I’m verbing my noun

It’s been quite a week for me and I’m near incoherent tired. SOME silly people wouldn’t blog when they can’t get noun-verb agreement, but I’m far more cavalier than that! We took a four day weekend and went Camping! In New Hampshire! With a 4 year old and 18 month old! Now that most of the scars have faded, it was a lot of fun. Thane has a death-wish, of course, which seemed most evident in the water. He loves it when he has a bath and lays his head back in the water. The same move in a foot of lake water, on the other hand, has predictable effects — at least to the grownup mind. He got pretty bored at the campsite. I realized, as we packed up, that we brought umpteen toys for Grey, but hardly anything for Thane. No wonder he attempted to drink the dishwater.

Anyway, so Thursday was ALL PACKING and Friday through Sunday were ALL CAMPING and Monday was ALL DOING CHORES.

Normally, work would seem vacation-like in comparison, but this week we flew in a bunch of colleagues from several different continents (bonus French accents!) and spent extensive time in windowless conference rooms discussing the relative merits of SAP and Siebel. And a good time as had by all. But it involved like all my time and brainpower. I mean, I didn’t even get to read my blogs! Or my advice columns! THE HORROR! This is probably the longest I’ve gone without updating in, er, a long time.

So instead of a nice and detailed summary of camping with three maniacs and some meeting notes, I’ll simply leave you with a portfolio of pictures:

Parks, backyards & camping

Pictures and Vignettes

My digital life is all behind. My work life is very, er, fulfilling these days. And my personal life is what Professor Willauer used to call “rich and full”. (Read: I’m still doing bills at 10:45 on Tuesday nights.)

But the thing is, I’m not using euphemisms. My life is fulfilling, rich and full. There’s laughter, giggling, serious discussions, rough-housing, beautiful spring days (at least through a window), lilac-sniffing, Miso-soup-eating, meeting-attending, project-planning and baseball-watching. Sure, I had 492 pictures to go through last night, multi-tasking as my husband and I watched Red Dwarf (we’re up to Season 6). Granted, I haven’t ordered prints in like a year, and my digital picture frame shows a little immobile bowling-ball of a Thane. And yes, my retirement funds need to be reallocated and the IRS sent me a nasty notice (I believe I’m in the right on that one, which just makes it worse. It’s easier, although much more expensive, to be wrong.) But hey, I’m never, ever bored. And really, it’s quite a joyful tumult, except the bit about cat vomit in the morning.

In the vignette department, I would like to record for posterity that this week marks the first time Grey begged for a cell phone. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If you ask me now, in the throes of preschool and my own fuddy-dud-ness, I’d say that maybe 14 would be an appropriate age for a cell phone. One without a camera or digital plan. That’s 10 years from now. Do you remember where we were 10 years ago telephonically? It was my senior year of college. We had an outrageously expensive plan in our dorm rooms, and I remember one or two people my senior year actually had their OWN cellular phones. For real. One of my very friends had a (wait for it!) car phone! It was so expensive you only used it in extreme emergencies, of course.

So that is to say that in 10 years from now, who knows what telephony looks like? I can’t predict what will be normal and expected. (For example, in less than 15 years email has gone from a cool thing that some people had to pretty much mandatory for civilized life.) So I can’t say what choice I’ll make about when it is appropriate for Grey to have his cell phone. All I can say with confidence is: not now.

In other communication news, Thane has started speaking in very short phrases this week. I will record as his first sentence this one, used to communicate key information to a babysitter on Monday night: “Dis Mama” (pointing at me). Yes Thane! I am proud to be your mama!

In funniest baby phrases of the week, Grey was asking what a copy was. You try defining a copy with out using a synonym. So my husband, reaching into a vast store of knowledge, explained that a copy is like “Echo Echo” on Ben 10. Grey got the concept, but Thane immediately blurted out “ECHO ECHO!”. Perhaps you had to be there, but the irony of your little echo saying echo was, er, ironic.

So with no further ado, the pictures. I didn’t have time to caption them or to edit them quite as much as is my wont, but I did shut my computer off for the second episode of Red Dwarf, so I regret nothing:

http://picasaweb.google.com/fairoriana/May2010#

Pictures

It’s possible I should upload pictures more often, so that my uploads are slightly less schizophrenic. To which I say: pppffft. You’re lucky I take pictures at all.

Cheese!

Anyway, I have pictures for March and April, including lots of playground stuff, pretty much every nice day in the last 6 weeks, Piemas, grandma, Easter, and many silly faces by Grey (which represent only a small portion of the silly faces that have pictures taken).

Enjoy!

http://picasaweb.google.com/fairoriana/April2010#

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Saturday was tree day. After several cumulative hours of aikido and a few tantrums because it wasn’t tree time RIGHT NOW we finally went to go purchase our Christmas tree. As we stood in the bitter winter afternoon winds, surrounded by swirls of evergreens, Grey demanded candy instead and promptly pitched a fit about not getting it. Then when I had my back turned he “went to find daddy”. Ahhhhh fun times. Then when I applied what I thought was an overly mild punishment (loss of DS use for leaving mommy) he cried so hard he threw up. All over the car. I think on purpose. And I broke the external screen on my phone somehow – I don’t know how.

Merry Christmas!

Happily, life then improved. We got home and cleaned up the car. We put an exhausted Thane down for a nap, and erected our festive boughs in the living room. Grey helped decorate the tree. Only two ornaments have been shattered so far. And as we decorated, it began to snow — the first true snowfall of winter a white benediction on our celebration.

Victorious Christmas tree assemblers
Victorious Christmas tree assemblers

I need to figure out how to do better with naps. Despite my attempts to get him down in the afternoon, yesterday Thane’s nap was about 1/2 hour of driving time from church to home (via Staples). By 6 pm he was weeping at everything. And Grey really does still need an afternoon nap most of the time, but NEVER takes one anymore at home. This leads to unnecessarily stressful weekends.

Yesterday I put all three boys down for a nap. First Thane (night night little Pookie!), then Grey (Robby, please make sure Grey goes to sleep), then Adam (he didn’t need much urging). Only Adam got any sleep, and that was 15 minutes while Thane was bopping around his crib before he started being unhappy.

While the boys were Not Sleeping, I was attempting to update my ipod (and mostly failing — my old one has a battery issue) and uploading pictures (and mostly succeeding). Here, for your viewing pleasure, are the latest and greatest in the our familiy snaps!

Early December pictures

When in doubt, post pictures

Last night, for the first night in what seems like forever, I had the blessed combination of some free time and some energy. I climbed the stairs to my attic fastness and plugged in my camera.

Holy Handgrenades Batman! 650 pictures! (In my defense, only about 6 – 7 weeks worth!)

It was the effort of an evening to cull the harvest down to the best fruits. The best fruits seem to involve quite a lot of Grey making weird faces and Thane reading. But here they are, for your viewing pleasure!

http://picasaweb.google.com/fairoriana/September2009#

The quandries of a blogger-mom

So in my “blog queue” I have a cute picture and I have a developmental update. The cute picture is Grey. The developmental update is Thane.

The deciding vote comes down to laziness. Posting pictures? Easy. Posting developmental updates? Not easy.

So here you go. I paid $15 for this picture. I removed for you the truly hideous border that used to surround it. There is one child in this picture that doesn’t look terrible. Happily, that child is my child.

This, my friends, is a ripoff:

I trust I don't have to point out which one is mine
I trust I don't have to point out which one is mine

Ok, so the girl in the upper left is pretty cute too