Educational Toys for the Modern Child

Valerie has a lot of toys. I don't know how it happened. I think I've bought her a grand total of three toys (two of them second-hand). I'm pretty sure they reproduce while we are sleeping.

Some of her/my favorite toys are her Melissa and Doug toys. They tend to be good quality, and they lean more towards the "children should play with toys, toys shouldn't play for children" philosophy that I hold. (Which, I will admit, is partly motivated by my philosophy that toys shouldn't annoy parents to death.)

That said, Valerie has a couple of Melissa and Doug toys that I wonder if they fully thought through...

1. The Corporate America Shape-Sorter



This birdhouse has four doors, in four different shapes, and four different colors. It also has four birds, in four different shapes, and four different colors. The child is meant to match the round, red bird to the round, red door, the triangular, blue bird to the triangular, blue door, etc. But here's the catch: the birdhouse and birds are both plush. So you don't have to match anything, you can just squish the square bird into the round hole, or whichever hole you feel like making all of the birds use, regardless of their individual attributes. A perfect training tool for future CEOs.

2. The Kidnapper Training Peg Puzzle



It's a puzzle where you can remove one finger at a time from a pair of hands, what more can I say? The fingers are conveniently labeled for ease of reminding children, "No, take the pinky from the left hand first, that's the finger they are least likely to miss." Special bonus feature: Remove all but one finger to teach your child practical hand gestures for use while driving!

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Fun Things and Not Fun Things

So, Valerie's monthly letter is over a week late, now. I swear, I have some really good excuses this time.

Last weekend was the weekend of Fun Things. Friday night, we went to a Starbucks Grand Opening at my former manager's new store. I got to see a bunch of people I really miss seeing from my old store, and had a really nice time catching up. Saturday morning, we went to an absolutely, insanely huge thrift sale that was actually too big to really dig through properly. I went through the specialty tables, picked up a few little things, then hung out at the babywearing table unofficially demonstrating various carriers. I also found a gauze wrap for $7 to replace my stretchy wrap that Valerie is getting too big for.

Saturday night, I left Valerie with her daddy and her grandparents while I went to a friends' house to pretend I was in college for an evening. We ate take-out and played video games until the late, late hour of 10:30 p.m. Okay, so that part of me is not-so-college anymore, but my limitless attention span for Katamari Damacy remains unchanged.

Sunday, after church, I met up with a local mom at the Wegman's café for soup and a nice, long chat. Sunday night, we had dinner with Jer's grandparents.

Meanwhile, we were all catching colds. By Sunday night, Valerie was coughing like a 70-year-old smoker, with a nose that wouldn't stop running. We weren't about to let a little cold spoil our fun, however, so we went ahead with our plans to go to the Aquarium with my playgroup friends on Monday.

Valerie did really well at the Aquarium. She spent more than half the time happily asleep (in her new wrap!), but when she was awake, she loved looking at the big fish swimming right past our faces. For less than the cost of two visits, we bought an annual pass, so we will totally be going back there again! I forgot my camera in the car, but my friend Jess kindly took some pictures of us, which I hope she doesn't mind me posting one of them.



Monday night was our game night, which has moved from Wednesdays to accommodate work schedules, board meetings, and LOST. We hammered out our new story arc, which is full of political intrigue and could end in war. Fun stuff.

On Tuesday, I was finally concerned enough about Valerie's cough (and the horrible, hairbally throat noises that were now accompanying it) to call her pediatrician. He told me what I expected he would, that there is really nothing to worry about unless she's throwing up or running a fever. But at least I could stop feeling guilty every time I heard her sad, pathetic coughs.

