I have read a few entertaining articles this week on BBC News summing up “the most popular internet videos of 2013” and such like. Here are the highlights from our family.
January: An Unexpected Party
I turned 30 in January, and as Matt is not much of a planner, and we hadn’t made many friends in Austin, I was not expecting too much. My mom, however, came up with an excellent surprise. She was so confident in it that she came to town telling me she had a birthday surprise and that I would never guess it, and she was right. I knew that she had invited people over because we’d been shopping for food and had even gotten a cookie cake; but I was shocked when the doorbell rang, and it was my two best friends from elementary school- and their children and their moms. I totally forgot any sort of politeness and just exclaimed something like: “Oh my God! It’s Sarah and Amy!” I had only seen Amy a few times since moving to Austin, and I had not seen Sarah since middle school. Not only did we have a delightful afternoon of catching up and eating Mom and Matt’s tasty lunch, Sarah and Amy had made an album of pictures from our elementary years, and we re-created each photo- complete with silly props. Thanks, Mom.
February: One Small Step
Corin took his first steps on February 24. At first, he was not keen to repeat his feat, continuing to crawl for much of March. Corin, you see, loves speed, and he was a very fast crawler. Eventually, though, he realized that the potential for speed was greater on his feet, and he never really looked back. Lily doesn’t run much. Her great kinetic delight is dance. Even before she could walk, she would move in time to music, and she dances still with enthusiasm and energy. As much as she loves to dance, Corin loves to run. “Run Fast!” is his motto, and he yells it with gusto as he runs in a big circle from our living room to the kitchen to the dining room and back. To every person who sees his solid build and says, “He’s going to play football some day,” I say, “We’re hoping for track.”
March: Travel, Exams, and an Abscess! Oh, My!
In March, I sat for my Ph.D. comprehensive exams. The whole family traveled to DC, and we did our best to see all of our old friends while squeezing in the exams themselves and several doctor visits for Corin, who developed an abscess on his finger and an ear infection the day we left Austin. I wrote a mildly crazy post a few weeks later on the night that I found out I had passed them. I was quite exhilarated at the time. Alas, the advice of a friend and fellow graduate student has since come true. That friend told me years ago: comps is the smartest you will ever be in your life. I am not nearly as sharp at the moment as I was then, even on short sleep with a feverish toddler. I feel sort of like an athlete must feel who has gotten in to peak shape for an event and then slacked off afterward. Oh well. Better to have been sharp once than never to have been sharp at all?
April: Wall Art & Gardening
Hooray! We live in a nice house with big walls. Alas! Wall art is expensive. So, being the project-crazed person that I am, I decided to make some. I cannot paint, but I found an idea online about rubbing charcoal on the back of a printed sheet of paper and then tracing a design onto a canvas. I’ll say it again for emphasis: I cannot paint, but I can color inside the lines. The results are not gallery worthy (or anywhere close) but since they hang in our bedrooms, the standards are pretty relaxed. For Lily, I did a spin-off of the popular wooden letters people use to spell their children’s names. For Corin, I did a set of owls to match his bedding fabric. Later, for our room, I did silhouettes of the kids. Unique is chic, right? You can’t say that my wall art is not one-of-a-kind.
While I was decorating inside, we also had a project outside. My parents bought a small lemon tree five years ago as a memorial when we lost a pregnancy. They had kept it in a pot on their back porch while we lived in Virginia, but it was struggling with the Corpus wind, so they asked if we wanted to plant it at our house this year. Our back yard is surrounded not only be a fence but by a hedge of red-tips, so we had to think hard about where to plant the tree so that it would have adequate sun and space. There was really only one spot that we thought would work, but it was oddly situated just outside the bare, rectangular flower bed behind the living room wall. But after a weekend’s worth of work and trips to a local garden center, we planted Splincher the Lemon Tree inside a lovely, redesigned flower bed amidst lantanas and kalanchoes lined with a curve of pale stone. Splincher has approved of his transplantation. He is currently out there weathering the near-freezing temperatures draped in incandescent pink Christmas lights.
