Happy Halloween!

I have always enjoyed Halloween. I never put enough time into thinking ahead for my costume, and thus it always ends up thrown together at the end, and often the same happens with any type of planning as to what to do for Halloween. But I still love it. I love the costumes, the possibilities, seeing what others who are more creative and witty than I come up with.

So when our date to move back to the US changed from early November to mid-September, one of my first thoughts was "We'll be there in time for Halloween!!" Meaning we get to dress Donovan up in a costume. And then laugh at his ridiculous cuteness. And take a bazillion pictures. (Hey, parenting is a crapload of work, we've gotta take advantage of these moments when they come, right?!?)

The natural costume of choice, having just moved back from Switzerland, is a cow. And then it hit me-- he wouldn't just be any cow. He could be a Herens cow, the fighting kind from the Valais. This idea came just in time for me to buy a teeny little cow bell for his costume while in the Valais with my family the week before moving. I wasn't sure how I'd put together the rest of the costume-- it's easy to find black-and-white jersey cow costumes for babies, but an all-black cow or bull costume? Nowhere to be found.

So I resigned myself to possibly having to do with just being a "regular" cow and ordered a costume online, then realized that the headpiece is separate from the rest of the costume. And then I found a pair of black pants and a black turtleneck at Target (and for only $4 each, god I love that place). And everything just came together so nicely.

So, without further adieu... First, here's a reminder of the real, live cows, taken during the cow fight in our village:


And here is the Donovan version:

And there was even a mini cow fight simulation, courtesy of Zach a Spanish bull Cristina gave me acting as another Swiss cow:


Unfortunately I think Donovan lost.


We let him take a victory lap around the block anyway.


We didn't have any trick-or-treaters till we were getting D ready for bed so we didn't get to show off the outfit, but you bet your butt we're sending pictures to all our Swiss (and expat) friends. =P

Pumpkin Patch

Yesterday was a big day. Debbie came by, and it was so great to see her and little Maddie (who was celebrating her 6 month birthday!). Debbie and I met in Geneva, I'd just entered my 3rd trimester, she was just 3 months behind. We were part of the lunch group that got together once a week and so saw each other that way mostly. Then she was put on bed rest and one afternoon I stopped by to see how she was doing and before I knew it hours had passed during which conversation had flowed seemingly effortlessly. She and her new little family moved back here a few months before we did, and while I know she misses Europe terribly, I selfishly am very glad to have her around.



(a few more pictures here)

Zach came home a bit early yesterday afternoon so we could partake in a bit of pumpkin patch fun. Julia had invited us along to a get-together with some of the couples (now families) she and Cyrus had met in their birthing class. We all met up at a local pumpkin patch to take pictures of our kiddoes in their Halloween costumes. Zach and I had not gotten it together to take family photos at a pumpkin patch yet, so we jumped at this chance. The results, which you can see in full here, are quite adorable. We had a lot of fun, and lucked out with the weather seeing as today it's been cold and rainy and just plain nasty.




Donovan says "I'm outta here."


He refused to look at the camera or smile. The entire time.

Sophia seems unimpressed by it all.

Farmer Donovan

The Luckiest

D seems to be in somewhat better spirits this morning. Debbie and her little girl will be visiting us today, and I think we'll head out to the park in the afternoon, which I think D will really enjoy. He loves the outdoors, just like his daddy. Often when he's fussy inside I just need to take him outside and he'll calm down. I don't know if it's the fresh air or the change of scenery, but there's something there.

The past few nights D's been sleeping better, which means that while still tired I've been feeling a bit more sane and alert when he wakes during the night. And lately, when I lay him back down in his bed after feeding, as he's already fast asleep, and I look down upon him as he stretches and maybe yawns, then rolls over to sleep, I've been getting bowled over with love and gratefulness.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I am not shy about sharing the difficulties of motherhood. What I need to get better about is also sharing the incredible parts of it. Like how sweet and peaceful he looks as he sleeps. The sound of his voice as he babbles or laughs, which must be some of the most beautiful sounds I've ever heard. His delicate, tired yawn coming from the backseat of the car as we drive. How he grabs at my face and holds it between his hands when he's tired, even with one thumb in his mouth. I really think there's a connection between what kind of sleep I'm getting, and my ability to notice these little things and appreciate them. He is such an incredible and amazing child, and it is so incredible and amazing to be his mother. We are so, so lucky, and that is something I need to remind myself of when I feel my patience and energy running thin.

