Interpretation

I had to ask Olivia who the subjects were in this picture she recently brought home from school.

"Mom, it's you and Daddy!"

So, apparently I'm going through a Michelle Obama-phase, what with those fabulously sculpted upper-arms and a gown worthy of a State Dinner.  And Adam must be in his Sammy Davis Jr.-phase, with that sharp blue suit and his signature wide smile.

She even remembered my green eyes.

Hello 8 months.

I sort of skipped over Saul's turning seven months (as I have with most of everything else that happened in October--ouch), and here it is that he's now eight months. 

As far as I can tell, he is enjoying being eight months way more than he enjoyed being 7 months.  Seven months was a lot of I'm-super-sick-of-this-bouncy-chair-and-am-totally-bored-with-every-regular-baby-toy-you-are-giving-me.  So, now I just let him play with plastic bags and suck on my cell phone (which is what he's been wanting all along anyway) and he's been much happier.  Also, he can (basically) sit up on his own now (I tell you, my guys are little slugs for the first year--don't expect any crawling for another 3 months at least--and you don't hear any complaining from me about it).  He is rolling over quite a bit more now and can eventually get to something out of reach.  He's also discovered that he has a voice.  His favorite (and most effective) sounds are a loud squawking, that make me pretty sure that he's part pteradactyl, and a closed-mouth growl, that makes me think that he must be part leaf-blower.  In any case, he got us both ejected from observing Max's piano lesson this week. 

He's also become really interested in actual food.  Too bad that I'm not getting around to feeding him very much of it.  I'll admit, I'm so slow when it comes to introducing solids.  For one thing, there's part of me that feels like something's wrong about feeing a baby from a spoon when they can't even sit up.  But mostly there's the part of me that's just too stinkin' lazy.  Really, it's a huge hassle to get out the cereal, mix it with formula, get everything the right temperature, put on the bib, take 10 minutes to feed them two tablespoons of cereal and fight every bite with their trying to grab the spoon or pushing the food out of their mouth, then clean up the whole mess and wash the dish, wiping down not only the tray, but the baby, bib and everyone's hands....and then I still have to nurse him when we're all done. 

So I figure I might as well just go straight to the nursing....but don't worry, he's completely vitamin fortified as I'm supplementing with Cheerios.  I am taking full advantage of his now having mastered the pincer grip and the fact that he can be occupied for great lengths of time with a tray full of Cheerios.  It's no Gerber-baby-approved plan to skip straight over the rice cereal and all the pureed veggies and go straight to the Cheerios, but I say, three cheers for Cheerios!

While I'm in the mood for making up my own parenting rules about introducing food, maybe this week we'll go straight for the turkey with cranberry sauce. 

Is it just me, but I think that I see some Smith in this guy....maybe?

Over all, he's still Mr. Fantastic. 

You get what you get, but there's always a fit

Adam just told me that Candyland is on sale at Toys R Us for just $2 (with rebate!) in case we want to replace the copy that I threw out a few months back. Thanks, but no thanks. It's still a big: PASS.

Next on the list for throwing away:  the stinkin' set of plates, cups, and bowls sold at IKEA.  Note to self (or any new parent): never, never, never, never, never, never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy anything that comes in multiple colors when you're planning to use them for more than one child.  Because, no matter how many times we say (blithely, sternly, apathetically, etc..) "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit!" still, (and here's the important part), no one is happy unless their cup, plate and bowl at each meal are all

MATCHING!!!

Aaaaaarrrrrgh!!  If my hair is starting to thin or if the bags under my eyes are looking larger and darker than normal, now you know why.   So finally, after all of these years with the buckets and buckets of tears shed over having to eat from a yellow plate with a green cup and a pink spoon, we finally went out and bought  three more sets--that's eighteen (EIGHTEEN!!) stupid plates and bowls and cups so that no one will EVER have to cry over this again.  In fact, now both girls can eat from an all pink place setting--HOORAY!  But, what happens? Irony has invited itself to pull up a chair at our dinner table because now Max is policing the nightly table setting (and then rearranging it) to ensure that no one will have a match. Cue hysterics from Isabel and Olivia. 

Afterall, (he's insisting!) you get what you get and you don't throw a fit!

