Six months a mama

Nose- beep beep!

2008-08-02T01:47:00.002-04:00

Ari is sitting in my lap, sticking Aquaman in my face and laughing like a crazy person every time I say "Aaah!" or "Don't stick Aquaman in my eyeballs!"

Anyway, just now I said, "I think you're a little punchy!" It is late, after all.

She picked up her baby doll's fist, connected it to my face, and said, "Punch!"

:D My baby cracks me up.

Wanting milk

2008-06-21T17:24:00.005-04:00

Here is Ari being a pirate. Yarr. She found this on the floor (our very, very messy floor) and demanded Thad put it on her.

The last few weeks have been pretty suck. I've been really sick, and Thad's been working alot. His days start early and end early, partly because he's been biking this route to work every day. It's nice because it leaves me the car (although I've been busing when convenient) and also means using less gas. :P But it does mean a 45 minute ride at both ends of his day, and get up at 6:00 AM.

It's so weird, because I've gone from going to bed at 1 or 2 in the morning habitually to sacking out- exhausted- around 10 or 11. I'm just tired all the time right now. The worst of the nausea seems to have let up; now my problem is that I'm too exhausted to cook anything, so even though I could eat, there's no food.

Our other good news is that we have decided on a midwife. We were debating going with CHOICE, which would have been fine, I'm sure. I met with them and they seemed good.

But then we went out to Heath (an hour away!) and met with an independent midwife named Kathy, and we really hit it off with her and her apprentice. Her apprentice lives in town, which makes me feel better about the whole hour-away thing, also. Anyway, so we agreed that we would have her attend the birth here. I'm not sure where in my tiny apartment this will happen, but I think we can work that out later. :)

Well, we're trying to get our horrible house cleaned up before we have guests for Origins this upcoming week. Wish us luck. :)

Big ol' cranes

2008-06-13T14:29:00.003-04:00

It rained yesterday. Alot! With wind. The power went out, and when we stepped out the front porch, look what we saw! This is the rec center across the street. As near as I can tell, by the way, that white car was completely unharmed.

To be honest, the whole thing made me slightly nostalgic. :) I did comment that if my parents had had a tree that rotten (see the rotting bits where it split?) they would have had it removed a long time ago, to prevent just this sort of event.

Oh, and when I came home from work last night, the local NBC station was filming some sort of news spot in front of it. Then I got woken up this morning by shouty men with buzz saws who were breaking the tree down. The whole thing is still there- I guess they mostly wanted to get it out of the street, and make sure it wasn't caught in any nearby branches so that it could fall and hurt someone.

Ari thought the rain was really cool.

A whole bag of nuts

2008-06-06T18:36:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, Ari came up to where I was sitting at the computer with a damp clean-up cloth. "Oh Ari!" she said to me. "Oh Ari!" I wasn't really sure what she was doing, or why she was saying that. I had just had to usher her away from a hot oven, and I thought maybe she was repeating my words from then.

But she was insistent. "Oh Ari!" she said. Finally, I looked around. Across the room, on the tile floor next to the kitchen, was a smashed egg. Apparently, Ari had gotten the last egg out of the carton sitting on the counter, and smashed it (advertently or inadvertently?) on the ground. Then, she went and got a cloth to clean it up with. She'd clearly tried to clean it up, not been successful, and come to me. Since "Oh, Ari!" seems to be what I say when I run across a particularly nasty mess she's made, that's clearly the thing you say. Kids are smart.

PS: Thad made this pie today. It is full of berries. I bet you five dollars it will be delicious.

Getting my English up

2008-06-04T19:56:00.005-04:00

Ari likes the nice weather, and she really likes climbing on mama's and papa's bikes. :P

This was me letting her run around the "back yard" (And by "back yard", I mean tiny fenced in space behind our house with two very broke benches and an increasingly enormous quantity of greenery round the edges) while I cooked. She fingerpainted and played with her balls and played with the trailer and then wanted to "ride bikes".

We've also been doing a lot of drawing with chalk on the front and back stoops.

This is Dr. Ari, running off to save lives.

We finally went and got a membership to COSI. COSI memberships are usually hella expensive, but we are not only poor, we are officially poor and on public assistance. That meant we were able to get an "access" membership, for not hella expensive.

That, in turn, means that Ari gets to go play in Little Kidspace, which is the kick-ass play area they have. It's got a water play area, and a big ol' playground, and some dress up/pretend areas and an enormous pile of blocks. Oh, and a giant helicopter and ambulance that kids can get in and "drive". Anyway, so this was Ari, dressing up like a doctor. She was running off to go drive the ambulance.

The weather has been warm, but it's been crazy rainy the last couple days. Yesterday, it started just pouring down. Ari wanted to run back and forth on the porch, getting wet.

As for us- Thad is done subbing for the school year. He's supposed to start a test grading job on Monday, which will run for maybe 6 weeks, and then he will go back to the Target. Well, up his hours at the Target- he's still working there one night a week.

My kids (I mean students) are supposed to give me their finals tomorrow, and then I have to grade them. Otherwise, I'm done for the summer. My goal is to have my final draft of my dissertation proposal done in the next week. I am, however, being frustrated in that goal by being stupidly sick.

For those of you who didn't know, I'm about 8 weeks pregnant, due sometime in January. I am in the hating-my-life stage. It ought to last about another month, or so.

Spit in your eye

2008-05-13T23:47:00.003-04:00

The three of us went to the almost-a-dollar theatre (inflation being what it is, you know) tonight to see The Spiderwick Chronicles, which is based off of a series of books that Thad read Ari when she was a tiny baby. It was our first time seeing a movie with Ari since she was four months old. She really liked it. :D Highlight of the movie for me was my daughter squealing "Issa GISSIN! Issa GISSIN!" when the griffin ("gissin") came on the screen.

Unicorn revenge

2008-05-12T10:20:00.003-04:00

Here's our little monkey, fast asleep in the papasan. I know this is a bit Anne Geddes (although, I suppose she would be dressed like a lima bean or something in that case) but I think it's adorable. :D

We have had sort of a low-profile weekend. Sunday was Mother's Day, of course, which I mostly celebrated by sleeping late and then getting taken out to a breakfast buffet, full of- as Kathy says- piggies and pancakes. Blueberry pancakes.

This is a shirt I made for Ari (I made another one as well). I was surprised that she knew it was (more or less) the Flash symbol, but she took one look at it and said "Sash!" and then demanded that I help her put it on and take pictures. This is her solemn little posing face.

It has been cold and rainy here. It sucks. I want the warm weather now! We were taunted by nice weather, but now it's pretty much coat temperatures again. :P Ari hates it because the cold and wet means no outings to the
park, and being stuck in the house all day.

I hate it because it means that my two year old doesn't get to climb her crazy out. Ech. Hope us for better weather soon, so my baby can play.

Night night Papa for the third time

2008-05-08T23:16:00.003-04:00

Look what Ray brought to contribute to game night dinner. :D

Ari has been into decorating herself lately. She found where we had our Sharpie markers- thank god, she was mostly interested in drawing on herself. Yesterday, she had to have two baths due to close encounters with food dyes and some washable markers.

Mind, I've been writing this entry over several days, so "yesterday" in the prior paragraph is like, Sunday.

Today, on the other hand, has been a pretty exciting day. Ari cooked with me for the first time today. It was a pretty mixed success. :) She had been having kind of a rough, tantrumy day, and when I started cooking soup, she was really interested. I went ahead and got out a chair for her so she could see what I was doing, and I gave her a spoon to stir the broth, and so on.

Then I started seasoning the broth, and she was super interested in that, so I started aliquoting herbs and spices into a little cup, and letting her dump them into the broth. She was having a great time.

Then I had to go upstairs. Then, when I came downstairs, I discovered that, in cooking the five pounds of brisket that I cooked yesterday, I left the celery salt out on the table. I discovered this by finding the empty celery salt jar next to my beautifully seasoned beef broth! There wasn't much in the jar, but she'd still dumped about a tablespoon and a half of it into the now-incredibly-oversalted broth. I was able to rescue it with two more cups of unsalted broth and some tomato juice, but still. It just wasn't quite the same.

It was really cool cooking with her, though. I hope I get to do it LOTS more. :D

Second exciting thing is that Ari has- at long last- started to show interest in the potty. We went out and got one of those potty seats that goes on your big toilet, and she was very taken with it. She spent about an hour sitting on it this evening.

She has definitely not progressed to knowing what to use the potty for, mind. But this is still a big jump up from the little girl who didn't seem to notice that the potty existed at all or what we did with it.

Couple of other things: we taught Ari how to blow on dandelions for wishes. She really digs it. She's been really tantrumy of late. I choose to hope that this heralds the cusp of a new developmental stage.

Oh, and she's been really freaking me out on the playground. I try hard to stand back and let her find her own boundaries- which she's really quite good at- but she's constantly attempting things I don't think she should be able to do. She's always either succeeded at them safely, or turned back if she didn't think she could do it. And I really do want her to learn to not do things because she knows they're not safe, not because I told her so.

But still. She's climbed to the top of the jungle gym, and I don't think she can get down without falling. I'm there biting my nails and making myself wait until she asks for help. She doesn't, though. She always climbs down on her own.

Cordon bleu rolls in puff pastry

2008-04-27T14:19:00.005-04:00

I'm here, trying to remember what in hell I've been doing for the last two weeks. Teaching... working on the dissertation. Trying to read French (a whole long article; too long to try to impose on Rebecca to translate for me), and hoping to get a computer thing going to help gather some data for my dissertation. Everything is going slower than expected, which is- as I understand it- the nature of the beast.

This weekend, we went to the Viking Festival, now an annual favorite (Ari's been every year she's been alive, thus far). Miss Ariadne had the Good, Good Times there, as you can see.

The Viking Festival is pretty low-key and relaxed, and not terribly crowded, so it was easy for Miss Ari to run around. Everyone was pretty nice about it, too, on the occasions on which she went running into someone's booth or tent or whatever. :)

She also had loads of fun with the music. We listened to this band composed of a dude playing a German bagpipe (did you know that the Germans had bagpipes? Apparently, most of Europe did) and another dude playing various kinds of drums. Ari, as you can see, had a good time dancing.

Then, they asked if anyone in the audience wanted to come play drums, since they had alot of drums. We got Rick up there playing, and Ari and I danced until I was too tired. Then, as the next number was starting, Ari ran up and started playing with a free drum. The guys in the band didn't mind her messing with it, so Thad came up and held it for her while she played. :D

Then we went home and ate pamcakes and played Munchkin and watched a little Doctor Who.

Flopping around like a pig with his head cut off

2008-04-14T01:46:00.007-04:00

I can't believe that it's already nearly half-way through April. We've been amusing ourselves right enough. The weather's been lovely (save for the last few days that have been rainy and cold and miserable). Last weekend we had Cookbook Party Club, but I haven't managed to write it up yet. The food was really lovely, though.

This is Ari, making her dinosaur drink from her cup. Ari had good times at Cookbook Party Club. Thad took her to parks and whatnot while we cooked, and then she got to play with Jeff and "Book" and "Tabbus", three of her very favoritest people.

This is Ari in our new papasan. Our last papasan crumpled one day and is currently being used as a pillow nest/landing pad by a little miss upstairs. Rick saw one at a thrift store, though, and got it for us as a replacement. Ari approved it.

She's been a bit more verbal now. She parrots alot, but also talks about things. She asks for "Sammy Hooogs" alot (her way of pronouncing "family hugs", which is when we all three get in a group hug-and-kiss session).

Oh, and she is way into "nopples". Comes of being a breastfed baby, I suppose.

She also likes to play dress up, which she comes by honestly. Lately, she really digs wearing other people's clothes- especially mine. She keeps stealing my shoes from my room upstairs, and walking around in them. Here, she's wearing my leather gloves and the swimsuit top I just bought.

She wandered around in it, saying "my nopples!" for a while, which cracked me up. She clearly knows what that top is about.

Tonight, we played UnMet again. I very dig that game. For dinner, I roasted a chicken, and made mashed potatoes and steamed asparagus (asparagus was on cheap at the store). Then, for dessert, I made this fantastic devil's food cake, and put strawberries in the middle, and cream cheese frosting on top. It was fairly phenomenal, in my opinion.

Tea for six and a half

2008-03-30T21:30:00.005-04:00

Here is Ari, finally liking her bike helmet. You may remember that she used to didn't like it, but now she's super into wearing it. We couldn't hardly get her to put it down.

We've been having a lovely set of spring breaks. I was off, and then Thad was off for my first week of classes, so that was nice. Oh, and I bought a bike again. My last one got stole at the end of fall (more or less) out of our backyard, which I was upset about. I like the new bike, though. It's super light (I think the lightest bike I've ever owned) and it rides really nice. I got it at Once Ridden, which, as far as I can tell, is the only used bike shop in the C-Bus. I approve of good used bikes. It's like recycling. Also, those guys are so the best bike mechanics. When you recondition old bikes, you really know your way around a frikkin' bike, you know?