On Wednesday morning, I wasn't feeling very well at work. I had some stomach cramps, but mostly, I was just feeling really worn down. Valerie wasn't sleeping at night, and she seems to have already learned that misery loves company. I called around to see if I could get someone to cover my Thursday shift. I wasn't feeling terribly sick, but I felt like I might get sick unless I took a day off. Unfortunately, no one was available to work for me, so I dragged my weary bones out of bed before the crack of dawn on Thursday. Before the first customer arrived, I discovered the cause of my stomach cramps. Without going in to further detail, I seem to have contracted the worst gastrointestinal virus I have ever had. Three of the babies from the Aquarium trip have it, too, as do three of their parents/caregivers. So, I'm guessing we picked it up at the Aquarium. Maybe we shouldn't have played the "lick a sick fish" game? I left work as soon as I could get a replacement in, and did not work Friday. I have been obsessively drinking water to avoid dehydration. I seem to be on the mend, now, and actually ate breakfast this morning. Now, I'm just completely exhausted, devoid of all energy, and back to dealing with obnoxious cold symptoms. Jeremy and Valerie both still have the cold, but have so far managed to avoid the GI virus. I'm praying they don't catch it. It's no fun. Besides, they're miserable enough with just the cold.

Anyhow, that's the long and the short of the fun and the not fun we have had this week. I realize, now, that in the time I wrote this, I could have written Valerie's monthly letter. Oh well. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that.

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Road Trip: the Miniseries (4)

Episode Four:

At the rate I'm going, it will be American Thanksgiving before I manage to finish posting about Canadian Thanksgiving. And in the meantime, we've done other stuff, too, so Thursday night through Sunday will be presented as a montage. Imagine appropriate music.

Thursday night, surreal. Very odd being a mommy in a house where I was a baby. Didn't sleep much.
Friday morning, family love.

Walk to the park wearing the baby. Alana climbed on the kiddie climbing wall. Someone else took pictures.
Visit with Jenn and Rob and Dom, who was still in the womb when I last saw him, and Andrew, who was born a week before Valerie but is gestationally a month older and it shows.

Awesome time catching up with old friends. Yummy homemade macaroni and cheese.
I think we did something Friday night. Lack of sleep catching up, so it's a blur.
Saturday, more fun with family and friends. Katie, Mike and Isla came over. Katie should be having her baby any day now.

We watched UHF. We set up Settlers, but didn't play. Alana and I made pies.
Sunday morning, church. April was dedicated.

We took a billion family pictures.




To be continued...

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Catching Up

So, I've been trying and trying to properly update this blog, but it seems like all of the times I am not extremely busy, I am extremely busy sleeping to catch up. I tried to blog about my vacation, wrote about 10 pages, and then realized that I was still only on day two. At that rate, I will be blogging about Auggie's birth sometime in 2014. So, here is the whirlwind tour of all the things I've been wanting to blog about in the past month, interspersed with some photos.

Rachel and I drove to Western Massachusetts for Jiffy Con. We played games.



We met awesome people, some of whom were awesome enough to pose all on one side of a table when I complained about the difficulties of photographing groups at round tables.



We did not play nutball. I did not take photos of nutball.

I finally managed to take some good pictures of Rachel.



We stayed at Joshua's house.



Then we drove to Vermont to visit my sister for a couple of days. We relaxed and played with my nephew and marinated meat for the camping trip. I didn't take very many pictures in Vermont, but I did get a few of Nick in the tub.



Then we drove to Crawford Notch, NH, for the annual YARR camping trip. There were about 15 of us this year, including one child and two pregnant ladies. It will be interesting to see how the dynamic changes in future years as our families blossom. Jeremy joined us at the campsite, which was nice, because I hadn't seen him in almost a week.

We camped. We hiked. (Hiking photo taken by Allison.)



We swam in the river.



We sat on logs and exposed our pasty-white June flesh to the sun.



It rained a lot. I didn't take any pictures of the rain. But our massive tarp set up helped keep the cooking area dry.



We spent a lot of our time just sitting around the fire pit - talking, eating, destroying confidential documents, and waiting for the dishwater to boil.



We played a lot of games. We took some touristy pictures of "the Notch".



We climbed on a slippery waterfall. Dan fell and got a concussion. Phil ripped his leg open on a guard rail running to the rescue and had to get ten stitches. (Everyone is okay, now.)



Sara found some luna moths while taking down the screen tent.



When I got home, everything I had brought with me was wet and dirty from all the rain. I did a lot of laundry, took a lot of naps, and went back to work. I didn't take any pictures of these things. Fast forward through about two weeks of post-vacation recovery, including my car having to go to the shop twice. (Poor Bitsy now has no AC, just in time for the hottest part of the summer.) Then my sister came to visit, and fun things started happening again. Like a trip to the Aquarium.