Mr Jekyll and Baby Hyde

Zach is off picking Jenny up at the caltrain station again tonight. She forgot her cell phone in our cat Sunday before heading back up to the city, and so she's spending the night with us tonight so she can come down and pick it up... and spend some time with us, too, of course. I'm glad for it, too, I feel exhausted and drained today and need a bit of a pick me up, which Jen always provides.

I had another difficult day with D today. He's just been on and off all day, seeming fine and then all of a sudden getting all upset, as if in pain. Maybe it's this new tooth coming in, I don't know. Last night I did something to my wrist so it's been sore all day, and watching him run around the house and practice his standing I also wonder if he might be sore somewhere, too, and just can't tell me. Things that used to always bring on giggles now don't work, and then times I do get him to smile and laugh I have to work pretty hard for. I wish I knew what I could do to help, I feel so bad for him. And I'm exhausted from trying to entertain him all day long.

I'm also questioning so much of what I do with him, all over again. I keep waiting for him to settle into some sort of a consistent eating/sleeping schedule, and it's not happening (ex- he goes to bed at 7pm every night, and wakes anytime between 5:30-7:30am-- not counting night feeds). I wonder if I need to just decide on something and impose it, and deal with the crying and crankiness that will come until he adjusts to it (whenever that might be). Maybe that's the best course to take for the long-term, but I'm not sure I have the strength to deal with the short-term consequences. I'm quite frankly pissed off at all the books that kept saying things would happen one way, when they very clearly have not.

I saw a quote recently by Brooke Shields saying that having children was the most selfish thing she ever did, meaning having created unconditional love for herself by her kids. I found it strange that someone who went through severe postpartum depression so publicly would say something like that. I know D loves me and in the moments when it really shows it feels so incredible, but I feel having children is the most self-less thing anyone can ever do. You're comiting to devote the rest of your life to someone else, to give up so much of yourself and your free time for their well being. I'm not trying to make this an angry or depressed rant, or saying it because I've had a bad day. I saw the quote days ago and have been thinking about it since. I don't know what the context was around that quote, but taken by itself it seems so misleading about all the work and effort that goes into being a parent and I guess that just irks me to see.

froghead

Today started out great-- went to get tires replaced on the CR-V but was told that they actually have another 8,000-10,000miles left in them (woot!), then I found a printer for half-price (after mail-in rebate) at Fry's, and in the early afternoon Julia, Sophia, and Julia's adorable and very sweet mom-in-law Betsy stopped by for a little visit.

And then came the late afternoon, during which D started this thing of randomly getting really upset, as if in pain, and I have no idea what was wrong. I'd be able to distract him some of the time, and other times there wasn't much to do, and he was just acting tired and cranky and generally unhappy. Maybe teething pain, maybe tummy issues, I don't know. We spent some time hanging out in the front yard looking at leaves and tree trunks and that helped a bit. I ended up giving him a bit of baby motrin at bedtime, if he is in pain over something then hopefully that will help take the edge off.

I'm finding yet another reason to try to keep up adding a picture to each blog post-- looking through adorable photos of D helps me forget a difficult day with him.

BTW my step-sister just opened up an etsy shop at bangalee57.etsy.com. She has some very cute crocheted items for sale. =)

six word sunday: They had hoped for some relaxation...

six word sunday challenge

Modern Montessori

My good friend Pat is part of a local group called the Bay Area Montessori Association (BAMA). This is a group dedicated to joining together Montessorians across the bay area, regardless of their affiliations (AMI, AMS, etc). As someone who was trained through AMI, I myself am guilty of being an AMI snob-- often that seems like the easiest way to distinguish true montessori from those who call themselves montessori just because they happen to own a pink tower. But while it is always frustrating to hear people speak badly of montessori due to a negative experience with a school that did a poor job of upholding the montessori standards (no, montessori does not mean just letting kids run around rampant, doing whatever they want), it is also true that one does not need to hold a particular diploma in order to understand the philosophy, and the spreading of the montessori method is almost always a good thing.