Saturday, we had a whole road trip with us and R&B and also Kira and Travis. I was just wondering if I'd ever actually mentioned Kira and Travis in this blog, and I see that I haven't. Thad sort of mentioned that Kira wasn't a cat once, and that we game with them. Anyway, they moved here last fall, and we have been hanging out. They like my baby. In fact, because they like my baby, they read this blog, so I feel weird talking about them. However, I suspect they're like to show up here again, so I thought I'd explain who they are and all. Sort of. Yeah. So.

Right! Road trip! We've been wanting to do a little steampunk crafting, but oh noes! We had no appropriately steampunky bits and bobs. So, Rick recommended us to go to this place in Dayton called Mendelson's. It was this crazy enormous warehouse full of weird crap. I giggled like a schoolgirl. Literally, I'm not joking about that. I mean, this place had an entire room just for vacuum tubes. I said, get in my ray guns! and bought seven.

After Mendelson's, we went over to the Der Dutchman and ate us some broasted freakin' chicken. I have gone to the Der Dutchman twice before (and yes, I noticed the double article there, thanks ;) ) and I highly approve of it.

It has a buffet, where you can eat as much broasted chicken and beef and turkey roast as you want. And also, you can have mashed potatoes and corn and green beans and amishy noodles. And they bring you as much rolls as you want. I ate and ate and ate. Ari had pizza, actually. I'm glad Thad was paying attention to her fooding, because I was paying attention to the fine, fine eating I was doing. I think he knew that he was going to have to look after her for the duration of that meal. Because, I mean, broasted chicken.

Then there was pie afterwards.

We always knew you was a whoopsy...

2008-03-20T14:12:00.005-04:00

R&B have had the last two days off for spring break, and we've been hanging out. Tuesday, they came over. We had dinner and watched movies and worked on craft projects (Rick's faaabulous leather tophat, the armored collar Brooke and I are working on, and my lab apron). Rick cried at the end of The Iron Giant, but claims to still be a man. (To be fair, we all cried at the end of The Iron Giant. "Superman...")

Anyway, yesterday, we went to Landoll's Mohican Castle and had a look around and some lunch. It's a fantastically expensive B&B, which used to be a retreat which a rich dude built for himself out in the woods. It's all... neo-medieval. Pretty, though, and there's a nice restaurant attached. We had lunch there, and it was tasty. I had tasty crab cakes, and Thad had a pork loin. Ari had french fries. Have I ever mentioned that my child loves french fries seemingly more than any other food? She does. She will only eat other food if the french fries are gone.

Unfortunately, it was raining while we were there. And cold. Then, it got colder. Brooke wanted us to go for a nature walk, but she was crazy. :) We went to this gorge overlook, and that was about good enough for us. Ari had a great time, though. There were puddles! And ice! And Miss Brooke!

Then, on the way home, it got even colder. Then it started to hail. Then, it started to snow. Then, the roads got really horrible. Ech. Anyway, we got home and I made scones (I love scones) and we played 4x4 HoMMV and worked on our craft projects. Apron: done, and also a copper mesh surgical mask. Now I have to make that blouse. I'm a little frightened. Tailoring is hard.

I don't have balls to slow me down.

2008-03-15T13:23:00.007-04:00

This is Ari, eating cereal. I did a lot of house cleaning yesterday and the day before. By house cleaning, read, playing HoMMV and picking stuff up in the in betweens. Anyway, so, as you can see, things look relatively picked up.

Ari is much better with her spoon use. Also, she came up to me after cereal today with a cloth to help her wipe the wayward milk off. :D

So, last night, we played a game called Scheherezade. Last fall, when I was in my not-blogging funk (to be fair, it was a funk that affected all my life, not just the blogging), we went to Con on the Cob. We had a fantastic time, I sold almost all of my weird critters, and we had some really phenomenal gaming. Including, but not limited to, this game Scheherezade. It's a cooperative storytelling game where you draw characters out of a hat, and everyone works together to make a cool story.

Alas, I cannot link to a place where you could buy this game, because it isn't on the market. The fine gentleman who made it ran it for us at the Con, but isn't selling it yet. He did send us his materials to play with, though, so we totally made an evening of it, with themed food and a costume box for all the character changes. And, as you can see above, fake mustaches.

It was good times for all, really. There's more pictures here, if you're interested.

Not for me. Only Gileta!

2008-03-13T23:00:00.004-04:00

Tonight was our Gary Gygax Memorial Dungeon Crawl.

For those of you who don't know, or weren't aware, Gary Gygax- the man behind Dungeons and Dragons- died last week. The geek community has gone into mourning. Seriously. And, while it's true that Thad and I don't actually like Dungeons and Dragons, the fact remains that we would not be who we are or where we are if Gary Gygax had not lived his life as he did. The least we could do was buy some pizza, some Cheetos, and some Mountain Dew, and play his freakin' game for one night.

So, Thad dug out the infamous Red Box (retrieved from his 'rents over Christmas), and we rolled up characters by the most old school of RPG rules. 3d6 6 times in order, no rerolls or dropping ones or nothing! Then, we went into a dungeon, and crawled all over it. PC's died. Jeff alone went through three. We killed goblins, and skeletons, and rats. And more skeletons. One of our number popped his RPG cherry on the Red Box tonight, just like so many of us have in the past. It was a glorious game night, TPK or no.

We even rolled to see if we were getting drunk.

PS: Ari asked for something today. She put the bag of bagels in my hand, and- quite clearly- said, "I want a bagel, please". Well, it might have sounded more like "A wan' boggle pease. Boggle pease." Nevertheless, my baby asked for something. With words. For like, the first time ever. :D

2008-03-12T23:58:00.006-04:00

This is so my child. I'm not sure what it is, but she is super into wearing big people shoes. Like, she got Rick's big ol' stompin' boots and was clompin' around the house in 'em like a little crazy person.

Anyway, it occurs to me that I haven't talked at all about my absence from my life here, or the outcome of anything. So, well, first of all: I passed.

Let me just say that again. I passed.

I only found out yesterday, because yesterday was the oral defense, which was really scary to contemplate beforehand, but not actually so scary in real life. It turns out that when you spend three weeks locked in an attic doing nothing but read stuff about a set of topics, you actually have opinions and thoughts about those topics afterwards. Who knew?

Let me just take a quick break to show you my daughter, in a shirt I made for her. Well, Janessa dyed the shirt, but I put the TARDIS on it. This was not staged, by the by. She went and got the Doctor to play with all on her own.

Anyhow, so I was locked in an attic*. I planned to stay with R&B for a week, and stayed for two. Lovely people that they are, they fed me lunch and breakfast and dinner and let me put enormous stacks of books on their dining table and play my 82-song "work" playlist over and over again. And they let me talk at them- at length- about analogy and grammaticalization and theories of contact-induced change. They even went "uh huh" and "yeah" and "bitch is crazy!" at the appropriate moments, and didn't complain when I seemed like I might just be staying indefinitely.

It was this huge, crazy thing, of me coming face to face with the work. Do or die, moment, right? No excuses, no putting it off. In theory.

So, my exam was due the 27th (a Wednesday) and it became clear by Monday that I just wasn't going to make that deadline. Brian told me I had to have it in by the morning of Monday the 3rd at the absolute latest. And there I am, on Sunday morning. I had 8 pages of question 1 and 5 pages of question 2 and 4 pages of question 3 and no pages at all of my dissertation proposal. At all.

After three weeks of not being able to write much at all, I suddenly went into overdrive. The final version of the exam was in the vicinity of 30 pages, and the proposal (written in about 4 hours straight on Sunday) was 28 pages long. It's been years since I wrote that much in one place. Hopefully it bodes well for the future. I've certainly been in a funk as far as work is concerned.

Anyway, I turned in the exam at about 3:30 in the morning on Monday. Then I went to bed around 5, and got up at 8 and taught. Thank god, I wasn't lecturing- it was presentations from the students.

Then, I didn't think about the exam for a solid week. Didn't read over my answers, didn't even look at a book. I moved back into my own house again. Then, after months and months of not feeling motivated to do anything except mess around on the internet, I suddenly felt like making stuff. So, I did that shirt applique, and started making myself costume pieces for Unhallowed Metropolis, and cooked a five course gourmet Victorian dinner for game night, and planned all kinds of fun stuff for upcoming days. Like Friday, when we're going to play Sheherezade and have a delicious Middle Eastern dinner that I've planned. There will be pastry involved.

Then, it was time for the defense, and I hadn't looked at or thought about my exam for a week. I ended up just reading over my answers in the morning. And, shockingly enough, when they asked me questions, I knew the answers- or at least, I knew things to say. I had ideas and responses. The exam was two hours long, and it was 15 minutes shy of over before I even noticed the time.

I turned my paper in to the Graduate School yesterday afternoon, so it's official. I swear, I didn't know whether or not I was going to finish the exam until that Sunday morning. It was that close, and there were moments when I thought it might well kill me. But here I am, and I passed.

There's the dissertation, now, of course, but I refuse to think about that for a while now. I have creative food to cook, and Victorian clothing to sew.
____________________
*To be fair, it was a lovely attic. It had a nice desk, and shelves, and a comfy chair next to the window where I did part of my reading. It also had an enormous bathroom with a gorgeous clawfooted tub, which is where I did most of my reading- with my sonic screwdriver and my postit notes balanced on the edge of the tub.

Eek! It's a mouse.

2008-03-09T13:40:00.008-04:00

It snowed yesterday. And when I say that it snowed yesterday, I mean, it SNOWED yesterday.
This is the front of our house. That big lump of snow in the left of the picture is our car. The lump of pink and purple is our daughter. :) (Thanks, Jen, for the snowsuit!)

So, after something like 14 inches of snow fell out of the sky, what did we do? Well, Brooke got the idea that we should go get ice cream. It's right down the street, after all, and they sent us a message saying they'd be open today. So, we hiked down High street in the snow. This is Rick, bundled up like a snow ninja, standing there on High. The yoga people shoveled their walk. High fives, yoga people!

The hiking was pretty slow going, especially with a toddler, but she had so much fun. She was obviously cold, but she was just grinning ear to ear. Brooke helped her in the snow alot. I had enough trouble getting me through the snow. Did I mention that I wore my snow pants for the very first time? (Thanks, Grandma!) People from Florida shouldn't have to wear snow pants, I say.

And then, we arrived! Jeni's icecream is the best. We made the poor man give us five million samples before we ordered. I got the "Roxbury Road" (Belgian milk chocolate, homemade marshmallows, toasted almonds) and the Forest Berry. It was phenomenal.

Thad had a cheesecake and brownie icecream that was really excellent as well. Ari totally vikinged his cone, though. I told him we should get her her own. Also, check out her spoon use. :D

Then we walked home. There was a snowball fight involved. Just so you know, the reason Ari is sitting in the snow saying "Ooow! Ooow!" is because Thad had shoved me into a snow drift just previous to the snowball fight breaking out, and because cold cold snow HURTS when you shove it up against poor naked flesh. Like the flesh in between the end of my sleeve/jacket and the beginning of my gloves and mittens. So, she'd just got to hear a bunch of mama going "OW! Dammit, OW!" :)

I have inside me blood of kings

2008-03-03T00:41:00.006-05:00

The Thrilling Conclusion to...Two Years a Papa...

By my reckoning this will make a full dozen of my proxy blogs since Julia went off the grid. Julia comes home tomorrow!! YAY!!!!
When I last spoke with her she had finished her dissertation proposal and only needed to do the final editing of her exam questions so she should be in good shape when she has to turn them all in tomorrow morning.

As for me, a new release for one of my favorite games came out last week, and so I got to play that some yesterday. Jeff, Ray-Ray, and Jaime all came over for a big four person game last night, which was lots of fun. The game in question is Heroclix, a silly little minis game meant to mimic comic books, but I have fun with it. I consider it to be about the closest thing I have to a vice. (I hear we're all entitled to one of those, right?)

Enough about grad school and little plastic figures, you all want to hear about a little girl.

Evidently I don't do so well learning from experience. Previously I mentioned how my camera ran out of power at the conservatory; well I went galavanting out sans spare battery again. This time it was while at the North Market. I got Ari and myself some slices of pizza and we sat down on a bench to partake of them and she looked so cute sitting on the bench with her little boots dangling in the air while eating a big slice of New York style pizza that I thought I'd take a picture. Well, as mentioned above, I failed to take the desired snapshot. Ari, however, did not fail in snagging my slice of pizza while I was up. What can I say, she's a viking. I have no one to blame but myself, that's what I get for having bought her cheese pizza and pepperoni for myself.
Just like last time, to make up for having failed picture-wise I got Shermy to fire up the Way Back Machine to find an earlier picture of Ari at the North Market. This time though, we really had to turn back the clock.

She's not that easy to carry anymore.

On the trip shown in the photo Grandpa Marcus bought Ari a lovely purple wool coat to keep her warm for her first Winter.
Ari was still wearing that coat this last Winter.
That dragon hat doesn't fit her anymore though. Believe me, I've checked.

