Nannying 101

Another catch up post:

From the end of November to just before Christmas (basically, a month) I nannied for these two cute little girls. Tessa is 5 and Sayde is 3. Their nanny was going to visit her home in the Philippines for a month and they were looking for a fill in nanny while she was gone. I was the filler. I wasn't starting my regular nanny job until January, so it worked out perfectly.

These girls looooove crafts! So we did a lot of them (thank you pinterest)! Tessa and Sayde have tons of personality and with that personality comes a lot of happy and laughing and sometimes some tantrums and tears. But when I look at the pictures of some of the things I did with these girls I smile and miss them.

 We made salt dough ornaments. Once they dried the girls painted them. I love on the right, Sayde's pinkie sticking up.

 On the left, Sayde enjoying her Christmas cookie. On the right, she's making snow fall from the branch as we head to preschool.

 Since Sayde just had preschool two days a week and Tessa went to kindergarten everyday, Sayde and I got to do some crafts, just the two of us. On the left, we made snow flakes for the front windows. On the right we painted cheerios and glued them to a cut out tree. (She wanted to make a Christmas tree like Tessa had done at school with Fruit Loops. This was our version and she was really excited to have her own cereal Christmas tree.)

 I built this Christmas lego village that their parents had bought and they played with it all the time!

 We painted bread which they thought was really cool. They loved dressing up! On the right is Tessa dressed as Jessi from Toy Story.

 We built a snow family in their front yard. This was the first one we made.

 On the left I cut out paper gingerbread girls that the girls colored and decorated and then began to play with like they were real dolls. On the right we made a gingerbread house. This was actually the first I've ever done, so we did have some issues with keeping the roof on, but somehow it stuck there.

 We went to Chinook mall to get pictures with Santa. They loved waiting in line because there was all kinds of stuff to look at and buttons to press. They mailed their letters to Santa. At one point Sayde said, "I didn't think this place would be magical, but IT IS!" Obviously, you can tell from the look on her face on the right.

 We made snow women from paper plates, construction paper, popsicle sticks, and cotton balls. We went to IKEA for lunch.

We went to Petland to look at the animals they had and they loved it, but they were over the moon when one of the employees asked if they wanted to hold a bird! They were in love with the thing and wanted to get one. I told them to ask their parents. Haha!


This was a good test run to start me off in my nanny career. I'm into my third month with the new family I nanny for. These two girls really broke me into the world of nannying!

Midnapore House Renovation After

I haven't written a post in a long time. It's partly been because I haven't had a lot of time because of nannying. Partly because I couldn't figure out how to get pics from my new phone to my computer. Partly because my husband's favorite hobby is looking at used cars for sale online, which often monopolizes our one laptop. Partly because I don't know if anyone really reads this blog. I guess I wanted to keep posting more for me. I haven't written in a journal in awhile and a blog is a good way to record life, especially when you can put in pictures.

I had a post a couple months back with pictures of a house that Mark and I and his parents were renovating. It was so much work! More work than I realized it would be. But it was rewarding to see the outcome. We sold it in a couple days, so I guess we did a good job!

Here are the after pics of the house...

front hallway

front entryway

                                    

                                front room (looking from the dining room)

                                    

                                dining room

upstairs bathroom

upstairs master bedroom (most of the rooms look
similar so I didn't include all of them)

          

basement bathroom

basement rec room

garge

backyard hot tub

other side of garage

Flippin'

So the reason I've been absent from blogging for a couple weeks and I'm playing catch up now is because Mark and I are helping his mom and stepdad fix up this house they bought. Like they say on HGTV, we're flipping it. Although, the difference is that on HGTV they have a team of like 50 and we just have Mark, his stepdad, Dave, and myself who're doing all the work. And it is hard work! As I write this my lower back is killing from what we were working on today! KILLING! Not as glamorous as on TV.

We got the house mid-demolition so some things had already been started for us.

Here are some before pics and I'll post after ones whenever we get done.

 The front yard (Yes, that is a tub of broken tile on the front yard gravel pit. Nice, right?).

 Front entry way.

 Front room into dining room.

 Kitchen...or a lack of one.

 Garage (the house came with all this junk in the garage! Yippee! So much fun to sift through other people's junk!)

Backyard (With spa and firepit! Ooo lala!).

"Mandy's Home!"

One of the nice things about when Mark and I got married is that I inherited some new nieces and nephews. Most of my nieces and nephews from my older siblings are teenagers now and I've missed having younger kids around in the family. In moving to Calgary we get to live near Mark's sister, Chelsea. A couple Mondays ago she asked if I'd watch her boys, Crew and Rocky, while she went to work. It was a pretty great day...also a bit tiring, but really fun!

