Saturday, July 21, 2007

Maine: 4

This is the day we went to the low-tide beach. It was Ari's very first time seeing the ocean, and she went right for it, cold water or no. Cold water not being very enticing to me, I set about building a sand castle. I did miss Dad and his big ol' shovel. I had to content myself with making a little sand castle instead of the ginormous ones of my childhood. I also made a sand lobster.

Here's Ari playing in the water. She splashed around for quite a while in there with her papa and her Uncle Theo.

There was this whole business of the high-tide and low-tide beaches that was strange for me as a Florida girl. But Maine actually has rocks in it, so you either have to wait until the tide drops below the level of the rocks, or go to the beach that has a thin strip of sand between the rocks and the high-tide line.

This is a nice shot of us playing pinochle! This is always a favorite pastime every time we get together with Marcus. You'll note also that Maryanne's crocheting her Gryffindor scarf, and Ari's Richard Scarry book is still on the table where she had been reading it.

We spent alot of nice time on the trip hanging out at the house and reading or playing cards or doing the crossword with Nancy. It was very relaxing. :)

Men in steampunk

This is Ari, dancing with Mr. Kitty. I actually tried to take a video, but she didn't want to dance for the camera.

The last few days have continued to be kind of rough, what with this tooth coming in. As a matter of fact, Ari is pulling the bright-eyed bushy-tailed thing right now. At 4:30 in the morning. It's the same old story- didn't nap, passed out at 8, woke up at 2 and will probably pass out again in an hour or so, just in time for mama to get a couple of hours sleep before papa gets home. Yay! :)

Ari got a new book from the library today, for filling in her summer reading log. Well, we filled it in. She just read alot. She picked out a book about animal walks, and Thad bounced her all around on his knees reading it to her.

I went to the Jo-Ann's the other day, and I succumbed to their tempting, tempting sales on cute prints. This one was actually passed onto me by another mama who sews, who heard Ari likes cats. I think I made it a bit big, so I'm going to just put it away 'till she's bigger, I think. More pictures will follow as I finish more dresses!

Ari likes hanging out with me while I sew. First, she likes to sit on the fabric I'm actually cutting out. Then, she likes to poke her little fingers near the needle on my sewing machine, and then she likes to pull pins out of my pin tomato. Not to mention unwinding my bobbins!

Oh, and tomorrow is the Jazz and Ribs Festival. I'm so excited! :D Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go stop my child from ripping open the bagel bag.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Down the stairs face first

Check out me and Ari, posing with the Silver Surfer. :D He's clearly about to wreak the power cosmic on some poor shoplifter.

Miss Ari's been having weird sleep again lately. Tonight, she passed out at 9:00, and then woke up again at 9:30. She only just got back to sleep again.

I was wondering why, and then I noticed that that canine Ari's been working on has finally broken the surface! Poor thing. Teething sucks.


We got this fireman hat at the thrift store, and she's totally into it. This is her playing with the new plastic bugs and fishes I got her.

She's been into messes lately. She had her first bowl of soup, and her first bowl of cereal (raisin bran, with the barest splash of milk). She's also been totally into bagels of late, which I hypothesize has to do with the tooth she's working on.

Oh, and I learned a valuable lesson: when letting your kid play with beans and spaghetti and tiny cups of water in a pan on the kitchen floor-

Don't use black beans.

Maine: 3

This is the day we went to the Owl's Head Transportation Museum. They were having a bike show of some sort that day, and so there was alot to see. We got to see an autogyro fly, and they had all these awesome planes out.

Here's Thad and Ari totally pirating this Fokker Triplane. As you can see, we could totally get up close, and even touch the planes. Those planes look all solid in pictures, but in real life, they seem stupidly insubstantial. Just canvas stretched over this frame.

Speaking of insubstantial... this was a stripped-down racing plane It was really cool! I spent the whole trip goggling at things and taking lots of pictures. They had some really cool cars and aircraft there. And a few cool motorcycles- including what was essentially a steam-powered bicycle! It looked totally steampunk.

After the museum, we all got together for a big dinner. Thad's aunts were both there- Rachel and Agnes, and Agnes's husband Paul. The whole family doesn't get together that often, so that was cool.

I helped Francis make the pasta sauce, which was fun. I like cooking with other people.

Monday, July 09, 2007

Maine: 2

This is Nancy and Francis's house. Because it wasn't designed to host the invasion that we constituted, Maryanne and Theodore slept on the lawn in tents. On air mattresses, so I'm told they were comfortable. :)

Elsewhere around the property was some beautiful lilacs and roses, and lots of nice lawn for Ari and the Papke clan to sword fight and roll around in. It also had a gravel drive that Ari was fascinated by. She kept running out there, picking up rocks, and transporting the rocks to other parts of the drive.

This is Ari and Francis and Bunny hanging out together. Ari had a great time with Francis- especially when he was showing her his slideshow of cats. She liked it so much that we went ahead and made a cat slideshow here, too (mostly of pictures from this trip!).