I may not have learned to carry a spare camera battery with me, but Ari is definitely learning things, like how to put herself to bed.
The other day I reported on how she had gone to bed by herself. Well, what I left out was that I had been there with her and had lied down beside her until she fell asleep.
Last night, however, she had been up in her room for a while and I thought that she was just playing or reading as she is often want to do, but when I went up to check on her this was what I saw:

There she was, snug as a bug and fast asleep. Fortunately, I had already put her in a night diaper and brushed her teeth.

That's about all I've got. I'll leave you with one last bit of utter sappiness before returning you to your irregularly scheduled Julia blogging.

Today Ari and I spent awhile just sort wrestling and playing around in her room. Something Ari kept doing was pouncing on me and wrapping her arms around me like in a hug and shouting "I gotcha!"
Trapped in her powerful two year old grip all I could do was look down into those big blue eyes and think, "Yes dear, you certainly do."

The Brave and the Bold

2008-02-28T02:54:00.005-05:00

Is it *STILL* Two Years a Papa?...

*Sigh* it is indeed. Julia was hoping to be done by now, but is still feverishly plugging away.
We tried to go over and give her a pep-up last night, but it was slushing so bad and the tires on our car are so worn that it felt unsafe to drive so I brought Ari home. Today we went and brought her hugs and junk food to cheer her up. Our favorite wings place (Zaxbys) is opening a location near our house, but they're not open yet so she had to settle for fries and a burger.

Now, presenting:
Ariadne Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Toybox!

Its true that they grow up so fast...
Today Ari was reading with me and repeated the whole phrase "Eeek! Its a mouse!" She's been getting quite verbal lately and is more and more able to make herself understood.
She's also been acting like a teenager! She'll contentedly spend over an hour hanging out in her room and has even pushed me out of the room and shut the door in my face!
Although she does tend to giggle like mad if I open the door and come in growling like a monster. We'll see if she still likes that ten years from now.

In other silly Ari news...
We have a box of things that we're collecting to send to Theresa, mostly books and the like, but I also put in one of those Cadbury Creme eggs. I'm not very fond of them myself, but Theresa seems to like them. Sometime when I wasn't looking though Ari swiped the candy from the box, brought it up to her room, and unwrapped it. When I went to check on her the chocolate egg was sitting unmolested on a chair while she happily gnawed on the wrapper.
I took the wrapper away and split her ill-gotten gains with her.

It is tough taking on the roll of a single parent, even briefly, but no matter how big the shoes are that I've got to fill Ari is willing to help...

I need to wrap this up as it is late and Ari and I have gotten into the bad habit of sleeping-in. It's just awfully hard to get up when you've got a snuggly little two year old in the bed. Especially one who likes to play peek-a-boo with the covers.

You don't believe in magic? What kind of witch are you??

2008-02-26T02:29:00.007-05:00

Aw shucks, it's Two Years a Papa...

Blah blah...went to the library...yada yada.. did some role playing...

Anyway, here's Ari being cute in one of her mama's hats.

And THIS ladies and gentleman, THIS is a little girl who put HERSELF to bed!

She took off her shirt, pulled up the covers, and just lay there until she was asleep.

No more Scots, please. One is enough.

2008-02-25T01:11:00.007-05:00

Who'da thunk it? More Two Years a Papa...

I really like having fresh baked bread. It was something I always enjoyed (and still appreciate) at my parents' house. Lately, I've been trying to perfect my own home recipe from the Fanny Farmer cookbook. My first two attempts came out denser than I would like (a regular problem with my yeasty baking), but over all okay.
*Huh, evidently Blogger doesn't recognize "okay" as a word. "OK" is okay though.*
Back to bread- I was looking forward to trying a variant tonight. It involved minced garlic, basil, and a whole cup of parmesan cheese, which I had to especially purchase. It would have gone great with the pizza we were having. Unfortunately, I got so caught up in the Unhallowed Metropolis game (we were attacked by ghouls right away!) that I totally forgot the loaves of bread until they were thoroughly burned.
:-(
UnMet was lots of fun though. Julia took her one big break from working to come play. We even did a little photo session beforehand.Travis didn't dress up so he got to be the photographer. Actually, I didn't dress up either, this is basically how I dress these days; although not always in so much sepia. If I had realized we'd be doing a little photo shoot I'd have worn the spiffy vest and hat that I got for my birthday.

It was very nice to have people over. Ari and I hadn't had any real interaction with others since the playgroup that we went to on Tuesday. Ari was so very sad when her mama had to leave again. The last slice of pizza was barely enough to consul her.

Speaking of Ari, I haven't forgotten that she is the star of this blog. Here she is wearing a silly thing on her head and trying to get in on the gaming.

Tomorrow we have another gaming night and then Julia will be back on Thursday.
For her birthday back in August Theresa gave Julia a certificate for a free message. Julia never used it and it hasn't expired yet so we figure that will be a nice thing for her to do as soon as she turns in her exams.

It's a Drow Gargoyle

2008-02-24T03:39:00.005-05:00

Could it be...Two Years a Papa?Or maybe it's just a sleepy little bean.

Yesterday I took Ari to the Franklin Park Conservatory, where they charge admission for two-year olds. *harumph* Ari had a grand old time running around looking at the funny plants and toy train displays they had set up throughout much of the conservatory. Unfortunately, the battery on my camera died the first time I tried to take a picture of her. So you'll have to make do with a photo flash-back from when she went to the conservatory with her grandpa Marcus nearly a year ago.This morning Ari was kinda sick, throwing up a little and running a low fever. I let her get lots of sleep today and she is doing so much better. She's also up and bouncy at 4 in the morning because she slept so much during the day. Papa, who had to get up early so repair men could fix our screen door and clean up Ari puke isn't quite so bouncy. She's climbing on me as I write this and is saying something or other about monkeys.

Lately I've been reading a book called Baltimore, or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire I am finding it quite compelling although also entirely depressing at times. I suppose that I would describe it as "folkloristic gothic horror". It's not entirely dissimilar in feel to Unhallowed Metropolis, which we get to play tomorrow. Yay!

7/9ths of an Elephant!

2008-02-21T23:20:00.006-05:00

Yes indeedy, it's Two Years a Papa...

So, Shutterfly doesn't work the way I thought it did and the link that I provided for the pictures of Ari taking a walk in the snow is useless. However, if you click on "Family Photos" here or under "Links of Interest" it should take you to Julia's shared albums, including the one I tried to link to the other day.

Speaking of Ari taking a walk in the snow...

This is a snow suit that Ari was given at the start of Winter. It is a hand-me-down from a girl younger than Ari who had outgrown it. That's right, younger.
Ari actually wore her mittens most of the time we were out. She kept taking her hands out then deciding it really was too cold and put them back inside the mittens.
It was a lot colder today than it was when we went to Glen Echo. Tomorrow looks at least as bad and it has snowed some more. They're fairly likely to close the schools again tomorrow.
Today I just went to the park across the street with Ari and she had great fun just tromping in the snow and on the poor neglected playground equipment. She even enjoyed playing on the swings, although her cheeks are still a little red from that.
There are some great wooden structures on the playground that look PERFECT for snowball fights to my mind. The utter lack of footprints in the several day-old snow says that the Youth of America disagrees. Ah well, unspoiled snow for my little girl.

Last Summer I was practically forced by a "volunteen" at the local library to sign Ari up for their Summer reading program. Evidently just her looking at books or having them read to her counted. This over-lapped with our trip to Maine and Maryanne can verify that Ari had those Richard Scarry books read to her so often that the binding started to come undone. Anyway as part of her reward for completing the program the library let her pick out a book to keep. She went for the one with a duck on the cover. The book is called "Wiggle Waggle" and it gives silly sounds for some of the ways that different animals walk. "How does a cat walk? Pish~posh, pish~posh."
I mention all this just because the last couple of nights Ari and I have been reading the book and acting out some of the animal motions. Which is to say... Ari is awfully cute.
I'll try to get a video of her doing this, but it's hard to orchestrate that sort of thing with just the two of us.

Someone is WRONG on the internet!

2008-02-20T01:40:00.005-05:00

Still Two Years a Papa...

Um, Ari's still a little sweety.

This is Ari with pigtails.
This is also the only time that she's left them in long enough for me to take a picture.
She's not too fond of hair clips either.

Today we went to a play group, but there wasn't that many kids her own age there. Even so she had fun either following the bigger kids around or playing by herself. In any case I think it was good for her to get a change of scenery.

I've started trying to sell some of my old comic books on Ebay. I've no idea how well it's going to work, but getting some sort of money in would be nice.

We've been reduced to keeping Ari in a red folding hamper!

At least she still has her dignity.

Could it be Butter?

2008-02-17T01:09:00.005-05:00

Good Grief More Two Years a Papa...

Well Ari actually seems to be on a reasonable sleep schedule these days, I hope that it continues.
Today Julia asked me how I liked being a "house husband", I replied that it was just fine except for all the guilt about not brining in any money.
Being home with Ari does give us time to do things like read books, sword fight, play with puzzles, go for walks and even take up baking.
This is Ari "helping" papa make some gingerbread cookies on Valentine's Day. We sneaked into Julia's department and surprised her with the cookies while she was working.

Yesterday the ground was still all snow and ice, but it had warmed up just a little so I thought that I would take Ari for a walk in Glen Echo, the nice little ravine/park near Rick & Brooke's place.

It was pretty much a Winter Wonderland and all that jazz.

We took a whole bunch of pictures of little miss tromping about in the snow. I posted a few of them here. Ari simply had a blast, she loves feeling the snow beneath her boots and giggled like crazy when she found herself sliding on an icy patch. Naturally I spent the whole time wishing that Ari would wear her mittens.
Of course she'd just loose her mittens and we all know what that means...
No pie.
And that's just sad.

Aggressive Rhubarb

2008-02-13T02:21:00.007-05:00

More from Two Years a Papa...

Lately Julia is spending about 13 hours a day at school working on her exam questions while Ari and I hangout at home. I'd like take Ari out to explore the wide-world of Columbus, but we've just been plagued with all manner of bad weather.
Last week it rained nearly non-stop and over the weekend we had arctic winds that blew so hard our screen door was destroyed by them. Today, freezing sleet and icy rain.

One way that Ari and I have entertained ourselves is sword fighting. Ari's weapon of choice is the dowel from inside her mama's rolling pin. She does a very good job of making sure that I'm armed before she takes her fightin' stance and starts shouting "Ah gotya!"

Yesterday she prompted me into a dual, but when I looked at her, not only was she holding her "sword" in one hand, but she had also attached two big foam swords to her feet. She cracks me up sometimes.

A Felargo of Unscientific Rubbish

2008-02-05T00:05:00.001-05:00

Two Years a Papa continues...

Today Ari somehow opened this picture of Julia on the computer-

I was doing dishes at the time and only noticed that she had done this because she was excitedly pointing at the screen and saying, "Mama! Issa Mama!"

I then put on a slide show with about 65 pictures of Julia for Ari and she asked me to replay several times.
We're missing her something fierce.

I think that a change of scenery will do Ari some good so tomorrow I'm going to take her up to Akron to see Andy Hopp and his daughter Ilyanna.

And now we present:
"Messy-Hair Ari...in a Box!"

5 o'clock is Naked Iroh Time

2008-02-04T01:24:00.001-05:00

Two Years a Papa continues...

Julia took our camera with her to Vienna so the majority of pictures that I'll be posting, for this week at least, will be from our extensive Ari photo archives. Tonight, however, you'll be getting a fresh batch of pictures thanks to Brooke.Yesterday I took Ari out to a gaming store and let her run around with Kelly while I got my clix on. Before this weekend I had been on a mad streak and had won the last 5 tournaments that I had attended. Let's just say that the streak is over, still jolly good fun of course. Then Ari and I went shopping at Target and Whole Foods so I could get fixin's for dinner.
I made two pizzas one was sausage (and quite tasty) while the other was...different.
In honor of the Arkham Horror game planned for that evening I made a calamari pizza. It was a tentacular delight and I'm sorry that I wasn't able to get a photo of it.
We (and by "we" I mean "I" as the game is just a little too advanced for Ari) did in fact play Arkham Horror with Jeff, Rick, Jaime, and Kelly and a reasonably good time was had by all. Brooke came over later and we watched City of Death. Good times.

Today we went over to R&B's for a breakfast so late in the day it couldn't properly be called brunch. Then we went over to the Rag-O-Rama for their $1 sale. Which translated to dropping Brooke off to employ her shop-fu while Rick, Ari, and I went and found other ways to occupy ourselves.
Later on it was back to R&B's for dinner and a board game. Evidently tonight was "let's play a really old board game that Brooke owns, but has never played before" night; first we tried to play Murder She Wrote: the Board Game, but then we realized that we didn't have enough players and instead tried out Clue- The Great Museum Caper. None of us had played it before, a few elements didn't make much sense, and I have no idea how it was supposed to be related to the game Clue, but it was still reasonably fun. We'll probably try it again sometime with Julia.

Lately Ari has been in a bit of a "naked phase" and will insist on removing all of her clothes no matter how chilly it is.
She also hasn't been sleeping very well. I've been getting her into bed at a reasonable time, but she keeps waking up and has a hard time getting back to sleep.
Consequently I haven't been sleeping very well either.

