Well that sure was a long trip!

Did you think I'd been in Orlando this whole time, soaking up the sun and ordering room-service sushi? Yeah, I didn't think so.

The trip was OK. Kind of a bust. Got bumped from the swank hotel to the Residence Inn so instead of sushi I had to go down to the crappy bar and get a mediocre grouper sandwich and eat it in my room while watching the debate. Pffft!

But everyone survived. Ryan said the girls were just fine, and didn't cry much about me being gone. Oddly enough, tonight, when I mentioned that Grandpa Cesar (Ryan's Dad) lives in Florida, Lilly said "Just like you went to!" And then proceeded to tell me that she cried about me when I went to Florida and was very sad. She seemed in good spirits about the whole thing, so it doesn't seem any irreperable damage has taken place.

We had a very nice Hulaween. That's not a misspelling, as the picture proves.



They weren't really as grouchy as they look - it was very bright and the sun was right in their eyes. I think we may have overdone the Halloween events, though. Sunday the 26th was a costume party at Gymboree, then Wednesday we had a Halloween-ish-themed birthday party for some twins we're buddies with, Thursday was a costume party at the library (where this pic was taken) and by Trick-or-Treat on Friday, I was totally burnt out on the holiday! I think they might have been, too. They enjoyed the T-or-T but they were pretty quiet and got tired after maybe 10 houses. We do our T-or-T in my old neighborhood, with Grandma and Pop-pop, because they have sidewalks and it's more "neighborhoody" (plus they love it) so we went back to my parents' after that and that was that.

This weekend was recovery, house-cleaning, and general lack of excitement. I cleaned my bedroom and scrubbed my bathroom floor today. I can't tell you the last time that floor got scrubbed. Well, I could...but then I'd have to die of embarrassment.

It's been a nice, dry summer so far

So of course the morning I'm supposed to have my "library friends" (we all met during a 10-week play class for the kids) over, we had thunderstorms at 7am and it's still raining on and off. The plan was to play in the yard. I have a pretty small house and no dedicated playroom. And I'm a lousy housekeeper. I have until 10:15 to hope the yard dries out, or build an extension on my house and clean it all up nicely.

EDITED TO UPDATE:

Everything went fine. The rain stopped, the yard dried out enough for us to play back there. The kids had a great time, the moms had fun, and I even got a good nap out of the girls afterwards. Then we went to see my parents, who hadn't seen the girls in over a week - heaven forbid!

We had a nice time there, got in the car (all jammied and ready to sleep) just before 9. I pulled into my driveway after the 20ish-minute drive, and Lilly was just-asleep, while Kate was staring blankly. I decided to just go for it, since Kate was clearly relaxed enough to go right to sleep. You see where this is going, don't you?

I open Kate's door, figuring I'll bring her up, ask her to wait while I get Lilly, and then maybe sit with her for 5 minutes as she passes out. She looks at me through bleary eyes, then spits out her binky, gives me this face, and cackles loudly, waking up her sister, who says "Ooh! We are at my home!" and giggles maniacally.

I should've driven around the block a few more times, apparently. About 30 minutes later they were both happily asleep anyway.

Reading is fun(damental)!

Did anyone else's school participate in the RIF program when you were a kid? I was an avid and early reader (according to my Mom, I taught myself to read at 4, and basically convinced my parents that preschool had taught me, and preschool that my parents had taught me) so for me it was primarily a way to reinforce an already-existing habit. I loved it, though - free books! Right up my alley.

So when I found this on Emilie's blog, I thought it'd be fun to do. Instructions are as follows:

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - I can't bold this but I've read a few of them
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving - my all-time favorite
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - I tried so hard to read this. One day I will succeed.
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Looks like 41 for me. Some (Jude the Obscure) I remember reading, but wouldn't know again if I tripped over them. Some (Anne of Green Gables, A Prayer for Owen Meany) are my "desert island" books. I could, and have, read them over and over and over again. Some (Watership Down, Lolita) I read when I was too young for them, and probably ought to read again. I only italicized a few on my "to read" list, because really I'd probably like to read all of these but don't imagine I'll have the time until I'm quite old.

