Happy birthday to me!!! I turn a big 36 today. I definitely feel the aches, but I am working on minimizing the pain by more exercise. In fact today, I am going to take a Pilates class. I haven’t taken an exercise class in a while, but I have been looking over the schedule, and it looks mighty inspiring for my 36 year old flabby legs and belly.

Anyways, Nothing else really planned for my big b-day. Tomorrow, lunch with my big bro. I haven’t gone out with him for awhile. Yesterday, after my dad flew in from Canada after attending a funeral, my parents stopped by and took us for to dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. We had this yummy deep fried fish. Too bad, I didn’t have a camera to take a pic.

I really came here to share a fun sledding picture of the kids, instead of blabbing about my birthday. I was trying to let the day pass by without me noticing it, but I guess that wasn’t possible.

Untitled from susieq on Vimeo.

So my mom thinks she knows how I spend my day because she reads my blog. Yesterday when my parent’s came over to see the kids, she tells me “I know what you do all day. I read your blog. I know you scrapbook, instead of focusing on more important things.”

Let me get it straight for you in case you are wondering. I mainly write about happenings in our life, it’s more like a rambling reporting of stuff though. And I do write about my crafty hobbies, but it’s not like I spend 8 hours, everyday doing it, and I don’t neglect my daily house duties either. Jeez! I haven’t even scrapped in over a year. Anyways…

So I am so happy because Elden has been wearing underwear for almost an entire week. On Monday, he decided on his own that he wanted to wear diapers, but also did not want to wear underwear either. I tried to get him to wear them, but he insisted on only wearing pants. I didn’t push any further because at least he didn’t want to wear his diapers either. So that day, we went out for the day. He did great, I am so happy to say. I even dropped him off to daycare, and he didn’t have one accident. He usually does his duty in the morning before we head out for the day. So yep, that’s the big excitement for us this week.

Saturday we attended a swimming party for one of Brennan’s school friends. It was one heck of a long party. They swam for at least 3 hours straight – the party was from 1-4 and then at the last 30 minutes they got out to the cake. Talk about a low maintenance party. I was a little bored sitting around and trying to force myself into conversation. Elden didn’t swim because he was getting over a cold. He was attached to Den that day and after just sitting on a chair for 30 minutes, they both left and ended up walking around the neighborhood. But Brennan had a total blast. I did take a few pictures, but haven’t uploaded to Flickr. In fact, I have taken some pictures this month, but they are all sitting in my sd card.

So I have reached a somewhat light bulb moment in terms of my career in Library Science. I think that I may want to focus more on Reference Services. So now I have opened up my choices a bit more, instead of focusing of being employed only at an Academic Library, I am open to working at a Public Library. But of course, I would love to work at a Museum or an Art Repository, or anything to do with fine arts. I definitely need to start of thinking about of internship experience sometime soon, although it would have to be a paid position. There are actually so many opportunities in the Library field, and I am excited to be part of this world. In the Fall, my schedule will be a lot more flexible, and I will be able to focus more. I am looking forward to having more sleep as well.

I just wanted to share with y’all a short random story about a jar of Nutella and some ants. I came downstairs after getting the kiddos to bed tonight to wash up some dishes. As I approached the sink, I saw to the left of me, a huge circle of ants. We have been having some ant problems since yesterday, perhaps because of the weather changing. I just know that our ant problems tend to spike up when the weather start to change. Anyways, this was a really odd pile of ants because they were literally a huge circular pile, and directly to the left of them was our jar of Nutella. I didn’t see a line of ants going up into the Nutella, but I was still worried that perhaps they already jumped into the jar. So I picked it up to open, and fortunately there were no ants inside the Nutella. The really weird thing was that when I picked up the jar, the ants split off in two different groups. One group ran off in a single file line up toward the wall, and the second one basically went berserk. It was really an odd thing.

Yes, I realize that there is a weird red squiggly mark in place of where my blog title should be.

I finally took the opportunity to watch “Brokeback Mountain”. This was actually my second time borrowing it from the library, but I didn’t have to time to watch it last time. Actually, I should say, I didn’t make time to watch it. It such a sad, sad love story. I admit that the fact that H. Ledger died piqued my interest in this movie. We probably watch like 2% of movies that come out in the theaters, so I completely missed this one back when it came out. Now I need to read the book. I admit again, that I have not been reading many books lately. A few months ago, I borrowed “Eat, Pray, Love”, but got to the first few chapters because again, I ended up running out time, and since it was a popular best seller, I was only able to rent it for a week. I have to request that book again, one of these days.

In school and work news, the big project that I have been working on for the last few months for San Jose State University was released this week.

SLISLife is the new social networking site where SLIS students, alumni faculty can connect in cyberspace. Susie Quinn writes, “SLISLife is a valuable tool that will enable the community of SLIS to connect socially in positive ways. I am excited to see it grow.”

In family life this week, we have just been busy with the same stuff as usual. Brennan did get his tb and other shots early this week, in preparation for Kindergarten in September. I know it is still a while away, but we will be moving at the end of summer, so I need to prepare all this stuff as early as possible. Actually, registration starts in end of this month, so it really isn’t too early. As far as Elden is concerned, I really, really wanted him to be in a 3 day a week preschool. My first consideration was a co-op two day program. I was going to register for it like last Friday, but I was still looking into other programs at the time, that I didn’t make it down there. I called them today, and of course they are completed filled. I was also looking in a few other preschools, one being the YMCA. We are already a member of the Y, so it seems logical. Another program is similar to the Montessori school, but instead of focusing on one-to-one learning, they are more group oriented learning. There are a couple more programs that I am looking into.
Right now I drop Elden off at the daycare and also he takes a tumbling class, but I definitely feel he needs more socialization of kids his age. Sometimes, when I pick him up from daycare, he is sitting at the table next to an older kids and just watching the kid play his hand held video game. I know that video games are inevitable these days, but heck, he is only 2 1/2. He has a few more years before he will actually get into them. Brennan never was never exposed to those hand held type games. The only games he plays is on the Internet, like Nick Jr. or sometime PBS kids, but other than that, he doesn’t care too much about them. I still can’t get him to wear underwear. And when he goes to bed at night, he doesn’t even want to wear diapers. So usually after he falls asleep, I have to put his diaper on. I know that I shouldn’t force the issue, but he is has all the basics down. It’s just the fact, he doesn’t want to wear it when we go out of the house.

I haven’t been taking many pictures for the last couple of weeks. I am okay with not taking pictures constantly and documenting every single second of life. I think I got to the point, where I felt obligated to be the family photographer of every event going on, even every birthday party that we attended. It feels a bit freeing actually. I did renew my flickr site in February, so I still intend to upload there. It’s great since I have a crappy backup system. I haven’t burned anything to DVD since last May. Bad, bad, bad, I know. Either I need to burn to DVD or purchase a second external drive.

In claying news, I have actually been actually getting my hands into it everyday. I even decided to start a new blog, just to focus on my creative clay processes. I was debating whether I should purchase a new domain name, but in the end just decided to create a subdomain within this site. If you are interested in keeping up with my polymer clay adventures, please check it out here. I haven’t uploaded any art up there yet, but I will soon.

Well, now I am debating if I should take a quick nap. I have been awake since around 1:00 or so and did nod off a couple time after. It’s 6 a.m. right now, and I am not too tired, but I know that if I go back to bed now, it won’t be long that the kids wake up, and then I will completely be exhausted.

Enough babbling!