The cat in the right-hand picture is Kira (not to be confused with Kira-the-Human who we game with). She was very tolerant of Ari's petting, but not so hot on Ari's repeated attempts to pick her her up. Despite what it looks like here, Ari was not about to jump off the couch after the cat.

Two Years a Papa

2008-02-02T03:04:00.002-05:00

I suppose that technically I'm two years and five months a papa, but it's still a good deal more accurate than 6 months. In any case Julia should have just arrived in Vienna at the time of this writing and I thought that while Julia is in the midst of conferencing and examening I'd take on the blogging.

So here goes...
This morning we took Julia to the airport and wished her well on her exciting travels. I wanted to take Ari out to the North Market today, but it commenced with the raining and the snowing so we stayed in and cleaned house instead.

In the evening Rick came over with a bit of Chinese for us and we watched Live Free or Die Hard. It was a pretty good action flick. Then we tried out the game Elfenland that Theresa had given us for Christmas. The game wasn't bad, but not especially exciting either.

Now it's three thirty in the morning and Ari is still awake. Yipee!

In terms of funny Ari-ness... Lately Little Miss has taken to being picky about her clothes and generally prefers to run around the house in just her diaper (sometimes with snow boots) no matter how cold it is.

Well we all know that you're really here to see cute pictures of Ari, so here goes...

Ari pulled out half the stuffed animals in her stufty box, crawled in, curled up, and fell asleep. Oh yeah, she's adorable.

All this has happened before

2008-01-27T04:53:00.001-05:00

This is Ari playing with Vir and Atom Smasher. Her play table there is one of those expandable storage bins you can buy. Silly me, I thought I was going to use it as a clothes hamper. Ari knew better, of course. After the tenth time I found my clothes dumped on the floor, it officially became hers to play with.

Ari's been funny about doors opening lately. Every time the front door opens, she freaks out and tries to hide under things. I have no idea why, or what she thinks might be coming in.

This cracked me up today. It's K-9 keeping company with a triceratops, a spinosaurus, a fluffy bunny and a rubber ducky. My daughter kicks ass.

So, on Friday, I leave to go to Vienna, to give my poster at the International Morphology Meeting. And then, my exams start. I should be done around the end of February. Wish me luck, and don't expect to hear anything out of me for a month.

A blank page

2008-01-17T03:42:00.000-05:00

This is my beautiful daughter, at 2 AM, sitting in the middle of a pile of rice crispies, compounded by a pile of cornstarch. She was eating the rice crispies, but I think she was just playing with the corn starch. I kind of hope she was just playing with it, because otherwise, it reveals some really disturbing things about my child's tastebuds. Ech, I got a face full of it when I was changing her jammies.

I haven't had the motivation to clean it up yet; I expect that'll come tomorrow. In my defense, I do get kind of zoned out when it's the wee hours and my girl still isn't to bed. I really ought to try to do something to get her on a more even schedule, but I've been too lazy- and her staying up so late all the time (which she has been, lately) isn't as suck as it might be, really.

Today, I got home, and Ari started asking for "sammy hugs"- which is to say, "family hugs", wherein she gets to be in the middle of a mama and papa sandwich. She also beeped my nose repeatedly and played "peetaboo" with me. It was freakin' adorable. Oh, and lately, when Thad goes to bed, she wants to snuggle under the covers. I can hardly get her away so he can sleep. Sometimes she asks for "sammy hugs" then, too.

The first outings for some of the cookbooks I got at the xmas are up at the Cookbook Party Club blog, if anyone cares. There is even pictures.

Revivification

2008-01-10T21:22:00.001-05:00

Hey there.

We haven't frozen to death up here, and my daughter is still adorable. In case any of you were wondering. :)

Here's a picture from Christmas. This is Ari holding her extremely lifelike kitty that Great-Grandpa Francis sent her- easily one of her favorite presents this year. Boy, did that disturb the hell out of strangers in the airport. They kept thinking it was a real cat that this little girl was dragging around with her.

This is Thad's tattoo. Did I not mention he was getting one? Yup. He's been planning to get one in a serious way for well over a year now. We commissioned Nigel to stylize an aegishjalmur for us, and this is what he came up with. This is the tattoo right after the second session- you can see it's a bit red, and I've just put lotion on it. Mayhap I should have taken the picture before I did that...

Anyway, it's about four or five inches in diameter, in the upper middle of his back. Thad goes in for a touchup at the end of the month, after it's had a chance to heal up.

This is Ari, in the lovely warm outfit her godmother Theresa sent. Ari's pretty fun these days. The other day, we sat on the stoop (it was 70 degrees out!), and she kept pointing things out to me. Like, "dees a birds. birds say, caw caw. deesa birds. deesa two twucks. see? one twuck, two twuck. two twucks."

She can also say "zombiepocalypse", which amuses us no end. I know it's wrong to get my baby to say things just because I think it's funny, but I can't help myself.

She also says "exterminate!" (as previously noted), but that's all her. Oh, and when I put on a TARDIS shirt that Theresa sent me today, she kept pointing at the TARDIS and saying, "Dotta Hoo!" How cool is that?

P.S. Here's some stuff I've been doing:

http://cookbookpartyclub.blogspot.com/
http://daharadreaming.com/ (look at toys>puppets)

Vikinged my bacon

2007-10-05T00:16:00.000-04:00

My baby's sittin' in her book box. Readin' books. She likes that.

The Bad Wolf

2007-09-23T03:16:00.000-04:00

My baby knows what a Dalek is.

(She does say "EK-TERP" in a little two year old Dalek voice, but we only caught a tad of it here.)

Interim

2007-09-17T13:52:00.000-04:00

Ari's sitting next to me, reading a book. This is what she's saying:

"Mousey mousey eek eek eek mousey [mouse say?] eek dat say mauwwww dat say mauwww cow say mooo dat mouse. Mousey. Mousey. Eeek eek! Mousey. Eeek eek! Dat say mauww. Mousey. Eek eek! Eeek eek eek! Cat mouse say mauww eek eek! Mousey. Mouse. Hey, dat. Hey, cow. Bear. Bear bear. "

She's reading the Peter Rabbit books that Great Grandma sent for her birthday. She loves those books. I hate them, because they're hard and have sharp corners. Ow.

Happy Birthday to Me!

2007-08-25T23:00:00.000-04:00

Well, here I am. Sorry about the long absence; I've been in a space of not doing anything useful these last few weeks (*cough*month*cough*) and this is one of those things. So let's see...

We've been sick some (some sort of respiratory crud). Ari has busted out with two canines, and seems to be a bit better now on that front. For the moment.

I sprained my ankle three weeks ago, and it's still giving me trouble. Thad's been having problems with his shoulder, and we're not sure what to do about it! He went to a doctor, but she told him to take some ibuprofen and stay off it. It's not really getting better.

Wow. That sounds depressing.

We also went to the Jazz and Ribs Festival, which was awesome. Also, Ari and I went with R&B to the State Fair, and Ari got to pet all kinds of sheep and cows (like the one she's feeding up above) and pigs and bunnies. Etc.

Also, the whole Papke family came up for a weekend (the weekend I sprained my ankle, as it happens) and that was fun! Also, I read the Harry Potter book, the new Bujold Sharing Knife book, and had some ill-advised adventures in cooking. We also got a new player for our games, and started playing Pirates instead of Changeling (we're still playing Pendragon. Yay!) Anyway, all that to say that it has not actually been a suck period of time for us.

Ari knows what stickers are now, and she approves of them. She's getting more verbal all the time, but she still doesn't have the "using language to communicate" thing down yet. Language seems to be something she uses for her own amusement more than anything.

She's having tantrums now, real ones. The other day, she had one where she was even balling up her little fists and stamping her feet! I remind myself it's just her age and where she's at- part of the problem with using language to communicate, maybe?

P.S. Ari turns two on Wednesday! I'm going to try making pierogies. With bacon.

Maine: 4

2007-07-21T04:43:00.001-04:00

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

2007-07-21T04:28:00.000-04:00

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.

Down the stairs face first

2007-07-17T02:46:00.001-04:00

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

2007-07-17T00:32:00.000-04:00

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.

Maine: 2

2007-07-09T00:27:00.001-04:00

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.

Random strung together things

2007-07-08T23:22:00.000-04:00

We've been mostly at Origins this weekend, as previously mentioned. Couple of thoughts:

We are more than ever determined not to take a two-year-old to a serious con (ala D*Con).
Ari liked wearing her badge. And her dice necklace. And she liked the Pokeball someone gave her.
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.
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!
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

2007-07-08T00:26:00.000-04:00

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!"

Orc blood

2007-07-05T00:10:00.000-04:00

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...

A matter of priorities

2007-07-04T01:55:00.001-04:00

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.

Bar some becue

2007-07-02T23:27:00.000-04:00

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

2007-07-02T01:14:00.001-04:00

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:

Guderian device

2007-07-01T02:24:00.000-04:00

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? ;)

Update

2007-06-30T08:07:00.000-04:00

Whew- we just got back from Maine. I have lots to say about it, and I'll post in a little while... There are loads of pictures, which I'll post when I get copies from Marcus.

Margot

2007-06-13T22:44:00.001-04:00

This is a picture one of the other moms took of Ari at a playgroup today. It was a crafty playgroup, and it involved a lot of children turning things a lot of colors. Especially and including themselves. :) We near gave Thad a heart attack when he woke up this afternoon, looking at her arm.

We haven't been up to a whole lot the last few days. Ari hasn't made any spectacular messes, nor has her sleep schedule been exceptional. She has given us lots of hugs.

Ari things:

Ari likes family hugs and kisses
Today, Ari picked up the phone (which was off) and said "hello? hello?" (or "heh-o? heh-o?" as the case may be)
I heard her say an [f] the other day :')
Today, I gave her bread and hummous, and she totally just used the bread as a vehicle to put hummous into her mouth

P.S. I have a beautiful new niece! :D

No action or character

2007-06-12T00:38:00.001-04:00

Guess what this is? This is us not having couscous for dinner on Wednesday. I think we need to get some more locking canisters to keep that sort of thing in.

Ari had a great time, anyhow. At one point, she even laid down on her tummy and made couscous angels. I went ahead and let her play with it, until she was napping and it was bugging me. And lo, I had a vacuum canister full of dirty couscous.

I meant us to go to the downtown library today, but one of my shoes was irrevocably lost, so we stayed home and cleaned up instead- after Thad woke up, he took her to the park at least, though.

She helped me sort laundry. She figured out that I was throwing clothes, and thought that sounded like a good time, anyhow. Most of the clothes ended up in their proper piles at the end...

Ants in cream

2007-06-11T01:00:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was a long day, but to be honest with you, I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. I ended up only sleeping for an hour, and was in that place where I seem to be okay, but I keep forgetting what I was doing, or what time it is, or where I am. I passed out late-ish last night, and Thad- wonderful husband that he is- let me sleep in for a while.

Until Ari opened the door to our room, and came and woke me up. Apparently, she knows how to work doorknobs now! I'm still processing that. :) Funny thing, though- the door to our bathroom doesn't really have a working door latch, so it can be pretty easily opened if you just push it in. Ari's done that bunches of times.

But now, I've twice seen her trying to get into the bathroom by fumbling with the doorknob, and she no longer tries to just push open the door. Go figure...

We went to the arts festival downtown yesterday with Jaime and Brooke. We parked down by the Giant Eagle and walked the rest of the way downtown with Ari in her bike trailer stroller. The bike trailer as stroller thing was lovely (it was nice how we didn't have to carry our stuff; it has delightful storage space) but I did wish it didn't have that long front arm; it was problematic in the crowd of the festival.

There were some bands there, at least one of which we liked. We all danced around and generally had a good time. We also enjoyed looking at all the art stuff, although there's never ANYTHING at that festival that we could possibly, in a million years, afford.

We also walked down by the waterfront, which I'd never been to before. The Santa Maria is down there, and some other neat stuff.

Oh, we ran into Brooke's family, and her little brother Joe had a great time playing with Ari. He had fun pushing the stroller around, and he kept wanting to pick her up and run around and play with her. It was really sweet.

All in all, we had a pretty good time.

Today's mostly been catchup, and house cleaning, and alternate napping.

Choux paste

2007-06-09T05:46:00.000-04:00

I am going to pay for this so badly tomorrow.

This is a picture of my baby, asleep, on her bed. Where she arrived just a little after seven o'clock yesterday evening. By yesterday, I mean... Thursday. It was really cute. She just came upstairs, lay down in her bed and fell asleep reading.

Then, she woke up around midnight and was up until 5 AM.

Yesterday, by which I mean Friday, I napped, because I was insanely sleep deprived from her being sick and all.

And then tonight, by which I mean Friday (or possibly early Saturday), I couldn't get to sleep. Probably because of the napping. And here I am, at 6 AM.

