Man Hike!

I had a post all cooked up about how hot it was over the weekend, and how it turned the girls into crabby little crabbersons, and I had some irritating titles on the table, like "Hot Cross Bun(nies)" or "Hottentots" or something similar, and some pictures of them all sweated up, and some of them in the wading pool, with their little teeth chattering. But now, of course, it is gray and cool and rainy, they put an extra onesie on Muriel today, under the tank top I sent her to daycare in, and I can't even remember what the heat was like. Also, it occurs to me that any readers in Arizona and even in the midwest would likely scoff at my claims of the magnitude of the heat, which really only got into the nineties.

So instead I will turn my attention to the oft-neglected (and completely outnumbered) man of the house, who on Sunday joined some of his coworkers for some wilderness male bonding. They went hiking near Mt. Ranier, and had a really good time. Why, yes, he did have to go out the day before to buy a lighter, more hikeable tripod for his big old camera. But it was worth it- look at this beauty...
And let us not overlook this beauty, for that matter!
Marmot!

Here's hoping we get a little more of the hot weather- we're planning a camping trip in the next week, and we would like it warm and dry, please....

The Crumber

Remember back in college when all of a sudden everyone was reading the Rabbit books, and you decided that Updike was a genius and you were going to read everything else he ever wrote, and you went to the used book store and found some little old early Updike paperbacks and you started in on them, and ...enh. The prose was still lovely, but they just didn't have the juice?

For me that paperback was The Poorhouse Fair, which I never finished. At the beginning, though, (and I hope I am remembering correctly), is the part where one of the women in the poorhouse reflects endlessly on her contribution to the running of their unconventional household, which is "crumbing" the table after meals. She scrapes and picks and gets all the little food bits off the tablecloth so that it is clean and ready for the next meal. Friends, Jim's mom was our crumber. For three months. And today, as I picked a galaxy of sticky jasmine rice off our tablecloth, well, I missed her a little more than I usually do.

Work is absolutely kicking my ass, if I may say so. As a rule, I am your aggravating coworker, who, when you complain about how much work you have and you can't even believe it, and how do they expect you to get anything done with all these meetings, and so forth, clucks sympathetically and strains all the muscles in her face to keep her eyes from rolling. But now, I am on your side. The work is piling up! It is insane how much we still have to accomplish! I am tripled booked, every other morning, between 9:00 and 12:00, with scrums (for all you Agile development fans), trainings, meetings, and more scrums.

And because everyone is feeling this way, whenever a new task comes up, which it does about fifteen times a day, somehow it's landing on my tablecloth. More things to track. More things to learn. More things to finish up. More things to be responsible for. And although it has me stressed out quite a bit, and feeling equal parts grouch and martyr, there is a part of me that feels a little more alive than usual. So I will continue to gather up these sticky, annoying bits of work, and feel secretly grateful for some external motivation. I knew I had it in me to be more productive!

School Daze

The girls have completed a month of school (Naomi is actually in pre-school, and for consistency we also refer to Muriel's baby holding pen as school), and I am pleased to say that the report is so far, so good. I usually time Muriel's drop off to coincide nicely with breakfast, so when I get there, there is a gaggle of toddlers sitting in teeny chairs, munching on incongruous pairings like pancakes and canned green beans. Mmmm. Muriel loves getting into one of these chairs and participating in the group snack. She is a sociable creature, noticeably more so than Naomi was at this age. She gets excited to see the teachers, she blows kissses when we leave, and does her random, non-directional hand waving. From the teachers' accounts, she enjoys music time, does a great job eating her lunch, and is especially fond of playing with dirt outside. Whee!

I would compare Naomi's initial reaction to school to a fervent crush. She LOVED school the first week or two, because at school there are teachers who are kind and friendly to three-year-olds. She is an adult-centric child, and this made it especially frustrating for her when her grandparents didn't know what to do with her for three months. She has settled down a bit, and more importantly, she has shifted her focus onto her peers. Hurray! We hear about her friends, we count them up (there are seven!), we talk about one in particular who seems a little bi-polar with her "play with me, no, don't play with me now" behavior every other day. Naomi seems unfazed by her flip-flopping, even though we are dying to rig her up with a hidden panda-cam to figure out just what the heck motivates three year olds in the "dolphin" class to accept and reject friendship overtures from minute to minute.

We visted a handful of preschools before settling on this one. I had thought a Montessori school might be good for Naomi, considering the glimpses of OCD I see in her, and my own anxieties about being able to model self-motivated learning (I am externally motivated in the worst way). We saw a few that were really fantastic. The one we chose, though, is close to our house, inexpensive, Montessori-inspired (close enough!), and has a shabby, comfortable feel to it, which I mean in the best possible way. It is the preschool that alleviates any concern you might have that you are in some way related to those people you hear about in New York City that call in all their favors to get the editor of the Times to write their two-year-old a letter of reference for admission to the preschool that will fast-track their kid to Yale or whatever.

Only time will tell whether this place sends Naomi to the Ivies, but in the meantime, here is a list of things she has learned at school in the past month:

"Ewwww!" All the cool kids at school must say Ewww! to just about anything that happens, because Naomi does it all the time now. Ewwww! Underpants! Ewwww, a baby wipe- I'm not a baby! Ewwww! Pee!

"Criss cross applesauce" = the new "Indian Style"... Everybody sit down, criss cross applesauce!

"Zip it, lock it, put it in your pocket." - Ha! If I were in just the right mood, I might be bothered by this, but most of the time I think it's really funny, and I have already tried using it on Jim, with undesirable results.

Songs, songs, songs. She can sing "America the Beautiful" all the way through ("above the fruit and planes!"), "I'm a Little Teapot," which I had purposefully never taught her because I have always found it a little too cutesy, a song for lining up to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell"..."I'm ready for the hall, I'm standing nice and tall...", and my super fave rave, a days of the week song set to the tune of "The Addams Family":

There's Sunday and there's Monday. There's Tuesday and there's Wednesday. There's Thursday and there's Friday, and then there's Saturday.
Days of the week. (clap clap)
Days of the week. (clap clap)
Days of the week, days of the week, days of the week. (clap clap)

In case you were looking for a song to get stuck in your head for 72 hours.

Splash Park!

This Sunday afternoon we repeated last Sunday afternoon's high jinks, minus the chilliness, minus the adorable vegan kindergartner. We had some splashing, we followed up with some Chinese food. Ah, weekend, I miss you already.