Tapioca Everybody!

I've been lucky enough to have had the same best friend since third grade.  Well, I guess technically there was a brief period in 4th grade where we must have been pretty thick with Liz S. too, since at the end of the year the three of us recieved the "3 Musketeers" candybar award.  And then there was the time during freshman year at BYU where she lived in the dorms and I still lived at home and it caused a sort of unspoken competition about who was having the better year.  But for most of the rest of our growing up, I think that we were basically known as AnnaandJennette....or was it JennetteandAnna....or was it just ConnectedattheHip.  Whatever. She's been a pretty awesome Buddyol'Pal over all of these years; if you like me, then you'll loooove Anna.

But to go where I want to go with this story I'll have to admit all of our nerdiness now. Don't get me wrong, I'm not ashamed of it; in fact, I hope that my daughters grow up as sweet and square and innocent as we were.  What it means is that we spent plenty of weekend nights not interested in fashion or shopping or magazines, but watching classic musicals or Doris Day movies or Room With a View.  That we listened to CCR or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, or the Mamas and the Papas, or (yes, I'll admit it) Enya, and made dozens of mix tapes.  That we thought we were hysterical to dress up as "F-Chicks" (you'll have to be from Provo), or for making epithets out of "Chang Kai Shek" or "Mao Tse Tung." That we would break curfew for rebellious activities like taking down political campaign signs off of one person's lawn and then putting them on someone elses' (or all of them on our AP English teacher's). That we thought it would be cool to marry twins and then share one big backyard with a joint pool. That we went to plenty of plays and concerts and art exhibits, but that we saw The Cutting Edge at least four times in the theater.  That we worked at Sundance and never once used the free employee season ski passes we had. And that we decorated our shared freshman year locker with pictures of Europe clipped from travel brochures and then spent lots of time planning about how we could get to see Prince Edward Island and Washington, DC and New York City and London together.  Oh, and, that neither of us liked sports.....or dogs.

Well, we did make it to DC and NYC and London together, but we didn't marry twins.  (At least we married from the same genre of guy--the hiking, skiing, biking, not-into-following-major sports, wants to drag us to the WARPed tour, smart science-nerd genre.)

She is still the first person I call when there's trauma in motherhood, or frustration in politics, or a fabulous find in food, or a tidbit to gossip.   And she is stil--far and away--the only person I can unequivocally trust with a movie recommendation.

So tonight, when Max cooked his own fried egg (from start to finish, all by himself) and when eating it said, "This is delish!,"  I knew that he got that phrase from me.  And I knew that I got it from Thoroughly Modern Millie.  And I knew that of the many times I've watched that movie, that most of those times I watched it with Anna.  And I felt lucky once again to have had such a terriff friend.   

Trick or treating has no rain delays

If like me you were excitedly waiting for the World Series game 3 on Saturday night (OK this is Adam posting not Jennette in case you're doing a double take) you will have noticed that the Philadelphia was experiencing a pretty good rainstorm which delayed the start by more than an hour. Well there are no rain delays for trick or treating so Max, Olivia, and Jennette braved the elements for quite a while. Here are the soaked skeleton and flapper girl post diluvial.

Isabel (bunny rabbit) and Saul (little lamb or "the golden fleece") did some local treating before hanging out with Dad at home to dish out the goodies and watch a little "Nightmare Before Christmas."

Here's a picture prediluvial with friends from the neighborhood

and from pre-Halloween festivities. As in previous years it takes some serious coaxing to get Max to don any form of a costume. The face painting is his first face painting ever (really). Olivia and Isabel have taken quite naturally to costumes though, Isabel had a complete list of what she wanted to be for Halloween (dog, zebra, bunny, butterfly). Naturally we steered her to the bunny since we already had the costume:

I know J won't be happy with the missing face of the golden fleece, so here's his cute mug. Eat your heart out Argonauts.

September's Trip to NYC

I've let the blogging lapse again, when really, we had a pretty fantastic month of September.  And now, I've almost let October slip by too.   

We finally made it (as a family) to NYC to see Sha-sha.  It had been months since I'd been up, and this was Saul's first trip, so we were sure to do it right with breakfast at Metro Diner, some takeout Thai, and even a little knock-off shopping in Chinatown (aka in our family as, "Shopolopolis"). 