Notable non-sleep related things:

I made even better cream puffs today- thanks for the tip, Max!
On that note, I also started reading those dragon books Max recommended... I'm enjoying 'em, too. :)
Ari voluntarily helped clean her room tonight. We've been in a routine of picking up her room before bed (first night diaper, then teeth brushing, then room cleaning, then nursies and sleep). And tonight, after we brushed her teeth, I said "What do we do now?" and she ran into her room and started putting her books on her shelf. :D
Ari knows the color purple. She has been reading the Mouse Paint book that her godmother gave her for her birthday alot lately, and it's all about mixing colors. When we get to that part, she has been saying "puhpuw" for a while. But, today, I pulled a dress out of her drawer, and she got all excited about "Puhpuw! Sauwuhs! Puhpuw! Sauwuhs!" (Purple flowers), so she really knows what it means.
Ari is cutting a canine tooth. I can see it now.

Sweet paste

2007-06-07T01:08:00.000-04:00

I graded final exams today, and worked on the draft of The Paper That Will Not End- which I owe Brian tomorrow, so he can look at it before he leaves Friday.

Cute story: today, Ari was reading her Richard Scarry book (which, by the way, she loves absolutely to pieces. Literally.), and she was looking at a page with some pictures of cats*. There were two pictures of cats with hats- one with a too-small hat, and one with a too-big hat drooping down over his eyes. Ari pointed at the first cat, and said, "Dat!" Then, she pointed at the second cat and said, "Seep dat!" Which, for the uninitiated, is her way of saying that the cat was asleep. Because she couldn't see his eyes. :D My baby is smart.
_____
*I know, I know. All the pages in that book have pictures of cats. And disturbingly cannibalistic pigs.

How many blueberries?

2007-06-05T23:56:00.000-04:00

This is Thad and Ari yesterday, out on the lawn in front of the house. Still, you'll note, wearing the dress. It was one of those "she fell asleep without having been put to bed properly so oh well she'll just sleep in her dress hmm we're both too lazy to corner her and put her in something new" sort of things.

I took her to the doctor yesterday as promised, for her first sick visit ever. And then, maybe five minutes after we got there, the power went out. I asked if they could go ahead and look at her real quick anyhow, and they did- but all their equipment (save for the ear thermometers) was run on wall power. So, I talked to them and they listened to her lungs and looked her over. The aforementioned ear thermometer confirmed that she was running a low-grade fever.

The doctors said that she was probably okay (her lungs sounded clear, and she seemed to be breathing okay, which was a comfort to me), and that it was probably a viral infection that she just needed to get over. They also said that if she was still fevery today, that we should bring her in again. Fortunately, she's doing much better today. She took a four hour nap, and went to bed at a reasonable hour, even. Wish me luck with her staying asleep, too. :)

Yellow sign

2007-06-03T21:59:00.000-04:00

Look what I made today. :) I found this fabric on sale at the Jo-Ann's and bought half a yard and made this. The other fabric is all from my stash, so at least I'm using it up. I think it looks really nice on her. It looks pretty comfy, too.

I think she likes it, also; I caught her flouncing around in front of the mirror.

Ari's been having a pretty hard few days. She's been sick, and I don't know what to do about it... I think it's time to go to the doctor. I'm going to call for an appointment tomorrow morning. She's been having a fever (but only at night), and a cough (all the time). She doesn't act sick all the time, but every time she tries to sleep, the coughing wakes her up, so she's clearly not feeling well now. Hard to tell how much is sleep deprivation, and how much is sick.

This is Ari a few days ago, running around with her duck and my hat (stolen off my very head!). She greatly enjoys having someone chase her with the duck and quacking.

Today, Ari said "Bunny", with the "n" and everything. That's the first time I've ever heard it. Oh, and she knew without being told that Thad was sleeping in our room. When we went upstairs to change her, she ran over to our door, and said "Papa seep! Papa seep!", and then knocked on the door. Where'd she learn to knock on doors?

Later on, I told her that I was going to wake Papa up soon, and she took it upon herself to run up the stairs and knock on the door until Thad woke up and came and got her.

Very belated

2007-05-28T02:41:00.001-04:00

This weekend was Marcon... check us out. I didn't take nearly as many pictures as last year- probably because I spent most of the con running after a certain little someone, and didn't have proper time to pull out a camera.

This is a picture of her, napping under one of the tables in the gaming room.

We pretty much spent the whole con in the gaming room, with one of us gaming and the other running after the girl. Ari had great fun seeing all the sights- including escalators, which she enjoyed going up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down.

This is Miss Ari deciding that the Icehouse pieces are her personal playthings. The rep from Looney Labs was nice enough about it, and I had her come away when they were actually ready to play. Brooke, who actually knows how to play the game, said that she was making some pretty good plays.

Matt McFarland (aka Black Hat Matt) brought his wife and daughter to the con, and Ari enjoyed playing with her. She's 10 months older than Ari is. She was really interested in other kids and babies, and every time she saw any, she'd run right up, saying "Bay-ee! Bay-ee!" One girl (maybe 5 or 6?) was getting really frustrated with her, saying, "I'M NOT A BABY!" But anyone not-adult is a "bay-ee" as far as Ari is concerned. :)

Oh, one kinda cool thing- there was a maybe 8 or 10 year-old girl there, dressed up all pretty and with a cat-fairy plushy. Ari kept pointing at her, saying "Seh-ee! Seh-ee! Seh-ee!" I told the girl that Ari thought she was a fairy (that being what "seh-ee" means in Ari-speak), and she held out the plushy, saying, "no, this is the fairy".

So, Ari pointed at the plushy, and said, "Dat!" and pointed at the girl and said, "Seh-ee!" She knew what she knew. :)

Lots of eggs

2007-05-25T03:40:00.000-04:00

Urgh... Ari just stayed up until 3:30 in the morning. She spent the last nearly two hours of that having a complete sobbing, screaming, scratching, kicking meltdown. Finally, she just passed out. Poor girl, poor me.

We went to a playgroup in the evening, and she had a really good time there. I wish I could get her out with other kids more often... but lack of a car makes it difficult.

There was no one there really her age- all babies, or somewhat older kids.
She was fascinated by the babies. She kept walking up to them and sort of, checking them out. She had to inspect the latch on one nursing babe (fortunately, the mama involved was tolerant of this toddler girl checking her boob).

Tasty little piggies

2007-05-23T23:58:00.000-04:00

This is Ari, playing with bubbles on our porch today. She doesn't know how to blow bubbles, but she sure thinks that playing with the wand and the bubble liquid is fun times.

We actually went over to the park today, bubble bottle in hand, and I (excellent mother that I am) let my child climb all over the play equipment with an open bottle of bubbles. :) To my credit, she only spilled it twice, and it dried very quickly because of the bright sun and nearly 90 degree weather.

Cute Ari things from today:

She thought the sloppy joes Thad made for dinner were "bacon"
We had a great time cuddling and playing in her room around naptime (no nap, though)- and she kept saying "kiss!" and giving me kisses all over my face.

This is Ari, playing sweetly by herself in her room. Well, insofar as "playing sweetly" involves her ripping pages out of one of her books. While I was crafting (it being my craft night), and Thad was working on the computer, she went upstairs of her own accord, and hung out there quietly, not causing too much havoc, for quite some time.

I'm glad she likes her new room. I like having and adult room room- I don't like sleeping less, though (since I have to wake up to tend to her in the night now). But the tradeoff is about right now- I like not sleeping with her more than I like an extra hour of sleep a night.

Papa Joe's

2007-05-23T00:53:00.000-04:00

Here it is, Tuesday already. Let's see... so far this week:

Thad-

Didn't get a tooth pulled (it was a near one)
Wants Chinese food
Bought our baby bubble soap

Ari-

Bit me on the arm today- and drew blood! >:(
Took a bath without screaming for the first time in ages today
Had a tasty rice and lemon tart dinner

I-

Can't freakin' figure out how to copy from DAT to my computer
Had my DAT recorder mysteriously fail to record 4 out of 5 times
Made a tasty lemon tart yesterday- I need a proper tart pan sometime

Oh, and I'm trying to work up an abstract for a project I haven't done yet. Whee!

Revenants and ghouls

2007-05-19T23:56:00.000-04:00

Look what I turned around and saw this morning! I'm not sure whether she managed to get the lid off, or whether I left it unlocked, but Ari sure thought it was a good time. :) It was all kinds of fun to clean up... there's still kind of flour on the floor. Fortunately, Miss Ari was able to be dusted off with a minimum of difficulty.

We went over to Rick and Brooke's house and hung out for the day while Thad went to Shaintar. Ari was excited to see Brooke ("Bwook! Bwook!"), Rick ("Ick! Ick!") and the cats ("dat dat dat dat dat dat dat!") and had a good time playing there. I made the cake I owed Brooke, and it turned out really good- it had whipped cream/cream cheese frosting and sliced strawberries in the middle.

Here are some cute pics of Ari from today.

And here's an awesome video from after Thad got back from Shaintar:

Tentacles

2007-05-19T02:19:00.000-04:00

Here is a fuzzy-headed Ari, having a good time playing with her wagon.

We've had a rough couple of days. Thad is sick, and seems to have a toothache (he's going to the dental school on Monday).

Then, a couple of days ago, we were out biking... which was nice. We went to the library, and Miss Ari was all excited, saying "Be-y! Be-y!" (which is "library", for the uninitiated). She jumped out of the bike trailer and ran for the door in all her darling toddlery 20-month glory- and promptly tripped and face-planted into the concrete. She scraped up the underside of her chin pretty badly. Bleeding on papa's shirt badly, mind, not emergency room badly... but it was clearly hurting her, and it messed up her sleep that night. Since then, all of us have been down sleep. I did make some things that I want to post pictures of, but that'll have to wait.

Crepes and Pastry Cream

2007-05-16T01:38:00.000-04:00

This is my daughter, napping in her own bed in her own room. Right now, in fact, she's asleep in her own bed in her own room.

Thad and I had talked yesterday about moving my office into our room and relocating Ari into her own room, so she could have a playspace, and not kick Thad so much, or pull my clothes out of my drawers.

Anyway, when I got home today, Ari was napping upstairs, and when I went upstairs to wake her, I discovered that Thad had done it!

Ari is way into her new room. A little while ago, our stairs gate broke, and Ari seems to be perfectly capable of going up and down on her own, so we just leave them unblocked now. And, several times, she went of her own volition upstairs to play in her room. I hope she continues to like it. :)

Poor Miss Ari has a nasty prickly heat rash on the back of her neck, so we just skipped the clothes today in hopes that it might help. It seems better, mostly. Rashes give me the everlovin' willies... I hope it goes away soon for both our sakes.

Very firm

2007-05-14T02:40:00.001-04:00

I just asked Miss Ari for a kiss, and she proceeded to headbutt me like, six times. In the face. And then, she said "kiss nose!" To be fair, I was laughing too hard to stop her from headbutting me the last five times, and so was Thad, who was watching the whole thing.

I had a great Mother's Day. Thad watched Ari while I went to see a movie, and then there was pie. What more could I ask for?

Swiving and thews

2007-05-13T02:03:00.000-04:00

Stupid blurry photograph. I'm not sure why I didn't realize I was out of focus while I was taking it...

Nevertheless, this is The Best Creampuff I Have Ever Made (So Far). :D I made it out of the Dessert University cookbook I've been fangirling over for the last month. He really explains how to do it, and what the tricky bits are- and you can see the results!

The puff part is properly puffly, and not sad and deflated and squidgy. The cream filling is creamy and thick, and not the least bit runny. And best of all, this recipe made 12 big ol' creampuffs. Even with inviting Rick and Brooke over, We still have four blackberry creampuffs waiting to be eaten! :D

This is Ari, playing the walk- around- attached- to- mama's- leg game. It was awesome.

Today's been sort of a weird day. I couldn't get to sleep until past dawn last night (this morning?) and Thad had stuff to do, so I was on Ari shift first thing. I spent the whole morning sleepwalking, and then took a nap in the afternoon. When I woke up, I felt totally energized, and made creampuffs.

Ari and I went for a walk over to the post office in the morning. She is hard to walk with, because she doesn't want to hold my hand, or necessarily go in the same direction as me. :) Also, it's hard to carry her unless I whip out the wrap, because she is not such a little girl as she once was, and I am but a little woman. She grew chub (and muscle and bones and skin etc. etc.) faster than I grew muscle?

Thad is off working his first night back at the Target- 10 hour shift, with adset at the end of it. So, yuck.

Happy Mother's Day to those of y'all to whom it applies, by the way.

A lack of tomatoes

2007-05-12T02:09:00.000-04:00

Well, before I go on about silly things, I should let you all know: Thad had his hearing, and was cleared to go back to work, which is an enormous, incredible relief. Thad intends to sub as little as possible, of course (he will probably sub some more this year, but not renew his license), but it's so good to not have that hanging over our heads, and not have to worry about it anymore.

Now, back to silliness:

Check out my first attempt ever at needle felting! I feel that it turned out pretty good. The color mismatch is less... apparent in real life, too. I will be making her a little merbaby and a sling to put over those boobies as well, though. :)

She's going to be for the art show I'm buying space in this fall. If I can sell one piece, it'll more than pay for the entry fee, so that would be really cool. I'm going to try to do maybe five larger things (like the mermaid, and the dice gremlin) and then maybe a few smaller things. We'll see what I can get done this summer... I have a million monsters in my head.