My church and my mother-in-law threw an amazing baby shower for me. My nephew took his very first steps in my living room, and rode on his very first carousel (not in my living room). We celebrated Nick's first birthday with yummy Korean food and gelato for dessert. And I have no pictures of any of these things for some sad reason, but they were memorable nonetheless. And that brings us to today, which is finally routine enough for me to spend it cropping pictures and uploading them to my blog. Hopefully, it won't be another whole month before I post again!

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Canada!

So, I've had photos sitting in my hard drive, and a blog post sitting in my head for over a week now, and it's high time I updated before something else happens in my life and pushes last weekend out of blogging range. In my defense, I have been sick for a little over a week now, a phenomenon I am choosing to blame on whatever pollens were blooming about three weeks ago in Philly that made me sick then, and apparently chose the very weekend I was visiting Canada to bloom there so that I could enjoy that particular bout of allergies twice.

Right, so about that trip to Canada.

I had booked a four-day weekend off of work. I am part-time now, which makes booking time off that much easier (and also me much happier and less exhausted). Jeremy chose not to come with me, because he wants to save his time off for when there is a baby to spend it with. I spent Friday driving, and even with my frequent, pregnant-lady pee and food stops, I still made it to my mom's house at exactly the time I had estimated. That was very un-Davis of me.

Benjie and Trish were there when I arrived, and I got to meet my niece, April, for the first time. Such a sweet baby. Auggie is going to love her cousins.



After dinner, I got together with my friend-since-we-were-eight-years-old, Sarah, and we bought slurpees, put candy in them, and sat in the park talking on the swings for a long time, just like we used to do in high school. I have many fond memories of hanging out in that park with slurpees and good friends. It almost makes me miss being a teenager. Almost.

Saturday morning was my baby shower, which was the original purpose of my trip to Canada. My mom still attends the church that I grew up going to, and, to this day, I have a hard time calling any place but Sunnyside my "home church". But I've moved around so much since graduating high school (11 years ago now - man, that makes me feel old), so I haven't been a regular attender there for more than a summer here and there, and that one year when I was articling in Ottawa. I was really touched that anyone other than my mom even wanted to attend a shower for me, and when I saw how many people came out, from every era of my life, to show their support for me on my journey into motherhood, I was really blown away. I'm pretty sure I cried once or twice, but I'm gonna blame the hormones for that. Yeah, hormones.



I also acquired a lot of stuff for the baby, and I'm finally starting to feel like it might just be possible that I won't have to wrap Auggie in one of her dad's old shirts and have her sleep in a cardboard box. Although I do have some very nice cardboard boxes, I think, in the end, I might find the highchairs and whatnot that came inside them much more useful.

In fact, I acquired so much stuff that those who were helping me carry it all to my little Mazda 626 seriously doubted that it would fit in my trunk. But all those years of watching my packing-guru father load the family car up for trips to grandma's or to the lake or to Algonquin park seem to have paid off. Also all of those hours of Tetris he and I used to play. See? Who says video games rot your brain!

The big surprise of the shower was that my aunt and cousin had made the trip up from Rochester to join in the festivities. It was really nice to see them, and we spent a really nice afternoon on Saturday sitting and talking and visiting. Then it got late, and I went to bed.

Sunday morning, I was able to attend church at Sunnyside, which is always one of the highlights of my trips to Ottawa. I still feel so much like a part of that church, and I received many warm hugs and congratulations from old friends and practically-families. It also boggled my mind, as it always does, to see the growth of the church since I was a kid there. I had one Sunday school teacher for most of my childhood, and I was almost always the only one in my class. Then, when I finished a grade, she would move up and teach me in the next class, because there were no more than a handful of other kids in the church, and there was no one waiting in the class below me, and no one graduating from the class above me. Now, there is such a crowd of kids (over 50, I'm guessing), that you wouldn't know that it was the same church, except that it is filled with the same loving spirit under which I remember growing up.

Sunday was hot. You'd think it would be less hot in Canada, but Ottawa gets its fair share of heat and humidity, and when it does, it's extra miserable because many people (my mom and brother included) don't have air conditioning. And I'm usually okay with that, because I believe that it's healthier to turn on some fans and keep cool naturally, but pregnant, I find it unbearable. AC has become a necessity for me.