 Rocky is two and he l-o-v-e-s wearing his spiderman costume. That's what he wanted to wear to the park so I let him. It's cute. He actually has a new costume now that has a mask and he's always wearing it and "webbing" people. One time when I went over to their house Rocky yelled downstairs to Crew "Mandy's home!" He's so cute!

Crew is four, almost five. He can already ride a two wheel bike! He had one lesson with his dad and a couple weeks later he got on and just rode it. While Rocky took a nap Crew and I played with play doh for almost two hours. We had some good laughs!

Two Weeks Notice

Yesterday at work I gave my two weeks notice!!!!!!!! Can you tell I'm excited? Something Mark and I have both been really happy about in moving to Canada was the fact that we could both quit our jobs. We both haven't really enjoyed them too much/hated them. I've been working at Vons Pavilions down the street. I started out just bagging groceries and then they quickly moved me into some checking because they realized quickly what a smarty pants I am and should utilize my sweet skills. Then they wanted to (cough) "promote" me (if I should even call it that) to doing price changes some nights and the GM department (which means put candy/mints/gums from bins onto check stands). 

The photo above is of what I usually come to find on my price change shifts. The main shift I basically had every week was going into work on Tuesday night (which I will be doing tonight) at 10 pm and then stay until 6:30 am just changing price tags due to expiring sales or new sales or whatever. I usually do some whatever hundreds or thousands of tags that need to be changed. I don't really know. I haven't counted because that would take too long. During this shift the store is mostly closed so I don't have to deal with customers needing help, I get to be out of uniform and wearing jeans, and I can listen to music on my ipod. 

Doing shifts through the middle of the night and then switching to do some day shifts has basically been killing me slowly. I would come home at 6:30 in the morning, get ready for bed, and then Mark would get up to get ready to go to work. I would sleep for however long my body wanted, wake up with a headache usually, and sometimes have a sense of alert with such thoughts as: what time is it? what day is it? I'm late for something!

Then I'd have to switch my body's time clock to try to get back to whatever normal shifts I was scheduled and be getting used to that when my Tuesday night would swing around again and my schedule would be off once more. 

I will say that working at Pavilions has given me more stories to tell my family when I come home because there are a lot more crazies in Monrovia than there were in Provo, UT. There's one guy named Daniel who wears girls and boys clothes. He likes to sing a LOT and very loudly. Usually he sings every kind of genre of music in one sitting. He also likes to talk in a voice sounding like he's possessed by something and then tells people it's the devil, which has quickly gotten him kicked out of the store. He even gets his own paper in the store window saying he's prohibited from entering the store. The last time I saw him he was getting arrested in front of the store.

Someone else who regularly gets a prohibited paper in the store window is a little Asian lady who steals. I don't know her name. That's how I've always referred to her and my co-workers know exactly who I'm talking about when I say it. I think she may have schizophrenia because she's really not in her right mind. One day she was trying to shoplift and one of my co-workers was trying to stop her and it looked like some hitting might ensue. My co-worker knew she could become violent so she was backing away saying, "don't touch me" and the little Asian lady was yelling, "NO, YOU DON'T TOUCH ME!" back at her. One of my supervisors was in a check stand and while checking started yelling at the lady, "Drop it! Get out of my store!" in which the little Asian lady yelled back at the top of her lungs while pointing with her hand, "NOOO! YOU GET OUT OF MY STORE!!!" I tried my hardest not to laugh after this happened. 

Last week I was hanging some tags on the chip aisle in the morning and someone walked behind me and I looked to see who it was. It was little Asian lady who steals. I watched her. She grabbed a couple bags of beef jerky. I watched where she went in the store. As she stood in front of the lotion on aisle 12 she opened her backpack and put the jerky in. I went looking for the store manager and told him what I saw. She walked out the door so he called the police. When the officer got there he had me tell him what happened, said they had her at the bus stop on Primrose, and they needed me to identify her (even though we all know who she is). So we went out to his cop car. He told me I could get in the passenger side, but then realized it had stuff on the seat, so I could get in the back seat. I've never been in the back of a police car nor do I ever want to be again. They have plastic seats and you slide around easily. I did try to get some pics though without the officer noticing.

So we drove over to the bus stop where she was sitting and I said it was the same lady and he let the officer parked by her know it was her and watched him hand cuff her without any problems and then took me back to work. My manager said she didn't just take the jerky. She had $28 worth of stuff in her bag. Some other things I saw that she took were a bottle of lotion, a white mug, and an orange. Hmmm...okay.

Well, my manager, Jim, already loved me before for being such a great worker, but by catching the lady shoplifting it just gave him one more thing to thank me and praise me for. 

Thank you for the good times Daniel and little Asian lady who steals.