This is Ari, having some tasty lunch.

Today, we went on an enormous long bike ride downtown. We went down to the main library, and then Ari and I hung out there while Thad went over to his hearing (a block away). Ari ended up napping most of the time Thad was gone, so I had a nice time sitting outside the library in the shade with a book while she slept in her trailer.

We are loving the bike trailer now that the weather is nice, by the by (thanks, Mom and Dad! :D). It's so nice to be able to get downtown without driving (or, more to the point, parking), and Ari seems to really enjoy going for rides.

Out of ink

2007-05-10T05:07:00.000-04:00

These are some pictures from a week or two back, when we went to the Viking festival. Contrast, if you wish, with last year's Viking fest pics... Ari was much smaller then, and trying to climb into things less.

(I swear that I put down the camera and hauled her out of there before she damaged even one of those delightful gay pride foxtails. :D )

Today is interesting, because I couldn't get to sleep. It's now five in the morning (as you can see), and I just haven't been sleepy. Poor Ari also suffered from insomnia; she passed out around 2:30, I guess. But it was clear that she desperately wanted to sleep before then.

Tonight was my craft night- I was pretty busy. I made all these guys. So, that's good. Now I will give them to someone else, and she will try to sell them.

Other than that, I spent all day grading. I promised my students I'd have their papers back to them today, and I shall deliver. Now, I just need to have a decent lecture prepared. Sleep might help.

Midnight pancakes

2007-05-09T01:52:00.000-04:00

Let's see- Thad's hearing has finally been scheduled, so we're not in that limbo anymore. He's putting his resume out to a few places, and going back to his Target job in any case, though. He's pretty much decided he's not going to renew his teaching license, though- I can't blame him.

(That, by the way, was me and my suckness at beginning writing things, deciding to just jump in in the middle)

Ari is way into superheroes these days. She flips through her comics (we grabbed her some on Free Comic Book Day) and insists that we tell her the names of all the characters. She can say Hawkman ("haw'mun"), Hawkgirl ("haw'guhl"), Green Arrow ("aaoh"), the Flash ("sash!"), and Superman ("soup-mun"). She can recognize the entire Justice League, though, and also some ancillaries.

She's officially in the two-word stage now- she routinely says things like "papa up!" and "peez nuhs" (figure that one out ;) ). It's very exciting.

She's been on an ungodly weird sleep schedule for the last little while, but we're starting to see hope that it's settling down.

Wasted pine nuts

2007-04-24T00:42:00.000-04:00

This is Ari, playing with beans on the floor. It was great fun, up until she decided to try to eat the beans, and papa had to fish a bunch of soggy, uncooked beans out of her mouth.

Ari's actually in a growth spurt (I think). She's been starving the last couple days, just eating all the time. Yesterday, she ate a grownup's portion of baked ziti and was still hungry afterwards.

I'm trying to get work done while Thad's off. I'm writing the first draft of my paper, so think of me. I hate writing papers.

This is Ari playing dress-up. She likes putting things on (hats, bits of clothing, etc.) and looking at herself in the mirror- I'm not sure what that means for the future, but I think it's adorable. On the other hand, her parents play dress-up, too, so she comes by it honestly.

Oh, and she knows Hawkman ("Hot-mun") and Hawkgirl ("Guhl") by sight. And, when we were playing pinochle the other night, she said "pass!" for her papa. Awww.

Apples and pears

2007-04-21T02:29:00.000-04:00

This is Ari, playing with circles. Thad and I went out last night, to see a movie and have dinner. So, Ari went to Rick and Brooke's house. She apparently had a good time finding things that were circles, and then calling them circles.

This has been a rough week for us. First, Ari and I were sick to start out.

Then, well- many of you know that a student accused Thad of assault, and that lie is just not dying. Thursday afternoon, someone from sub services called to tell Thad that his Friday job was canceled, and not to try to schedule any new jobs.

Apparently, this whole mess is going to a hearing (we don't know when) and Thad's not allowed to work until then. I understand why this is happening, but it's almost unbelievable that a kid could just totally make something up like this, and it could cost us hundreds of dollars of lost wages- or worse, if Thad loses his license over this. Or worse.

Oh, and then, someone stole Thad's bike this afternoon. Out of our backyard, behind a locked privacy fence.

I hope that bad things come in threes, and that means our three are done with for a while. We could use some better luck.

Bullet dancing

2007-04-18T23:31:00.000-04:00

Here's Ari, enjoying the box that we brought our groceries home from Sam's Club in. She spent a good long time getting in the box, and then getting out of the box. And getting in the box, and out of the box. And then she went and played with things in the kitchen. :D

Ari's been pretty grumpy the last few days. I'm not sure if she's still feeling sick, or what. She's not sleeping very well, anyhow.

Other than not sleeping well (late, short nap) and being on-and-off grumpy, we've had a pretty good day. We put Ari's dining room books (as opposed to her bedroom books, or her living room books) in the new bin we got at the Walmart- there were getting to be too many for the little wagon. Plus, she tends to like to pull the books out and sit in the wagon, and that's clearly not behavior we want to discourage. ;)

Tonight was my craft night (I made this, and this and this other thing), and as you can see, Miss Ari was very interested. Aw. Now, by the by, my fingertips are covered with superglue, which is really irritating.

The dice gremlin is nearly done now. I just need to get some wee little dice to have him hold, and we'll be all done. After the dice gremlin, I start on brain-and-tentacle man.

Well, Ari's grumping at her papa upstairs. I should go help him get her ready for bed. Plus, it means I get to read my book.

Unidientified hurty spot

2007-04-18T00:26:00.000-04:00

Aw- check out my little sleeping pixie. I'm not sure why she likes to sleep with her arms up like that, but it's her usual way to sleep. Maybe she wishes for a pillow? That shirt, by the way, is my most recent and most ambitious foray into machine embroidery.

We went on our big shopping trip this evening, and it was everything it usually is. We had a moment of feeling like morons when we suddenly realized why Ari had gotten so grumpy- namely, it was 10:00 and we hadn't fed her any dinner. To our credit, neither had we. But boy, did we feel like crap when we finally figured out what the problem was. Poor little hungry monkey.

Ari's generally feeling better, but she's still not totally well. Today was her day to be glued to the papa, as you can see. Not me- she definitely wanted papa.

Cool stuff from the last while:

She knows some shapes ("suh-coo", "cwawe")
She knows some numbers ("sits", "se-un", "at"), mostly from playing with dice. I first noticed this because she was flipping the dice to different faces and naming the numbers on them. Ah, dice.
She gives kisses now. If we ask for a kiss ("kess!"), she'll grab our faces and give us a little baby kiss. Awwww.
She also gives hugs, if you ask and she feels like it.
She's all about saying please ("pees!") lately. I think she realizes that we're helpless before the onslaught of a baby saying "pees?" and making doe eyes at us. And she does make doe eyes, plus this "little old me?" sort of gesture. ;)
She knows the word "bacon", and likes to eat it. Poor girl- Rick and Brooke came over and fed me on Saturday with bacon and french toast. And little miss asked so nicely ("bakun pees!") and she so couldn't have any. I felt bad eating in front of her, but I really needed to eat (it was like, 5:00 and I hadn't been able to get food that day).

Bruised knees

2007-04-16T23:46:00.000-04:00

This is a sick baby, being held by a mama who was shortly to become sick. We've been sick as dogs all this weekend. Hopefully, I'll be doing better soon. Particularly because I need to work tomorrow.

Ari threw up a bunch, and is still not 100%, but is doing much better. She's back on solid foods now, anyhow. I was glad we're still nursing, because she basically only had nursies as her sole nourishment for nearly three days.

(Side note- this led to the delightful phenomenon of liquidy breastfed baby poo, in toddler quantities. It got, let us say, messy.)

Pig's butt

2007-04-01T00:59:00.000-04:00

Well, I didn't end up taking any pictures today, so I thought I'd post some of the pics my dad sent me from his trip. These are from when the three of us walked over to campus, and the weather was warm and lovely for the first time in a while.

Today, we went to a gun show with the Marcus; it was kind of cool to see the different stuff. I was really glad I had my wrap back from being dyed, because I wore Ari the whole time.

After the gun show, we went out to lunch and had tasty pizza. Ari, despite being quite tired, was remarkably sweet and good-tempered throughout the whole meal. I was very impressed.

This is Ari quacking at the ducks. She was all excited to see them, and was quite irritated that I was holding her back from getting at them (and thereby jumping into the lake).

Anyway, after lunch, we dropped by the Target for a few things (including a cat plushy that Grandpa Marcus got for the little girl), and then came home and napped.

This evening, we went to R&B's- he caught a sale on ham, and he had a ham that weighed nearly as much as Ari did. We had ham and mashed potatoes and bread and a variety of desserts- I made a walnut cake/chocolate pudding trifle, and there was pie and also strawberries. Mmmm.

Agrael

2007-03-31T04:16:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm gonna make this quick for reasons that should be obvious upon checking the time stamp of this post. :P A little someone refused to nap, passed out at 8:30, and then woke up again at 11:30. She didn't get back down until around 3 or 3:30... lucky me.

This is the shirt I made for her today. :D She loves it; she squealed "DICE! DICE! DICE!" as soon as she saw it.

This, on the other hand, is my baby in a steamer basket. She had been playing on the floor there, putting things in and out of it, when she decided to put herself into it. She was pretty funny, too- she'd get in, realize she was stuck, burst into tears until I rescued her, and then proceed to jump right back into the basket. It took her about 4 of these go-rounds for her to finally figure out how to get back out herself, and about another 4 before the entire exercise got boring.

Oh, and Grandpa Marcus is here; got here this evening.

Honeysuckle, lavender and rosemary

2007-03-28T23:35:00.000-04:00

This is what I made for Ari today. :) The shirt was dyed by the same woman who dyed Ari's dragon costume, and I used the last of the cat fabric from Ari's dress. Although, technically, I bought the fabric for this project and made the cat dress with the extra. I'm experimenting with machine applique... I think I need to acquire an iron of some sort. I have another shirt or two in the works. I already have her dice shirt half done- all that remains is to sew it down.

This was Ari's response to the shirt:

The Queen of Air and Darkness

2007-03-27T00:56:00.000-04:00

Here is a picture of Ari in her new cat dress, whipped up in a fit of crafty-ness this afternoon. She picked out the fabric; she near hurled herself out of the sling trying to get at it when she saw it in the fabric store. :) She was really excited the whole time I was making it, too- she kept trying to get to the sewing machine, saying "DATS! DATS! DATS!" This is the first non-costume I've made for her, and it was really easy. Didn't take long at all... I'd better not keep it up, though. :)

We had a nice day today... the weather was lovely, and Ari went for a bike ride with papa to the library, which she greatly enjoyed. Oh, cute thing: this evening, Thad was holding her and he grabbed me and gave me a big kiss. After a bit of watching us kiss, Ari decided she wanted in on that, and stuck her face in the middle of us to get kisses. :D

School starts again tomorrow, and I must get into writing my paper in a serious way. No more vacation for me.

Here's a video from yesterday, though:

Chest stove in

2007-03-25T23:35:00.000-04:00

Whew... we had a busy weekend. On Friday, we had a bunch of people from my mom's group over to play board games. It was four couples, three toddlers, and two babes in arms. In our house. It was awesomely fun, but it got pretty crazy.

Ari had a great time playing with the other kids. Here you can see her with Rheya (who's just her age) stacking cans one atop the other.

Then, on Saturday was the annual vernal equinox party. The upside of having two parties in a row was that we didn't have to do too much cleaning in between- surprisingly, the kids didn't do too much damage.

It was a lovely party- the weather was beautiful for the first time since I've been throwing parties for the equinox. We went across the street and played bocce in the park- a little contingent of neighbor kids came up and begged to play, which was fun. My side won- just barely.

Then we went inside to eat (quiches, roasty veggies, mini creme brulee cheesecakes, and an incredibly awesome berry torte brought by Jeff) and dye eggs. Ari did a few.

This is Ari running around, holding her bunny.

Today, we got up and went to meeting after Thad's job. Since then, we've been basking in our home-alone-ness. :D I did some projects- including making some puppets- and we got caught up on a few things. Which is good, because this is the last of my break. The quarter starts again tomorrow, and I go back in for the first time on Tuesday (I'll be T-R at work now, for those for whom it is relevant).

On the docket for tomorrow: doing my class syllabus!

Now, here's a video of Ari playing in the ritual equinox Arkham Horror game:

How much is enough?

2007-03-23T00:38:00.000-04:00

Well, my dad was seen safely off this morning (as far as I know- Thad didn't tell me of any problems). Here's a picture of Ari, having a Grandpa ride- the weather was gorgeous on Wednesday, so we walked down to the Short North for ice cream. Ari walked most of the way, but her grandpa carried her a while, too.

