New Jersey, Ohio or Colorado, eh?

Nathaniel is submitting an application today for a teaching fellowship at Princeton! Yeah, New Jersey. I know. No offense, Bridget, but it's not somewhere I've ever pictured myself living. Still, I've been to Princeton and it's beautiful, so I think I could make do for the three years of the fellowship. It's seriously competitive, though, as might be expected of somewhere like Princeton, so we're not really holding our breaths, but the Princeton prof who is "mentoring" Nathaniel in the application process said he thought Nathaniel's proposed research/teaching plans were excellent and he'd have a real shot. Say a little prayer for Nathaniel on this one. It's definitely the opportunity he'd love most at this point, since it would allow him to teach in the near future.

Other options right now include a couple positions at Ohio State that Nathaniel will apply for in the coming weeks. There's another location I've never had any desire to live in! But since Ginny, one of my best college girlfriends, is currently living there, I've been encouraging Nathaniel to go ahead and apply. We'll see what happens. This is one of those times when I love having gone to college at ND. It really seems like no matter where we move in the future, I'll have some good friend from ND living near by. That's pretty cool.

Lastly, we have the easy option of Nathaniel staying on and taking a position he's been offered with a prof at CU, and that's looking pretty good these days since it would mean NOT having to sell our house, and NOT having to get established in a new city, and, well, NOT living in New Jersey or Ohio... :)

Cause they're just that cute!

Ruth is sprouting teeth like a pro these days. She's popped out four of them in the last week. Both center bottom and both center top have at least somewhat broken the surface now, and that's good news. She'll be chewing food before we know it. Or hands, or kitty tails, or whatever.

I dragged the girls to a portrait studio today to get some cute pics to give the grandparents and great grandparents for Christmas (pretend to be surprised when you see them, okay?). Marianne and Ruth were both remarkably good during the photo session, which was a huge weight off my shoulders since I'd been all but dreading it. It can be tough enough keeping kids from screaming in a store, but trying to keep them actually HAPPY while a stranger shakes stuffed animals in their faces can be a nightmare. I'm basing this on the experience I had the one other time I took Marianne to a professional photographer. We ended up with a few good pictures that time, but it was a total fiasco getting there. This year went much more smoothly. I'm sure there will be some illegally scanned copies on Nathaniel's website shortly after Christmas, so keep your eyes peeled.

Back to the grind

Despite what I said in a previous post about being thankful for the flexibility of my job, having a week off is enough time to make me never want to go back. It was a tough commute in this morning, just thinking of all the icky work awaiting me. And the 100+ emails in my inbox didn't make it any better.

We had a wonderful holiday weekend! It was great having my parents out to visit, although I think they may boycott Thanksgivings in Colorado in the future, because for the second year in a row they've gotten stuck in a nasty blizzard on the drive home. We braved a trip to the fancy mall near our house on Saturday morning to get the classic picture of the girls with Santa (photos forthcoming either here or on Nathaniel's site). Marianne would hardly look at Santa until we walked away, then it hit her that this nice guy had given her a book and everyone said he was really friendly, and maybe she DID want to talk to him. Which means she got a little upset wanting to go back and see Santa again (not going to happen). The mall was surprisingly quiet on Saturday morning. We were only about the 6th group in line to see Santa, and shortly after we finished there was no line at all! By the time we left the mall, though, things were picking up and the parking lot was looking pretty full. That night, ND won their last game of the season against Stanford, so that's happy news. We should end up in a real bowl game this year! My folks are debating trying to get tickets to the game if ND ends up in the Fiesta Bowl, since we have family in Phoenix they could visit while there... We'll see how that goes. I'd love to go, but getting more time off work and paying for tickets and airfare, even if Southwest has cheap flights, may be a little beyond our means at the moment.

I hope all my friends and family had as wonderful a weekend as I did! Happy Thanksgiving again. Here comes the holiday season...

Happy Thanksgiving

I won't get terribly deep with this, because I find that if I think too hard about all of the blessings in my life that I have to be thankful for, I get a little overwhelmed.