May: Showtime
May saw a variety of performances. First, there was the Mother’s Day Tea at Preschool, which was themed as “Mommywood.” The kids sang show tunes with modified mommy lyrics, and we all came dressed in our movie star best. They even had a red carpet (or butcher paper) for us to enter on, complete with the four-year-old class holding cardboard cameras and screaming for us, a job for which they were eminently well suited. Next up was Lily’s ballet recital. The run-up to this show was interesting since (a) I realized that I did not own several key elements of her costume needs, including a curling iron and blush, and (b) torrential rains nearly made my parents miss the show. We all got there on time and sufficiently coifed, however, and Lily made me proud. She knew her dance perfectly, and she was not at all intimidated by being on stage. In fact, when it was her turn to stand in the front line about half-way through the song, she looked up at the big lights and got a look on her face that seemed to say: “Now THAT’s more like it!”
Spilling over into June a little, Lily had her last show at the Little Gym. We have loved that organization since Lily started classes there at 18-months old, but moving forward, we limited her to one activity, and she chose dance. She never quite got the hang of the balance beam, but she was excellent on the bars. Corin had his “show” the next day, but obviously, the toddler classes didn’t show off skills in the same way. Indeed, Corin never took to the group classes as Lily did. His favorite thing was the “big red mat” on the floor...but only when no one else was on it. While the class was sitting in a circle on the mat, he preferred to wander around, casually climbing on the various cushioned shapes. But when the class got to explore, he would let everyone clear off the mat and then run in crazy circles.
June: Sink or Swim
As you can read here, June was the month when Lily basically learned to swim. We never got to completely independent swimming, but we broke the critical barrier of fear. Frustrating as the process could be at times, I look back fondly on the hours we spent, just Lily and me, working together.
July: Hello, Idaho
In July, we journeyed to Boise, and we had a blast. The trip made a big impression on both kids. For about five months afterward, Corin called airplanes “Emmas.” It could be that this was his attempt to say “airplane,” but I think it may have been a mental association of his first plane ride and meeting his cousin, Emma, both of which we hyped up for him. Lily hasn't added any vocabulary words, but this November at ballet class, the girls were pretending to be airplanes as they stretched. The teacher went around the circle asking each girl to name her destination. Most of the girls said “Disney World,” but Lily said “McCall, Idaho.”
August: Mockingbirds
Corin’s adoration of his sister reached new heights in August when he donned one of her nightgowns and headbands and ran merrily around all of our bedrooms. He may not borrow form her wardrobe much in the years to come, but I hope he continues to see the best and bring out the fun in her, and she in him.
September: Preschool for Two
Lily, partly because of wait lists, started preschool at age three. Corin, because of the need for grad school work time and the hope of introducing him to school while Lily could be there with him, started at one and a half. In September, he started attending the Kids’ Day Out program at Lily’s preschool, Monday and Wednesday mornings from 9:00 am to noon. The first few weeks were tough. He--and all of his classmates--cried at drop-off time, but Corin was usually in good spirits at pick-up. His teacher texted pictures of him playing calmly during the day, and by October, he could go to class without drama. Lily, meanwhile, is a little less communicative about the 4s class than she was about the 3s. I think that she is having a harder time socializing with the larger group of children, especially a group of five girls who knew each other from last year. Still, she is happy to go to school, and the different dynamics should help prepare her for kindergarten.
October: Visitors
My grandmother, Mema, was set to come visit us for a few days before flying out for a cruise with my parents in mid-October. The day after she arrived in Austin, however, the cruise was cancelled and had to be re-scheduled for November. Rather than flying back to Dallas, though, she decided to stay in Austin, and so a few days’ visit became nearly three weeks. I think that the kids wore Mema out a little (she napped very well while staying with us), but it was a pleasure to have her. Between her visit and those of my parents and brother, both Lily and Corin got so used to having company that I think they were a little disappointed when it settled down to just us again.
