Vacation, part one

First of all, let me say that (a) beach pictures are what I believe to be the quintessential family photo and (b) I believe that one can never take enough of them. That said, I am totally disappointed in my beach pictures from this year for two reasons:  (1) most of them are blurry and (2) I didn't take enough, although now I know that even if I had taken a million they would all have been blurry.

I love wearing glasses. Well, unless I get it in my head that maybe I'd like to try contacts until I remember that the thought of touching my eyeball  in any way, shape or form is a disgusting proposition. I digress. While at the beach, I could not for the life of me figure out why I couldn't get the binoculars to focus on the birds I was watching (why, yes, I became a bit of a bird watcher while we were gone) until Dad told me to try without my glasses. Problem solved. And then a second problem reared its ugly head, unbeknownst to me until we got home and I transferred all my pictures to my computer.

Anyone who wears glasses of any sort to the beach can tell you that they pretty much become enveloped in some kind of grainy, greasy fog pretty much the instant you step out on the beach or even anywhere near the beach. So everything that you see is through this fog and thus is a little bit blurry. This means that when I looked at all of my pictures as I was taking them, I thought that the blurriness was caused by the fact that my glasses were dirty. But, alas, it wasn't just my glasses that were dirty but also my camera lens. Lesson learned. So long story short, all of my beach pictures are grainy and blurry. Boo.

Moving along.

This was my view in the quiet of the early mornings, with my best girl eating down below as I took these. Sorry about the screen getting in the way but I wasn't about to lug all of us out and down the stairs in search of a better photo vantage point. Still pretty, screen or not. It kind of makes up for the progressively earlier wakeup times that Laura provided over the course of our vacation. The early bird in her has really hung on. (This was also before the lens dirtiness set in.)

I'm including this picture for a few reasons: (1) Laura's giraffe print bathing suit. Really, does it get any cuter than that?  (2) Evidence of the blurry lens. (3) Also evidence that my father is half crazy. We had a six-passenger golf cart but Dad insisted on riding a bike everywhere. He actually kept up with the golf car and, on more than one occasion, beat us to our destination. If you've ever wondered where Will's boundless energy comes from, look no further than the upper left hand corner of this picture. (Also, if you're unfamiliar with it, we went to Bald Head Island, where the only modes of transportation are golf cart, bike, or foot.)

While Laura is generally a pleasant baby, this pretty much sums up her feelings about the beach. Her expression in almost every picture is the same, with the combination of pretty fierce winds, heat, sand, and sun sapping a little of her happy little self. Never fear, though, she still had fun, as it's virtually impossible not to be having fun with the extra attention of no less than five of your grandparents (one of those being her great-grandmother!) at the ready for your entire vacation. 

Will and Dad building an elaborate sand castle. Now Will is totally disappointed in his "dirt castles" that he attempts to build on his construction site here at home.

We're trying to get back into our normal home routine, back to reality. A reality that includes lots and lots of stuff to be done around here. (Sometimes I get the feeling that our house must require much more maintenance and work than is normal. Maybe I'm just feeling sorry for myself?) The diggers are back on our street and I'm hoping that this means that our sidewalks will be finished soon, thereby making our morning walks a little bit smoother. (Before you think our morning walks somehow make us health-conscious and very active, please consider that 90% of them end up at Starbucks.)

I have more beach pictures to share, lots of cousin and family pictures that I'm more disappointed in being blurry than anything else. And all of Laura's first beach experiences are seen through a fog. The saddest part of all is that my camera really does take good pictures, after you factor in moronic user error and all...

Happy Wednesday!

(PS. Blogger is doing something weird with the margins and spacing today. I'll try to fix it later. Sorry.)

Just when I thought I couldn't love her any more . . .

Laura's latest hobby is crawling into her room and getting into the basket of books that's under the nightstand. Happy as a clam, she'll stay in there flipping pages and "reading" for a good half hour. (It appears so far that both of the kids have inherited their parents' love of reading and now the challenge is for us to keep it that way.)

(Also, I'd like to just go ahead and admit that girls' clothing is kind of cuter than most boy options out there. Not really fair, I guess, but true.)

I'm trying to work on my vacation pictures so hopefully I'll share something tomorrow.

Bits and pieces

Somehow I appear to have misplaced the entire month of May and beginning of June. How can it already be (almost) mid-June? I feel like Will should maybe just be finishing up with school and here we are smack dab in the middle of summer. Weather-wise and otherwise.