- I'm thankful of course for my immediate family - my husband and daughters who add meaning to every day of my life.
- My parents are out for the weekend to spend the holiday playing with their granddaughters, and it reminds me how thankful I am to have a great relationship with my folks. It always saddens me to hear about people who don't love spending time with their parents. I consider mine to be very good friends, and always look forward to visits with them.
- This weekend is also a good reminder of how thankful I am to live here in Colorado. The temps in the high 50s and beautiful sunny views out our back windows of the mountains... My parents, Nathaniel and I took the girls to the park this morning and spent a couple hours outside enjoying the fresh air on the day after Thanksgiving. Not that this is typical of every November in Colorado, but I'm thankful for it all the same.

I'm even thankful, though I seldom admit it, for my job. I have almost a full week off for this holiday, and on a normal week, I only work three days. That's a good deal. As much as I complain to friends about working at all, if I have to continue to do it in order to the pay the bills, I'm very lucky in the job I have right now. All in all, life is really good.

Oh, and the pumpkin pie! I'm thankful for that, too!

Not quite potty trained

Background: We're in the process of slowly potty training Marianne. She's just over 2, so we're not in a huge rush, but she likes to use the "big potty", so we certainly encourage that. But she's nowhere near ready to give up a diaper.

Story: This morning around 5:30am, Ruth woke up for her morning feeding. (Don't worry, that's normal. Usually I feed her around 6am before I leave for work). When I went into the girls' room, Marianne was asleep with her blankie and bear on a little kid-sized cushy chair instead of in bed. Strange, but not the wierdest place I've ever found her sleeping. I went to lift her to put her back in bed, but her jammie legs were sopping wet, and when I felt her bed, it was wet as well. I woke Nathaniel up to give me a hand, since Ruth was getting feisty about wanting food. When Nathaniel woke Marianne up and picked her up, he realized that she had NO DIAPER ON! Our first assumption was that she'd taken it off and put her pants back on. But since she's never managed to get her snug-fitting jammie pants on by herself, this was far-fetched. The lack of a diaper anywhere in the room pretty much shot that theory down. Once we'd talked through the possibilities, we realized that after the last time she'd used the potty before bed, we'd put her pants back on her without remembering to get her a new diaper. (I'll point out that I'm saying "we" out of kindness, cause it could easily have happened to me, but I was feeding Ruth at the time...) So, here's our daughter in soaking wet jammies, with a soaking wet bed and chair, where she'd obviously gone a second time in her sleep after moving there from her wet bed, and it's totally our fault. Parents of the year? Maybe not for 2005.

Hooray!

I'm all done with work for the week! I can hardly believe it myself, but I don't have to go back till Monday. Why then, you might ask, am I up before 8am? If you're asking that question, then you're obviously one of my friends who does not yet have kids. {sigh} This IS sleeping in for me. Sad, but true. I comfort myself with memories of a time when I was young and my sister and I would wake up on a Saturday morning at 9:30 or later and my mom would still be in bed, sleeping till 11am! No joke, I remember it that way (feel free to correct me if I'm totally making this up, Mom). So it's not that sleeping in is gone forever. Just till my kids are old enough to either sleep in themselves, or to get their own breakfasts and entertain themselves all morning. I realize that's years and years away, but it's still something to look forward to.

This one is for the E-wood girls...

...and may be incomprehensible to anyone else. I just had one of those great flashbacks because you hear a song on the radio... The song that started it was 'Because the Night' by Patti Smith, although in the memory it's the 10000 Maniacs' version. It's freshman year, and we're riding in Sara's mom's minivan on the way to Wichita for the boys' tennis state finals. The above mentioned song comes on the radio and Sara's little brother, Ben, is singing along to it and he actually thinks the lyrics at one point are "cannah-chee-ow". You can figure out for yourselves the real lyrics, if you know the song. Other great sing alongs from that particular roadtrip include 'Love Bites' by Def Leppard and 'Never Gonna Get It' by EnVogue (on which we thought we were singing great harmony, though in reality I'm sure we sounded like nothing but crazy noise to Sara's mom in the front seat). If I'm not mistaken, this was the same trip on which we wore McDonald's bibs to the grocery store in the middle of the night, some guy named Cam spread cousin-DeeDee's underwear drawer all over her room (after offering compliments on the bibs), and an orange shirt caused certain tennis players to be distracted from their games. Good times!

Howard pride

Three of my best girlfriends (Kelly, Bridget and Ginny) at our college dorm, Howard Hall. I'm sad I missed it! But then, I was warm all weekend, which was nice.

Finally Fall!

