Nora and I went to my mom’s house yesterday for dinner with Nora’s Granny, Aunt Colleen, Uncle Brian, cousins Beth & Brien, and Brian’s friends Shannon & Derrien. Much fun was had by all but, as usual, the market on fun was cornered by a certain little girl with large blue eyes and a newfound fondness for thread.
This picture contains three of my favorite things. Nora managed to pull my favorite novel out of the library and carry it to the living room and her face is covered in chocolate because mommy is out of town and everyone eats chocolate for lunch when dad’s in charge. :)
Nora’s lunch was: quinoa risotto, sweet potato cubes, broccoli, vanilla pudding, and dark chocolate. She doesn’t quite eat like the g20 leaders, but she doesn’t do much worse.
it’s official, hang the quarantine sign. we are now *all* sick (again). in times like these it’s important to fall back on the little things that make us happy — and if those things also help clear out our noses and keep us clean then how could we go wrong?
Some firsts we could definitely do without. I think everyone at Ruggles End would be happier if Nora had 2 fewer ear infections and if I could get healthy even for a minute. I swear someone is going to nail a quarantine sign to the door if Jen gets sick again.
Lately our little one (traditionally a champion eater) has become somewhat more difficult to feed. She starts off chowing with her inveterate enthusiasm but invariably loses interest and gets cranky. Switching to a finger food will renew her will to eat for a time –only to wane again after returning to the spoon.
The mystery seems to be that the teachers at baby school have been encouraging Nora to use her spoon to feed herself! This results in a whole new world of laundry stains (and meal times stretching to incredible durations) but an equally incredibly happy and excited eater. Amazing.
Nora’s long been obsessed with our umbrella stand (a gift from our friend Ellen Parker). It’s brightly colored, she can make it roll around, it’s noisy –what’s not to love? Yesterday she learned this neat trick, though: you can put things into it and then … take them back out again!!1!!1 (omgponies!)
This, apparently, is both hilariously and deeply enthralling.
It is also cheaper than netflix.
The last time Nora went to the polls she was quite a bit smaller (and lit like a conehead). This time she “helped” me “complete” my ballot. As a side note, the optical scan voting machines are surprisingly resilient to the presence of random marker scribbles on the ballot.
Here’s Nora and her mommy basking in the joy of doing our civic duty.
p.s. Happy Birthday, Bethy!
There were a lot of campaign workers in our neighborhood trying to get out the vote. So I posted a sign.
It says:
shhhhh!
(baby sleeping)
You wake our baby and we’re voting for the other guy.
p.s. we mean it.
p.p.s. shoo!
p.p.p.s. thanks for volunteering!
We got Nora a new car seat this weekend because she’s fixin’ to outgrow her current Graco SafeSeat any growth spurt now. We’re going to miss the baby bucket immensely. It’s a car seat, it’s a stroller, it’s a high chair at any restaurant with a booth. It even served as her crib on our trip to LA. We can leave her asleep in it when we’ve been out all day and she falls asleep in the car (to do that with the new seat would require actually leaving her in the car which I’m fairly certain is frowned upon by people who are not parents and who therefore should keep their fool opinions to themselves.)
So, um, anyway… the new seat is here and off-gassing in the dining room and Nora is… well? She’s just *way* too excited about this new car seat.
We have a pile of pictures of Nora playing in her bunny suit on Halloween. In short, she loved it. She seemed to really like putting on the costume. She loved people coming to the door all evening. She really liked the trick-or-treating we did (we only went to one house; our neighbors are mostly pretty weird). She loved playing in the leaves. It was great fun. Then we all got horribly, horribly ill (no, it was not an excess of candy).
We still have the chocolate skittles. We certainly can’t let the baby eat them. It seems weird to save them until she’s old enough to have them. And neither of us is going to eat them (even I have standards*). Probably we’ll drop them on the table in Jen’s office and some happy undergrad will gobble them up with nary a second thought. :)
* no, this is clearly not true. I have no standards when it comes to snacky cakes.