We've been pretty busy around here, which is kind of strange to me since it seems like we should be lounging around at home painting each others' toenails or some other such summery activity. But, no. We've been out and about and working outside and trying to finish up with lots of little (and bigger) home projects and trying to get ready for vacation. But, really, is this anything different than what everyone else is most likely doing? Probably not.

I spent all of Memorial Day weekend working in the flower bed out by the street. (Really, who needs to have that area landscaped? I struggle to see the necessity of making this area pretty when most people use this space to pile up their leaves in the fall to wait on the leaf-sucker to make its rounds or to put their sticks to be collected by the mulching truck or to place yard waste bags to be picked up. But, alas, our small space is full of plants and flowers and in need of constant weeding and mulching and rearranging and pruning.) At the end of the weekend, I was sore and exhausted but it looked the best it's looked in a long while. Jamison mentioned, jokingly, that the utility company would probably be coming to work on our street and sidewalk the very next day, as they'd placed their white flag of destruction in our landscaping about a month and a half ago or so. I laughed wearily and didn't think much more about it.

But I did illustrate this handy little picture for you:

And you know what's coming next, don't you? This happened the very next day:

They ripped out the entire middle of the landscaping with a giant digger, which Will loved, of course. Me, not so much. Honestly, they did a pretty good job of not making a giant mess of everything, but still. All my hard work was kind of ruined. And our sidewalk was busted up in the area between the cones. It's still not fixed. Boo.

Will was so excited, though. He sat and watched every move the men made. (And kept referring to them, king of embarrassingly, as "workers," which comes from his fascination with Richard Scarry books, in which he refers to the various characters as such. But still, it felt a little too lord/peasant-y for my taste.)

After this, we went to the playground some.

Laura's a fan of the swings.

And Will's a fan of the slides. (He's saying "weeee!") This picture just makes me laugh.

Finally, we went to the zoo Wednesday to meet my bff and her babies who are no longer babies.

Amanda (black tank and sunglasses), Hanna (blue tank and plaid shorts), and Chloe (posing sultrily next to Laura in the stroller), along with us. I especially like Will's pose and the fact that Laura's hair kind of looks like a toupee. I know I poked fun at all the tank tops we saw at the zoo the last time we were there, but I want to make clear that I find regular tank tops (ones that offer full coverage and no views of tattoos) on women perfectly acceptable. I also would like to make clear that I'm not a drug addict, as I appear to be in this picture. (In the picture, I'm looking at Will which results in a strange angle and look, and we'd been there for over an hour in 90-something degree heat, so it could've been even worse, I suppose.)

In all seriousness, even though we only saw them for about five minutes (in which Will roped everyone into a gratuitous train ride), it was so nice to see them. One of my greatest hopes for both of my kids is that they find a friend like Amanda has been to me since I can remember. I'm not certain that everyone has that and the thought of them not having it is sad to me. We don't get to see each other much these days, and our communication is mainly via email now, but we're pretty low maintenance that way. We can pick up right where we left off. Someday we'll be in the nursing home together and then we'll really get to make up for lost time. We'll be the two old women cackling at a wildly inappropriate joke that Amanda made. You won't be able to miss us.

Will on the train, another of his happy places.

And just because it's Friday and it's too cute not to share, this is what Laura's wearing today. Hot pants and a halter. It's so cute I'm pretty sure it's illegal in some states.

Happy weekend!

Here and there

I really have no plan for where this will end up but it's nice out (i.e. not 95 degrees with 98% humidity) and I'm sitting on our dirty deck watching Will dig on his "construction site" so I thought maybe now would be a good time to attempt something more significant than a few pictures and some half-hearted commentary on them. If you count a list as "significant," anyway.

1) Reunion. Somehow it's been 10 years since I graduated from college. Somehow I've only managed to return to Lynchburg twice in those 10 years. (Once for a brief night or two on our way to the beach with Ann and Whitney and another short stop there for Lucy's wedding.) I had forgotten how pretty Lynchburg is and especially how nice the houses there are. When I told my mom this, she asked me why I thought she and my aunt liked to come visit me so much. (And I think she was only half kidding.)