Autumn has been sneaking up on us for a long, long time, it seems. But every time we'd get a couple days of cool, crisp weather, it would be followed by a week in the 70s and low 80s. I'm happy to announce that I think fall has finally arrived for real. Hopefully winter doesn't follow too quickly on it's heels. The picture is actually from last weekend, and the cool temps have stuck around till now. It's nice enough most of the time to play outside, but not hot. Hooray!

I saw Harry Potter yesterday. I give it a big thumbs up. I won't spoil it for others, but I will say that, understandably, they had to leave a lot out and mix things up a little to get the important bits in. It was very well done. Although there are a couple missing things that I wonder how they'll deal with later in the series, as I considered them key to future plot lines. I'm sure they have a plan and have consulted J.K. Rowling along the way so as not to set the movie series up for failure. The big question for my friend, Heather, and I from about 2 minutes into the movie on - "when did they grow all those muscles?!". Harry and Ron (Ron, in particular) are both significantly more buff than previously. Not that that's a bad thing, but they are only supposed to be 14.

Not for the squeamish

I almost forgot to mention this... I heard a crazy report on NPR's 'All Things Considered' on Wednesday evening! It was a man talking about how, as a child, he'd undergone a "transorbital lobotomy". It almost made me sick in the car when the procedure was described, and I have a hard time believing that a doctor could think this would do a patient any good. There's a picture of the guy at age 12 mid-lobotomy. Yick! But intriguing, all the same. You can download the audio, or read the transcript - 'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey.

Things I'm looking forward to...

1. Harry Potter opening TODAY in theaters! Nathaniel is seeing it today with his buddies from work, and in repayment, those buddies are having a little play group with all the kids tomorrow morning so the wives (who have real jobs that they can't as easily skip out on to go to midday movies) can take in a matinee. This is made even more exciting because I can't actually remember the last time I went to the theater to see a movie. Early July, maybe?

2. A one day work-week next week. Thanks to my part-time schedule and a company that gives really good holidays (Wed-Fri for Thanksgiving this year), I only have to work Monday. Sweet! And since I've prepaid for daycare on Wednesday, I may just take advantage of that to have a half day or so to myself so I can get the house cleaned and the pies baked before my folks roll into town that night.

3. Lots and lots of yummy food in the coming week. In particular, pecan pie. Mmmmmmm! I love Weight Watchers, but there's a time and a place for everything, and next week is the time and place for pecan pie.

Go Ducks (and IRISH, too)

I was reminded this morning that this is the weekend all my college girlfriends are headed to ND for the Syracuse game. It's not as though I'm the only one of my friends not able to go (I'm not positive, but I'm assuming that Emily isn't going since her new baby is only a few weeks old), but that doesn't make it any less disappointing. Have a fabulous time, girls! Have a mimosa for me at the tailgater, since I know Bridget would never sink so low as to drink beer first thing in the morning. And don't let Ginny take more than one crossword puzzle into the game. If she finishes it, she'll just have to watch a little football. I'll be thinking of you all! Here's to the Howard Ducks, and to the IRISH as well. Cheers!

Happy half-birthday, Ruth!

Ruth is 6 months old today. I'm taking her in for her check-up and shots this afternoon. Happy birthday to you - baby girl! Now let me jab some needles into your little baby thighs. Nice, I know.

I had one of those moments yesterday where you can't quite believe your life is really your life. I was packing away some clothes that Ruth and Marianne have outgrown. Some of Ruth's stuff is hand-me-downs from Marianne. As I was putting them away I thought, wow! these clothes have made it through two kids in decent shape. Then it was like everything froze for a second as the realization hit me that I have two kids who've handed down clothes and outgrown them and it's all so grown up and scary and no way am I old enough for all of this! Within a second, though, Marianne came tearing into the bedroom from the living room giggling, and Ruth was laughing at the mobile in her crib and it all just seemed right. Whether I believe it or not, I am old enough, and I am living it. And it's pretty darn fun.

Update: Ruth's appointment went very well other than all the crying. She's perfectly healthy and has actually leveled off a little in size. Instead of being totally off the charts for height and weight, she's now in the 90th percentile for each. She's weighing in at 18lb 4oz and is 27 inches long. If memory serves, that's the exact weight of Marianne at her 1 year check up.