And again, there's Bunny, willingly being near that noisy little bundle of chaos that is my Ari.

I was really worried about how Ari would do in a strange house for so long- both in terms of us having to prevent her from destroying things and in terms of her being happy and okay with things. As it turned out, though, she was totally fine with Nancy and Francis's- she totally made herself at home- and not in the pouring flour all over the floor way, either, thank god.

This is us at Cod End, having our first (and I think, the best) lobster rolls of the trip! We're all squinting because it was shockingly bright there. It didn't seem like it was that bright, but by golly, we couldn't see anything.

They had big, open tanks of lobsters on the floor in there. Ari kept wanting to play and splash in the tanks- I'm not sure what she thought of the delicious, delicious doomed crustaceans there.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Random strung together things

We've been mostly at Origins this weekend, as previously mentioned. Couple of thoughts:
  1. We are more than ever determined not to take a two-year-old to a serious con (ala D*Con).
  2. Ari liked wearing her badge. And her dice necklace. And she liked the Pokeball someone gave her.
  3. Poor Ari took a beating this weekend- on Thursday, a kid bit her at COSI. Like, grabbed her arm and chomped down with his whole set of teeth! She still has the marks, days later. Poor bean. And then today, she got her head whacked, too.
  4. Ari got into my cornstarch yesterday. I was cooking, and when I turned around and saw the cloud o' cornstarch, I said, "Ari!" in a loud, startled voice. Ari jumped, and got up and ran away. But a moment later, she reappeared with a rag. She was trying to clean up her mess!
  5. Ari has a game lately of claiming that other people are Ari. We'll say, "Where's Ari?" and she'll point at me, or Thad or Brooke or whoever. And then giggle.

Maine: 1

We recently went to Maine, to visit Thad's grandparents. They have a lovely (gorgeous, stunning) house in Thomaston, and we spent the week touristing around the area and generally getting to spend time with Thad's extended and immediate family. It was a great trip, and here's some pictures. I picked the ones I liked the very very best, and I figured I'd take the time to write some stuff about what I remember about the trip. It'll probably take a while (a number of entries, anyhow) but if you don't want to, no one is making you read. ;)

This is Ari playing with pots and pans. She very much liked going in the kitchen and playing in the cupboards there- perhaps because she has no cupboards at home? Eventually, we had to tie the cupboard with the bleach and cleaning supplies in it shut- although, all she seemed to want from there was the scrub brush. Go figure.

Also, the liquor was kept in one of the cupboards, and she thought it was great fun to grab the bottles out! Marcus had hopes for getting her to bring them to him, but it didn't work out that way. ;)

This is where we slept on the trip- in the music room. It's one of the few cat-free rooms in the house, which was nice. It was full of windows and beautiful plants.

If you look closer at this picture, you'll notice that Ari and Thad both have pen marks all over them. Thad stayed up with her the night before this, and she apparently got hold of a pen and went to town. I snuck in and took these pictures for posterity.

This is Ari with Bunny, a very tolerant Manx cat (hence her name). Ari loved the cats at Nancy and Francis's, but most of them decided that this loud little creature was too much for them, and they were steering clear. Bunny was most willing to put up with Ari.

Not that she was too bad, as toddlers go. She was generally very gentle and reasonably respectful of the cats- but in that loud, clumsy toddler sort of way. Anyway, Ari liked to lie on the ground with Bunny or pet her or follow her around. This is her pointing at Bunny and saying "dat! dat!"

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Orc blood

This is me and Ari, watching the fireworks today. Ari wasn't scared in the least, and she seemed to really enjoy watching the lights in the sky.

It's been a busy holiday day for us. First, Thad was feeling ill- he had a terrible headache. So, he slept in a while, and came to feel better.

Then, we went over to Origins to get our badges- two teacher's badges (free) and a child's badge, also free. Since Origins is held downtown in our hideously ugly convention center, we just biked there. On our way back, we had to skirt through the Doo Dah parade. Fortunately, it was just getting started, so we were able to cross through a gap.

This is Ari and me painting. She was into the watercolors, and really seemed to get the gist of how to use them (wet brush in cup, dip in paints, put on paper). Much of the time she thought it was more fun to smush the paints around on the tray than paint them onto paper, but that's cool. Those paints are in my "kid art supplies" box. All alone, for the moment- I should take her crayons out of the heater intake and put them there- also, I want to get her fingerpaints.

And this is Ari playing in a puddle. After we got back from Origins, Ari took a nap, and it started raining pretty hard, which nixed our plans to barbecue with R&B in the park before the fireworks. We ended up just staying in and cooking the food at home- pork ribs, corn on the cob, chips (with Mom's famous dip) and cherry pie for dessert. The cherry pie was particularly excellent- flaky crust, sweet cherries, good filling ingredients.

Thad had to work tonight, which is total suck, so he missed the fireworks. They were lovely. At least he got cherry pie...