November: Injury, Illness, and Saving Thanksgiving
On November 3, while rushing out of a room thinking that Woody was growling at the kids, I caught my foot on the corner of a door and ended up with soft tissue damage and a possible hairline fracture on the smallest toe of my right foot. That put an unwelcome stop to my running and made keeping up with the kids significantly more difficult. Less than two weeks later, Corin woke up sick to his stomach, and in the following four days, the stomach bug spread to Lily, Matt, and me. Since more company was due the week after that, I cleaned our house as it had never been cleaned before, steaming pillows, laundering the sofa covers, and disinfecting all of the door knobs and surfaces. I am happy to say that none of our guests seems to have taken the stomach bug from our house, but my parents, far away on a Caribbean cruise, came down with influenza A. Days later, my grandfather, sailing on the same cruise, caught it too. We were due to spend Thanksgiving week in Corpus, sharing the big Thanksgiving meal at my grandparents’ house with dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins from Houston. But with my parents still recovering and with Gramps being diagnosed the Monday before the big day, it all got canceled. Lily was so disappointed that she left me the following note in my spiral:
But, being the superhero-nut that she has become, she insisted, “Mom! We have to save Thanksgiving!” At first, I was inclined more to whine than to leap into action. I had never cooked a turkey. Being blessed with a big family in Texas and wonderful, culinary friends in DC, I had never been responsible for hosting a full Thanksgiving meal. But who can resist the call to be a hero? So on Tuesday and Wednesday, I planned a menu and went to various grocery stores. I set up a schedule of when to cook which dish starting with prep work on Tuesday night and carrying on until the last batch of hot homemade rolls came out at 2:00 PM Thursday afternoon. I even got cloth napkins and a tablecloth because if you’re going to save Thanksgiving, you have to do it right.
I was determined that Thanksgiving at home with just our family of four would not be a let down, and I think we succeeded. Matt was a tremendous help in the kitchen, and we set a lovely and well-stocked table. Ironically, I had been worried most about the turkey, and that’s all the kids ended up liking from the main course. They snubbed all of my sides, though Corin tried to eat an entire can of cranberry jelly by himself.
December: Anniversary, Family Style
Lily likes to go through our end-of-year photo books, and after seeing some SeaWorld photos from 2011, she told me several times that she really wanted to go back. So Matt and I decided to celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary with a family outing. (No, I have not seen the documentary Black Fish. Too late.)
Corin was still recovering from a sinus infection, and he does not like to sit still, so he was disgruntled at times, but Lily was beside herself with excitement. Apart from seeing the sea life, we got to play in artificial snow, ride on a carousel, see thousands of Christmas lights, and take Lily on her first ever roller coaster. A romantic date it was not; but just as a wedding is as much for the guests as it is for the bridal couple, this anniversary was as much for the kids as for us, and we enjoyed sharing it.
January: An Unexpected Party
I turned 30 in January, and as Matt is not much of a planner, and we hadn’t made many friends in Austin, I was not expecting too much. My mom, however, came up with an excellent surprise. She was so confident in it that she came to town telling me she had a birthday surprise and that I would never guess it, and she was right. I knew that she had invited people over because we’d been shopping for food and had even gotten a cookie cake; but I was shocked when the doorbell rang, and it was my two best friends from elementary school- and their children and their moms. I totally forgot any sort of politeness and just exclaimed something like: “Oh my God! It’s Sarah and Amy!” I had only seen Amy a few times since moving to Austin, and I had not seen Sarah since middle school. Not only did we have a delightful afternoon of catching up and eating Mom and Matt’s tasty lunch, Sarah and Amy had made an album of pictures from our elementary years, and we re-created each photo- complete with silly props. Thanks, Mom.
February: One Small Step
Corin took his first steps on February 24. At first, he was not keen to repeat his feat, continuing to crawl for much of March. Corin, you see, loves speed, and he was a very fast crawler. Eventually, though, he realized that the potential for speed was greater on his feet, and he never really looked back. Lily doesn’t run much. Her great kinetic delight is dance. Even before she could walk, she would move in time to music, and she dances still with enthusiasm and energy. As much as she loves to dance, Corin loves to run. “Run Fast!” is his motto, and he yells it with gusto as he runs in a big circle from our living room to the kitchen to the dining room and back. To every person who sees his solid build and says, “He’s going to play football some day,” I say, “We’re hoping for track.”
March: Travel, Exams, and an Abscess! Oh, My!