BAMA has recently started a blog titled Modern Montessori. My friend Pat asked me several months ago to be a contributing writer to the blog. Do I have time to write to yet another blog? Um, probably not. But I was flattered and honored to be asked, and welcome this as a challenge and inspiration. I want to apply the montessori method and philosophy into our daily lives and into my parenting, and I think writing on a blog about it will be a way to encourage me to do so. I don't know how often I will post there, it might only be a few times a month. But I hope some of you will pop on over and check it out. =)

Yay for hippie California

One of the things I liked about living in Switzerland was that it felt like simply being there made us more ecological. Recycling was decent, our village had a community compost center, all electricity came from renewable/sustainable sources, etc. I worried about having guilt when we moved back to the US, where some of these things aren't as easy to do on your own.

But being in California, we have lucked out. Our house gets one medium-sized trash container, and a humongous recycling container. Once the trash can is full, that's it-- it costs $6 per bag to get extra trash picked up. With recycling, however, it's unlimited. Our area recycles EVERYTHING it seems-- plastics 1-7, paper, cardboard, aluminum and scrap metal, even styrofoam and textiles (cloth). And everything goes into the same container. How ridiculously easy is that?? I've had to stop myself when throwing things into the trash, remembering that it can actually be recycled, instead.

We're also planning on starting up a compost pile. I don't know how it will go, I haven't even gotten around to doing research on what it takes, etc. But we both feel bad throwing compostables in the trash when there's an alternative. This way we can also compost at least some of D's gdiaper inserts, since I'm not sure I trust our current toilet enough to flush them. We don't really need the soil that will (hopefully) come out of it, but that's what freecycle is for, right?

When we lived here before the electric company gave an option to buy all your power from renewable sources, so we also need to still look into doing that again. There's actually a lot of overhead lighting in this house, all with 3-4 lightbulbs in the fixture, and all are incandescent, so I'm debating leaving them be till they burn out (in, what, a year?) or replacing them already with energy-efficient bulbs.

Mind you, I still drive a CR-V on a nearly-daily basis. But it's nice to do even small things that feel like they help somewhat.

That's one squirmy fussosaurus

D has been alternating between smiley and adorable, and perfect impersonations of a Fussosaurus-Rex, these days. I'm blaming it on two things: first, he appears to possibly be constipated. Every so often he just starts straining, he gets kinda upset, and nothing happens. It's amazing to me how his poop can go from runny goo to rabbit pellets literally from one day to another, but I guess he's just a weird kid (to the non-parents reading this post-- so sorry). I think I'll get him some prunes tomorrow. Second, his fourth (FOURTH!) tooth looks like it's just about ready to break through. I'm really hoping this is the last one for a while, as we've been going at a rate of about 1 new tooth every week or so lately.

Whether the fussing is actually attributed to these things, or if they are indeed even happening, I have no idea. Sometimes parenting feels like one big guessing game ("Blinken, what are you doing up there?" "Guessing? I... guess nobody's coming?").

He's also been kinda whiney at meal times. He absolutely loves those Gerber puff things, and I swear would eat an entire meal of just those (can I do that?). He'll have moments of taking in his puree, but I kinda have to shovel in what I can when he's up for it because it'll last about 30 seconds before he decides NO MORE OF THAT. I want to try giving him more foods as finger foods, but really anything that's in small enough pieces and soft enough so that I feel comfortable with him being able to gum up, is then way too hard for him to pick up with his fingers (tried banana one time, even I couldn't pick up most of those sticky pieces off the tray). Advice?