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

A matter of priorities

Thad found this awesome beetle lying dead on top of our trash can. I desperately wanted to pick him up and do something with him, but the question of exactly what I might do with him (since I have no insect collection, and he is a damaged specimen in any case) reared its ugly head, and I just took some photos instead. Dad, if you're reading this, do you know what kind of beetle he (or she, I suppose) is?


This is a very tired Ari, being all sleepy and snuggly. And in a last- resort, diapers are in the wash, fish- bespangled diaper.

I'm glad to be back to cloth diapers; we went to disposables on the trip for space and convenience, and they were weird. And they smelled gross. I mean, pee never smells awesome, but mixing pee smell with weird chemicals and perfumes somehow doesn't improve it.

I found out today that Ari is scared of stickers. I got her some for the plane trip, but then forgot them at home. So, today, I took them out and sat down to show her about stickers. She was interested in them (I got cats and other animals) but seemed really freaked out by me removing the stickers and putting them elsewhere. Maybe it seemed unnatural to her, me peeling the pictures off the page.

Yesterday, we went outside and looked at fireflies. I caught one for her, so she could see, and she watched him fly around and blink.

Monday, July 02, 2007

Bar some becue

Brooke sent us some pictures from her birthday party on Saturday, and I present them here for your delectation. This first one is Ari begging ice cream from the birthday girl. Not shown is Ari totally vikinging the birthday girl's chocolate truffle, and stuffing her little face with it. :)

Well, I'm back to work. I haven't been able to face revising The Paper That Will Not End, so I spent today working on prepping materials for Mary's class (my source of rent money for the summer). Today, I rewrote a homework/online quiz. Oh, and I cleaned my desk. It was getting pretty bad.

Poor Thad got stuck with a double shift because of my meeting with Mary today. Hopefully that won't happen again- I did tell her I'd prefer to avoid Mondays and Thursdays. Since none of the four of us involved in this project seem to have a set schedule, that ought to be pretty easy.

I'm looking forward to getting to take Miss Ari out to some places this summer. I already picked up some tickets to COSI and the conservatory, and I'm going to try to get some zoos soon. :) Plus, we can attend playgroups! Huzzah!

Fly unzipped

This is Ari, having dinner like a real grown-up, with a fork and a regular cup and her own seat at the table. How about that?

We've been trying to unpack and readjust to a less lobster-filled life. :) Oh, and also catch up on any of the several hundred email and snail mail and phone messages we had waiting for us (so, if you're wondering why you haven't heard from us, that would be why).

I will tell y'all more about the trip (which was lovely), but I think I'll wait until I have the pictures from Marcus, so you can see what I'm talking about. :)

Otherwise, we're trying to work out what the summer will be like. Thad's working a few nights a week at Target (hopefully, getting to be more like 4 or 5 and not 2 or 3 like it is now). I've got to go meet with people tomorrow, and then I'm hoping I can just work a couple days a week, around Thad's schedule. We will see.

Ari's been talking up a storm. She's firmly in the two-word stage, and now she can say medial consonants. So, where she was saying "bay-ee" for baby a month ago, she definitely says "baby" now. Still no proper "f's", though. When we were in Maine, I'd tell we needed to go back to our family, and she'd say "go sammy! go sammy!" all excited-like.

Oh, funny thing- Ari will sit there and go "mm mm Mama. mm mm Mama. mm mm Papa. mm mm Ah-ee." Um, and she's starting to be able to count. She's known the numbers for a while, but now she's aware that they come in a set sequence.

And here she is, fallen asleep over a book she was reading:

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Guderian device

This is Ari from a few weeks back, admiring herself as she wears a fashionable mama's undies stole. I decided to sort laundry in the living room the other day (since Thad was asleep upstairs), and Ari thought it was great fun. She tossed those clothes in piles, just like mama! Not necessarily the same piles, mind, but a busy toddler can't be bothered with such details. :)

I wanted to post it back then, but I didn't, and then I forgot about this saved draft until just now. :)

It's neat to see Ari learning to help us. She more often helps us- just a little- clean her room at night, or when we're tidying up the downstairs, too. In fact, yesterday she wanted to take a nap. So, she went around her room, picked up the couple of books that were lying around, and then laid down to get nursies and go to sleep- because picking up is part of the bedtime routine, you see.

This is Ari sitting in her wagon, reading her Richard Scarry book. That's the Best First Book Ever that Mom and Dad got her for Christmas. We got her (by which I mean, the Marcus got her :)) two new Scarry books at Stone Soup- Thad's aunt and uncle's used book shop. We got the Best Word Book Ever and the Best Counting Book Ever, and she loooooves them both. Come to think of it, I think the counting book is responsible for the new counting trend with Ari.

Thad got shanghaied into signing Ari up for the library's summer reading program, and so we've been filling in circles every time she reads for 15 minutes. We're up to six hours (that we've tallied) in the last two days- she really is a reading fiend. Where did she get that from, I wonder? ;)