Vacation photos!

So this August we rented a beach house in Rhode Island for a week.  It was great!  Everyone enjoyed it.  Especially Gilly.

It was an easy walk from the house to the beach -- Gretchen's favorite, I might add.

We lucked out on the week that we picked for our vacation:  both of my brothers could spare some time to come to visit!  That meant that Scott and Julia came to visit with Sage and new, cute, and somewhat pneumatic baby Jura (despite Scott's new job at Harvard) and that Seth and Lana flew in from Texas with Katelyn and James (despite their hectic work schedules and Lana's night school classes).  Here's a pictures of all of Grammy Donna's (Did I mention she came, too?  So did Gretchen's mom) grandkids on the couch:

I don't want to start another "sea monster" craze, but what is this thing? Mom took the picture and says it's a big bird of prey taking a sizable fish out of the water for its dinner.  I have my doubts, though...
Especially since I think that this could be one of the monster's partially decomposed feet, washed up on the shore (which would explain the stink at certain points along the beach, come to think of it).

Anyway.  The kids had a lot of fun even if, come bedtime, they were all parked on the floor of one room like SUVs on the Block Island ferry.

They're still working on that bike path to Block Island, by the way.  So if you're planning on biking there, make sure you bring a towel in a Ziploc bag to wipe the salt water off your frame afterwards.

Lots of fun.

Maybe too much fun.

James and Harry played with Star Wars toys and Legos much of the time they were there.  Mom took this picture and originally captioned it "James and Harry or Seth and Ben?"  I still like Lego, and I know Seth still digs Star Wars.  Oh, and if you happen to be the people who rented the house after we did, I'm so sorry for the Lego bits you probably stepped on in the middle of the night.

Well, that's about it.  Except for one strange bit of deja vu.  When I first walked into this rental, I thought to myself, "I've been here before."  See, I had some friends who went to URI for college and these beach houses get rented out to college students in off season.  But there are lots of beach houses, probably all built at or about the same time.  Probably all look similar, right?

Maybe.  But when I banged my elbow on the corner of the sink while using the bathroom in the middle of the first night there?  That clinched it.  I've definitely been there before.

A Big Day

This is a big day at our house. First and foremost, Gillian turns four!


Harry, who has been on a whirlwind tour of grandmothers' houses, is coming home.


AND Nicky is coming home from camp!


Gretchen and I can kiss goodbye the bliss that comes with having only one child at home. But we missed them. And boy howdy, did Pablo miss Harry.

A day in my life...

Guest blogger, Gretchen

It takes me twice as long to get anything done.

Case in point: I was lining the pan for the brownies. I finished the
roll so I put the box in the recycle bin.

Gilly goes behind me, pulls it out and starts marching around the
house with it.

Normally ok, but not with this--metal cutting edge!

I ask her to give it back and end up chasing her down to wrestle it
from her and dispose of it.

Now...where was I??

Wedding

We went to a wedding this weekend. A family friend and our former babysitter tied the knot. It was a lovely ocassion and the kids looked fantastic!

Gilly got dressed up to be the flower girl. It didn't stop her from squashing bugs, though.


The kids behaved themselves exceptionally well, even through a long church service.
Well, mostly behaved themselves.

Harry was the ring bearer, and looked killer in his rental tux.

LOLs

...just stuff I do when I'm goofing off. And yes, I wrote them all.

Muppet Spin-Off?

I was talking to Gretchen the other morning about the Muppet Show.



Like so many around my age, I was a big fan of the show. My favorites were Prof. Bunsen Honeydew and his hapless assistant, Beaker.



I actually used an impression of Beaker as part of the courtship ritual I used on Gretchen. Regardless, I've always thought that Bunsen and Honeydew could have spun-off from the Muppet Show to have their own TV series.

"They did," Gretchen says.

"Really?" How could I miss it? I would have watched every episode!

"Yeah, it's called Mythbusters."



Of course. And I do watch every episode.

Breathing Normally Again

I gotta tell you, it's nice to breathe without making bubbly gurgle noises.

And in response to my last post, I made it to 2PM before I had to go lie down. I reawoke at, like, 8PM. So that experiment had mixed results.

Gilly, we think, is getting better but has a wicked case of "sick baby syndrome". She can't bear to do anything but cling to Gretchen and complain bitterly about her lot in life. Not fun.

Speaking on Gilly, a funny thing happened the other night. We have an old baby monitor. Gretchen got it when Nicky was born so it's about 10 years old. Has two different channels, "X" and "Y". What with the creeping illness, we started using it to keep an ear out for Gilly during the night.

So the other night we start hearing a baby crying through the monitor. Gretchen is up and out the door like a flash. I've never seen anyone move that fast, let alone Gretchen. Me, I'm none too swift when awoken in the middle of the night so it took me a few minutes to realize that something wasn't right.

Gretchen races into Gilly's room, but I don't hear Gretchen through the cacophony on the monitor. Then Gretchen comes racing up the stairs, and bursts into Harry's room, across the hall from our upstairs room. And there's this wild, panicked look in her eyes. "It's not Gilly!" she screams as she charges back downstairs to check on Nicky and Gilly again.

Blink, blink. Um, what's going on here?

Gretchen whirls back into the room, and she's electric with nervous energy. "I checked Gilly, she's asleep. Nick's asleep. I think I woke up Harry when I checked on him. The crying isn't coming from our house!"

Oh, yeah. I guess someone else's monitor was tuned to our frequency. Oops.

But you know, in the time that it took Gretchen to check on all her babies twice, our neighbors still hadn't gotten up to take care of their kid. So how's that for a Super Mom?