I bought some very cute two-piece pajamas for D today. He was gonna need some soon as half of his current set are sized to 9 months and they're starting to feel tight. But the bigger reason, is that the days of D sitting still for a diaper/clothing change are behind us, and snaps are close to impossible to do up when he's wriggling and turning over and trying to crawl away and screaming at me the entire time b/c I'm trying to keep him somewhat still. I'm figuring the top-and-bottom style (no snapping required!) should be a little easier to deal with. (Case in point: Zach's getting D ready for bed tonight, and he just came out here to get me to help put his sleep sack on b/c he couldn't do it on his own.) For this same reason (extreme squirminess), we've also decided to give up on using his changing table, and have set his changing pad on the floor. Zach and I would both rather deal with bending down and sore knees than the very real possibility of D doing a sommersault off the changing table. I've found this is another advantage of the gDiapers, btw-- since they velcro in the back, it's almost easier to just let him roll over to his tummy and put them on that way.

trial and error

There is so much to learn in the world of photography, and I sometimes feel like kicking myself for not doing so while I was still pregnant, and had all the time in the world. I was intimidated by it then, the only reason I even got away from shooting in the basic modes was because Zach pushed me to. But all the other settings? Seemed like it was all way over my head. Ah well, that's a lesson learned. These days it's easy to go weeks without taking any time to try to learn anything new, so I've added a couple photography blogs to my google reader and am forcing myself to actually read the updates, so if nothing else I can be sure to spend just 5 minutes a day exposed to new information and inspiration.

One thing I loved about this house when we first saw it is how bright it is. The living room has so many windows, one whole wall with light streaming right in. I was taking pictures of D earlier today and was thrilled to realize that I could set my ISO down to 200 and still have a fast enough shutter speed. Awesome. =)

The other day as D was eating breakfast I started taking a few photos, of him and of other random parts of our new home. And then, I even went and edited a few of them with Gimp. Looking at them now I might have overdone them a bit, but I still kinda like the effect. It's all trial and error, isn't it?

Settling In

The internet guy came right at 10am this morning, got everything set up. D and I then went to Target and picked up a crapload of incidental essentials for the house. Pretty incredible how much stuff you need when setting up a new household. There's still more things we need, but there's only so much you can fit into a Target shopping cart at a time.

In the afternoon we walked over to a shopping center that's less than a 20 minute walk away-- holds a Kohl's, Bed Bath & Beyond, Panera, and some other stores. This might not be a good thing. ; ) But it's certainly convenient to be able to just walk over with the stroller and pick up small things.

It all of a sudden feels like fall, mainly because last night for the first time it actually felt cold. We've got a blanket along with our comforter on the bed, and today I bought a space heater to help heat our and D's rooms at night. I worry about him getting cold, so he's wearing a onesie, footed pyjama, sleep sack, and is also covered by a small fleece blanket. I will say one nice thing about waking frequently at night to feed him, is it gives me a chance to check him and his room throughout the night to make sure he's not too cold or warm.

I know this is a pretty boring post, so I'll attempt to make up for it by posting a picture of D from a park outing last week. This is his "That baby's not trying to out-cute me, is he?!?" look.

sleep, elusive sleep

As in, we're staying here (at the new place) tonight. There's still boxes and other randomness strew around the living room, but it looks several orders of magnitude better than it did 2 days ago. It helps a lot that we have lots of closets (CLOSETS! Imagine that!! Europe, can you take notes on this?) and we also have half a garage into which we can pile random stuff that we don't know what to do with quite yet. I'm sure it will all get sorted out soon. Definitely.

