Birthday Week

Help! I'm addicted to Ebay!

...So I've officially added it to "my favorites," my eyes are fogging over from staring at the screen for hours, and although I've only bid on and purchased one item (so far), I'm starting to abbreviate everything (EUC, NIP...) and use words like "webinar" in everyday conversation. I admit it was craigslist for awhile, but it was a kind of drudgery, like an alcoholic compelled to drink two six-packs of Busch every day. Nothing good ever came of it. I haven't even looked at craigslist since this afternoon!
Gotta run, an auction is ending.

Trevor the politician...or maybe used car salesman

Todd's department at work celebrated its 100th birthday last week and we took the family to a dinner event. The kids behaved very well for the most part. Trevor sat through dinner without too much fidgeting, then it was time for the speeches. The department head (ask Todd for an impersonation of her husky voice if you want a laugh) began the lengthy introductions. Here's how it went: she delivered her punchline, hahaha polite laughter...two beats...Trevor's fake and hearty chuckle (loud) followed by sincere cracking up. And so it went for several minutes. I am just about to fall off my chair thinking about it now.
We did not stay for the speakers.

Date Night

My apologies for no new pictures; the children are adorable and sweet, but somehow we cannot locate the charger for our camera battery. You'll have to trust me that they're cute. Trevor's latest hobby is making great piles of stuff--toys, books, clothing, framed pictures, pillows--piling it all up and calling it something, like a barricade or something, I'm usually too annoyed by then to care much about the creative process. Although I admit I had to laugh today when he took a painting I recently purchased at a used art sale and stacked it on the piled-up couch and called it the gummer. Noel's favorite activities now involve crawling quickly toward the stairs, chewing on electrical cords, putting shoes in her mouth (she also likes the little white thing from the bottom of the toilet), wrapping my purse strap or any other ribbonlike object around her neck. She wouldn't last twenty minutes on her own. She also loves the baby swing (whew, she's restrained) and makes a happy noise when I ask if she wants to swing. She points at airplanes in the sky and waves at everyone. What a cutie pie.
Last week was our anniversary and we celebrated the beginning of our sixth year together by going out on a date. It works like this: You hire a sitter and leave your children at home while you go do stuff you wouldn't normally do with children. We went out to dinner* and then it was a toss-up between going to home depot to look at flooring samples and taking in a movie. We went with the movie. A movie theater is a series of large rooms filled with soft chairs, and in each room there is a different movie which is projected onto a large screen. Sometimes people eat popcorn and drink pop. I might do it again; it's cheaper than a new floor.
*Dinner out is something you can do with children, but it's usually about getting to the end of the meal so you can leave before your 3 year old asks you to take him to the bathroom for the fourth time. I guess Block 15 does have pretty nice bathrooms. Plus minors aren't allowed in the bar area of Aqua, where you can get a fabulous meal off the happy hour menu, plus two beers for Todd and a weird rooibos-infused cocktail for me (not recommended) for under $30.

Not-so-green Confession

I love bleach. Yeah, that's right. Good Ole sodium hypochlorite. I don't use it often because I must have heard somewhere that it's not good for kids (or adults) to breathe or ingest it. But now and again my towels get stinky and I can't think of anything else to do but break out the strong stuff. Also, around about January when everyone's got the stomach bug, I get paranoid and go around and bleach all the door handles and such...as if one day of compulsive cleaning will protect us from months of domestic neglect. But still, my kitchen towels have a nice clean bleachy smell right now and none of us barfed in January.
Don't tell me about the eco friendly alternative that works for you...because I have tea tree oil and I have oxiclean (like them both) but sometimes the only thing to do is pull out the big guns.

I can't even catch up now.

So I'll just summarize and skip ahead. My sister Donna and niece Elizabeth visited for three weeks and helped us move. If anyone needs help moving, I recommend having Donna help you. She also watched the kids a bunch and fed Trevor gelato every day and Noel cheerios. It seems like we did a lot of stuff while they were here, but the time flew by.
Noel has been crawling everywhere and pulling up on stuff and eating lots of food even without any teeth. I'm pretty sure that it's all that sitting and standing that is disrupting her (and my) sleep. Trevor has been saying the funniest things, as usual. The other day as we were walking by our neighborhood cemetery, Todd said "that's where the dead people live." On the way back by, we saw a woman jogging through, and Trevor asked "Is she dead?" The day before that, a baby squirrel fell out of a tree in front of our house. He was really worried about it and fussing over it and then he said "can we have it for dinner?" In case PETA is scanning this blog, I'll have you know we brought the baby to the wildlife rescue center and he's doing well.