I will write more soon on my little school (I don't mean "little" to be dismissive or belittling) and some things that I've been thinking about since returning there but for now, I will say that it was nice to go back to the first place where I ever had to make it on my own, where I didn't know a single person and I was as anonymous as I'd ever felt (insofar as one can be "anonymous" at a small school, which isn't very, but it felt almost exotic to me to be somewhere where I could go to the grocery store and not be guaranteed to recognize at least every other person as a familiar face). I left the small town where I'd lived my whole life (in the same house, no less) to escape that stifling sense of familiarity, where every single thing I'd ever done wrong (or right, in fairness) was shared with the entire town in what felt like a matter of minutes.

But truthfully, now that I look back on it, it was this very same quality that I was most drawn to in my little school. People spoke to you, they got to know you, your professors knew your name. It was comfortable. (And gorgeous.) It was still comfortable. And still gorgeous. With one small difference. They've gone coed. And I'm still kind of pissed about it. But that's another topic for another day because I think I could fill up a novel on that subject. And novel-writing isn't exactly what I've set out to do today.

2) When Will returned from his little WV vacation, he had two doctor's appointments. One was to assess the status of his perpetually infected ears and another to assess the status of his potentially lazy eye. The verdict on both was that he's perfectly fine. Finally (after months), his ears are clear. His vision is nearly perfect. The highlight of the day was when he told the nurse at the eye doctor's that (and I'm quoting him exactly here) he "doesn't have any decent toys" at home. I thought the nurse was going to fall off of her stool. Our basement is apparently full of toys of the non-decent sort.

3) We are leaving for the beach in sixteen days. Can you tell that we're excited? Will keeps asking if we're leaving tomorrow.

4) Will also told us this morning after Jamison asked him if he liked all of the four thousand blackberries he consumed yesterday that he was in fact allergic to them. Just FYI.

5) He also told me to "watch his technique" as he plunged from the back of the couch to the cushions. (This was also after he had been told approximately 25 times not to do this but I let him slide after he said this.) I seriously wonder where he gets some of the stuff he says. It's certainly not from television, as we've been on a major tv cleanse since the beginning of summer. Will's kind of like an addict with tv, which could partially be our fault since we've kind of made it out to be his forbidden fruit of sorts. I've found that his behavior, though, is a million times better when he doesn't watch tv, in part because he's so high energy that any time spent outside instead of in front of a screen of any sort generally means better results for all involved. This coincides with our getting cable, of all things, since we had to get a land line due to my phone never working in the house.

6) Laura is getting braver by the day. And while it's certainly not an accomplishment of mind-boggling proportions for a 14-month-old, she's nearing walking.Which is funny because Will took his first steps over Memorial Day weekend three years ago. So far, though, Laura doesn't appear to subscribe to the Kamikaze Baby school of thought, which is a nice change from Will's impulsive ways. And . . . here's the kicker:  she appears to actually be capable of listening. While it's still early and I know we can't predict exactly what her personality will be, you could have almost knocked me over with a feather the first time I gave her the stern "No!" (of the electrical outlet variety, a special brand of sternness) and she actually stopped, turned around, and crawled away. It's happened enough at this point that I know it wasn't a fluke.

The first time it happened, I picked her up and danced around with her as though she'd just won the Nobel Peace Prize or developed the sudden capability to do yardwork or babysit her brother. And, I'll freely admit, I really had to laugh at the idea that nurture trumps nature. I know she's young and we could be in for it at another point in her life, but really, right now, I'm savoring this girl. This girl who is just so easy and so pleasant that I can see how people may be tempted to simply chalk up their kids' good behavior solely to their mad parenting skillz and laugh down their noses at parents who happen to have a Will in their midst.

I'm learning from both of them. From one, that it's never too early to be outfoxed by your child on a regular basis. And from the other, the redemptive value of an easygoing personality. I could easily have at least two more if I could be assured that they'd be just like Laura. It's so unspeakably nice to have some of my confidence in myself as a disciplinarian restored.

7) And finally, there's really nothing quite like a four year old to lend some levity to your daily conversational topics. Our last few days we've talked about race (after he noticed that the two sanitation workers were black and he said he couldn't be a "trash man" because he wasn't black)*, what "war" means, and the differences, both real and perceived, between the sexes. And here I thought I had a few years before we'd be getting into the more meaty subjects . . . We've yet to hit on the finer points of major world religions, but there's always tomorrow, right?

*For anyone who's curious, I'm currently reading NurtureShock and the authors talk about how we're really doing our kids a disservice by not directly addressing race out of a desire to be pc. So I used the opportunity to point out how anyone of any race could be a sanitation worker while I silently pleaded with the universe to please steer him in a totally different direction in his future career path.