Category: photos

disconnected thoughts

Things have been a bit crazy over the past few weeks, and it’s a little hard to know where to jump in to start blogging again. So I guess I’ll just offer my disconnected thoughts.

I see that it’s been almost 3 full weeks since I posted anything beyond Just Posts stuff.

3 weeks ago we had a full but fun weekend. Fun up to a point…

John was finally able to take a day off from work after many weeks of working long crazy hours 7 days a week. That Sunday, we spent a family day together, hitting the Boston Children’s Museum, and then dinner at a really great little restaurant in Cambridge with a play area for kids and really good food. At dinner, John and I enjoyed the food and conversation while Phoebe and Theo played happily a few feet away. Theo seemed not too interested in food, so I called him over to try to get him to eat. I pulled him on my lap and offered a bite of fruit. At which point he started throwing up.

That was the point at which the weekend stopped being fun.

We had a long drive home with a very sick Theo and a very disturbed Phoebe.

Theo was quite sick for a couple of days, and was barely able to keep anything down. I was getting worried we’d need to get medical intervention to keep him hydrated. I’m quite sure he lost a lot of weight. He was so miserable that I could barely put him down for about 48 hours. We didn’t want to leave him alone when he was sleeping because we were worried about him choking.

Phoebe got sick, too. Not quite as sick as Theo, but quite miserable, nonetheless. Especially on that Monday. Which was her 4th birthday.

It was a long week. John and I both got the virus to varying degrees. I lucked out by only having 48 hours of fever and mild nausea. (Though I guess that makes the 5th time I’ve been sick so far in 2010. The year is clearly off to a rollicking good start.)

Once everyone was more or less recovered, it was time to get the house ready for Phoebe’s birthday party. We’d been living in steadily increasing levels of chaos for the past year, and if we were going to have a party at home, we were going to need to relocate parts of the house that had long since become buried under piles of things. My mother came from California for week-long visit, and she helped a huge amount to get the house sorted out. Together, we found that we did, indeed, still have kitchen counters. They were approximately where I’d last remembered seeing them.

We had Phoebe’s party last Saturday. My mother left Tuesday. Her visit was lots of fun, but considering that we were working almost non-stop with cleaning, party prep, party, and post-party clean-up, it was pretty exhausting. She’s probably still recovering from her “vacation.”

The last couple of days I’ve just been feeling tired and pretty run down. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve been eating leftover cupcakes and cookies daily.

I may manage to post something about the party. (Can anyone guess what theme Phoebe chose?)

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My feed reader is overflowing, and I’m strangely at peace with that. I’ve been reading posts here and there, in a haphazard way. Even when I have read posts, I’ve been really bad about commenting. Again.

There’s part of me that knows that in order to really move forward with my degree, I need to find more time. And really the only time I have to “spare” is the couple of hours each night that I tend to spend online. So it’s probably good to start disconnecting from that time sink.

But I just can’t bear to pull the plug on my blog.

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In other news, Holly and I are super close to getting the Best of 2009 Just Posts up for voting. We actually have all the finalists chosen, and had hoped to put up the post tonight. (Friday night, that is. I see it’s now technically Saturday.) Hopefully the final kinks in our voting procedures will get worked out tomorrow (or today, seeing as it’s after midnight).

cuddly (PhotoHunt)

Just a few months ago, thanks to the wonders of digital networking, I re-established contact with a friend from high school. We hadn’t seen each other for about 20 years. We had both been living in France back then, so I was surprised to learn that she was now living in Canada. (We’re practically neighbors!)

My friend asked for our snail mail address so that she could send us a card at Christmas. In mid-December, the card arrived in a fat box guarded by some cute companions: a backpack with some unidentifiable creature, and a cuddly plush of some other unidentifiable creature. These mysterious cute companions were none other than two of the mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, the city which my friend now calls home. The creature on the backpack turns out to be Quatchi, a sasquatch. The plush was Miga, a “sea bear,” some sort of bear/orca hybrid.¹

Phoebe and Theo were quite taken with them. As the older child, we let Phoebe pick which of the two gifts would be hers. She picked the backpack, as she loves packing things for trips, and said that Theo, who still has comparatively few toys of his own, could have the plush. Judging from her expression in the photos, she may have had some regrets about this state of affairs.