Comcast will be coming by tomorrow sometime to set up our internet (right now we're stealing a neighbor's... shhh don't tell anyone). They claim they'll be here between 12 and 2 but you know how that goes, they'll probably show up at 5pm. Donovan's been doing his Mr Sourpuss impression lately, he did this a few days before his 3rd tooth came through and so I think he's working on tooth #4. I hope we get a break after this. After a few nights of only waking up 2-3 times, he's now back to waking 4 times a night (that's about every 2 hours, btw), and frankly I'm amazed I'm not more of a zombie right now. I tell you, mommy hormones are incredible, they must be the equivalent of speed. Unfortunately not only is he waking lots, but his morning wake-up time has been moving up slowly-- he used to sleep till 7am, then it was 6:30, then 6, 5:45, and this morning he was threatening not to go back to sleep after waking at 4am. Um, kiddo, that's where I draw the line. I may be pulling out our sleep books again because I'm not sure how much longer I'm willing to let this go on (hah, as if I have much control). We bought a (cool-mist) humidifier today, wondering if it's his congested nose that's waking him up and hoping that perhaps a humidifier will help. I also gave him a dose of Motrin as he seemed to be in pretty active pain as he approached bedtime, but I don't know how much that's really helped in the past, either. This will also be the first night in a month that we won't all be sharing a bedroom, and maybe, just maybe, that will also help him sleep better? If anyone has other ideas I'd love to hear them. I'm not asking for him to sleep all through the night, I'd just sure love to get one nice 6 hour stretch every night.

Well, I'd better be off to bed, though I expect him to be waking up for his first feeding of the night anytime in the next hour. Oh god I think I hear him now.

Look who's hair's long enough to be mohawked

I am pleased to report that we made a lot of progress today. There's still much, much to be done, but the place looks SO much better and we're on our way to being organized. We're staying at the temporary apartment one last night tonight, then tomorrow we'll finish up and fully move in to our house.

Karen and Benjamin came over for a bit this afternoon. They told us about their recent trip to New Zealand and Australia, and also helped watch D for us while Zach and I worked on the chaos. D has yet to show any signs of stranger anxiety and was happy to play with them. I don't know how much longer this easy-going-ness with strangers will last, but I'm crossing my fingers perhaps we'll skip that anxiety stage. Of course now that I've typed that he'll probably hate everyone but me starting tomorrow.

Zach was able to run off to Fry's to buy a modem and terabyte back-up hard drive for us (we need it, too-- just yesterday I was uploading photos and we once again ran out of space). Karen mentioned she has a friend who's trying to sell a washer and dryer, so perhaps that will work out for us. We also still need to buy a vacuum cleaner and all sorts of odds and ends. I'm glad we signed a 2 year lease... I am not looking forward to ever having to move again.

(I know the picture has nothing to do with today's post, but it's a cute picture of Donovan and who doesn't need that?)

Don't let movers unpack your stuff

So our shipment arrived today. To our house. Awesomeness. We'll ignore the fact that we didn't even have confirmation of whether it was going to be delivered or not today until this morning. Hey, at least it didn't get held up at customs for weeks, right?

The movers were nice enough, Zach got to practice his Spanish with them. They carefully counted off each box and waited for us to confirm which room to put them in. Zach and I had gone back and forth on whether we should let them unpack the boxes, or do it ourselves. We naively thought that by "unpacking" the movers would actually put things in somewhat coherent places, and figured the worst case was we'd just re-arrange a few things when we had time.

Hah. I left to go buy a few things at Target, came back an hour later, and it was as if all our boxes threw up all over the house. There were huge piles of crap everywhere, with no order at all. After all that time spent figuring out which boxes went in which rooms, we still wound up with big piles of my clothes in D's room, kitchen stuff on our bed, my jewelry in the bathroom, etc. It wouldn't be that big a deal, except we have a baby that's constantly on the go and exploring everything, and thus having, say, a bunch of picture frames on the floor, well it doesn't make for the most "baby friendly" environment. Which means that we'll be spending the entire weekend making sense of the chaos so that we can actually move in by Monday. It's kinda worse than just leaving everything in boxes, as at least then we'd be able to go at our own pace rather than have to do it all RIGHT NOW. Some parts of it will go quickly-- drawers were left empty for the most part, so putting things away in them should be quick and easy, satisfying. However our closets are packed with random crap in huge piles, which may take a bit more effort to sort through before being able to put the proper things in those closets.