If you look closely, you'll probably notice that her knee is skinned. She's an accomplished walker now, but she still sort of leads with her chest, and it makes her trip alot (try walking around as though someone were pulling you forward by your chest, and you'll see WHAT I meaN).

AHH... Ari's playing with the capslock now. YOU all geT TO ENJoy the results.

IT was A very nICE VISIT, THOugh. I was gLAD I got to show Dad whERE I liVE.

OKAY, this is getting really annoying. Something must be done.

Aaah... I distracted her with the lizards my mom sent.

Okay, so what was I talking about? Oh, Ari's wearing pretty dresses in these pictures that her great grandma sent her. :D Today, she's wearing a really cute overall set from her, too.

Cute stuff from today:

When I tried (and, mind you, initially failed) to put Ari down for a nap this afternoon, I laid her down on the bed. She immediately started giggling in that "I'm about to get nursies!" sort of way. :) Even after I laid down and we started nursing, she had to keep pulling off at first to giggle.

When we went to the fabric store this evening, Ari caught sight of a print with cats on it. She began trying to get at it, squealing "DATS! DATS! DATS!" I have had a project in mind (a shirt for Ari) that I thought it would work for, so I bought a little chunk of it, and Ari insisted on carrying it to the register.

Apple, singular

2007-03-21T00:02:00.000-04:00

This is Ari hugging the Ostara lamby she got in the mail from her godmother! It also came with an apple, which will be eaten with much gusto by little miss. She quite liked the lamby- Thad snuck it into bed next to her while she was napping, and when we came back, she was awake and petting it. :) She did, however, think it was a bear.

We had kind of a blah morning this morning. I couldn't sleep last night, for whatever reason, so I was reasonably zombie-like. Ari napped pretty well, though, so I was able to get food and get some stuff done.

This is a picture of Ari thinking, "Hmm... dice, or food. Which one to eat?"

My dad came in this evening, and we had tasty Indian food. Ari surprised us by ignoring the naan (she usually adores bready things) and going straight for the rice, with or without spicy vindaloo sauce. By the end of the meal, her nose was running and there was rice all over the floor. I felt kinda bad about that, but what're you going to do?

Ari had a pretty good time with her grandpa after we got back. She was a little shy at first, but then she ended up spending a good while playing a dice game with him, and she brought over her Richard Scarry book for him to read.

Both grandpa and baby are asleep in bed now, though, and so should I be...

Shocking

2007-03-20T02:29:00.000-04:00

Thad didn't end up getting a job today, so we had kind of a lazy day. We spent some time cleaning for my dad's impending visit. It was remarkably futile... :) There's nothing quite like spending 30 minutes picking up toys and books, only to have them all spread over the floor again in 30 seconds.

Ari has started using the -s plural morpheme spottily in the last few days... I've heard "bears", "birds", and (yesterday) "cats". A whole new level of linguistic expression is opening up to her! :D

Here she is, showing that she knows how to use a hairbrush:

Rules dispute

2007-03-19T00:31:00.000-04:00

This is Miss Ari's "cat dance". She literally does this all the time when she sees cats. Why? I don't know. But cats are clearly very exciting.

As you can see, we went over to Rick and Brooke's for dinner this evening. I spent most of the day (including while we were at R&B's) grading exams. I hate, hate, hate grading. :P It'll all be over soon, though- I'm almost done with them.

Time lapsed

2007-03-18T02:00:00.000-04:00

Happy St. Patrick's day, y'all. We had a nice one, here. Although, it's ended a bit late, as you can see. We had some corned beef and potatoes and soda bread. I also made some green shortbread balls, which were delicious.

Hmm... I seem to be kind of delirious. Perhaps I shall go to bed and finish writing this upon the morn.

••••••••••••••

Okay, then. So, yesterday, we had R&B over for breakfast- it was supposed to be Cthulhu time- but Lauren was sick, so Cthulhu didn't happen. They ended up going back home and planning a dinner with some of Brooke's family. We were invited, but decided it would be better for the girl to stay home; she was really tired and grumpy. Jaime and Kelli and Jeff came over for dinner, though, and we proceeded to play a bunch of games- per usual. It was quite fun.

This is Miss Ari completely passed out on my lap, bless her heart. She just climbed up into my lap while I was on the computer, and was unconscious before I even realized it.

The day before, we all went over to R&B's for dinner- we brought them dinner, actually, because Brooke's granddad died last week (he'd been extremely sick for some time), and Friday was the funeral... I thought it might be nice for them to not have to cook.

Oh, and in very exciting news (for me, anyway), Ari knows my name now! :D She sees me and says "Ma! Ma!"

Lessee, what else... she knows the name of one number (six), and when she rolls dice now, she'll roll them and say "six!" and raise her arms in the air in triumph. She's also an accomplished nose-beeper these days, and she still likes to play the growl-like-monsters game.

Very exciting cupholders

2007-03-16T00:26:00.000-04:00

Ari and I went to the department today, to talk to a woman thinking of applying to grad school. She's interested in historical, and apparently wanted to talk to grads with young kids (she has two of them herself), so that was me. Ari and I got free lunch out of the deal, and we also got to get out of the house.

Bedtimes have been creeping later and later recently, but I got Ari up bright and shiny early at 9:30 AM. She was not appreciative in the morning, but she did take a lovely nap at a reasonable hour, which is a good thing.

This is a random picture I drew. For a thing in a roleplaying game. I thought I'd throw it in for the hell of it.

Fun Ari things lately:

Ari beeping our noses
Ari playing dress-up with hats (as you can see)
Ari climbing our stepladder and then having to cry to be let down
Ari playing "throw the dice down the grating"

Feelin' woozy

2007-03-15T01:51:00.000-04:00

This is what I did this evening. I have a Goal, and that Goal is to make enough of these little monsters (I have a page full of designs) to have space at a convention art show in the fall. Anyway, I've had this little dude kicking around in my head for over a year, and it's kinda cool to see him in 3D now.

It's been pretty warm here the last couple of days, and Ari and I have been out at the park. Ari no longer likes the swings, for whatever reason, which I thought was interesting. She definitely likes the slides, though, and climbing on the playground equipment.

We're going into the department tomorrow; maybe I'll try to remember to bring the camera and take a few shots of her there. She has good times.

Midtown

2007-03-10T00:39:00.000-05:00

Today was the first day this season that I've been outside without my coat on! Ari and I went over to the park, and she ran around for an hour. Then, when Thad got home, he took her for a bike ride. The forecast looks nice for a while- maybe that groundhog *wasn't* lying. Maybe. :)

Ari is much the same- talking lots. New words lately: "pants" "butt" "birds" "bacon" and "apple" (plus others I'm forgetting, I'm sure). She's been trying to say "apple" for a while, but she'd just say "ap! ap!". Tonight, she said "ap-ooooh!".

This week was the last week of class for me, and now I have two weeks off. At some point next quarter, I have to have my paper in. For the moment, though, I'm giving myself a break, and a little vacation- at least through to when my dad comes, next week! :D

Alternate reality

2007-03-07T00:17:00.000-05:00

Well, I proceeded to celebrate my presentation being done by promptly getting sick. :P I spent most of the weekend feeling like crap, and watching the Justice League cartoon (which is surprisingly good). This is me lying on the couch, feeling like crap. Ari randomly decided to climb up onto the couch and lie herself down next to me and give me cuddles. It was adorable.

Ari's clearly getting some new teeth in, and it's been making her grumpy, unfortunately. Her sleep has been borderline messed-up, too.

This is Ari eating raisins today. She grabbed down the container off the table, and brought it to me to pull the lid off. Then, she proceeded to munch down raisins as fast as she could. I decided to just let her eat as many as she felt like- I figure, it all works itself out in the end. I'm sure we'll see some interesting diapers tomorrow, though.

Other fun stuff lately:

Ari brought me her bottle of teething tabs so I could get her one out.
Ari likes to read while she gets her diaper changed- it's hilarious to watch her lying there with her book up while you change her. At least it means she's not wiggly or combative...
I got to watch Thad chase Ari around with her duck walker toy today while Ari giggled and screamed "Dut! Dut! Dut!"

Dissapointed

2007-03-02T23:50:00.000-05:00

These are pictures from yesterday- I didn't write yesterday out of a desire to go to sleep at a reasonable hour so I could be rested for my presentation today. Which is over now. I refuse to do work for the rest of the weekend now. :)

This is Ari in a pirate hat, reading her book with a pirate hat in it. She finds this very amusing. You might suspect that this shot was in some way staged, but you would be wrong. My little girl knows that pirate hats are awesome!

I took this picture of Ari just because I thought she was pretty. She's eating shrimp artichoke melt over noodles. Or, more properly, she's just eating noodles.

We went into the department together today, and Ari promptly did what she could to charm the heck out of all the other students. :) There's one student who Ari has decided is one of her buddies, and she ran right up to her and spent a while sitting on her lap and playing with her.

Angelo was hoping she'd talk for him, and he wasn't disappointed. She said "cat" and "dog" and "pig" and "up". People ask me sometimes what all she can say, and I can't keep track of it. She's getting new words all the time! It's so exciting.

Sexy Abe

2007-03-01T01:07:00.000-05:00

Here we have visual proof of Ari's teething. The hands she has shoved in her mouth obscure the gobs of drool on her chin, but you get the idea, I'm sure. It seems to be an on-and-off thing, and I haven't seen any evidence of an erupting tooth lately, though, so I think nothing's imminent.

It's been a weird week. I had my practice presentation on Monday, and it went fairly well. Then, on Tuesday, we spent the whole day shopping for food (three hours and 250$) and doing laundry (two loads darks, one load whites, one load diapers). We had gotten to the point where we barely had anything edible in the house, and no one had clean underwear anymore. :P Jaime, sweetheart that he is, brought food over and cooked us dinner Sunday night so I could finish my handout without worrying about food.

Now, ensconced with food and clean underwear, I have to face the actual presentation. Brian gave me notes for extensive revisions of my handout (why do I never seem to have fewer red marks on my handouts, no matter how often I revise? ;) ), so that's my job now. I pretty much have tomorrow to do it, too. It's good, though, to have an advisor who's so helpful with comments. The handout should be much better when I finish with it.

This picture is of Miss Ari, passed out mid-diaper change. She walked all the way to the comic store and back with her papa, and apparently just collapsed in exhaustion afterwards. She didn't even end up staying up that late, despite sleeping from 5:30 to around 7:00. Note the book she's curled up with... awwwwww.

Oh, and I feel all like I accomplished something- I made dinner tonight. I made a recipe from the 6 o' Clock Scramble book, and it was tasty and easy to make. And I even made a vegetable. I never feel so much like a grown-up as when I make a whole dinner and we eat at the table, I swear. :)

I leave you with a picture of Miss Ari, coloring (notice, if you will, that she has put a bunch of her crayons into her dice bag, too) and playing with her fairy dolls. :D

Mixed feelings

2007-02-25T00:44:00.000-05:00

Ugh. This weekend sucks. Working on an abstract and a handout.

A few Ari things-

Ari's all into dancing lately. And spinning around. She'll do it at random, but more often if there's music. It's adorable.
Ari's been eating like crazy- growth spurt maybe? We've been getting free dept. food the last few days, and she's munched it down. Crab rangoon? Egg rolls? Blackberries? Chicken kebabs? Turkish bread? All munched like crazy. Tonight, she ate two big chunks of chicken, most of a Turkish bread and some veggies. And then, when we got home, she declared she was still hungry and ate an entire plate of noodles.
Ari's had a dog sort of day. We walked past a man with a dog today, and she said "cat!" I said, "No, honey, it's a dog," and she immediately said "dok? dok!" Later, when we went to the department party, she saw the host's dog, and immediately said "dok!" She was really scared of the dog at first, but by the end of the evening she was at least tolerating his presence. She kept following him around going "dok! dok! dok!", but every time he'd turn around to check her out, she'd squeal and run away.
Thad and Rick inadvertently taught Ari to say "sucks" today. We think. It might be "socks", or possibly "fox".

Fitting it all in

2007-02-22T02:02:00.000-05:00

Augh, when it rains it pours. I've ended up hosting someone for prospectives weekend (damn you, spare bedroom!). Which is this weekend. Which is the last weekend before my presentation. :( I'm going to be spending every spare minute- after we clean up our house for the incoming guest- working on aforementioned presentation. Wish me luck. I have to have a version of it done by Monday... Oh, and my ICHL abstract. Mustn't forget my ICHL abstract.

Ari is a sweet little snuggle girl. She didn't nap this afternoon for her papa, and thus had kind of a rough evening. She did pass out right when I got home, and I have to admit, I just loved having her all passed out and snuggly in my arms for a while. I always miss her when I'm gone, and I love having a chance to hold my chubbly, snuggly little girl when I come home.

Today, Ari said "please" and "bye bye". I think she thinks "please" means "read me a book!", but it's hard to tell.

