Skipping Town

Last Saturday, we set out for a new adventure: our first road trip with Lucia and Greta. Andrew and I took many a road trip in our pre-children days, tooling around Spain and California, taking the long way, going off the map, pulling into small, newly discovered towns and worrying about a hotel only at the last minute; or finding great luxury rooms in San Francisco through Priceline or Hotwire, not caring where we stayed. We took a few short road trips with Lucia when she was a few months old, to San Francisco and wine country; and of course we've driven to Connellsville and up to New Hampshire. But sixteen hours from New Jersey to Jacksonville was taking our family road trips to a new level. We planned the trip from necessity--four holiday-season plane tickets and mountains of presents made flying unrealistic--and really didn't know what to expect. Andrew took command of the itinerary and planned our route down I-95, and in a rented SUV (our small station wagon wouldn't...

Dear Baby Grets, Oh, but you love being two. You've embraced it. You revel in it. The power of no! The power of your own will! It's intoxicating. You have learned that you can assert yourself and your whims in this family with just as much force as anyone else, and there's no going back. Your worst fits are triggered by having to put on your clothes, socks, shoes, and coat. You also don't like to be told no, or to give up something you want to hold onto, or to stop doing something you want to do. You have learned exactly how to enrage Lucia--grabbing her stuff and running away with it and refusing to give it back. When you're particularly angry, you don't just yell "No"--you scream it at an ear-splitting pitch and volume. If there were ever any considerations of a third child (there have not been), your two-ness would have squashed it expediently. After you are done with all this, we will be free of age two forever! All this said, you are also co...

Dear Lulu, ***Note: For the first time in four years, I'm going to combine two months of letters into one. I wrote your 50 Month letter last month, and forgot to post it; and now here we are, past time for Month 51, and I've missed this one too. It's New Year's Eve, and for the sake of finishing off the year all caught up with blogging, I'm going to just post a two-month post. Forgive me...*** As I've said before, being four years old seems to suit you. You can do more and more things on your own all the time--from getting dressed entirely to putting on your boots and coat to retrieving your scooter from the basement and carrying it upstairs. The house is your domain: you traverse it from top to bottom, from attic to basement, embracing the various activities you do in each room. Your bedroom: stacks of tiny cubes, elaborate games with your many princesses. The basement: riding your scooter, crawling through the tunnel-and-hut setup, coloring, doing art proj...

It's been busy busy busy around here the past few weeks, but we've been having lots of fun with the holidays. We went to Connellsville for Thanksgiving, driving during the day both there and back, and Lucia and Greta were superb travelers--playing together, playing with toys (especially their Magiclip princesses and small Gingerbread Girls). We had a great week--Andrew and I got to have some shopping getaways; and we had a night out at Lynn's Bar with Molly. Lucia and Greta loved playing with Luca. Neither girl ate more than a bite of Thanksgiving dinner. We also did our Christmas celebration, since Andrew and I will be in Florida for Christmas this year. The highlight, as always, was our homemade gifts. Molly made dot-painted boxes filled with recipe cards of the best recipes she made this year; for Lucia and Greta, she made boxes of elf donuts from Cheerios; Mom and Dad created a photo book with detailed, photographed instructions on making scrippelles; and I made tin...

Dear Little Grets, This later is late, and I have only you to blame, little one. This is just a fact of life right now: you are taxing. You take all our energy and then some. Most nights the last thing I can think about is writing a blog post. You have fully embraced Being Two, and we've entered a stage where everything--each piece of daily life--is a challenge. The hardest things are changing your diaper, putting on your clothes, putting on your socks, putting on your shoes, putting on your coat, getting you into your car seat. Unfortunately, these are all the things we have to do pretty much on a daily basis--usually more than once a day. This might be the winter that we just never leave the house. You're also getting frustrated with talking. You know so many words, and are putting two and three together--but you are more or less unintelligible. The three of us--Daddy, me, and Lucia--understand almost everything, but occasionally you stump us, and this makes you very angr...