I pick, you eat

That's apparently what Katie thought the sign said at the pick-your-own strawberry place today. She was grabbing those suckers out of the basket almost as fast as I could put them in, at one point.





Eventually she either got bored, hot, or full, and went off to play with her sister. Ryan caught a few spontaneous huggy-kissy moments while I was busily filling up our strawberry basket.






For kids out picking strawberries at high noon (that's what happens when you decide at 9:50am that strawberry picking is the plan for the day) they did remarkably well. Only a little cranky towards the end.

These beauties are waiting in my fridge for tomorrow, when I should have the energy to make jam with some, stuff our faces with some of the others, and maybe cover some with chocolate before stuffing our faces with those. Yum!

Happy 5th Anniversary, Happy Father's Day

June 15, 2003

I'd do it all again, even the hard parts. And now that we have our two beautiful daughters, it seems even nicer that we got married on Father's Day.

It's been a whirlwind, like late May/early June always is in this family. Mother's Day, then Memorial Day, then my birthday, my mother's birthday, our anniversary, and Father's Day, all within a 4-week period. I'll try and get back to regular posting now that the madness has passed for a while.

What a great weekend

We really had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. The weather was basically perfect - warm, not-too-hot, bright sunshine, no rain. We had an early playdate on Saturday with the neighbors who live behind us. They have an almost-5-year-old daughter, and an almost-3-year-old son, and a 10-week old daughter. The kids are adorable, and the parents are super nice. Really super nice. Like, Ned Flanders nice. They brought sticky buns and used the phrase "yummers" when I said we had bagels and lox.

On Sunday we had a BBQ over here because my cousin Rachel was in town with her boyfriend, who none of us had met before. Her Mom came down from CT, and my parents came over, of course, too. I made yummy chicken wings and cedar-planked salmon, which everyone seemed to really enjoy. Actually, I really want more of those wings right now. Yum. The boyfriend is really a great guy and very personable. I hope they get married. The girls loved everyone and everything, doing all their "tricks" including a new one - blowing off their afternoon nap completely. Ack! Bedtime was early that night, but their sleep was very interrupted and today's nap was shortened, too. I hope the fallout does not continue tomorrow.

Today we laid low at home, other than lunch at the diner and a trip to the Home Despot. While the girls napped, I weeded my garden, put up a new little edging fence around it (the reason we went to the Despot in the first place), and planted tomatoes and peppers. I wasn't really sure I was going to do a garden this year, but my Dad (who starts his own veggie seeds) had a bunch of extra plants and offered them to me. I accepted, thus forcing the issue. I'm so glad I did. There's not much yummier (yummers-ier?) than fresh ripe tomatoes in the summer.

The only dim spot in the weekend was a situation with my next-door neighbor. She is a very nice, maybe not-so-bright single mother of a very bright, very manipulative, but also very personable almost-7-year-old who I'll call Jenny. We don't have fences in our neighborhood, and since we moved here 3 years ago, Jenny has always come across to our backyard and we've played with her. Ryan more so than me. As she's gotten older, her mom has given her a lot more freedom, and basically just lets her come outside and pretty much counts on me letting her play in our yard, and keeping an eye on her. Most of the time she doesn't even come out herself until it's time to call Jenny in for dinner.

I find this pretty frustrating. I have 2 kids to take care of already, and the thing is Jenny doesn't want to play with the girls. She spends a couple of minutes pushing them on the swing or whatever, but for the most part she wants me to play with her. I know she's very high-energy and her mom runs out of steam, but it's not really fair to constantly pawn her off on us. But then, I have never sent her home (successfully, at least) and when her mom has said "I hope Jenny's not bothering you" I've never said "Well yeah, she kinda is..." because who can say that without coming off as a bitch?

So on Saturday when everyone was here, Jenny saw us outside and came right over. Her mom said "Jenny, stay away from the kids - you have a fever."