So, after Benjie and Trish and I had a quick lunch, we took April to an indoor pool for her Very First Swim Outside the Womb. It was a lot of fun, although April didn't seem entirely sure what to make of the gigantic bathtub. She seemed to have a good time, though. After swimming, I was craving shawarma, so we stopped at a little place I used to go to all the time with Sarah, and I indulged my craving with shaved beef and heartburn on a pita. I've pretty much resigned myself, at this stage of my pregnancy, that anything I eat is going to give me heartburn, so why not eat what I want? It was delicious. I really need to find a shawarma shop in Philly.

After shawarma, the four of us laid claim to one of the air conditioned lounges in the church that was not currently being used (my brother lives above the church offices), and spent the rest of the afternoon not being miserably overheated. I broke out my water-based face paints, and Benjie and Trish created the first two entries in my belly art gallery. I will post them after I finish this post.

At this point in the weekend, my pregnant body had pretty much had enough excitement, and I was ready to go back to my mom's house, maybe play a board game, and go to bed early. But there was more excitement to be had. A few hours later, I was upstairs on my mom's computer, when I heard the door open, and someone said the name of my sister's dog. My sister lives in Vermont, and, although she couldn't make it up to Canada for the shower, she decided to bundle up her dog and my nephew, and surprise us on Sunday night for a visit. It was awesome to see my sister, and Nick who has doubled in size and mobility since I saw him last. He's even saying a few words now, and most adorable of anything, he makes little fishy faces when he wants you to pick him up to ring the fish chime that is hanging from the door frame.





So, counting Auggie, all three cousins were together for the first time, so we made some fumbling attempts at a family portrait. Here is, sadly, the best one of the bunch. Hey, it was getting late, and we were all pretty over-stimulated by this time. Even the babies.



Monday morning, I got to spend a bit of quality time with Alana and Nick before hitting the road. We took Eli for a walk, which I thought would be a good idea, since I was about to sit in the car for 8 hours. Unfortunately, I think it was the walk that ultimately did me in, allergies-wise. Between that, and the stubborn gas bubble in my chest that mysteriously appeared sometime after eating the shawarma (completely unrelated, I'm sure) and didn't go away until Tuesday morning, I was feeling pretty lousy by the time I hit the road at about noon. The trip home was miserable. The only highlight, really, was a relatively easy border crossing, where the border guard peeked in my trunk, but didn't even need to see my extensive list of all the gifts I had received with all of my rough price estimates. So yeah, let's fast-forward through the overly long drive, with far too many stops (several of which might have ended with me sleeping in a parking lot somewhere if it hadn't been for the fact that I had to keep driving to keep the AC on), and a burning sore throat, and a nose that wouldn't stop running. But I made it home eventually, tired and miserable, and really not feeling up to going out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary when I got home. We've decided to postpone that particular celebration.

And that brings us up to today. Well, okay, not really, but we can fast-forward through the rest of last week, last weekend, and the the beginning of this week, and that will bring us up to today. I'm not as sick anymore. The sore throat has gone away, which is good because it was the symptom I was most worried about, and the cold/allergies/whatever has mostly settled in as a stuffy nose and glop in my chest. Still no fun, but better than before. Besides, I'm on vacation now, and that makes everything better! I'm on vacation for two whole weeks, during which time I will be doing a bit of cleaning at the house (but only a bit), and then heading off to Massachusetts to play story games with some friends I met in a forest in Virginia, and then off to New Hampshire to sleep in a tent and spend some quality time with some friends from college. I will bring my face paints along, and if I happen to see you on my travels, maybe you can paint my belly!

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You should try soft pretzels with ranch dressing. Yum.

So, I disappeared for another month. This is starting to become a bit of a habit. Maybe I should just change the by-line of the website to, "Now with monthly updates!" Then we will all know what to expect.

Speaking of expecting, Auggie is doing well. She (and yes, I am using the feminine pronoun in a gender-uncertain context; I blame going to law school in Canada for that tendency) has become extraordinarily active in the past month. She remains almost completely quiet the entire time I am at work, and then as soon as I am at rest, she likes to disturb my rest with pokes and prods and kicks and jabs that cause me no end of amusement. Except when I am trying to sleep. Then they are less amusing.

