{Just like Momma}

This has been sitting as a draft for a while now because I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say or why I'm trying to say it. oh well, here it goes.

I have figured out that Evette and I are pretty much the same person. I'll have to apologize to her frequently for that later on down the road.
At my parents house this last weekend [more on that later] we were looking through some old photo albums and it turns out that we look so similar. She has her daddy's smile but her eyes, nose, everything else was like a copy and paste from me. Crazy.
She's also super independent but social at the same time. She likes to people watch whenever we go anywhere and she loves the attention from everyone. She's a party animal and a people pleaser. But sometimes she needs her own alone time. Sometimes she likes to go down for her nap or bedtime anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour early just so she can lay in bed, sing songs and read her books. I'm serious.
She also has started to cuddle with me. But only on her terms and only if she wants to.
She likes to play on her own as well, but I must be in the same room. She will happily play with her books, stuffed animals, etc for 30 minutes on her own if I sit in the room reading my book. The second I try to leave to do the dishes or something she has a fit.
In every little thing she does I see pieces of myself in it.

Turns out I'm just like my mom, too. She has apologized for that as well :) I used to hear my mom say, "I just open my mouth and my mother falls out.....Someday that might happen to you, Heidi!" What a weird thing to say.....
I didn't believe her. But, one day I was talking to a friend and I said, "I just open my mouth and my mother falls out." Seriously? Did I just say that? That weird old phrase that my mom says? Yes. My mother just fell out of my mouth.
Luckily I got a lot of the good things from my mom and a few quirky things as well. :)

I just look at her and it's like looking in a mirror. It terrifies me. Am I who I want my daughter to be? No. But I'm working on it.

Update on my job

I love my job. It's hard. Painfully hard sometimes, but I love it. My most recent "man, I love what I do" moment was when I switched from spending ~16 hours/day researching the convenience store industry to spending an entire day learning about how water is used in power plants, with really no ceremonious break in between.

Here's an overview of what I've been up to at Oliver Wyman:

My first six weeks were spent supporting the building of a risk-analysis financial model for a proposed power plant. Basically, the developers of the power plant hired us to validate their own economic forecasts and to add "risk" to their model - i.e. we can tell an investor what the best vs. worst case scenarios look like, or what would happen if fuel prices went up or down, or if x or y other thing happened... with 95% certainty (dependent on our assumptions). I performed some commodity price research and spent a lot of time building macros (a type of computer programming) in Excel to facilitate the function of the model. I worked out of the Oliver Wyman office in Dallas, remote from the rest of my team who were in our Toronto office. 

My next two weeks were spent at week-long training sessions in Chicago and Boston. Ideally, said training would have come before my first assignment, but that's how things turned out. I had a great time meeting other new hires, getting to know the firm better, being nostalgic about Chicago (I had no idea how much I missed that city), and exploring Boston.

Following training, I joined my next client team at an airline in Dallas. However, it turned out that the project they were gearing me up to take over was shut down half-way through that week, so my time with that project was rather short lived. Only a week all-in-all and I didn't really have the chance to do much besides learn about the airline industry.

The next week was spent again working in our Dallas office helping a partner prepare materials for a workshop he was going to give at a potential client in New Zealand. Not my favorite assignment, and I finished that week very eager to get some real client-based work.

That wish was granted. On a Friday afternoon of that week I was informed that I'd be joining a small team in Houston working for the retail-arm of an oil/gas company. I flew down the following Monday morning and set right to my work: researching potential convenience store partners for our client. Basically, our client had determined that their gas wasn't selling as well as they would like and the major factor driving their drop in market share was their aging convenience stores. So it was my job to research convenience stores to identify potential partners for them. Very fun work, great team, great client team. I spent three weeks there, just finishing up this last Friday.

And tomorrow I'm flying out to San Francisco for my next project. I'll be working out of our office there (as opposed to the client's office, which is the norm) becoming an expert on the usage of water in power plants and performing a market analysis for all products and services related thereto. Our client is a utility company looking to invest in the water management business, so we're helping advise that move. I expect to be on this project for 4-7 weeks.

It's all been fascinating stuff. I love the diversity of projects I've been on so far and I'm excited to see what else comes down the road in the future. It's a hard job with difficult expectations and deadlines, but I've loved the challenge. 

{From the phone}

From my phone and all out of order:

Night time stories

 Working on the dresser outside

  

Working out

Matching toenails!

Making cinnamon rolls for our awesome Sunday school class - love those kids.

Trying to be a stowaway...

Sleepy faces...

Evette LOVES our weekly library visits. She could seriously stay there all day and pull every single book off the shelf and flip through it if I would let her.

Jenga is her favorite game. I build a tower, she knocks it down. She has recently started putting the blocks back in the box or transferring them from one box to another. Brilliant Baby.

Our morning runs

 

Cleaning the house

Playing outside/getting cleaned off after a spaghetti dinner 

 Enjoying the summertime!

{Snuggle Bug}

Evette has turned into a little snuggle bug! It's seriously adorable. Sometimes she just walks up [yes, walks up to me] to me throws her arms around me and gives me a great big hug. Also, whenever she sees anything soft on the ground [pillows, stuffed animals, blankets, old socks] she goes and lays on top of it and snuggles with it. It's the cutest thing I've ever seen. It makes my heart melt.

{July Books}

Enchantment by Orson Scott Card

My Dad and the husband both recommended this book to me. I've read a few of Card's books before and very much enjoy his style. This was a fun read - an interesting take on a fairy tale. It was riveting, exciting...etc...Recommend it. Good times.

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

Yes, this was a re-read for me. I read this back in May but I'm hosting book club in a few days and I chose this along with the screwtape letters and wanted to reread it so it was fresh in my mind.

I loved it even more the second time through. I knew the whole story so I was able to make more connections and catch some more symbolism - it was fabulous.

{Dr visits}

For some reason this story never made it in the blog so I'll share it now:

When Evette was just over 3 months [early January] she was running a fever. She was a little bit fussy that day and I felt that she was getting warmer so I checked her temperature and she did have a fever. I called the health clinic and they said to bring her in since she was so young. We went to the health clinic and they checked her out. She did have a fever but they couldn't figure out why so they decided to take a urine sample to see if she had a bladder infection or something of the like. How do you get a urine sample from a baby? A catheter. Poor thing. She was so brave even though it was a lot more difficult than the nurses had anticipated. Turns out she didn't have anything and they decided that it must have just been teething.

Recent doctor story:

On Friday night Evette's elbow got pulled [nursemaid's elbow]. DO NOT lift babies up just by their arms until they are way older. aughh.... After lots of crying from both Evette and I and a rush to an after hours clinic they fixed her right up. Oh man, I thought I was going to puke - couldn't stand to see my baby girl in so much pain. She couldn't move her arm and she was trying to be so brave.... Poor baby girl. She's all good now and it didn't slow her down one bit but it sure did give me a scare. I thought all of her fingers were going to fall off or we'd have to get her arm amputated, or whatever else my terrified mind was coming up with. Thanks to the husband for being my rock of sanity and taking care of his girls.

Cute sleepy baby.

{Yes, I love technology, but not as much as you, you see...}

Even though the husband travels we can still chat face to face thanks to the wonderful world of technology... always and forever.

As you can tell, we have very serious conversations.