OK, what? Your kid has a fever and you let her come over here to play with just a lame warning? I know I should've said something right there and sent her home, but I felt so uncomfortable with the confrontation, and I assumed that her Mom would come back out in 15-20 minutes or so and say come on home, you're sick, or something. She never did, and Jenny was at our house for the whole afternoon. Ryan told her she needed to go once, and my Mom told her twice. But she just lingered. Short of taking her by the arm and walking her home, there was no getting rid of her. I actually don't even know how she ended up out of here at the end of the day - she just eventually disappeared, as far as I know.

This afternoon, she showed up again. Her Mom came after her to remind her not to get too close to the girls because she's still sick. I looked at her Mom and said, pretty sarcastically, "Well, she was here all day yesterday..." and she smiles brightly and says "And the girls are OK?" At that point I was so pissed-off that I just said "That wasn't exactly my point. She was sick, she was here all day, and she was asked to leave several times." (I'm pretty sure Jenny wasn't paying attention to this conversation, but not certain) Her mom looked at me and said "Oh. That wasn't what I was told." and I said well, that's what happened, and she said "Well we're going to have to have a talk about that," looked towards Jenny, told her they had to go, walked away without saying goodbye and went in the house.

Ryan thinks I was absolutely in the right, but not very diplomatic, and now thinks that Jenny's Mom is pissed-off. I interpreted what she said as embarrassment - partly at her kid's behavior, and partly at her own negligence. Either way, I'm glad I said something, and this was really my only opportunity to do so, but I don't know where to proceed from here. I don't want her never to come over, but I can't be responsible for someone's high-needs kid (who isn't even really a playmate to my kids) for hours at a time, and even more so when I am having a family gathering, not to mention I don't want a sick kid hanging out with my kids for hours on end.

I wish we'd had the stupid confrontation yesterday, so it wasn't the last thing lingering from the weekend.

Anyone into swinging?

It's here!

None of these are really great photos, but we really didn't get to play long outside. It was unseasonably chilly today, and the girls and their friends Bobby and Sarah who were over actually wanted to go inside. The moms agreed. But boy did they enjoy it while they were out there! I'm really annoyed that tomorrow is supposed to be cloudy, chilly, and rainy in the afternoon. How am I supposed to keep them inside now that this thing is out there?!

I think the whole swingset adventure put them in a better mood than usual tonight. They were adorable in the tub, and afterwards. I wrapped them up together in a big towel, and they were all snuggly and warm and started hugging and kissing. Lilly told Katie "You are my best fwiend, Katie." And Katie took a cue from this song we listen to a lot in the car, looked her sister in the eye, and said "No one can take me away from you, Lilly."

I almost had to explain the idea of crying when you're happy to them. And then they were off and running, so I got to cry a few happy tears in private.

Mother's Day Redux

Since last Sunday was not quite to my liking (to understate the facts) Ryan offered me a do-over today. I got to sort-of sleep in (well, I got to go back to sleep after being awakened at 5 and 7 by my children) and I'm going to go out for a pedicure, some shopping, and who knows what else for the afternoon. I'm very excited.

I don't often get to do this on the weekends, because we're always trying to have family time. But if I don't get some me time, the family time just isn't going to be very fun. I do sometimes get out alone when the girls are at my parents, but it's never enough time, it often involves some frustrating logistics (dropping them off, picking them up, or generally trying to figure out how to get them a nap since they won't sleep at Grandma and Pop-pop's house). It's so nice to be able to just leave them at my own house, with their own father, and let him deal with the logistics for an afternoon.

In other news, I am almost excited for the weekend to end, because on Monday, Wood Kingdom is delivering a (not-wood) swingset for the girls! I can hardly wait. We were looking at a small Step2 set, but then Grandma stepped in and upgraded us to the big honkin' Naturally Playful Adventure Lodge with Glider.

This is fantastic news. We do not have fences around our yard, and our next-door neighbor Emma (who is in first grade) has a big wooden swingset and a playhouse that the girls love. But they don't understand that they can only play on it when Emma is home, and that leads to a lot of conflict and chasing when we are outside, as you might imagine. I think this set will more than satisfy their swingy, climby, slidey, playhousey desires.