Earaches and animal sounds, but no pictures

No pictures. Sorry. I am waiting for Matt to get them ready on the computer to be put on the blogspot. I still need to share birthday and halloween pictures! No one is going to want to look at Halloween pics when it's Christmas time. But anyway, in the meantime I wanted to give all of you faithful blogspot checkers an update on our lives.

Living in Lehi has been pretty fun so far. We have a pretty big back yard. Unfortunately, on the other side of our fence there are two gigantic Great Danes that bark incessantly when they see anyone. So Jane is terrified of the dogs, and essentially the entire outside world. She sometimes points to the windows and whines. When we are in the house and she hears the dogs bark she whimpers and runs to us. Thank you, neighbors, for instilling a life-long fear of dogs into our child.

Jane learned to imitate the dog's barking without me ever teaching her. Now when I ask her what a dog says she can tell me. She's also learned other animal sounds, such as sheep, horse, and duck. Her favorite thing right now is ducks. She finds them in all of her books and those are the books she wants to read over and over again. She loves her ducks in the bath tub and says "quack, quack" (her version of quack, quack anyway) any time she sees them. And then our friend here we endearingly call "B-Money" gave her a stuffed duck the other day and it has been her favorite ever since. She cuddles it every night and is always talking to it every morning.

Before Jane became more vocally imitative I taught her a few signs. I must say, it is the cutest thing to see a 12 month old doing sign language. Her first sign she learned was "more." She took it to mean "give me whatever I'm thinking of." She has since learned to point to what she wants and then sign "more." So in actuality she is communicating "give me" but we get the point. Yesterday I was getting the bath tub ready and she was pointing into the tub and signing "more." While walking over to her I said, Do you want more bath or ducks? Then I realized she meant "Give me back the book that I just threw into the water that is getting damaged and ruined." She also knows how to sign up, bath, all done, and book.

As for me, I have had an earache since I've moved to Utah. I've gone through two rounds of antibiotics and the pain is finally easing up. Throughout this time my hearing has been horrible in my affected ear. I was at the store the other day and me and my shopping cart were standing in the middle of the aisle as I looked at some products. When I finally faced the front of my cart I saw a lady saying "Excuse me" as if she had said it a million times. I was quite embarrassed. One thing the doctor told me to do was to keep trying to "pop" my ears like you do in an airplane. So one night I was sitting on the couch pinching my nose and blowing into my ear canal. I was finally hearing some squeaks-- loud and insanely high pitched squeaks, and thought that maybe I was making some progress. Matt was looking at me mortified and said, "What is that sound?" He said he could hear the squeaking clear as a bell. What? That was my first clue my ear drum had actually busted. Apparently that's not so bad as long as it will heal itself. However, I am now left with the symptom of leaky ear. Because of this small hole in my ear drum all the nasty infected gunk is leaking out. That was fine when it was happening when I lay down on that side, but now it will happen all throughout the day. I'm constantly looking for a tissue so stangers who see me won't see yellow liquid dripping down my face. Disgusting, yes, but I thought you should know.