snow days!

we had two forced days at home due to weather. (don’t laugh at us, you hardy northerners. this wasn’t our idea of an emergency.) you can laugh at us, though, for being unprepared for mairin. who thought we’d need to get her snow boots? (not me, that’s who.) so on day 1 we improvised with plastic bags and rubber bands. mairin thought this was so great that even though we had boots for her on day two (it wasn’t so much of an emergency that we couldn’t get to the shops across the street from us) she still wanted to wear bags held up by rubber bands. i’m thinking we’ll start a new trend.

toddler hip waders, day 1

throwing snow at mommy, day 2

mommy throws back, day 2

another cold, wet evening …

… and we’re all hanging out in the living room, me sprawled on a chair, carole and eamon on the couch, and mairin (as she is wont to these days) running around the wall separating our kitchen, dining room and living room, squealing “look at me — i running!” over and over again until she’s so out of breath that it sounds more like “loo — gasp! me-i — heave! ning!” and we watch her like she’s reality tv or the teletubbies or something equally mind-effacing. the heat kicks on, and for the first time in hours mairin changes course, leaving her loop of “look at me!” and angling toward us. we brace for the affectionate hurtle into one of our laps (“da-ee pick-a me up-a!”), and carole instinctively shields eamon’s eyes, ears, and fontanelle. but mairin ignores us, landing instead on the floor register, which she stands over, hair wisping in the upward gust of warmth, coyly grinning at us, saying:

“look — i marilyn.”

thoughts on a new year

as we dragged our still-kinda-sick kiddos out the door into the car for yet another road trip, and, once arrived, as i subjected one child to a tense and only mostly successful errand that i was running for people who are not my family, and then later as we retold our turkey-day stories to our dinner companions, and as i sat back sipping wine, wondering whether i had washed enough clothes to pack for eamon and for me as we head to boston tomorrow for three days — which led me to wonder why, exactly, i had done all this today when i could be home folding laundry (um, because seeing friends is always better than folding laundry?) when maybe what my family needed was another day of quiet rest before we separate for the weekend–

as all this happened in a compressed moment of imaginary time, i pondered my lucky new year’s day meal of black-eyed peas and ham and collard greens and thought maybe this year, just maybe, my good luck takes the form of new priorities.

(which i’m game for, as long as it doesn’t mean seeing friends less and folding laundry more.)

happy new year, one and all. thank you so much for hangin’ with us through to the bitter end of 2008. i’m pretty sure — even though i seem to remember saying the same thing at the end of 2007  — i am pretty sure i have never been so glad to put a year behind me.

who knew?

that a hungry 3-month-old with sinus congestion and a bit of a cough sounds exactly like a bleating lamb…

…being skewered.

what do giraffes say?

this has been mairin’s favorite question since her excursion to the bronx zoo. and in the ways of all parents everywhere, we’ve made up our answer. it goes like this:

1) begin to make the “mmmmm” sound of “mmmmm mmmmm good”
2) partway into the first “mmmmm,” press your lips apart by pushing your tongue up against them
3) open your mouth by forcing your tongue all the way out , all the while continuing as much as possible with the  “mmmm” sound
4) open your mouth all the way, stick tongue out as far as possible, and make as much of noun sound in “bleeeech” as you can
5) roll your tongue around as giraffes do when they eat popcorn out of your hand (i know! i know! but when *I* was a kid, you were allowed to get closer to the animals) while changing from the “eeeeech” sound to a grass-chewing kind of noise
6) finish with whatever kind of open-mouthed, tongue-lolling, grass-chomping strange sound you can make, without sounding scary (not as easy as it might seem)

and that, my friends, is what giraffes say.

mairin watches the fish in the crocodile tank at the bronx zoo

tagged

thanks, dd, for giving us work during a week when we were going to slink away, unnoticed, from all things bloggy.

so the meme: open your 6th photo folder; open the 6th photo in that folder; post it and the story about it.  here goes:

this is eamon shannon smith on his ninth day of life, sleeping on our (unmade) bed.

as for the story? well, there’s not much to tell. it’s a sleeping baby.

or there’s a lot to tell, but it’s taken us the whole damn blog to tell it. feel free to review the archives if you’ve forgotten any of the essentials.

(too lazy? here’s the cliff’s notes version: dead sister. live sister. dead sister. final pregnancy. SICK SICK SICK. holy bejeezus, twins. in past tense. thank heavens this little girl remains strong and healthy. WHAT? THAT’S A PENIS? rethink whole relationship to existence. eat lots of ice cream. nope, it’s still a penis. wait four more exhausting months where nothing much happens, if you discount the drama in our heads. september 9, 2008: heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s gus!)

when mairin was an infant i spent all day, every day, for at least 8 weeks, taking pictures of her sleeping. maybe that’s an exaggeration, since those of you who knew mairin back then knew she RARELY SLEPT. nonetheless we somehow we have boatloads of her chubby mug snoozing away. i thought it would only be fair to have, if not equal numbers of photos of the little man (as mairin has taken to calling him), but at least a few that are decent.