Sticky feet

I had a couple things to return at Old Navy, and it's too cold to play outside today (high of 30 with a dusting of snow on everything), so I decided to take the girls to the mall and let Marianne play in the kid area there. We've gone once before, but she'd been so overwhelmed by the number of kids that she hadn't really played much. The kid area is basically a 50' x 30' padded floor with big, cool dinosaurs sticking out of the floor that the kids can climb all over and slide off of and crawl under. Shoes are not allowed, so I let Marianne run around in her socks. I noticed that most of the kids were barefoot, which seemed really gross to me and made me want Marianne to keep her socks on even more. But then I figured out the problem. The plastic that the dinosaurs are made from is really slippery, but it's perfect for kids to climb on if you allow them to use their naturally sweaty, sticky little bare hands and feet. They're like flies climbing up the windshield or something. Marianne yanked her socks off within a couple minutes and warmed right up to the fun. She was all over the wooly mammoth and sea-serpent looking thing. She really did seem to be having a great time, along with the 30 or 40 other kids hurtling around the space, but a part of me just could not get over the ickiness of all the little bare feet.

Start the college savings account now!

I had an exciting weekend of accomplishing nothing while feeling very busy, which is pretty much the standard at our house. True, we did get the house nicely cleaned before having some friends over to dinner on Sunday evening, so I guess that counts as accomplishing something, but there's little to show for it now other than half an apple pie. I have several craft projects (sewing and crocheting) that I'm either in the middle of or have on my list of things to do, but it's been weeks since I've touched any of them. To my new baby niece, Lucy, if you're reading this, there is a blanket nearly made with your name on it... Maybe you'll have it by Christmas. But don't hold your breath. Marianne used to hold her breath when she got upset, and it scared me half to death. Don't do that to your mom.

Both Marianne and Ruth spent the weekend snotty and coughing. That's good fun for the whole family! We think it's a virus, and it seems to be getting better. We'll see. The biggest issue we have with the coughing is due to the fact that the girls share a room. If you have two girls sleeping in one room, and one wakes up coughing, you run a high risk of the other following suit. It makes for some tense moments of baby monitor listening as we cross our fingers that the coughing fit will subside and both girls will come out of it asleep. We've been pretty lucky so far.

ND beat Navy this weekend! GO IRISH! Marianne seemed to be boycotting football last weekend, and refusing to cheer on the Irish, but she made up for it this Saturday. Without any prompting other than my saying that we should go downstairs and watch some football, she starting clapping and cheering "Go Irish!" and "Go Notre Dame!". Then during the actual game she was throwing out things like "Get him! Get him!" and "Ouch!" when someone was tackled. Since I barely understood football prior to college, it feels good to be giving my daughter a feel for the game early in life. Oh, and for the record, Marianne stated for the first time ever that she intends to make ND her alma mater. Nathaniel and I have every intention of being low-pressure on this issue, but I was just trying to explain what Notre Dame is, and that I met her daddy there, and she looked at me very earnestly and said "I go Notre Dame". Seriously, I didn't coach it out of her! Of course, this means Nathaniel needs to get a professorship there, because with the way tuition is going up, that's the only way she'll be able to manage it.

Out of place?

I just read an interesting NYTimes article (courtesy of Kris's blog) about restaurants requesting patrons to keep their kids under control. I am all for this. Nathaniel and I have altered our eating habits since having kids, and try to avoid taking them to places where they'll be annoying to adults trying to have a quiet meal out. We spend more time at Red Robin and Chilis, and less at fancy date-type restaurants. Although I will say my sympathy level for parents dealing with hard to control kids has sky-rocketed in the past 2 years, give or take 3 weeks.

The part of the article that struck me, though, was a single line thrown in the middle of the article about a clerk asking a woman to stop breast-feeding her child in a store. There is a major difference between a parent who allows her toddler to run screaming through a restaurant and a mother quietly and discreetly nursing an infant. Obviously I don't know if this incident involved a mother who was completely exposing herself in public, or a mother trying to nurse her 4 year old or something. But that particular situation seems out of synch with the other examples given, and left me a little disgruntled after reading what was an otherwise interesting article. Hmph.

So I said to myself...