In March, I sat for my Ph.D. comprehensive exams. The whole family traveled to DC, and we did our best to see all of our old friends while squeezing in the exams themselves and several doctor visits for Corin, who developed an abscess on his finger and an ear infection the day we left Austin. I wrote a mildly crazy post a few weeks later on the night that I found out I had passed them. I was quite exhilarated at the time. Alas, the advice of a friend and fellow graduate student has since come true. That friend told me years ago: comps is the smartest you will ever be in your life. I am not nearly as sharp at the moment as I was then, even on short sleep with a feverish toddler. I feel sort of like an athlete must feel who has gotten in to peak shape for an event and then slacked off afterward. Oh well. Better to have been sharp once than never to have been sharp at all?
April: Wall Art & Gardening
Hooray! We live in a nice house with big walls. Alas! Wall art is expensive. So, being the project-crazed person that I am, I decided to make some. I cannot paint, but I found an idea online about rubbing charcoal on the back of a printed sheet of paper and then tracing a design onto a canvas. I’ll say it again for emphasis: I cannot paint, but I can color inside the lines. The results are not gallery worthy (or anywhere close) but since they hang in our bedrooms, the standards are pretty relaxed. For Lily, I did a spin-off of the popular wooden letters people use to spell their children’s names. For Corin, I did a set of owls to match his bedding fabric. Later, for our room, I did silhouettes of the kids. Unique is chic, right? You can’t say that my wall art is not one-of-a-kind.
While I was decorating inside, we also had a project outside. My parents bought a small lemon tree five years ago as a memorial when we lost a pregnancy. They had kept it in a pot on their back porch while we lived in Virginia, but it was struggling with the Corpus wind, so they asked if we wanted to plant it at our house this year. Our back yard is surrounded not only be a fence but by a hedge of red-tips, so we had to think hard about where to plant the tree so that it would have adequate sun and space. There was really only one spot that we thought would work, but it was oddly situated just outside the bare, rectangular flower bed behind the living room wall. But after a weekend’s worth of work and trips to a local garden center, we planted Splincher the Lemon Tree inside a lovely, redesigned flower bed amidst lantanas and kalanchoes lined with a curve of pale stone. Splincher has approved of his transplantation. He is currently out there weathering the near-freezing temperatures draped in incandescent pink Christmas lights.
May: Showtime
May saw a variety of performances. First, there was the Mother’s Day Tea at Preschool, which was themed as “Mommywood.” The kids sang show tunes with modified mommy lyrics, and we all came dressed in our movie star best. They even had a red carpet (or butcher paper) for us to enter on, complete with the four-year-old class holding cardboard cameras and screaming for us, a job for which they were eminently well suited. Next up was Lily’s ballet recital. The run-up to this show was interesting since (a) I realized that I did not own several key elements of her costume needs, including a curling iron and blush, and (b) torrential rains nearly made my parents miss the show. We all got there on time and sufficiently coifed, however, and Lily made me proud. She knew her dance perfectly, and she was not at all intimidated by being on stage. In fact, when it was her turn to stand in the front line about half-way through the song, she looked up at the big lights and got a look on her face that seemed to say: “Now THAT’s more like it!”
June: Sink or Swim
As you can read here, June was the month when Lily basically learned to swim. We never got to completely independent swimming, but we broke the critical barrier of fear. Frustrating as the process could be at times, I look back fondly on the hours we spent, just Lily and me, working together.
July: Hello, Idaho
In July, we journeyed to Boise, and we had a blast. The trip made a big impression on both kids. For about five months afterward, Corin called airplanes “Emmas.” It could be that this was his attempt to say “airplane,” but I think it may have been a mental association of his first plane ride and meeting his cousin, Emma, both of which we hyped up for him. Lily hasn't added any vocabulary words, but this November at ballet class, the girls were pretending to be airplanes as they stretched. The teacher went around the circle asking each girl to name her destination. Most of the girls said “Disney World,” but Lily said “McCall, Idaho.”
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| Huckleberries! |
August: Mockingbirds
Corin’s adoration of his sister reached new heights in August when he donned one of her nightgowns and headbands and ran merrily around all of our bedrooms. He may not borrow form her wardrobe much in the years to come, but I hope he continues to see the best and bring out the fun in her, and she in him.