The Joys of Camping

I am shivering beneath a urine-soaked sleeping bag on a poorly inflated air mattress; my toe, which I recently broke by kicking Trevor too hard, is throbbing and my lower back is aching from the rigors of lifting Noel in and out of the pack n play. I'm lying there listening to some yahoos (it sounds like they're about six inches from my head) going on about f-ing this, f-ing that, as they have been going on all night. I went up to Moonshine with my friend Betsy, my two kids, and her three, leaving the men to follow the next day. It took us three hours to just get out of town; what with all the items necessary to stave off children's whining or certain death, we couldn't have squeezed a bottle of valium in her minivan. (Tsk, tsk.) Then we had to set up our tents (at least she had a clue, I could barely comprehend that the blue pole goes in the blue slot, the green one in the green slot), feed kids, put them to bed. So finally, I have no idea what time it was, I'm lying in the tent, hoping baby Noel won't wake up for the nineteenth time (I don't think she's a fan of camping; either that or her ears were freezing off). I am planning my elaborate, early escape from the trip, and willing morning to come so the nightmare will end. I could've kept smiling, even with the loud rednecks and infants, the aches and discomforts and aromas, but for one thing that pushed me right over the edge: the tent was positioned in such a way that the restroom light on a motion sensor shone directly in my eye.
Moonshine, never again.

Sharing a room...

We had planned on the kids eventually sharing a bedroom, which seems like a good idea for many reasons. I've heard they sleep better together (not as lonely) and it is nice to free up another room for guests or as a playroom or office. But it so happens we are doing it a lot sooner than is ideal. Here's a brief recap:
Night One: Went very well, once both babies were asleep. Getting them asleep was rough.
Night Two: Both were up way too late, one wouldn't let the other settle in. Noel slept fitfully, waking up several times, crying for a length of time, insisting on being carried around and nursed like a newborn, but this did not rouse Trevor at all. I don't understand how he could sleep through the racket, but sleep he did. I don't think she was having trouble because it's a new room (same crib, etc.); I suspect teeth coming in or some other irritation. That was a terrible night's sleep for all of us except Trevor.
Night Three (tonight): It is 8:30 and all's quiet. There was a small fuss when Trevor noisily crashed in. Having had no nap, he was not as rowdy as usual.

Major Update

Oops! I have been neglecting my loyal (although silent) readers. We have been busy enjoying summer, kicking off with Trevor's third birthday, which we celebrated at Avery park with a pirate party. Next I guess it was Father's day, and a few hot days of summer which I did not take pictures of. Mixed up in the middle of all this is buying & selling houses which so far has involved reams of paperwork arriving daily, most of which is for some reason in a foreign language. The gist of the ones I managed to decipher is mostly to obtain a signature acknowledging the receipt of some or another legal document. We will probably need a few extra boxes to move all the papers to the new house. Finally, today is the Fourth of July and once again I didn't take any pictures, but I assure you the kids were all decked out in red white and blue.

We're kicking around selling our house and buying a new one and it is stressing me out. My mind is coming up with really weird stuff, like I just closed my eyes for a moment and saw our and our friends' places as they would fall on a monopoly board, where we are the light blue property, one set of friend are red, another set is green (the rich friends, because we don't socialize with anyone on boardwalk or park place.) It's a creepy and weird sort of comparison, one that is not discussed or considered, but what can I say? It just popped into my head.

Hobbies

Trevor's latest greatest hobby is throwing objects, usually at people. Seeing as I'm the "people" he's around most, I'm usually the target. Today it was a softball (not so soft! No warning!). Yesterday as I sat on the lawn with Noel, he threw a small radio flyer wagon at us. Luckily his aim was off.
Noel, on the other hand, has the sweet new hobby of sitting. Yeah, that's it, just sitting there and watching various objects whiz by, and occasionally falling gracefully forward onto her face. She's all arms and legs now: When I pick her up from her crib after a long sleep, it's like a giant beetle with four waving kicking rowing legs.
Amazingly, Noel has not been hit by any of Trevor's wild throws. If she did, I can imagine just what he'd say: "What happened to she?"

That's My Man!

This morning, shortly after Todd left for work, Trevor said "I want to bike to work like Daddy." Need I say more?

How Does Your Garden Grow?

When I grow up and blog for a living-you know, ads and that-maybe I'll have a garden blog. I need an idea for a catchy name, though, something with roots or green or sprout in the title.
My first entry will be about garden themes. Not color schemes like purple and yellow, or hot or cool; not dull themes like butterfly garden, white garden (der, that's a color) night, cottage, native, drought tolerant, shade garden. No, it will be about themes that evoke the specific feeling of the garden or the intent of the designer. For example, the present theme of our front yard border is "Romp Freely." (How's that for a blog name, eh?). After ripping out a succession of beautiful, ill-mannered plants--yarrow, snowberry, fennel to name just a few still crashing the party--I unsuccessfully amended the theme: Romp Freely, with Restraint. I guess that doesn't work. Today, as I almost broke my shovel excavating a gorgeous Cape Fuchsia (phygelius for you fellow latin snobs), I came up with another one: Casual Restraint. I'm still working on exactly what that means, but I'm pretty sure it should be pronounced through clenched teeth.
Here are some other ideas to start the list, which I ask you, my faithful readers, to complete: Unbridled Optimism, Zonal Denial, Perpetual Motion, Too Much Festuca (insert other words, Too Much Centranthus, Too Many Irises, etc.), Lazy Hippies, Perfect Symmetry, Cottage Kitsch, benign neglect. What is YOUR garden theme now, and what will it be tomorrow?