I learned an important lesson this Sunday in church: Don't wear shirts that are skin-tight across your six-month pregnant belly if you want to be able to pay attention to the sermon. Auggie loves music, and whenever I sit down after singing or drumming, she decides to keep the beat going for a while. This week, "for a while" lasted throughout the entire service. I kept laughing, because you could actually see my belly bounce up every time she kicked it. And, of course, the other people in my row kept looking at me to see why I was laughing, and then they would see the little kicks, and laugh, too. I really hope the pastor was trying to be funny, because an entire section of the church was suppressing giggles for the entire sermon.

My mom turned sixty this year, and I turned thirty, so we decided that we should do something special to celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime "I am half your age and both our ages end in zero" event. So, we went to see a Broadway show with my sister and her mother-in-law. Believe it or not, this was my first Broadway show. I saw "Phantom of the Opera" in Toronto when I was 11, but this was my first New York City Broadway with a Capital 'B' Broadway show. It was awesome. We had coal oven baked pizza for lunch, and saw a matinee so that my sister could get back in time to feed her baby before bedtime. I snuck my baby into the show without buying her a ticket (shhhh....) but I'm glad I did, because I think I have a Broadway baby. Easily the most active Auggie has ever been was during the big choral numbers of the show. I wonder how young is too young to start your child in tap lessons?

The show was Curtains, with David Hyde Pierce (and a couple of other people from "Frasier," too), and it was amazing. But then again, I am no Broadway critic. I probably would have been starstruck and impressed by anything.

My sister sent me a picture of the four of us outside after the show. I'm the fat one in the purple shirt.



So, let's see, what else has been going on in my life in the past month or so? I spent most of the month of April quite sick. I even went to my doctor because I thought I had something serious like mono (and, if you know me at all, you'll know that it takes a lot to get me to believe that I am sick enough to go to the doctor). Fortunately, I did not have mono. Unfortunately, I did not have anything treatable, so I just had to stick it out until the pollens changed and my allergies died down a bit. Yeah, allergies. I spent a whole month sick from allergies, and there is not a single blooming drug that you can take for allergies while you're pregnant. I've never had allergies like this before though, so I can only hope that it was just some kind of fluke combination of a bad pollen season and being pregnant and having no immune system, and that I won't ever get them like this again.

Meanwhile, I have still been working full-time at the store, which has left me completely drained. Eight hour days on your feet the entire time is pretty exhausting when you're simultaneously building a human being. The paperwork hasn't gone through yet, but hopefully, by the end of the month, I will be down to part-time hours. Then I might just maybe have time to blog more than once a month again. And get that daily nap that I was supposed to stop needing about 13 weeks ago when I entered the second trimester.

Oh yeah, and we also moved. See? This is what happens when I only blog once a month. I forget to mention big things like moving all the way back to the opposite side of the city, to a lovely townhouse that we have yet to move all of our crap into, so it still looks nice. Or at least, it still looks new and empty, which is nice in its own right.

This just proves to me that I need to blog more often. I still don't think I wrote about my trip to Florida in March. I definitely didn't get to write about the lovely day I spent in Princeton with Katie and Mike and Isla (and Squidgy), who were down from Canada for a conference. Nor did I write about the fantastic weekend, albeit cold, that I spent in a Virginia forest with a bunch of story-gamers playing all sorts of fun games. Jeremy even learned how to make boffer weapons out of PVC and duct tape.



But, when you're always either working or sleeping, and you manage to squeeze in a day (or even a weekend) to do something fun for yourself, you pay for it afterwards with extra working and sleeping. Hence the infrequent blog posts. I've been told that now is the time to do things for myself, to go on trips and have fun, because it's the last chance I'll have to do those things without having to figure out how to include or make alternate arrangements for the baby. I'm not 100% convinced by this argument, because I'm truly looking forward to sharing camping trips and, one day down the road, games and Broadway shows, with Auggie. But I do understand that, in just a few short months, my life will be changed irrevocably, and if there is something I really want to do now, I should do it now, before my life and priorities are turned completely upside down.

