Skipping Town

Dear Baby Grets, Little baby, you are an endless source of frustration and joy. When you are good, you are so very, very good: giggling, joking, dancing with wild abandon and surprisingly good rhythm. When you are...not so good, you are writhing and screaming on the floor instead of letting me put on your coat; you are taking off your socks and shoes as fast as I can put them on you; you are grabbing things from Lucia and running as fast as you can (which is pretty fast) around the house. You are full of opinions, more and more each day: you've even insisted on picking out your own clothes and pjs a few times. But you are so cute, and so silly, that we'll still keep you around. You love to pretend to put things in your mouth or into a cup of our coffee, watching for our reaction and then saying with high hilarity, "Noooo!" A tiny fairy Squinkie in Mama's coffee? Noooo! Does a plastic coin go in Greta's mouth? Nooo! And on and on. You find this hilarious...

Winter with little kids is hard. It is easier to be here, in a house, than it was to be cooped up in our apartment in Brooklyn. Here, at least, we have various areas to be cooped up in--we can be cooped up in the living room or play area; we can be cooped up in the kitchen; we can be cooped up in the basement playroom. Still, we are cooped up. It has been snowy and frigid, so there has been no opportunity whatsoever for going outside, and until this morning our car was snowed in. And so the past few days have been long, long, long. Tuesdays are always tough for me, since there's no preschool and no babysitter, and this Tuesday was made even harder by an early Greta wakeup, an early departure of Andrew for work, a long freezing day, and Andrew's post-work drinks, which meant he missed bedtime. (He actually skipped the drinks because of the snow, but then had a ridiculous two-hour commute; but I digress.) The day did not start promisingly: the girls' scream-laughing chase a...

Friday night, we had dinner plans with friends. We had reservations; we had a sitter all lined up; we had on nice clothes. We'd planned to leave once the girls were in bed. Andrew was giving them their bath when suddenly the power went out. Our entire neighborhood was pitch-black. There were some minutes of chaos as we grabbed the girls out of the water and put their (battery-operated) night-lights on. The power stayed off for an hour, putting our dinner plans in jeopardy; but five minutes before we needed to be at the restaurant, the lights came back on. We speed-walked into town and had a lovely dinner. On our way home, we ran into a neighbor walking her dog and accepted her invitation to come in for a drink. It was nice to be so free-wheeling until reality struck with Greta's 6:30am wakeup. Sigh. Sunday, our same dinner-friends came over in the morning, and the dads watched all five kiddos while the moms went to yoga. Then Andrew and our friend went out to chain-saw some l...

Dear Little Lulu, You're growing up so fast. It's suddenly apparent that you are not such a tiny little girl anymore--your hair is getting longer, your preferences for clothing more outrageous and personal. You love wearing tights, and spend most days in some sort of dress-up outfit, usually a leotard or leotard-with-attached-skirt. You are not bothered by the wintry cold in such outfits. I walk around the house in two sweaters, and there you are in a leotard. Right now you love playing hide and seek, and though our range is limited--you have yet to realize you can hide absolutely anywhere in the house and always just stick to whatever floor we're on--you manage to find inventive places, like covering yourself with pillows on the couch. It's hilarious when you and Greta both play. You both hide in the same place, and though you understand the point is to hide quietly, Greta squeals and scream-laughs, often popping out to see where I am then darting back into your...

Just backed up all my pictures (ha!) and thought I'd post a few more from our winter and holiday activities. Fun in the snow: Cookie baking: A folded-book Christmas gift: Playing "resting":

Two things happened to make our return journey memorable: it rained the entire way, both days, and Andrew erased all the content (pictures, contacts) on my iPhone. We got an early start on the 28th, drove in the rain, stopped for lunch at another great BBQ restaurant called Duke’s in Orangeburg, SC; drove in more rain. We stopped for the night in Christiansburg, Virginia, and made peanut butter sandwiches in the hotel room for the girls. Andrew and I ate takeout Olive Garden. (And I went to a Target just down the road before picking up our food to buy some 70%-off Christmas stuff.) The next day—breakfast at the hotel, and then more rain, and then a very unwise stop at a pub in Winchester, Virginia, where Greta was teetering dangerously on the edge of a total meltdown. I thought some videos would get us through lunch; couldn’t get the YouTube app because my iPhone hadn’t been updated in forever; Andrew decided he knew how to update my operating system; and then—everything was gone. My ...

We spent Christmas week in Jacksonville this year, a lovely reprieve from the winter back home. When we arrived, it was in the eighties; the girls got to play outside and run through the hose. They were ecstatic. They shared a room at Andrew’s parents’ house, which we weren’t sure was a great idea, but it worked out fine—once again showing us that we’re slowly approaching a time when we’ll once again be able to travel with some degree of sanity. The weather cooled but remained nice for most of the week, and we kept the girls outside as much as possible—going to playgrounds, looking for cats, playing with toys on the deck. The day after Christmas, Andrew, Lucia, Greta, and I even went out to Atlantic Beach. It was pretty cold that day, but the girls still took off their socks and shoes and ran in the surf. Greta made designs with shells in the sand. Lucia built an elaborate structure from sticks she found in the dunes. Andrew and I were freezing, but the girls were in no hurry to l...