Blogs are so 2009...

Wow, just wow. Easily our longest gap ever. Family and friends have long since stopped bugging us for updates, and probably have just resigned themselves to the belief that we've given up on blogging. I think it's just funny that our last post was titled Fall Picture Catch Up, as if that was a long gap or something. At least we have been updating pictures on Flickr, so those are at least as recent as June.

Seriously, it's almost been a year though, so quite a bit has happened. I went from being an inexperienced first year resident to an inexperienced second year radiology resident. Starting in July, I now take call, which means that I have to stay at the hospital after work until 8:00 AM the next day (= a full 24 hours), and read all the studies that come in overnight to the ER. Obviously, my vigilance has increased dramatically; I no longer have someone I can just turn to and ask,"What do you think? Nasty fracture or totally normal?" Technically, I can call the attending radiologists, it's just something you don't want to do unless you really need to. Especially at 4am. I haven't had to yet, but I imagine that's coming up in the near future. It's been a little easier to deal with because I've started a strange new sleeping schedule largely composed of short naps throughout the day rather than a long sleeping period at night. I've been doing this since March of this year and so far it's been mostly good. I can't get into it now, but maybe I'll have a post later about it.

Hopefully Ellen will tell you a bit more about her, but she's been good, on the whole. She's been getting a lot of freelance work lately from her old job. We had a lot of insurance headaches for Sonja's therapy, but it seemed to work out for the best for 2010. For 2009, they basically told us "sorry, we know you did everything you needed to do, but we don't care, and we're not paying for that year." For 2010, there does appear to be some money coming in.

I think the most major news about Sonja (at least as far as day to day life is concerned) is that she is potty-trained! Yes! That happened a while ago, starting at the beginning of June, and she did pretty well about going by herself when she needed to. Since she tries to avoid verbal communication when she doesn't have to, she pretty quickly adapted to just running to the bathroom and going when it was time. We tried to teach her to say "I want potty" but that's sort of less effective with her (even though we're still trying obviously). She's gradually moved passed wetting the bed and needing the potty chair; these last 2 changes are much more recent.

With Natalia, there's something new just about every week, so I won't waste my time trying to go into everything. She really won't stop talking all the time. She loves when I come home; halfway across the apartment when I open the door, there is a distinctly audible "I HEAR DADDY!!" And she has been saying "hi" to everything probably for a year now - that hasn't slowed at all, although she has been limiting it lately to living things rather than inanimate objects and abstract concepts ("hi happy" being an example of one of her phrases from just a couple months ago when she saw one of us smiling). She's also a slave to routine, like most normal toddlers, I imagine. She has a strict bedtime routine, which wasn't changed much by getting her a twin bed to sleep in a couple months ago. Bedtime consists of reading a book, then a "book for bed" where she gets to choose a book to take to bed with her, then finding her beloved pink blanket, then getting in bed, then prayers, then singing "itsy bitsy spider" and "twinkle twinkle little star" in that order.

Here are some videos for your amusement.

This is Natalia saying hi to her cousin Scarlett (Marissa's daughter)

And... Natalia giving us her repertoire of songs (these are just her favorite)

Those are the major things. I plan on uploading a lot of videos to YouTube in the near future, so hopefully that will be fun for everyone. And by everyone, I mean grandparents. I will let you know.