Sweet pies

2007-02-19T16:45:00.000-05:00

Since tonight is Changeling night, I'm probably not going to get a chance to post later on, so I'll just post now. I'm still at school. Ari was asleep last I checked, so I'm having to wait to get a ride home. Roads and sidewalks in our neck of the woods are still so bad that it's not practical to bike, so I'm dependent on my monkeys to ferry me around. Oh, and plus, I had to bring pies to school today :D

The pies went over really well at school today. Angelo liked both of them. We had them for snacks at Changelings (the historical linguistics study group, not to be confused with Changeling the roleplaying game), and no one even realized they were gluten-free till I mentioned it.

I haven't seen Ari much today- not since the morning- so I can't speak about her. We had a really sweet waking-up this morning, though. She was all snuggled up next to me and looking like such a sleeping angel. I'm looking forward to seeing her in person again soon.

Don't forget the beans

2007-02-19T01:49:00.000-05:00

This is me trying to make gluten-free pie for a friend of mine who may or may not be but probably is celiac (he's not man enough to actually take the definitive test, but eating wheat makes him sick). One of his chief loves in life has been pies and pastries (followed swiftly along by pasta, poor man- have I mentioned he's Sicilian?) and I decided to try to encourage in adjusting to his new diet by making him pie. These pies have a sweetened goat cheese base, with orange curd and whipped cream on top. Thank god, he's not showing signs of dairy intolerance.

This, on the other hand, is the rare two-headed monkey, from (I am told) the wilds of Borneo. Or something like that. It ambushed me this morning, and this was the best picture I was able to get before it leaped upon me!

I spent today trying to get work done. I have two weeks until a major presentation, and I still have this class to teach, and I've been feeling pretty sick for most of a week- which has made it difficult to work. Anyway, I'd best get my nose to the freakin' grindstone.

Ari has been her sweet self today. She's definitely teething, and her sleep/napping has been unfortunately disrupted.

Consistent crashing

2007-02-17T23:44:00.000-05:00

It's been a rough day here at Casa de Papke. I've not been feeling well for a few days (although I'm starting to feel much better now!) and Ari is showing signs of teething again. Poor Thad was up until 6 AM with her, and got back up with her at 10 AM, because I wasn't feeling well enough to care for her. Have I ever mentioned on this blog that I have the best husband ever?

So, not much to report. I've mostly been lying around the house, going "glagh", not eating, and watching movies about transvestites. Ari has been reading books with me, and playing with dice. Oh, tonight, as we were getting her ready for bed, I told her to say goodnight to her papa. She waved at him and said "papa!" She said it two or three times even. Awwww....

Speaking of "awww....", here's a video of Miss Ari helping her papa make pancakes for a poor sick mama.

Too many piggies

2007-02-16T01:12:00.000-05:00

Hey, guess what? It's like to snow again this weekend! Yay! :)

We finally made it out of the house today, which was very exciting. Thad walked up to the comic shop early today, and then we went out in the car later. I'm told that walking was totally no fun- too many chunks of snow to climb over and too much ice.

Fortunately, there's relatively little ice- mostly because it's never gotten above freezing since the big storm, so the snow's not doing that melting/refreezing thing it tends to do.

This is Ari, wearing her papa's hat and playing with her paper dolls. The picture above is of me lying on the vent on the floor. She apparently decided that it looked like Good Times, and she wanted to join me, so she came over and sat there with me reading a book for a good long while. She was babbling up a storm, really loudly, and pointing at things in her book. Every now and again, she'd laugh. It was awesome listening to her "read" to herself.

I'm not entirely sure what Ari gets out of print books, but she's all into them. Is it just because we like them? She'll sit there for ages- 10, 15, 20 minutes sometimes- turning pages and pointing at things and leaning in to look closer at certain things, and babbling and laughing. She totally looks for all the world like she's reading them... I can only assume she's picked up behavior from watching us read.

This is the map from tonight's Carcassonne game. Our trip in the car was to go to the gaming store for Valentine's Day, get gas, and stop by the store (since we've been trapped at home for days). We picked up the Traders and Builders expansion for the two of us, and a big, purple d8 for Miss Ariadne (she loves it).

At one point, Ari grabbed my builder meeple, and ran off with it across the room. Then, she proceeded to roll it as if it were a die- apparently, all our game pieces look the same to her! I had to trade her for an elven d6 to get it back. :D

P.S. Ari definitely knows Batman's name. She consistently points and says "Bats!" When she sees images of him, or her action figure. She doesn't know "mama" or "papa", but by golly, she knows who Batman is!

Like I had the flu

2007-02-14T23:01:00.000-05:00

Guess what? We had another snow day! The university was closed again, so all my classes were canceled. Which was just as well, because I would have had to cancel my class anyhow- we're snowed in, right and proper. No one's bothered to plow or salt our dinky little street, and our car is actually pretty stuck. We briefly tried to leave, to go to a nearby friend's house, and discovered that we couldn't even pull onto the street.

Anyway, so it was another day stuck at home. It was fun the first day, but was less fun today... and we can't even walk anywhere easily; the sidewalks are all deep with snow. To make it worse, it's not even regular snow- it's about 5 or 6 inches of snow, then about a 1/2 inch layer of ice, covered with another 1/2 inch to an inch of snow. So if you try to walk on it, you go "*step* SHUNK *step* SHUNK" as you break through the ice. Slow going. I'm not sure what we'll do tomorrow- Thad hasn't gotten a job yet, but we don't know if they're going to close the schools again tomorrow. Or, even if he does get a job, whether he can actually get to it safely.

In the meantime, here is a video of Ari rolling dice. She likes to raise her hands in the air whenever anyone rolls dice (which is pretty often in this house).

P.S. Happy Valentine's Day! We didn't get to go the Guardtower as we had planned. I hope your V-Day plans worked out better!

In suspense

2007-02-13T22:34:00.000-05:00

This is what it looked like outside today. We got... well... alot of snow. I don't know how much. Then, it proceeded to sleet the rest of the day, so all the snow is covered by a thick crust of ice. Even the university closed today, which is exceedingly rare. I keep hoping I'll get a snow day tomorrow, too- but that's not likely. Mostly, I'm concerned about having to make Thad drive me on icy roads- since there's no way I'm biking through inches thick snow topped with ice on a day where the high is supposed to be 20 degrees.

This is me and Ari reading the Valentine's Day book that her Grandma and Grandpa Porter sent. :D She totally loves turning the flaps!

In any case, we stayed home today. Thad had a job, but CPS was closed (of course. We did successfully de-Death-ify our desk. Some, at least- and I found the charger and the fresh battery for the camera, as you can see.

Ari had a good time having mama and papa both home... she had a good nap, and was really fun and cute today. New words: "box" (as in, the box I have my coin collection in that she dumped all over the floor :D) and "bats" (pointing at the picture of Batman on the desktop).

And here's my baby, dancing with toast:

A woman of quality

2007-02-13T00:47:00.000-05:00

Today, I have no pictures for you, because I can't find the battery charger for my camera! We have a terrible Stuff accumulation problem on our desk (our version of the Shelf of Death, Marcus. Doesn't everyone have a Shelf of Death somewhere?) and I know it's somewhere in there. There is a very cute video of Ari dancing in circles with toast that you can't see, and there would have been some nice stills of her playing with her new, improved paper fairy dolls, had there been a charged battery to pop into the camera at the appropriate moment.

Goal #1 for this weekend: Well, finish my next handout revise for Brian, really. But after that, I want to try to de-Death our desk.

Erm... Thad got Ari's fairies laminated today, so they're more durable. And waterproof, which is necessary. She totally loves them. She had a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast this morning, and ate all of it. She also had an almost grown-up slice of papa's pizza for dinner.

Cute things Ari does lately:

When we get her undressed next to the mirror in the bedroom, she'll sit there and preen and pat her nekked chest and make faces at the mirror.
Every time she rolls a die ("DAISSS!"), she raises both hands up in the air in celebration! Our friends are trying to teach her only to do this for sevens or higher, since less than that isn't a success.
She likes to play a game with papa where he says "Yeeeess..." and nods, and she shakes her little head vigorously.
I've started ending nursing sessions by counting down from 5... for some reason, Ari gets very enthusiastic and excited every time I do this, and is totally jazzed about stopping nursing and switching to something else! I don't get it, but it's kind of nice.

Dragon Den

2007-02-10T23:43:00.000-05:00

This is me and Ari, a few nights ago, sitting on the warm vent. We do that a lot lately; our house is pretty cold. Because it's really cold outside, and we're kind of poor, so we just pop on sweaters and deal. Note me also in my thermal tights and snow-stompin' boots- my constant companions these days.

There's still lots of snow on the ground. And ice. And it being really, really cold out. At least it's now in the teens in the mornings, rather than the naughts.

Today, we played alot. It was Viking Cthulhu day, so we had breakfast and game. Then, we went over to R&B's for dinner (pizza ala Rick) and game playing. We played John's uber-expansioned Carcassonne... to be honest, it was a bit much. But it was nice to try out the expansions, since we've been thinking of picking some up.

Ari had great fun over at R&B's, wandering around and playing with things... pulling books off of shelves, pointing at cats, y'know. The usual. She kept shrieking "DAT! DAT! DAT!" every time a cat showed itself. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to chase them, or run away.

Here's a less exciting video... Ari sits in a chair, and says "ball" some more. What the hell, it's 20 seconds of your life, right?

Chicken Dijon

2007-02-10T02:51:00.000-05:00

Whew! It's three in the morning. I'm going to pay for this tomorrow.

Jaime came over tonight, and we had dinner and played games- 10 Days in the USA (Jaime won), then Pinochle (Jaime won), then King's Gate (I won) and finally, Carcassonne (I won). Come to think of it, it wasn't a very great game night for Thad as far as winning went. :)

I made dinner from a recipe from a book I picked up from the library this afternoon. I really like it, actually, because the recipes are like, normal recipes that normal people without an hour and a half to cook and capers and quinoa and shit in their kitchen might be able to produce. God knows I love to get a little gourmet now and again, but I kinda needed new things to put in the normal dinner rotation, so it's pretty awesome. I marked about 20 recipes that looked promising!

I took Ari with me to school today. She was awesomely sweet in Gothic- she actually spent most of the time (15 minutes straight) reading my Gothic textbook. There are no pictures in my textbook, just printed word- but she spent 15 minutes flipping through the pages and pointing at things and peering closer at them and making "hm... ooooh..." sort of noises. :D

She also said some words for the people at school, which was sort of cool. Brian commented that she was giving the English, and not the Gothic pronunciation of "fish", so she must not be picking it up yet. ;)

It's a tie!

2007-02-08T23:57:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of Ari. She was inexplicably walking around with her hands behind her head for a while, but this was the best picture I was able to snap. :)

It's been an interesting week this week, full of snow. And coldness. :P Have I mentioned how much I hate the cold? Monday and Tuesday, school was canceled because of sub-zero windchill. Then, on Tuesday afternoon, we all of a sudden got four inches of snow.

It was particularly exciting for me, because I was way the hell across town when the storm started, at a playgroup with Ari. It was snowing when I left, but I expected it to be a light snow and then stop- but no. It snowed hard from about 1:30 until 10 at night! I ended up leaving my car at the playgroup and getting a ride home from someone more used to driving with an inch and a half of snow on the road (and a van with an extra carseat).

Anyway, school got canceled for the third day in a row- Thad ended up only missing one day of work (because I work Monday-Wednesday) but, as you might imagine, three days off at the beginning of the week plays hob with teachers' willingness to take off days at the end of the week.

This is a picture of our contribution to last Friday's Imbolc dinner at Rick and Brooke's. They made braised lamb and potatoes and something else delicious that escapes me at the moment. But it was all delicious, anyhow. We stayed up late playing games and had a grand time, but we inadvertently screwed up Ari's sleep doing it, and ended up paying for it later.

This is a picture of Ari, eating her very favorite of foods. She looks like some sort of hunchedy gnome here.

You'll note that she's in a sweater... our house is pretty cold, what with the temperatures in the teens and lower. We'd turn the heat up, but, y'know, we're poor. So we just all wear sweaters and socks around the house. We also put that saran wrap stuff on some of our windows, which has helped a great deal, but 65 degrees is 65 degrees.

This is Ari playing with paper dolls. Someone on one of our Changeling boards mentioned this site where you can create fairy avatars, and Thad printed some out on cardstock and cut them out for Ari to play with. She totally loves them! Several of them she's loved right to death, so we're going to print them again and laminate a few for her, I think.

Ari's just exploded with the talking- I think she's got well over a dozen words, and you can tell she's trying other ones. I can't remember all of them.

Cool stuff from today:

Ari was learning to beep noses today- she kept pushing our noses and going "eep". She even did it to her baby doll!
I was playing with a dragon toy, making it roar at her, and she picked it up and started chasing Thad with it and going "rawrrr!"
Thad got home just before she woke up for her nap, so he was there when she got up. She staggered over towards him, and when he asked her for a hug, she totally understood and gave him one. :D

We've been having issues the last few days with Ari trying to claw the bejeezus out of me when she nurses. We had a really horrible night where she was in a constant tantrum and I wouldn't let her nurse if she was trying to knead me... but it seems to be getting better. She's clawing me less and tantruming less when she does claw me and I pull her off.