On Saturday afternoon Max, Isabel, Sha-sha and I all biked up the trail along the Hudson to see the Little Red Lighthouse.  We hadn't been there since Max was something like 6 weeks old.  Lucky us, it was the Little Red Lighthouse Festival that day.  So there were plenty of crafts and games and people wearing sequins walking on stilts waving large windsocks that made it so we ended up spending the entire afternoon there.  The kids even got to decorate red-colored sugar cookies in the shape of a lighthouse.  We had to come home and read our copy of the Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge all over again, it was so fab.

While we were on our bike ride and at the festival, Adam had taken Olivia and Saul to the carousel in Central Park (and then to find something in a yummy and chocolatey and buttery and sugary--with plenty of pink frosting, no doubt).  When we got back to the apartment and told them about our fun day, they decided that they couldn't miss that either.  So they cruised up with Olivia in the back of the bike seat to hit the rest of the festival and see the lighthouse.

Every time we're there, I think, "Yeah, I want to live in NYC."  And I totally do--I love it--but then I come home and park in my own garage and haul my stuff only a few feet from car to door and then I think, "Yeah, this is good too."  I'll just enjoy how nice it is to have such a swell mother-in-law to visit, and that we get to go and pretend that we're New Yorkers.   

Lazy Sunday

More than a few times Adam and I have had the discussion that goes something along the lines of how we should make more of an effort to invite other people over for Sunday dinner.  I've got a list, and I've got good intentions, but then no phone calls are ever made or roast ever planned.  So here's my invitation to all those intended invites to go ahead and call me a big lazy-head. But when push comes to shove, I really like my Sunday afternoon nap, a day off of thinking too much about dinner, and the slow-afternoon time where we can just kick-it as a family.

Actually, I'm having a hard time thinking that I want to trade in on the kind of peaceful day we had yesterday for an afternoon of my barking orders at the kids and Adam just to get some elaborate dinner planned and the toys picked up off of the floor and random papers on the counter shoved into a drawer before anyone shows up. 

Instead the kids turned cardboard boxes into various types of vehicles (air, land, sea) with Saul even getting pushed around the room in a smart little roadster.  And Olivia spent plenty of time dressing up with whatever assortment of blankets, scarves, and skirts were available.  (And then she spent plenty of time dancing to her request for the the Sound of Music soundtrack.) 

We polished off the leftover cupcakes I had made for Saturday's swim meet (stop....it wasn't the only thing we had for dinner!). Isabel, who only licked off all of the frosting (they are made with whole wheat flour and zucchini afterall), handed hers back and said,  "I all done with my cupcake," and then in the same breath, "Please I have another?"

And I'm not even going to apologize like Adam's working on building a wheel for his winter bike wasn't an appropriate Sabbath activity.  It was probably more of a family activity than was my sitting at the computer working on photos and helping Max with his blog posts (oh, and cuing up a new soundtrack from some classic musical theater for Olivia).

But, yes, Max has his own blog now, and it's pretty darn adorable (and hysterical) if you ask me.  He'd been begging us for a while, so one weeked while I was out of town, he and Adam set it up together.  And the creative license has been him completely--right down to the blog's title.  I only have to assist with how to upload the pictures, but even that he's hardly needing me for anymore.  And he's got his routine down as everytime a picture was uploading he would say, "Can I dance while I wait?"  Then there would be 30 seconds of jumping off the arms of the couch and running around the room with Olivia. (And one more groan from me about thinking that I might as well never plan on buying a new sofa since it would only be destroyed within the first year by the circus troupe that always mistakes it for some important piece of equipment.) 

. 

We made the blog private just to remove some of the worry about him posting what he likes. So far we've sent out invites to basically just his aunts and uncles, but if there's anyone out there who wants to see the inner-workings of Max's mind, as well as a few choice facts about his favorite animal, then send me an email and I'll send you an invite. If anything, he's been way more prolific than I've been lately so you can at least see some of what we've been doing these days. (p.s. He loooves comments.)

So maybe next year I'll reevaluate if we can muster up any sort of energy for dinner guests.  Until then, I'm enjoying the life with a lazy Sunday.