I talk to myself a lot! This is not the first time I've had the realization, but it struck me the other day as I was walking a couple blocks from my office to the post office. It's not really an out loud conversation with myself, but a mostly-under-my-breath conversation. I blame my children (as any good parent would). Others with kids are welcome to give me their two cents on this, but my theory is that I talk to myself more these days because I've gotten used to keeping a running conversation going with a non-responsive baby while shopping or driving in the car. I talk to the girls all the time about things going on around us, or what brand of cereal happens to be on sale, and how when I was a kid (and now) I would eat all of the oaty bits out of that brand of cereal first and save the marshmallows for last... or whatever else comes to mind. It's an effort on my part to keep them entertained. But it's translated into my having the same sort of running conversation with myself even if the kids aren't there to hear it. I'm hoping that this will taper off now that Marianne is getting old enough to respond and be involved in real conversation, but we'll see. I may just end up a crazy old lady who talks to herself all the time.

Lions, tigers and bears

Lions, bears and apes, at least. There probably would have been tigers if we'd looked harder, but the kids were getting really tired by the time we got to that section.

I met a friend at the zoo this morning with what I think legitimately qualifies as our entourage. I had Marianne and Ruth with me, and she had her son and daughter, Charlie and Braley, who are each about two months older than my girls, respectively. I can happily say that Charlie and Marianne are reaching a really fun age. It's impossible to keep them happy in a stroller or out of it for longer than 20 minutes, so there's a lot of buckling and unbuckling, but they ran all over the place and climbed up the gates to see the animals and rode the carousel... All in all, it was a very entertaining trip. The only real drama was when we tried to keep them going right past naptime, and even then all of the kids were remarkably good. There were a couple adorable moments of the older kids walking around the zoo holding hands or with arms around each other, but of course they were over long before I could get the camera out of it's case. I need to get better at that.

Ruth has a nasty hacking cough today. I'm keeping my fingers crossed it doesn't develop into anything worse. She's probably just congested because she's teething. One of the joys of having a baby is being able to blame anything and everything on the possibility of teething.

Tiny whatsit?

A few weeks ago we (Nathaniel, Marianne, Ruth and I) were all in the living room one evening and I was taking tags off some new things that I had bought for the girls, including some socks. You know how socks have that plastic hook to hang them in the store for display? I set one of those on the coffee table. Marianne sees it, picks it up, gets a big grin on her face and says, "Little tiny hanger!!" then runs to her room to try and hang it in her closet. Nathaniel and I cracked up. And since then it's expanded to the point where every small thing is a "little tiny" something to Marianne. A crumb from her cereal is a "little tiny chex!" and so on. That's where the name comes from. I love that story because it just goes to show that kids are so much more tuned into things than we think. Almost everything she says is completely TRUE, it's just that we had never thought to look at it that way.

Getting the word out

It's a workday today, which is always less fun than a stay-at-home day. That fact slaps me in the face when my alarm goes off at 5:30am. Tomorrow I'm taking the girls to the zoo, so I'll focus on that and slide through the work portion of today. Don't get me wrong - I'm a good employee. But you don't necessarily have to love your job to be good at it.

I'm slowly but surely telling people that I have this new blog-thing going on, and other people are spreading the word for me. Nathaniel said if I don't tell my friends on my own, he'll publicize it for me, so I might as well do it myself. So far I've told a grand total of 5 people. I'm feeling good about that! I'm sure there'll be more by the end of the day. There is no better way to procrastinate at work than to email friends.

To the park

This morning, I took the girls to the park, double stroller and all. It was a last minute decision on my part to go there, rather than just for a walk, based mainly on the fact that Marianne (my 2 year old) had already gotten syrup in her hair at breakfast, so would need a bath today whether she rolled herself in sand or not. When we arrived, Marianne realized immediately that we had "forgotten" the bucket and shovels for her to dig in the sand. It had actually crossed my mind just as we were closing the garage door that I should grab them, but I thought maybe if I didn't take them, Marianne would spend a little more time on the slides and swings, and less in the dirt. Silly mommy. The result was Marianne throwing herself into the grass in tears, until I caved and poured her sippy cup of water into my bottle so she could pretend her cup was a bucket. Whatever gets the games back on track. Now she's sleeping the sleep of someone who has done her job well. She's gone down slides, she's swung with no hands, and, most importantly, she has moved the sand from her right side to her left. She can rest now.

Giving back a little

So, Nathaniel set up my own personal blog for me last night, and I have to say I'm very excited. I've used other people's blogs to procrastinate for quite a while now, and it feels good to be giving a little something back! I've no idea what to write about yet, but I'm sure something will come to me. At a bare minimum, I can keep friends and family a little more up to date on my life and kids. So, as Nathaniel said in the earlier post, here goes nothing!

Foray into the Blogosphere

Here goes nothing!