That said, I am making it my goal to thoroughly enjoy my third trimester. And yes, all of you mothers out there, I heard that snigger you just made. But really, I have been so tired and overworked for the first two trimesters, I have had very little chance to enjoy myself and my pregnancy. But I'll be dropping to part-time hours, I have several trips planned, and, always subject to providence throwing me a curve ball, I want to make the most of this. I might even (wait for it...) blog more often! I have a few ideas for the third trimester, including a weight/date pool and featured guest belly artists. Wow, I don't think I've ever done a "coming attractions" thing on this blog before. I guess I'm stuck with it, now!

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Birthday Week

So, I turned thirty this week. And I didn't really think I would care, but, man, there is something about not being "in my 20's" anymore that just feels so life redefining. Not necessarily in a bad way, I don't think. But I've definitely been introspective this week.

That didn't stop me from having fun, though. It started last Sunday with a big, family, combo birthday party for me and Jer (whose birthday was in December). We managed to convince Jeremy's extended family that, since it was a birthday party for us, they should all travel outside of their normal five-mile-radius stomping ground to have the party at our house. It was fun to have everyone down here, and it was a great motivator to get the house thoroughly cleaned. I wore myself almost completely out, but it certainly felt good to get it all done.

Wednesday was my actual birthday, as well as our regular Wednesday night gaming group. Erin made hot roast beef sandwiches (one of my all-time favorites), and Rachel made an amazingly rich chocolate-raspberry cake. Rachel also gave my character a lovely surprise birthday gift in the form of her first kiss with the non-player character she has fallen in love with. I know it's only imaginary, but it left me on cloud nine.

So, to finish off a nice, long birthday week, I decided to throw together a last-minute birthday party with my non-family and non-gamer friends for Sunday night. I shot off a quick email to a bunch of friends, and invited a few more people that I didn't have email addresses for in church on Sunday morning. The lovely thing with last-minute parties is that there isn't nearly as much pressure for everything to be perfect, and I'm not nearly as disappointed if no one ends up coming. The house was still relatively clean from last weekend, so getting ready consisted mostly of taking a nap. And thawing out frozen pizza dough. At least a dozen people ended up coming, which was really awesome considering the short notice. We had lots of fun, even if we did only end up playing a couple of games (I won at Settlers, while those with less patience for tiles firmly established that they were, indeed, smarter than the DVD-game version of a fifth grader). And everyone left fairly early, which might have disappointed a younger me, but the old lady who had to get up for work at 4:00 the next morning appreciated it.

Unfortunately, between the three parties, there were at least three cakes, and at least half of each remains. I might just need to throw another party, and call it the "Please Eat My Cake Before I Eat it All and Get Fat; My Aging Metabolism Can't Handle All This Sugar" party. You'd come to that, right?

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Two fun things in one weekend!

So, the trade-off for having Monday and Tuesday off was that I had to work the other five days last week. So of course, a friend of mine had a party on Saturday night that I wasn't able to make it to, and I was gearing myself up for having to miss out on all the fun again for another weekend. But then some friends from church decided to go out for Vietnamese food on Friday evening, and I had to look at my schedule seventeen times to convince myself that I really was free to go along with them. I love Vietnamese food. It was practically a staple for me when I lived in Canada, and I've been missing it since we moved. It was really yummy, too, even if they didn't have that drink with the coconut milk and beans and grass jelly that I love so much. (I asked the waitress about it, she said that used to carry it, but there just wasn't enough demand in that particular region of suburbia. So sad.) So, good food, and lots of good conversation with people that all-too-often I only get to greet for 45 seconds during "extend the right-hand of fellowship" time at church.

I really love my church. It may not be big, but it really feels like a family to us. It did from the very first day we were there. This Sunday, after church, we found ourselves talking for a really long time with two other couples (who are both fairly new to the church and, in an incredible twist of providence, are both expecting babies only two days apart in April), then we were joined by the pastor and his family and we all went out to lunch at Appleby's. There's something really nice about fellowship with Christian families/families-to-be. And I suppose I should say something witty or introspective in closing right about now, but what can I say, my blogging is rusty.

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A Week With a Baby

I arrived at my sister's house late Saturday night. I was supposed to be there Friday afternoon, but a bunch of last-minute stuff came up that threw my plans off. Once I had done everything I could on Saturday, however, my awesome husband shoved me out the door (figuratively, of course) amidst promises that he would take care of everything else (which he did).

