own joke. I had just put her in her crib for the night and she asked for some water as she does every night. She names the type of water she drinks by what cup it is in, "pink water" or "Egg water" (an Easter egg cup) or "hello kitty water" and that night when I brought her some "pink water" Christine says "HOT DOG WATER! ha ha ha ha!" she was laughing her head off at her funny joke. So now whenever we are talking about the new baby Christine always says "Christine tell new baby joke. Hot dog water! ha ha ha!" She's no Jim Gaffigan but she's on her way.