Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Delinquent Bloggers Anonymous

I need a 12 step program to get back into blogging. Today might not be much, but at least it will be the first step! Lately it feels as though things have been in such constant motion that I'm always a step behind, a moment late, or forgetting something.

I feel like I've got about as much brains as our Thanksgiving cookie project. :)



Rest assured though, things are still much the same in our household.


Aaron is usually still naked from the waist down, climbing onto something and wearing his boots in the house. Meredith is still busy with Kindergarten, her activities, and wondering if one of her teeth is going to be loose soon.

The weekend after our anniversary marked another very big first, and the one that consumed my thoughts in my every waking (and should have been sleeping) hour. We headed to Las Vegas with some friends for a long weekend anniversary celebration. Without the kids. I felt like I was planning a military invasion with the list-making and organizing to get ready to go away. We are so blessed to have a network of family and friends whom we could piece together like a patchwork quilt to care for the kids. I obsessed over what meals to leave for them, what needed to be packed in which suitcase, how the hand-off of carseats was going to be made, and other equally riveting details. When I wasn't busy thinking about details, I just worried about how the kids were going to do.

They, of course, did great. Thanks to their own independent, secure personalities and the kindness and care of the angels that took care of them, they flourished! We spoke to them a few times on the phone, and no tears were exchanged, so that was a tremendous success for all of us I think! I'd love to climb inside of their imaginations and see what Las Vegas looks like from their vantage point!

Meredith was told by someone at daycare that Las Vegas is a playground for adults. Imagine what she sees!

Aaron can't possibly understand the concept of it all at the tender age of two, but was unfailingly sweet in asking "You at Las Begas Mommy?" when he talked to me on the phone, and "You all done at Las Begas Mommy?" when I got home.

Dave had to travel on to L.A. from Vegas for work, so I came home to a week alone with the kids. I had missed them so much that it was like a gift to have so much time with them last week. We're all very glad that Daddy got home on the weekend, though. Both Dave and I, independent of one another, thought that Meredith had grown taller and thinner in the past few weeks, and that Aaron's speech was even clearer.

Now we eagerly await the arrival of the newest members of our family, the Sea Monkeys that Dave brought home as a gift for Meredith!

Step one of the twelve step re-blogging program wasn't so hard after all!

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Where does the time go?

It seems this fall we're living through a series of firsts, each of which is serving to point out how grown up the kids are getting, and consequently how old I must be!



Friday was a momentous day on a few fronts. For starters, it was the 10th anniversary of our wedding day! 10 years of life for this new family of ours. We had a chance to watch parts of the video of our wedding day later in the weekend after Dave found and hooked up a VCR to watch it on! The audio only worked for a portion of the tape. 10 years ago it was recorded in the best quality available at the time! We saw faces which have changed very little in 10 years, and whom the kids recognized right away. We saw our own faces which have changed quite a bit! We saw the tiny faces of our nieces: 3 year old Amy and newborn Kasha who are now 13 and 10 years old. And perhaps sweetest of all, we saw my dad, my maternal grandmother, and Dave's grandmere full of life and enjoying that special day. It was wonderful to have this living, moving record of those people that our kids will never meet, and to hear them say "There's Grandpa Bill!" when my dad came on the screen for the second and third time.



On another front entirely, we had the first of many picture days at school. This is what Meredith looked like before she left the house:



The jury is still out on how she looked by the time she met the photographer in the school gym. From what Meredith tells me, Madame Katie fixed the clip in her hair before she headed off for her picture, so clearly the worst of the problems were dealt with! Now if we could only figure out why she smiles a Jean Chretien lopsided smile every time she looks at the camera lately....

Last in the series of firsts for Friday was a massive dump of snow! The day we were married it rained a bit, but was a lovely temperature. Every anniversary we've celebrated has been some variation on classic fall weather. Never have we tromped through ankle deep snow on October the 9th! There has been nothing ordinary about the weather for the past year though, and October is no exception. Fortunately, Dave has the hot tub up and running, so Saturday morning he and the kids pretended they were in Banff or Aspen and enjoyed a dip while surrounded by snow!


After a while, the kids were so hot that Meredith took to making snow angels,


and Aaron cooled his heels!


I can't believe all that's happened in the last 10 years. Imagine what the next 10 years will bring!



Thursday, October 8, 2009

Ice, please!

We required ice today, for two different purposes. Well, three if you count the fancy Thanksgiving cranberry ice skewer thingys I'm trying to make for Sunday and keep breaking.

Anyhow, I had a call from the daycare this afternoon. It was the room leader for Aaron's room. The last time the daycare called me at work, he had just vomited all over himself, so I wasn't feeling so chipper once she identified herself. Today, however, the conversation started out with "Everything's okay, and you don't need to come and pick him up or anything, but I thought I'd just call and talk to you before you come."

Sinking heart. My child is a notorious biter. As you may have heard me mention before, he's been to the director's office at daycare more than once on account of his incorrigible biting. Mind you, he hasn't bitten lately (why am I even tempting fate by writing that...) but then a couple of weeks ago there was the day where he came out of the bathroom at daycare repeatedly with no pants on. And the day he picked his friend's nose.

But today he was the victim, not the victimizer. Apparently one of his friends pushed him during library time (rowdy book-readers) and he fell, striking his poor little head on the bookshelf. Really hard. So hard that the room leader thought she'd best warn me what it was going to look like before I walked into the room.

It's definitely a nasty goose-egg with a bit of broken skin right at the top of it. And a Scooby Doo bandage on it. After the requisite checking over and kissing, it appeared he was not a) in an altered mental state despite his appearance in the picture below; or b) in iminent danger of melting down, so it was off to the rink for Meredith's first skating lesson of the season. I was hoping the day's second encounter with ice would be under her feet, not applied to a wound on her head!

Yes, she's still growing her bangs out. Yes, tomorrow is picture day at school. Yes, I've already emailed her Kindergarten teacher in my neurotic state to ask if she will PLEASE reposition the clip in Meredith's hair to ensure her school photo doesn't look like this photo. As if she didn't have eleventy hundred other things to do!

Anyhow, the rink was the perfect cure for Aaron's funk because the Zamboni was in full action when we arrived. Being a conoisseur of all things mechanical, he was very pleased with this new discovery!

And Meredith was more solid on her feet than I had dared to hope, after only one session of skating lessons last winter and months and months of time away from it. Which is not to say she didn't spend her fair share of her time examining the ice up close. It was not until about 10 minutes into the 30 minute lesson that I was able to convince Aaron that the Zamboni was not coming back on the ice while "Mer Mer" was skating, and it was not going to run her over. Tender concern.


Aaron spent most of the remainder of the lesson eating raisins out of the back of his dumptruck.


Meredith skated forward, glided a bit, fell a lot and got back up promptly. She and the two other kids played the world's slowest game of freeze tag, which was more entertaining than a slapstick comedy routine. Watching three new skaters try to tag one another, and skate under each other's outstreched arms to un-freeze was good entertainment! They concluded with some kind of beanbag retrieval game and we emerged from the rink with the same ratio of goose-eggs to people we arrived with.



Looks like maybe Aaron could have used the helmet today!