Updates on the kids

One of the books we checked out of the library on our latest visit is about Pirate Pete. Trevor loves it and we've read it at least ten times in the past two days. Pete and his parrot are following the sound of thunder to find the magical Seafairy Sapphire...the thunder booms again, and Pete picks up his pace. At this point in the story, Trevor asks me, "where's his pace?"
I was corrected this week on my pronunciation. Trevor's friend Anna cannot pronounce s-blends, so they come out as a p. He picked up a toy at her house and asked, what's this? Anna replied, it's a pider. I repeated, oh, it's a spider. And Trevor said, no, it's a pider!
It is amazing the things he repeats. His language is growing more and more descriptive and he loves to get in conversations with strangers anywhere we go. Today we went to the earth day procession of the species parade and saw lots of cool costumes of mythical and real creatures. I think he loved the seahorse most because he just learned about them in Pirate Pete and it was a big, beautiful creation. We stopped at the coop on the way home and he was talking about it with someone in line, who said it was big, and he corrected them, and said it was GIANT.
Noel is growing by leaps and bounds, but it is much less obvious. She is really starting to recognize her family. When she wakes up in the morning, she coos and talks in her crib until I go pick her up (unless I wait too long, then she yells), and she always has a big smile when she sees me. She's making a lot more varied sounds, like squeals and screeches, and is very ticklish with the silliest little laugh. She can roll from her back to tummy, but only to the left and when she's feeling very motivated. She grabs everything now and passes stuff back and forth and puts it in her mouth and is totally bored with all the dumb baby toys we have.

Yummers. Cookies!

The only thing I've eaten today is about a dozen of these yummy cookies I whipped up using a recipe from one of my favorite food blogs, http://tiny-morsels.blogspot.com/. (Note: there are probably thousands of way better food blogs out there, but I have no idea how to find them.) I changed the recipe slightly based on ingredients on hand (I don't stock rice flour and I didn't feel like grinding up any oats), but I have to say that this recipe is a godsend for vegans who are missing their tollhouse chocolate chip cookies...yummy and buttery but without the butter. Trevor liked them, too.

1 cup (256 g) tahini

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1/2 cup (120 ml) pure maple syrup or (168 g) agave nectar

1/4 cup (48 g) raw sugar

Zest of a big (organic, preferably) orange, about 2 heaping teaspoons, or same amount of lemon zest

1/2 cup (40 g) ground oats (I used hazelnut meal)

1/2 cup (80 g) brown rice flour(I used whole wheat)

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

1/2 cup (88 g) nondairy semisweet chocolate chips (I used minis and I don't think they were nondairy.)

I will eventually post more pictures!

Carseat Woes

Anytime she's in the carseat, Noel is either crying or sleeping. Trevor says "I don't like that noise." Today he wanted me to "calm her off." I don't think it's legal to do that while driving.

The Economic Conditions

The front door of a business establishment I recently visited displayed a handwritten sign that announced that they would be open only Thursday through Sunday due to these economic times. I don't know the technical word for this (any logicians out there, help me out!), but I sense that it involves some sort of fallacy. I have been noticing this a lot, what with these economic times and all; assigning blame to a general condition where direct causality can't really be established. True, some small part of the "economic times" may have adversely affected their business, but, really, is it the whole thing? It's kind of like blaming "the weather" when a tornado rips the roof off your house.

"You can't have too many."

So says this woman who now has 18 kids and is ready to keep going. All I'm saying is, men named Jim Bob probably should at least keep it in the single digits.
Don't get me started on these octuplets and the nutty doctor who ivf'd a woman who already had six kids. Six seems like plenty for a single mom living with her parents. Isn't Ethics 101 a required class in medical school? The whole thing is just too nutty. If they have a reality tv show, I cannot in good conscience watch it--my intense fascination notwithstanding.

Junk food is mercury-laden!

I saw an ad in Martha Stewart Living Magazine attempting to dispel the "myth" that high fructose corn syrup makes you fat. Well, I don't know about that, I'm sure it makes you just as fat as sugar, and now it seems that almost half of hfcs-containing processed foods contain levels of mercury above the "safe" threshold. http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2009/01/theres-mercury-in-high-fructose-corn.html

I like this blog: http://tiny-morsels.blogspot.com/
Some good kid-friendly recipes. I made the golden coconut rice (with slight alterations) and it was a hit. I might try out the morning glory muffins, too, if I ever get the ingredients together.

Kids do say funny things!

I just realized that some pretty entertaining words and sayings come out of Trevor's mouth, and I'm not writing them down so I keep forgetting them. Maybe someday I'll start writing them on actual paper, but until then, I'm putting ones I can remember in here.
One day he warned a young friend, as he was pretending to build a fire with some random objects in the living room, to "get away from the hotness."
He's actually perfected the pronunciation of crocodile now, but he used to say "croco-idle."
More later, whenever I think of them! Share yours here.