The thing that struck me most vividly about living with a five-week-old baby for a week was how irreversibly a baby re-centers your life. And you'd think that would be a bad thing, but it's really just different. For one week, I got to see what it's like to have a baby at the center of my universe, and what really amazed me was how much life still continued to move along pretty much normally around that new center. And I'll stop there before I start to wax too poetical. I'll admit that I got off easy, because I didn't have to get up for thrice nightly feedings, and my sister insisted that I shouldn't have to be on diaper duty all week. But I really enjoyed the rhythm of living with Alana and Eric and Nicholas for that time. And Alana took lots of pictures of us for me to post on my blog.

I won't go into a detailed blow-by-blow of the entire week. We ate three meals a day and evening snacks at night, Nicholas eating approximately twice as often as us. I did as much of the cooking as I could, vacuumed, did dishes, went grocery shopping and stacked firewood. While Alana nursed, I read. When Nicholas was fussy, I walked around with him and let him look at the world to keep him entertained.


When his neck got tired of twisting around to see what there was to see, I held him on my chest until he fell asleep (exhausted, no doubt, from the strain of trying to read the words on my shirt).


Sometimes, he would sleep soundly, and I would rest him on my knees and send Alana to bed while he napped and I read (or just stared at him).


Sometimes, I would entertain him by reading him his dinosaur book,


and sometimes, he would entertain me with his Dr. Evil impersonation.


Other times, we would just hang out and let mommy do housework unencumbered.


During the week I was there, I learned to tell his hungry cries from his bored cries, and he learned how to stick his tongue out for me when I encouraged him with laughter. (Sadly, there are no pictures of this, which is odd, since he did stick his tongue out an awful lot.) Alana and I both swear we saw him smile real smiles, not just the gassy ones. While I was there, Nick discovered his hands, and by the end of the week, he had developed a really strong grip.


We took walks with Nick and Eli (Nicholas' big, hairy, canine brother). We visited Alana's Taiko group to show Neko-chan off to Alana's second family. One night, Tim and Allison (a friend from college and his girlfriend) came to visit me and we played Settlers of Catan while Alana and Nick napped. We picked a whole bunch of tomatoes from Alana's garden and made sauce. We talked, we laughed, and we splurged and ate ice cream almost every night.

As I was looking over the pictures that Alana sent to me (and over them, and over them, and over them), I realized that not only was I enjoying how adorable my nephew looked in those pictures, but I was also enjoying how I looked in those pictures. I haven't liked very many pictures of myself in the past few years - I always seem to look old or tired (to me, of course, everyone else always seems to think I look fine). But since I quit my job at the law office, I have had several people tell me how much happier I look. And a week at my sister's, a week that for all intents and purposes should have seemed routine and boring, a week of living simply on a schedule driven by the needs of an infant, that week seems to have been the icing on the cake. I look at these pictures, and I like the way I look because I look happy.

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Well, I'm back at home after spending a week at my sister's house in Vermont and a weekend in Ottawa for my ten-year high school reunion. I have loads to say, and, for the moment, have no idea where to start saying them. Until then, here are two more pictures from the wedding I went to two weekends ago (sent to me by my sister-in-law, who felt sorry for me and my lack of photos of myself from the wedding).

Jeremy and I, being silly as usual:


The Davis clan, now with a third generation!
From left: Jeremy (my husband), Jule Ann (me), Jill (my mom), Eric (my sister's husband), Trish (my brother's wife), Benjie (my brother).
Front: Alana (my sister) holding Nicholas (my nephew/her son).

Weekend Redux (with pictures!)

Thanks to fortuitous timing (okay, fine, it was mostly deliberate), I find myself with nearly three weeks of "vacation" between the closing of one chapter in my work life and the opening of the next. I'm loving the break. And of course, in true Jule Ann form, I have packed the break so full of activity that I will probably be more tired when it is all over than I was to begin with. But that's just the way I am.

To be fair, several of my planned activities involve relaxation. I spent most of the afternoon last Wednesday at the pool with Ali to start things off, and it was blissful. Then, on Thursday, Ally and I went thrift store shopping, because I needed a dress to wear to a wedding this weekend. I found a great dress, and had a great time. I also found an awesome corset, which, of course, I purchased, because there is a moral imperative to buy a corset that actually fits you when you find it for $4.50.