So it goes that when I tried to get photos of my children happily enjoying their gifts, thinking to send them to my friend by way of thanks, I ended up with a series of photos that would make Poster Children for Poster Children proud. Happy they may not be, but I defy you to tell me that they are not cuddly.²

¹ Merci, chère amie, pour les cadeaux fabuleux!
² This week’s Photo Hunt theme is “cuddly.”

heart of scone

We’ve been going through another hectic stretch, mostly due to John working crazy hours again. My own hours have been pretty well filled by taking care of kiddos and work, plus not quite enough sleep. On Sunday, though, I got to sleep in a couple of extra hours. John was still up working when Phoebe and Theo woke up, so he wrangled them and got them a bite to eat while I slept until after 9. It was a wonderful Valentine’s Day present–even better than chocolate.¹ (Now if only I hadn’t been up till 3 trying to get a little quality time with my laptop…)

We haven’t really done much for Valentine’s Day in the past, as I am a cynical cold-hearted type who scorns all forms of romance and sentimentality, with an aversion to heart-shaped things and the color pink. However, having the wee ones around, with their spirits as yet untarnished by such cynicism has changed me a bit. In spite of its brittle candy exterior, my chocolaty heart has melted somewhat towards the heart-shaped rosy-colored trappings of Valentine’s Day. A festive heart-oriented activity was in order.

In keeping with my enthusiasm for baked goods, I thought making pink heart-shaped scones would fit the bill. We used the blueberry scone recipe, but used frozen raspberries instead of blueberries to get the scones festively pink. (They ended up more purple and red than pink, and we all agreed that we like the blueberry ones better, but they were still tasty enough for us to gobble them down in short order.)


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¹Though John did also get me some chocolate.

The Lawn in Winter

Did you notice how my photos from that last post had no children in them? I just figured I would post some photos that weren’t of a) my children or b) food or c) my children eating food.

But I can’t hold out long. Here are a bunch of photos of Phoebe and Theo playing in our yard this winter.

This was Monday.

You’ll notice that not all of the lawn has snow.

These were from a few weeks ago.

Back in December, we got a goodly amount of snow, and our lawn looked more like this:

Phoebe, our little penguin, loved playing in the deep snow.

Theo, not so much.

It’s snowing right now, and we’re supposed to get around a foot of accumulation. So far it’s just a dusting.

head in a fog

I’ve come down with a bad cold, and my head is in a total fog. It’s really remarkable how hard I find it just to put words together. (I tried to write something funny, but apparently my sense of humor has been impaired by the virus, along with my sinuses. Or maybe my sense of humor resides in my sinuses, and is now inflamed.)

I also find myself really annoyed that this is the 4th time I’ve been sick in as many weeks. I’m not sure what my point is, beyond, um, blech.

I guess I should be relieved that this cold waited to strike till after I was done co-teaching my class last week. (It was a week-long intersession class on prosodic transcription.) As it was, I really enjoyed the class. And found myself quite relieved to not be pregnant while teaching it this time. (This is the third time we’ve put on this class. The first time, I was 8 months pregnant. The second time I was only a few weeks pregnant, and had morning sickness.)

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Meanwhile, Holly and I have been making great progress with our project to highlight some of the best Just Posts of 2009. We’re quite grateful to have gotten loads of help from readers, bloggers and other friends. Since evaluating posts is so subjective, in the interest of fairness, we are having each post evaluated independently by 2 different reviewers.  Holly and I will then be making the final cut based on the ratings and comments we’ve received, plus our own two cents. (Or possibly 4 cents, since there are two of us. Is someone keeping track of the pennies?)

We’re getting close to having our reviews together, but there’s still more to be done. (A few batches of posts to review have gone astray due to spam filtering or other irreconcilable email woes, and need to be reassigned.) So, if you have the time and inclination to join in (or join in some more!) and look at 5 or 10 posts over the next few days, let us know.