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!

Barnyard Noises

Whenever we get the camera or videocamera out, Myrick inevitably stops whatever cute thing she is doing and runs at it saying "Baby! Baby!" She knows that if she gets behind the camera she can see the screen and the baby on it (can't yet tell if she knows it is herself she is looking at). So I thought if she were strapped in her highchair she at the very least couldn't run at the camera... and look! We got a video of her making many of the animal noises she knows! Sshhh, you have to be very quiet to hear her pig noise - she just breathes really hard out of her nose in an attempt to make a snort. What a funny girl!

Country Mouse in the City

I didn't suspect that when we moved to our well-researched little town that I would end up having such mixed feelings about living so far outside of a city... but I do.  Don't get me wrong - I love living here and am more than happy to raise our family here on 18 acres of woods, meadows, swamps, and all the wildlife that goes with this place, but I do miss some aspects of city-living.  I miss the convenience of having everything so close that you can pick up dinner at the grocery store on the way home from work.  I miss the ease (and exercise) or walking wherever you need to go in a city.  It just never really dawned on me that Nate and I spent our entire dating lives and then early marriage together living in cities - Seattle and Boston.  I'm just finding it a little frustrating to have to get in the car and drive half an hour to get to a store whenever we need something.  And this feeling is especially exacerbated during the long and cold winter here (currently 7 degrees!!) when every once in awhile I just want a quick change of scenery for an hour or so - but going anywhere entails planning for Myrick's naps and always more than just a couple of hours, always.  It's still challenging right now with Myrick so small and unable to stay outdoors for very long.  She has her snow suit and cold-weather gear, but she's tiny and it's hard for someone who's only two and half feet tall to adeptly navigate 15 inches of snow on the ground.  Outdoor playtime is rather limited during these months.

So to avoid the stir-crazies, we got in the car today and drove an hour to Salem, NH to go and exchange something at the closest mall that had a Williams-Sonoma.  Clearly we don't do this very often, so Myrick hasn't had much exposure to mall-like settings.  She was pretty cute to watch for about the first 15 minutes we were inside.  I held her hand and she ran and squealed and took in with huge eyes all of the lights, sounds, and smells around her.  It's funny to go and do something that seems routine or normal but realize that for Myrick it is completely novel.  It certainly makes me see things though fresh eyes again.  She was the epitomy of a country mouse in the city!  Even so, after tonight's onslaught of stimuli, I think I am thankful that she will grow up with an abundance of fresh air and room to run around and play outside and with less opportunity to spend her time under the glare of neon lights with pounding music beating in the background.  I suppose the inconveniences of living "way out" are worth it in the long run.  With that, I will go, curl up under our warm wool blanket, and enjoy some couch time in front of the wood stove before heading to bed out here in the country.

Good Intentions

After quite a hiatus from posting, I thought I'd try my hand at this again.  I had great intentions of writing more than I did in 2008 -  is it too ambitious to think that I could manage one or two entries a week?  I guess we'll see.  Perhaps I could begin with some catch-up entries from the holiday family visits.  That will have to wait for another day when technical help from the husband is available - I need our new wireless router up and running so that I can post photos from my computer.

I almost titled this entry "Resolutions" but that would just doom my goals wouldn't it?  So instead, I'll just refer to these as my "intended good intentions for 2009".  I usually do these sorts of personal goal setting-things around the time of my birthday, but for those of you who know what my year has been like so far, you understand that I just couldn't get to it in November.  So without further ado, here are my modest little intentions this year...

• keep my priorities straight: family first, self next, work last.
• keep connected to my friends, both near and far

See?  I said they weren't fancy.  But I'm not naive enough not to see that embedded in those two little bulleted good intentions is a heap of mini-challenges to navigate.  I wonder how long I'll be able to keep these in the forefront of my brain?

With that, I will leave you to go tend to good intention #1: family first.  Time to retuck Myrick into her jumble of blankets!

Pioneer Days

So it's not often we get hit with inches of ice up here in these parts. A week ago we got to experience the full brunt of an ice storm and were kept up all night as trees surrounding our house shattered and fell apart under the weight, convinced that our big silver maple was about to fall upon our bedroom. It was impressive how many trees and branches came down over night. Significant cleanup ensued. A lot more firewood!

Also our power went out. As did most of the power in our state--half a million homes. Shelters opened for people who lost their heat. And we cranked up our wood stove and fed it around the clock--for 5 days! That's a long time to be without power, as some can attest. In retrospect, it was a bit surreal, spending that long like we were winter camping. We went to bed and rose pretty close to when the sun did, making for short days and a lot of sleep. We played cribbage, Sudokued and perfected toasting bread on our wood stove. We dug out our hand-crank radio. And we got a Christmas tree (but didn't decorate it). And I think we all got a bit of cabin fever, perhaps Myrick most of all. But despite the toting buckets of water up from the creek to flush the toilets and depending on our wonderful neighbors for their generator-driven shower, the enforced break from work was appreciated; we couldn't have done much school planning if we'd tried. And it makes for a good story.