As an aside, for the curious, and/or for those who think that I am simply an inconsistent speller: I do have two different friends whose names sound like a small street, and one spells her name Ali and the other spells her name Ally. Which either clears up or adds to the confusion, I'm not sure which, but I like to think it's the former. I was going to attempt to clear up / add to the confusion even more by posting some pictures of me with Ally and me with Ali, but I somehow can't seem to find a picture of me with Ali, so here is one I stole from Ali's Facebook:


And here is one of me with Ally:


And now, back to our story.

Jeremy took Friday and Monday off of work in order to make this weekend a nice, long one. Friday we drove up to my mom's cousin's cottage at Silver Lake, Western New York. We were hoping to get there in time for some lakeside relaxing / swimming, but we got a late start, took a long lunch break, and then arrived at the Lake at about the same time as a huge windstorm, which dropped the temperature to well below comfortable swimming temperatures. Fortunately, we also arrived at the cottage only a few minutes after my brother and his wife, so we had a nice visit with them before heading up to my uncle's house at about 7:30 for the after-rehearsal-dinner party.

It was nice seeing everyone at my uncle's house, even if everyone else was mostly pre-occupied with last-minute wedding preparations, which it was kindof nice to not be part of for once. I was mostly pre-occupied with meeting my nephew, Nicholas, for the first time. Such a cutie. Here, have a picture:


Actually, that picture was from Saturday, because I was too busy holding him and cuddling him and loving him to take any pictures on Friday. So, why don't we skip to Saturday in the narrative, so that I can post the rest of the pictures.

Saturday morning was nice and relaxing. We all fought over took turns holding Nicholas, until he and Jeremy fell peacefully asleep together on the couch, and no one had the nerve to disturb them.


The wedding on Saturday was beautiful, but my camera sucks, so none of my ceremony pictures turned out. We sat in the back row with Alana and Nicholas to keep them company while Eric was taking pictures, which meant that we were the last people to be released from the church. So, we did what bored people do, and took pictures. Here is one of Nicholas with Grandma Jill:


And here is one of me kissing Jeremy, which I am including in part because it is fun, and in part because it is the only one I have of myself from this weekend:


After the wedding, I accompanied my sister to the nursery while Eric was taking the wedding party photographs, which really doesn't add anything to this story other than context for this picture of Alana and Nicholas:


The reception was held on my uncle's property, in a pole barn that was constructed specifically for this occasion. In case you ever wondered about my tendency to take on enormous projects that sound like a great idea at the time, end up being more work than I thought they would be, nearly drive me crazy trying to get them done, and then end up being finished just barely in the nick of time, this is proof that I come by this trait honestly, through my father's DNA. The building was gorgeous, perfect, and completed mere days before the wedding:


And yes, for the more observant car enthusiasts among you, that is a 2007 Mustang convertible that Alistair and Heidi made their entrance in. With "Final Countdown" playing in the background. My family is awesome.

There was a lego competition, and our table's entry, an homage to the word "poop", earned honorable mention. There was a wedding cake on every table, which enabled my Aunt Ester (the one who brought the parachute to my wedding) to dig a little hole in our cake for Mr. Mouse to set up his home.


And, while we're on the topic of cake, here is the only picture I got of the bride and groom that is even remotely good enough to post (I really need a new camera):


What was that? You want another picture of Nicholas? Okay, here is one of him with his Auntie Trish:


Alright, this post is getting to be pretty long, so I will rush through the rest of the weekend. We got to spend some quality after-wedding time with the extended family, and said our goodbyes to everyone but my mom on Sunday morning. Then we headed to my mom's sister's house with her to have lunch and visit with my mom's side of the family. It was especially nice to see my cousin Sean and his wife Melody, along with their four boys, who are about twice as big as they were the last time I saw them.

And then, in case we hadn't packed enough into one long weekend, we stopped by Liverpool on the way home to see Dora and Scott and their boys, whom I also hadn't seen since they were about half the size they are now. It was a really nice visit, and it was really great seeing them all again. Hopefully, now that they are only four hours away, we will see more of them in the future.