While We Were Away

Although we were only gone 4 1/2 days, it seems longer. The seemingly insignificant changes that take place on a daily basis appear much larger when they're all clumped together and noticed at one time. For example, there are frost heaves just down the road that weren't there when I left. Did they just appear overnight? Hard to imagine, but there they are bouncing my car to and fro. (An aside about frost heaves: when I spent my first winter in New England, I saw all of these road signs that read "Beware frost heaves ahead." I had no idea what they actually were, but imagined they were some road monster that rose up to get you - ridiculous, I know).

As wonderful as the warm Texas weather was, I was happy to come back to a fresh layer of clean, white snow. It makes everything look lovely, and it gave me something to do with Whidbey on our morning walk - kick the heavy snow off of the branches of my drooping blueberry bushes.

Other changes that were afoot while we were away: Whidbey was groomed into her lovely short sport cut making her oh-so-soft and respectable looking after a rather woolly winter! Our mailbox was plowed over. Again. So now the box sits directly on the snowbank next to its post. Ahhh, the daily intricacies of living life with an abundance of snow! And drum roll please............ I came home to a cleaned kitchen and uncluttered house thanks to Nate the Great.

Nate also remarked that Myrick is much chattier than she was just a few days ago. She talked to him every night on the phone while we were gone and has been busy chattering away since she arrived back in her own space. Although being away and visiting friends was fantastic, coming home from anywhere is always the best.

P.S.) I forgot to mention the sap buckets! I came home to find that the weather has apparently been warm enough during the day and cold enough at night for the sap to start running. It's sugaring weather so sap buckets are beginning to be hung from the maple trees. Just a couple of more months before fresh maple syrup coats our pancakes - Yum!

Myrick, Katie, and Zachary

Here are a few pictures from our trip south. I love that Myrick finally got to have playdates with two of my oldest friends' toddlers - what a remarkable moment!

Texas Two-Step

Alright, so really this is more like the Texas Two-Jump. Myrick and Katie are having a ball jumping on the indoor trampoline!

How to Fly with a Toddler

Thank goodness for experienced mothers who are willing to share their expertise with me! Two women whom I work with at school are mothers of a three year old and twin 6 year-olds. They are an endless source of advice, wisdom, and support for me, and they came through yet again when I most needed it. They rallied and helped me gather my supplies to occupy Myrick during a long and potentially disastrous airplane flight to Texas. We just returned today, and when all was said and done, Myrick survived:

• a one hour flight from Manchester to D.C.
• a one hour flight from D.C. to Charlotte
• a three hour flight from Charlotte to Dallas/Ft. Worth
• a three hour flight from Dallas/Ft. Worth to Philly
• and the final leg of our trip, a one hour flight from Philly back to Manchester.

Wow - pretty impressive little traveler, isn't she? So, how did we do it with only minor wrestling and melt-downs to speak of? In the event that anyone reading this is ever about to journey forth on their own long adventure and needs a list of tried-and-recommended ideas to keep an active one on your lap busy, here they are:

• Sticker books! Not only did the stickers end up in the book, but they also found their way onto the seats, the tray table, the window, Myrick's clothes, my clothes, our faces, etc. Get the idea? Very successful trip toy! Dollar stores often have big cartons of foam stickers which are great for little hands that are working on manual dexterity skills.
• Window gels. I don't know what they are really called, but you know those things that are usually seasonal and are gel-like that stick to windows and glass? They also stick to airplane windows and tray tables and don't leave a mess when you peal them off - cool.
• Coloring books and crayons. Not very original, I know, but they still managed to keep her busy and happy for part of the ride.
• Crayola Color Wonder kit. The markers have "clear" tips so they don't show up on anything other than the special coloring book that it comes with. This was key for Myrick who enjoyed drawing on any and everything - no mess!
• Books. Again, not terribly original, but great nonetheless. I found a combination of a few tried and true favorites mixed in with a few new ones worked well. Two series that I recommend: "A First Discovery Book" published by Scholastic and "Magnetic Play and Learn" by Top That.
• Lacing cards. Toy makers Melissa and Doug have great ones, but I'm sure others work just as well.
• Puzzles. I found one interlocking foam puzzle at the dollar store and also borrowed a few four and six-piece cardboard puzzles. Again, Melissa and Doug also offer tons of great puzzles, many of which are also easily packable.
• Foam shapes with a hole through the center. This was a borrowed item so I'm not sure where she got them, but they were a similar concept to the lacing cards. We laced them onto pipe cleaners and made bracelets and necklaces for Myrick to wear. Fabulous!
• An MP3 player. Load it with your little one's favorite music, especially the calm, lullaby type!
• Elmer's Water Wow. Another no-mess "coloring" kit that just uses water and once dry is re-usable. Love it!

I pre-packaged everything into gallon sized ziplocks so that all I had to do was reach into my backpack and pull one out. Now that I am home, I am putting all of these toys away so that come April, when Nate and I are trekking south for a 19 hour drive, I can pull them out and hopefully they will be novel all over again. Myrick was a trooper. She, of course, had a few expected moments of toddler melt-downs, but overall she did a wonderful job of playing in my lap contentedly and occassionally napping soundly. In between flights, we ran up and down the concourse to get some energy out. Pweeff - I am exhausted and glad to be home safely with my daughter napping upstairs as we speak. Perhaps it is time for a nap myself!

Moments to Share

I simply cannot keep up with all of the changes in Myrick. She is growing like a little weed. Pants that fit her just three weeks ago are now highwaters, and developmentally, she is moving with lightening quick speed!

Some moments that I have to share from the past several weeks:

• When our friends Joe and Sarah and their baby came to visit a couple of weeks ago, Myrick decided to greet them at the door by dropping her pants around her ankles and just standing there. Hhmmm...
• Nate is my own personal barista. I love his coffee, and he grinds the beans each evening in preparation for the next morning's fresh pot. Whenever Myrick sees him getting out the beans and the grinder, she runs to him saying "Coffee, coffee!" and wants to be picked up while he makes the noisy grinder do its job. She loves this and makes her surprised face every time!
• There are certain songs that Nate and I enjoy dancing to around the house with Myrick on our hips. Nate's is "Three is the Magic Number" by De La Soul. This morning I played that CD, and she went walking over to Nate with her hands raised as if saying, "This is our song, Daddy. It's time to dance!" When Myrick was much smaller I would often dance with her cradled in my arms to Dizzy Gillespie's "Swing Low Sweet Cadillac" because it has such a great steady drum beat in the back. It was on the other day for the first time in awhile, and Myrick paused mid-play and started to bounce up and down to the beat, completely surprising me! When I asked her if we should go downstairs and dance to it, she shook her head yes so we boogied until the end of that long song!
• Myrick has now identified the moon. She looks out of windows for it, including the car window. When I picked her up from her sitter's last week, she saw it as we walked out to the car and tried to keep it in her sights during our car ride. She was mighty upset each time the car took a turn and pulled it from her view. She even cried about this.
• Nate has done a great job keeping our birdfeeders filled. We turned Myrick's highchair to face the window so that she can see the "buwdies" from her seat while she eats. Yesterday, she started "counting" them. She also loves to look out of her 2nd floor bedroom window right when she gets up in the morning and say "No buwdies" when they aren't there.

Like I said, she is growing so fast that I will be hard-pressed to keep up with recording all of her mini-milestones. She is the highlight of our days here.

Tiny Tot Snot

After just posting about Nate and I not being big fans of screen time for our toddler, I have to say that there are some times when it is awfully helpful to have a few DVD's on hand. Like today, for instance. Poor booger is feeling mighty low with a cold that has her dripping snot everywhere. Her nose is completely red and chapped, she breaks down crying for the smallest of reasons, and clearly is just out of sorts. Enter the "Little People" DVDs. She snuggles right in with lamby and chills out. Watching them has given us just the right amount of down-time and peace together while her little body works on healing itself. I guess tonight will bring another steam shower to help with her congestion. Not that Valentine's Day was ever a big holiday with us, but goodness, how times have changed!

Preparing to Fly

In exactly one week, Myrick and I are hopping on a plane to Dallas/Ft. Worth to visit Candace and her two girls and Joanne and her two boys. I am so excited to see these two women as mommies having known both of them since elementary and middle school. Of their four combined children, I have only met one of them so my anticipation continues to build! I just have to make it through all of my grading and one more week of school and...

a cold that both Myrick and I have. Yep, that's right. Doesn't illness always strike at the most inopportune time? Not only do I need the extra sleep right now to fight this off, but of course grades are due this week which prevents me from getting the hours I need. And so it goes.

I have tons of anxiety about our airplane trip. We will have three legs to get down there which isn't terribly conducive to Myrick taking a nap. And of course the more connections you have to make, the higher the probability of missing one of them. And being the busy toddler that she is, I can't foresee her sitting on my lap as being a pleasant thing. I'm having terrible daydreams of her running and screaming wildly up and down the aisles with irritated passengers shooting me those "you're an awful mom" look. So tomorrow I will head into town and try to find some trip toys that I can pull out as needed throughout the journey. Nate and I briefly discussed the idea of getting a stripped-down portable DVD player... and then decided that just doesn't go with our values of active parenting. I will be an active and most likely exhausted parent of a young child on a very long journey. My mom did give Myrick a pop-up airplane book for Christmas so we have been looking at that in preparation. And a friend from school who has a 3 year old that just went on a long plane ride loaned me her DVD called "Shae by Air" about a little girl preparing for her first big plane trip. It teaches flying social skills for little ones - pretty neat. Granted this isn't Myrick's first plane ride, but it is her first in quite awhile, and she has very different needs now than she did just 7 short months ago. I hope all of my anxiety is for naught, but she has truly entered the "terrible two's" which makes me nervous...

Letter to Self

Dear Emily,

Just a reminder that you posted an entry not so long ago - oh, say about a month ago. In it you blogged about keeping your priorities straight. I think it went something like this:

• family first, self next, work last

Pretty good keeping family first - you've cooked some yummy food for them this week (tasty burritos, bread pudding, chocolate chip cookies, homemade mac-n-cauliflower-n-cheese) and spent some nice time playing outside with them. Don't confuse yourself for work, though. Hmm, seems difficult to do when grades are due beginning of next week, doesn't it? But I thought it was worth sending you a reminder before you made a decision to stay up into the wee hours of the morning grading papers.

Have an efficient, successful evening grading papers, and I'll see you well-rested in the morning!

Love, Yourself

First Piggy-Tails

Myrick's hair has finally grown long enough to put into itty-bitty piggy-tails, and I have to say, she's pretty darn cute! Getting them in was a bit of a chore. If I let her watch "Curious George" on PBS, then she is distracted enough to not notice what I'm doing. However, if she isn't distracted, let's just say we wrestle a bit and then she pulls at them. Without further ado, here are her adorable, blonde piggy-tails!

Precious Weekends

After putting in another 55 hour work-week grading papers and planning, it sometimes doesn't feel like there is enough coffee on this planet to fuel my life. It is hard to feel excited or motivated about going out and doing things over the weekend, and sadly, this is a pretty typical feeling - pure gratefulness that we've made it to another weekend when we can get a little R&R. Thankfully, though, we've had some snow days this year, and although I know we'll have to make them up in June (and that come June, I'll be grumpy about this very thing), I'm happy to take them whenever the snow deity sees fit to shower us with more fluffy flakes. It makes getting through these long school weeks feel more manageable when there is a recuperation day in the middle of the week. Gotta love those 4 day weeks.

Given that I never have enough time for myself, I find that I'm prone to daydreaming about my ideal Saturday. And I think it would go something like this:

• sleep in
• play with Myrick all morning outside (because it is warm enough!)
• cook something yummy and healthy for lunch - comfort food AND dessert
• put Myrick down for a nap and take one, too
• afternoon alone time (wish-list: massage, read for an hour, write some letters/emails/blog entries, hike or snowshoe with Nate)
• late-afternoon, early evening time with my Myrick
• date-night with Nate (owling, going out to the movies - gasp!, enjoying dinner at Zampa)

Ah, doesn't that sound so lovely? And you might've noticed that nowhere in that list was grading papers or returning school emails.

But enough daydreaming. Despite the copious amount of essay-grading that is staring me down from the corner of the room, this weekend is shaping up nicely: winter farmer's market shopping in the morning, bookstore errands, naptime and grading in the afternoon, and some cooking and netflixing in the evening. I love knowing that I have an entire weekend stretched out before me with the plan of mostly staying home with short outings here and there. Sounds great!

E-I-E-I-O

She's got those vowels down and some smooth moves to go with them!

Snow Days

Playing Barnyard Bingo

A recent favorite activity of Myrick's is to get up on one of her twin beds (it's really high for her so she needs a boost from mommy or daddy) and use it as a playspace. She plays with her puzzles up there and snuggles with Lamby. This week she and I have sat up there together to play with her "new" hand-me-down game Barnyard Bingo. She likes to collect all of the chips and put them under the covers or sit on them like she's keeping them warm! I'm not sure that's how we're supposed to play the game, but she sure has a great time.

My bonnet-headed girl

I told you she likes her hats. The top two arrived in the mail yesterday - a surprise gift from BZ! And the bottom hat is one Geoff picked up on his travels to Ecuador. I suppose that living here in the Arctic, I mean New England, entitles a girl to as many hats as necessary to keep that little blonde noggin' warm!

Potty Training... Part I

Well, here we are. I'm not quite sure how we got here so quickly, but in the blink of an eye we are approaching "that time." I am referring to potty time, of course. My vocabulary has changed from bathroom and toilet, to potty instead. My friends at school who have children slightly older than Myrick informed me that Myrick sounded ready to start some potty training. Oh my! Guess I'd better read that chapter of my book.

Over Christmas when mom and dad were here we went out and bought a tiny little toilet that is now stationed in our bathroom. Myrick has progressed from sitting on it as a stool with the lid closed, to sitting on it with the lid up but fully clothed, to recently sitting on it entirely naked! Baby steps, folks, baby steps! She will sit on it while she does other stuff... like play with a toy or hold a book, but so far she has yet to put it to use. We talk about it, and name it, and she calls it "tee-tee" and "poo-poo," and she especially likes getting up to grab a piece of toilet paper when she is finished sitting. She imitates how to use it and then crumples it up and tosses it into our big potty. It's so entertaining to watch her! Perhaps next time I write about this she will have made some progress towards putting something in it besides her toys.

Chasing Whidbey... in the snow

I guess we are in the "calm before the storm" - I mean, of course, the next storm. Sounds like another one is closing in on us after this past Wednesday's 10 inches. The difference between this winter and last is that even though we came close to record-setting snowfall amounts last year, it warmed up enough in between storms to melt some of it. This year, though, the mercury has barely lifted out of the single digits which means that we still have remnants of earlier snow falls - which means that we can barely see to pull out of our driveway these days with the mountain of snow continuing to grow. Where will we put another load of plowed and shoveled snow??? It has been lovely this morning, though, with temps in the mild 20's - warm enough for Myrick to get outside for a half-hour romp across the snowfield that is our backyard. What an enjoyable way to spend a slow Sunday morning!