I have inside me blood of kings

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."