I know I shouldn't be complaining. All of our stuff arrived, all in one piece (as far as we can tell). In a way this is good, as it does force us to sort everything out right away-- we can't procrastinate. I'm sure we'll still end up with boxes of miscellaneous crap in the garage, but that's nearly unavoidable when moving.

I am looking forward to being a bit more settled in the new place. As the movers were bringing in boxes and D was playing on the floor, and I looked around at this house that would be our home for the next 2 years, I got a really good feeling. It's not perfect, and there's already a decent list of things to tell the lanlord about that need to get fixed. But it's cute, it's bright, it's got a nice big living room, and it has a good feel to it. I think we're gonna like living there.

"health"

I don't normally blog about politics on here, but there's something McCain said at last night's debate that infuriates me so much that I just can't not write about it.



I cannot believe that someone in the running to be our president would say what he did, in the way he did. John McCain's apparent complete lack of respect for the LIFE of mothers-to-be is appalling, infuriating, and inexcusable. I've been disappointed in McCain recently, but still found him to be overall a decent and reasonable person that wouldn't be a terrible president (mainly I just don't want Palin to have a chance for that position). But after seeing the above clip, my respect for him has vanished. Words cannot explain how pissed off I am.

fauxtoshoot

I recently was looking through newborn shots on flickr and felt a pang of regret that I didn't think about or have the time to try to replicate some of the adorable poses I was seeing. Its not like I'm lacking in photos from D's first month, but I don't have any shots of him as a naked, scrunched-up, sleeping newborn. I know there are many reasons for this-- I was exhausted beyond comprehension, feeling fairly stressed, and living in a cold house and always worried about D being cold when not fully dressed (not to mention that he HATED getting un/dressed, so clothes were removed only when absolutely necessary. But that pang is still there, and if I can't go back in time I can still try to do things differently starting now. And thus I was inspired to comb through more infant photos, and set up a (very, very amateur) "photoshoot" with D here in the apartment.


I learned many things in this first shoot. First, that the sun's position changes awfully fast at this time of year. I remembered noting that the apartment got pretty good light, with the direct sun reaching only a little ways into the room but still illuminating it quite well. But by the time I thought to do this and set it up the light had already changed, and streaks of sun crossed the carpet halfway across the room making it hard to avoid getting harsh, direct sun on D as I took pictures (see photo below). Even now, just a week later, the sun's reaching noticeably farther, all the way onto the couch. So, next time pay more attention to available light.


Also, I need more light so I can use a lower ISO setting. I shot at 1600 in order to have a high enough shutter speed, and most of the photos look fine to start with but start showing "noise" pretty quickly once I start trying to edit the shot. Ah, well.

I need to work on fast focusing. I haven't used manual focus very much, as I don't trust myself to be a good enough judge of sharpness (partially b/c I don't think my eyes are that great, a visit to the eye doctor is on my to-do list). So I usually go auto- which is sometimes slow and by the time the lens has focused D may have moved (the trouble with shooting a rambunctious baby). I do sometimes fix the focus point to the center point in the camera, and I should do that more often as it makes it a bit faster for the camera to focus on what I want, and then I can recompose the shot quickly. I may also try to borrow a friend's 50mm f/1.4 as I think that lens might focus faster than my 1.8.

Lastly, I'm noticing that the biggest drawback to The GIMP is that I just don't use it. If I want to edit one or 2 photos at a time, fine. But if I have a batch of 100+ photos that I want to look through, which is often the case, I'll just open Picasa3 as it's much easier to just click from one picture onto the next during editing rather than waiting for each photo to open individually. Because of this, the perception that it's slower and just takes more time to edit photos, I have not opened The GIMP in I don't know how long. I don't know, maybe that's just the name of the game and something I'll need to get used to if I want to use fancier programs for editing. The downside of Picasa is that I often want to do more than what its tools allow. I think I'll download the trial version of Lightroom and try it out, from what I understand Lightroom has the same organizational tools and structure that Picasa has, but with more editing options.