September: Preschool for Two
Lily, partly because of wait lists, started preschool at age three. Corin, because of the need for grad school work time and the hope of introducing him to school while Lily could be there with him, started at one and a half. In September, he started attending the Kids’ Day Out program at Lily’s preschool, Monday and Wednesday mornings from 9:00 am to noon. The first few weeks were tough. He--and all of his classmates--cried at drop-off time, but Corin was usually in good spirits at pick-up. His teacher texted pictures of him playing calmly during the day, and by October, he could go to class without drama. Lily, meanwhile, is a little less communicative about the 4s class than she was about the 3s. I think that she is having a harder time socializing with the larger group of children, especially a group of five girls who knew each other from last year. Still, she is happy to go to school, and the different dynamics should help prepare her for kindergarten.
October: Visitors
My grandmother, Mema, was set to come visit us for a few days before flying out for a cruise with my parents in mid-October. The day after she arrived in Austin, however, the cruise was cancelled and had to be re-scheduled for November. Rather than flying back to Dallas, though, she decided to stay in Austin, and so a few days’ visit became nearly three weeks. I think that the kids wore Mema out a little (she napped very well while staying with us), but it was a pleasure to have her. Between her visit and those of my parents and brother, both Lily and Corin got so used to having company that I think they were a little disappointed when it settled down to just us again.
November: Injury, Illness, and Saving Thanksgiving
On November 3, while rushing out of a room thinking that Woody was growling at the kids, I caught my foot on the corner of a door and ended up with soft tissue damage and a possible hairline fracture on the smallest toe of my right foot. That put an unwelcome stop to my running and made keeping up with the kids significantly more difficult. Less than two weeks later, Corin woke up sick to his stomach, and in the following four days, the stomach bug spread to Lily, Matt, and me. Since more company was due the week after that, I cleaned our house as it had never been cleaned before, steaming pillows, laundering the sofa covers, and disinfecting all of the door knobs and surfaces. I am happy to say that none of our guests seems to have taken the stomach bug from our house, but my parents, far away on a Caribbean cruise, came down with influenza A. Days later, my grandfather, sailing on the same cruise, caught it too. We were due to spend Thanksgiving week in Corpus, sharing the big Thanksgiving meal at my grandparents’ house with dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins from Houston. But with my parents still recovering and with Gramps being diagnosed the Monday before the big day, it all got canceled. Lily was so disappointed that she left me the following note in my spiral:
But, being the superhero-nut that she has become, she insisted, “Mom! We have to save Thanksgiving!” At first, I was inclined more to whine than to leap into action. I had never cooked a turkey. Being blessed with a big family in Texas and wonderful, culinary friends in DC, I had never been responsible for hosting a full Thanksgiving meal. But who can resist the call to be a hero? So on Tuesday and Wednesday, I planned a menu and went to various grocery stores. I set up a schedule of when to cook which dish starting with prep work on Tuesday night and carrying on until the last batch of hot homemade rolls came out at 2:00 PM Thursday afternoon. I even got cloth napkins and a tablecloth because if you’re going to save Thanksgiving, you have to do it right.
I was determined that Thanksgiving at home with just our family of four would not be a let down, and I think we succeeded. Matt was a tremendous help in the kitchen, and we set a lovely and well-stocked table. Ironically, I had been worried most about the turkey, and that’s all the kids ended up liking from the main course. They snubbed all of my sides, though Corin tried to eat an entire can of cranberry jelly by himself.
December: Anniversary, Family Style
Lily likes to go through our end-of-year photo books, and after seeing some SeaWorld photos from 2011, she told me several times that she really wanted to go back. So Matt and I decided to celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary with a family outing. (No, I have not seen the documentary Black Fish. Too late.)
Corin was still recovering from a sinus infection, and he does not like to sit still, so he was disgruntled at times, but Lily was beside herself with excitement. Apart from seeing the sea life, we got to play in artificial snow, ride on a carousel, see thousands of Christmas lights, and take Lily on her first ever roller coaster. A romantic date it was not; but just as a wedding is as much for the guests as it is for the bridal couple, this anniversary was as much for the kids as for us, and we enjoyed sharing it.
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