for photogs like me, it takes hundreds of snaps to get one or two that are decent. this is obviously not one of the better shots. sure it’s cute and all, but his makeup artist was out that day and the baby-bedhead updo is not his best look. but here’s the other thing about taking oodles of shots: i can rarely bring myself to delete any of them. i *usually* delete those that are out of focus (unless i’m having one of those days when i think i might do something, you know, artsy with them one day), but i tend to be quick and sloppy in the storage department, opting to save them all now and sort through them all later. (thus we have a desktop with close to 10,000 pix on it, causing said desktop to crash any time you try anything fancy, like playing freecell while you wait and wait and wait for firefox to load.) one day it will be later and i will be organized; our computer will no longer crash; and rainbows will shine in the sky and bluebirds will sit, singing, on my shoulder. (i actually just typed “bluebirds will shit, singing on my shoulder,” which may turn out to be true as well.)

so there you have it: the story of the baby, and the story of the picture.

you’re it:

squab

fatcyclist (or his proxy)

vamplita

alexis (to help you with nablopomo)

fill in your own narrative(s)

eamon took his first road trip to see his uncle rocco talk at ohio state:

the chariot returns! (hey, auntie kate, notice the hat?)

long-limbed baby:

see (a little bit) more here

meow, ribbit, or i doan wannit, redux: halloween 2008

poor edwina — no love for the t-rex at our house last night. after some serious toddler hemming and hawing (or “ummmmmm”ing, mairin’s most recent verbal tic), she finally decided to be a kitty-cat, and to paint her face, and to eschew all other costuming efforts, save for the showcase of her spastic side, growing increasingly more frenetic — spasticker? — as the evening wore on, until finally shannon found her sitting quietly on the grass in our front yard at the bottom of her slide, saying “i want to go inside. i’m tired now,” and so the two of them trundled off to bed.

but not before she enjoyed herself with her cousin emmet — the best looking frog in town — and her bff leo. indeed, the whole street joined in the fun. when you look at the pictures you’ll notice that yes, it was light for much of trick-or-treating, and yes, we were all in short sleeves at 6:00 in the evening on halloween because yes, it was almost 70 degrees.  it has been a lovely fall.

as for the face painting? do not believe the many internet sites that say you can make your own face paint out of cornstarch, cold cream, water, and food coloring. or out of cornstarch, flour, karo syrup, and food coloring. you can not. and i do not recommend waiting until 4:00 on halloween to find this out.

i need my friends!

a few weeks ago shannon and his teammates had an evening meeting to plan the cyclocross (that’s the non-motorized version) race they sponsored two fridays ago. all evening mairin paced the house, poking her head into room after room, saying “daddy with friends? daddy with friends!” the next day, when she discovered that it was possible to go see your friends one night and still be home the next morning, she started saying “i need my friends too mommy!”

turns out mommy also needs her friends.  and so we spent the weekend with them.

on saturday, our hip columbus friends drove down to spend the afternoon with us at the zoo.  this was my maiden cincy-zoo voyage, but mairin is a practiced — and to date, uninterested — zoo-goer. this time, however, with “my julian!” at her side, mairin loved every minute at the zoo. (almost.) only a few stroller-strides in she was hollering “where are you elephants?” and then pursing her lips and blowing like a trumpet and waving her arms up and down in perfect approximation of a toddler pretending to be an elephant. happily, we finally did see the elephants at the end of our visit.  well, they were not at the very end… that was the long-awaited face-painting adventure, which i suspect will send both families to the nearest theatre-supply store for more regular face-painting fun (and perhaps, in our case, to salvage the halloween costume fiasco.)

on sunday, our hip milford friends (that’s for you, cara) took mairin, eamon and me to the blooms ‘n’ berries farm to visit the pumpkin patch. to hell with pumpkins, said mairin — i want to SLIDE! eventually we played all the kitschy games we could play and wandered through as much of the pumpkin patch as we could with one needing-to-nurse infant and two adorable if needy toddlers. we gathered our pumpkins and headed for home.

mairin has it right, as usual. playing with friends is where it’s at.

i doan wannit!

or, another brilliant plan of mine bites the endless dust bunnies.

for a few weeks mairin’s favorite book has been “edwina, the dinosaur who didn’t know she was extinct.”  edwina is a perfect role model for mairin, since she is big and strong, she bakes metric tons of chocolate chip cookies for the neighborhood, she is genuinely friendly to everybody (and god knows she won’t learn that from US), and she is impervious to logic, all the while carrying a purse. edwina is, in short, perfect.

so it seemed only appropriate for mairin to dress as edwina for halloween, in this cute t-rex costume (she’s already got the necklace and purse and hat to finish the look):

the costume arrived in the mail yesterday, and when mairin’s best friend leo came over dressed in his knight outfit, we thought it a perfect time to try on the edwina outfit. which mairin wants absolutely nothing to do with. indeed, she so strongly wants nothing to do with it that she wouldn’t let up with the plaintive cries: i doan wannit, mommy, i doan wannit.

and then? she wouldn’t even let me read her edwina last night.

damn kids.