I'd love to hear feedback on the photos and edits I made (click here to see the whole set). Sometimes I'll edit a photo and think it looks great and later go back to it and think it just looks wierd. I'd love to get some outside reactions to them, and suggestions. I think some of the photos turned out a bit on the warm side (D looks like he's got red hair in some) so that's one thing to look for next time. Some photos have 2 or 3 versions, let me know which you like best, too. Thanks! =)

serene

From our outing at the park last week.

D and I had a good day of shopping at the mall today. We returned some things, bought some things, stopped at Wahoo's to have lunch and man he must like that place b/c it's the 2nd time we've gone there and he's sat in his stroller completely content while I ate my lunch, which hardly ever happens. I did also cut up teeny tiny pieces of my chicken and let him gum them, he seemed to like that. It's fun to be getting to the point where I can share some of my food with him, though I'm also worried about him choking since he doesn't have many teeth to properly chew with. Though he seems to be working on that...

It seems every time I sit down to bog my mind goes blank, and all the stuff I'd wanted to write about is forgotten. So I'll just leave this short post for today.

Bits & Pieces

Donovan tried Cheerios for the first time this morning. Was reminded of just how difficult seemingly simple tasks, like picking small items up with your fingers and then getting them into your mouth, are to babies. But he seemed to like them and had fun gumming them in his mouth. I got it on video, will be online... eventually.

Zach got an email update claiming our shipment has arrived on shore. WOOT! Even better, they said that because our paperwork was in early we may already be cleared by customs (double WOOT!), but don't have confirmation of that yet. We need to be out of our temp place by Monday, and we're planning on being able to get a hold of a last few items we'd need to survive at the new place for a week or 2 if needed, but it sure would be nice if we could get all our things by the weekend.

I'm also kinda wigging out at realizing that we only have this week to do 1) buy a washer and dryer, 2) get internet hooked up at the house, 3) buy small, random household items like a shower curtain rod, and 4) probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting.

I have a halloween costume for D! Two, actually, one of which I'm gonna take back. We'd been planning to dress him as a Swiss cow, but then I saw this costume today and thought, "Oh.My.God. Donovan could dress up as the land shark." And how friggin awesome would that be? Ah, decisions, decisions. I actually have no idea what our plans might actually be for Halloween, and have given no thought whatsoever to what costume I might wear. Those are mere details. The important thing is, this is my baby's first halloween and there need to be lots and lots of pictures of him in a ridiculously adorable costume.

six word sunday: ...and turned into bushes, as punishment.

six word sunday challenge

Photos: Donovan and his Ladies

Yesterday was a big day. Julia, Sophia, Donovan, and I went over to our friend Paula's house to play with her girls, Josie and Dana. Dana's about a month younger than D, so I was excited to meet her and get them playing together. Donovan was totally psyched about getting to play with a roomful of NEW TOYS and interacted with his new buddies some, too.

Donovan and Sophia all cozy in the car about to head over to Paula's.


Dana kept lunging open-mouthed at Donovan's head. It's unclear whether she was trying to give kisses, or teeth on him. ; )


Sophia looks perplexed by it all.




Dana also kept grabbing Donovan's feet and toes. So cute!


Who knew plastic utensils could be SO MUCH FUN?




We lined up the kids to try to get a picture all together, It, um, kinda sorta worked...? =P


I think the kids all had a good time playing together, and I know I really enjoyed spending the day with two mamas and chatting about motherhood and all sorts of other things. Hopefully we can do this again sometime soon.

Change of Pace

Zach's been coming home around 5:30pm most evenings, and we often have a bit of time to take even a quick 15 minute stroll outside before starting the dinner/bath/bedtime routine. The other day I brought the camera with me and took some photos. I was pretty disappointed with the pictures I took, didn't think they'd turn out well at all. But then I spent a few minutes on the computer with them, and was pleased to see how a few simple tweaks turned them into something I now quite like:






And of course, I also have to share a couple Donovan shots:




And last but not least, a picture that made me laugh out loud this afternoon, curtesy of my sister and her new skills using Paint.NET: