I just realized that I didn’t take a single photo of the cupcakes Annalie decorated for her birthday party today. I took the photo above of one of the unfrosted cupcakes, because happy cupcake is happy, and that’s kinda neat. I took a few shots of the kids eating cupcakes at the party, but the decorations probably aren’t very visible, and who knows when I’ll get around to downloading those photos off the memory card anyway.

I’m bummed that I don’t have a picture of the cupcakes, because she really had fun decorating them. But I also think, “Eh. Whatever.” And that indifference bums me out a little bit too.

There was a reason I was kind of distracted today, though. Sonja—one of my favorite people on this or any other planet—was busy having her baby yesterday and today, and I was checking my phone every time I even imagined it might have beeped or buzzed, anxious for news. From the little I’ve heard, the day was far more exciting than they would have liked, but everyone is fine. Whew. Also, yay! Baby!

I was going to try to blog every day this month. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to make a big thing of it, I just wanted to set myself the goal and see if I could reach it. I did great for nine days. Maybe I should just be thankful I got that many posts written, and work on keeping myself afloat until there’s another calm week when I can write a post every day. Maybe intermittent blogging is all I can do right now.

I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that it’s impossible for me to do all the things I need to do in my daily life (homeschool an 8-year-old and parent a toddler, be a halfway decent wife/daughter/sister, keep the clutter and dishes and laundry from taking over the house, cook the occasional meal, crochet baby blankets and golden snitches, keep up email correspondence with friends, sleep more than four hours a night) AND ALSO blog on a regular basis. At least not like I used to, with lots of photos and thoughtfully composed paragraphs.

I just…can’t. And that makes me really sad. I don’t know what else could possibly give at this point. I guess I could give up reading and TV. I’ve already basically given up painting, and am trying to find a way to cram exercising back in there somewhere.

Sigh.

Then, as I was backing out of my spot in the parking garage, I was distracted and talking to one of the kids and forgot I was parked next to a giant concrete post. You see where this is going, right? I plowed right into the post with my door and knocked the sideview mirror off. There’s a pretty severe dent right under the mirror, about four inches wide from top to bottom. Pretty sure that one will be expensive to fix. But on the bright side, no one was injured and I destroyed no property that didn’t belong to me. And I have learned that when I am in a parking garage, I need to make sure the sun shades on the windows are down. I realized after the accident, when we’d all calmed down and I’d finished a phone conversation with Troy and I went to back out of the spot again, that with the sun shade up, it was dark enough in the parking garage that I couldn’t see the post out that window at all.

Since we were across the street from the store where I needed to pick up a photo order, I went ahead and did that. Then, after I’d carefully checked and re-checked my mirrors and over my shoulders, I reversed slowly out of my parking space and tapped a shopping cart that had rolled right into my path as I was backing up. It made Annalie declare that the day was cursed. (There was no damage to the back of the minivan or the cart, thank goodness.)

Roasted veggies for dinner, plus a chance to work out for the first time in days, an amazing season finale for Castle, and a great nerd twitter party with friends discussing which Hogwarts houses the Avengers, Commander Data and various others would be sorted into redeemed the day, though. Here’s to a less eventful Tuesday.

Outside my window there is a supermoon!

I am thinking about The Avengers. Troy and I just went to see it this evening (on opening day!) and it was really, really excellent. Joss Whedon knows how to direct an ensemble cast like no one else, man. Usually during action movies I get pretty bored during the action sequences, but I wasn’t bored for a single minute during this movie, which simultaneously felt like it flew by and went on far longer than 2 hours, 20 minutes. There were a couple of cameos that were a pleasant surprise, and I laughed out loud many times. When the end credits started I turned to Troy and said, “I wanna see that again.”

I am thankful for the fact that the big database Troy’s division was working on, the one that was causing him to work such ridiculously late hours and some weekends, has been turned over. Troy has been coming home in time for dinner most of this week, and it’s been fantastic. I know it won’t last, but I’m enjoying it while it does.

I am wearing dark gray yoga pants and this t-shirt. Why ARE there so many songs about arcs of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 380 and 750 nm in concentric bands formed by the refraction and reflection of solar energy off of moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere? (Though really…there aren’t that many.)

I am remembering that I really loved the TV show “The Incredible Hulk.”

I am going to the National Mall tomorrow. We thought it would be cool to take Aurora downtown and take photos of her in front of some national monuments and museums, so she’ll be able to see evidence that she visited D.C. when she’s older.

I am currently reading Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. Well, re-reading it, really. It’s only been released in the UK so far, but it will be released in the U.S. and Canada next February. So if you think you’d like a book that’s funny and sad, sarcastic and sincere, and above all geeky—a book about two misfit high-schoolers who accidentally end up sitting on the school bus together every day and fall in love over X-Men and Watchmen comic books and mix tapes featuring The Cure and the Smiths—a book about falling in love the way you do when you’re 16 and it’s your first love and everything is desperate and hopeless and wildly hopeful—then stay tuned. I’ll be talking about E&P again in February, have no fear.

I am hoping that out cats will stop vomiting and peeing and pooping all over the place. But I know it’s a forlorn hope. They’re 16 and 10 years old. They’re gonna be throwing up on our carpets and peeing on our laundry and pooping right next to the litter box until they die, probably. Sigh.

On my mind: Uh…my mind is a blank for once. Fringe? We’re watching Part 1 of the Season 4 finale right now.

Noticing that I need a pedicure. And to use lotion on my hands more often.

Around the house things are getting rather messy. Three kids create so much more mess than two. I don’t even wanna think about what four kids would be doing.

In the kitchen, there is a bag of gumdrops. BRB.

One of my favorite things is the bouquet of orange ranunculus and pink tulips sitting on our mantel.

From my photo archive: our friends’ daughter holding a woolly caterpillar on a stick at the beach in April 2007.

*cough, cough* Gracious! It’s dusty in here, isn’t it? Let me just wipe away these cobwebs and blow off the dust…there, that’s better. I’m a little embarrassed at how I’ve neglected things around here. I have resolved to do better in May. Wish me luck.

My mom and my niece Aurora are here visiting us for a few weeks! It’s fun having them here, but my mom and I have been a little surprised by how much more exhausting it is to have three kids in the house (two of them toddlers) than it is to have only two. Of course, this is partly because Aurora has never been to our house before, had never flown on a plane, had never been more than a couple hours’ drive away from Omaha before. And Aurora is very two right now. In fact, she’s just about two and a half, which means she’s entering that period of disequilibrium that kids often go through around their half-birthdays. (I’ve talked about this before with Annalie.)

Since Elliora is almost exactly a year younger than Aurora, she’s been going through a bit of disequilibrium herself lately, which isn’t surprising. She’s changing so fast these days, adding new words every day and even putting them together in short sentences. Three of her first-year molars have just popped through her gums, and at the park the other day she was climbing all over the big-kid play structure and going down the slides without any help from anyone. She cracks us up every day with mannerisms and reactions that seem older than her 18 months. She regularly eats more than her big sister, and when we have brussels sprouts or asparagus (!?) she eats as much or more than I do. She is meeting life head-on and keeping up with her cousin and big sister just fine.

Annalie, meanwhile, is almost eight! Her birthday is only eight days away. She’s been simply FANTASTIC with her sister and her cousin. She’s been patient and calm through tantrums and craziness. Since they’ve both been sitting in the back row of the minivan, Annalie has been buckling Aurora into her carseat every time we go anywhere, and unbuckling her at the other end. She’s willingly shared food and toys with the littles, and more than once she’s cheerfully agreed to wait to do something she wanted to do until naptime. I think I’m gonna love eight.

What have you guys been up to?

There are so many violets in our backyard in the spring that it looks almost completely purple for a couple of weeks. It’s one of the reasons Elliora’s middle name is Violet, because our backyard looked like this around the time we found out we were pregnant. It was actually even more violet-covered a week before this, believe it or not. It’s almost the end of violet season around here.

Here’s an alternate Day 7 shot. Our LED twinkle lights (they’re not Christmas lights because we keep them up year-round) cast interesting pools of light and shadow on the ceiling and walls around them. I was inspired by Bex’s shot of her grandparents’ vintage bunch-of-grapes lamp and the cool shadows it cast.

Hey, look! I am actually done blogging every single one of my 7 Days photos from the run that was only a couple of weeks ago! Not only that, but…I MADE IT THROUGH THE WHOLE WEEK WITHOUT GETTING SICK. IT WAS A 7 DAYS MIRACLE! *cue angelic choirs*

I expect to come down with the plague shortly, now that I said that. (Although I originally wrote that almost two weeks ago and I’m still not sick.) I guess there was that toothache I had that week—really that I had had on and off since around my birthday almost a month ago. It was finally resolved on Day 6 when I went to the dentist. It turned out the problem was a cavity in one of my remaining wisdom teeth. The solution was easy: pull the tooth. It was done and I was driving home less than 30 minutes later, much relieved. I don’t really count that as being sick.

While I’m blogging, a couple of quick things:

• Up until a few days ago, I was more than a month behind on uploading photos to Flickr. I’m still taking photos every day, I just don’t get around to doing anything with them. I’m starting to catch up and am hoping to be caught up before I leave for Omaha. Wish me luck.
• Instagram finally released an app for Android phones, just a few days before Facebook bought Instagram. So I’m enjoying using Instagram as a new, easy way to share photos from my phone on Twitter and Facebook. Or you can see my photos here.
• Elliora has a new favorite all-purpose word, suitable for all sentiments and occasions: MINE. Her dad’s laptop? “Mine!” Annalie’s jacket? “Mine!” My frosted mini-wheats? “Mine mine mine!” Lily the cat? “MIIIIIINE!”
• We’re heading to Omaha on Friday, just me and the girls. (Poor Troy, he has to stay here and work, and have the house to himself for a week and a half.) When we come home, my mom and my niece are coming with us. They’re going to stay and visit for three whole weeks and will be here to celebrate Annalie’s eighth birthday. We’re all pretty excited about that.
• Party plans for Annalie’s birthday were on hold for a while, because we weren’t sure if my mom was going to be able to come here, or if she’d have to stay in Omaha because of some family obligations. Now that we know, I have sorted out the party plans and I think it’s gonna be really fun. It’s a big relief to finally have a plan.
• Chris wrote something great about blogging with two small children that expressed perfectly how I feel, so I’m just going to quote her:
  

  Well, I’d still love to have an awesome, regularly-updated website. That endeavour is sitting on a back burner, as our time and energy are all earmarked for other stuff for a while.

  In my mind I have an enormous stovetop with quite a lot of burners, especially at the back.

• I started a page to keep track of all the words Elliora says. She’s adding about three or four new ones every day. There’s a button for it over on the sidebar. —>

How on earth did it get to be mid-April already!?

Last week, Troy didn’t get home until after 9pm every single night. And then he went to work at 8:30 on Saturday morning and didn’t come home till after 10pm. On Sunday he “only” worked from 11am till 7pm. And today, he didn’t get home till almost 9:30pm.

Elliora didn’t see Troy from Sunday night until Saturday morning. Annalie only saw him once or twice when she was still awake when Troy went in to give her a kiss good night. Troy’s sister Dana and her son Leo came up for a visit over the weekend, and they barely saw Troy at all. (We had fun sightseeing with them, though, and it was nice having them around to distract us from the fact that Troy was gone all weekend.)

It hasn’t been too bad. Annalie, Elliora and I have been chugging along, doing our usual thing. It’s actually been good, having zero expectation that Troy would be home early enough to have dinner or give Elliora a bath or help with bedtime. Of course I wish Troy were home earlier, but it’s okay that he hasn’t been. I’ve managed all right, even if I am more exhausted than usual, and a little more stressed out.

But still. I’m hoping that these crazier-than-crazy hours don’t last much longer. We’re all hoping.

p.s. Isn’t my new daffodilly spring banner awesome!? Thanks, Brenda!

We’ve had a string of good days lately. It’s probably due to a combination of factors—we’re recovered from all the travel we did in January and February, no one is sick, everyone is sleeping better—but I think the biggest factor is that we’ve gotten back into a routine.

I know that I function better when life is somewhat predictable, and I know that my kids do too. For some reason I have a really hard time sticking to a routine, even under ideal circumstances; throw a baby and frequent travel and a husband regularly working long hours into the mix and all is confusion and chaos and lost tempers and pouting and hands thrown up in defeat.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across some reading and math workbooks that looked like a good fit for Annalie. I had Annalie look them over, and she thought they looked good too. We talked, and agreed that we were going to start out by doing one lesson per day from each book. That’s not very much, considering that last year before Elliora was born we were consistently doing two to three hours of sit-down schoolwork per day, but I figured it would be a good way to ease back into things.

At first, Annalie resisted every suggestion that it was time to do some schoolwork, but I stayed calm and persisted. She thought it was pretty cool when I told her that she could take a pre-test before each math chapter, and if there were concepts she already had a grasp on, we could skip some of those lessons. Within a couple days, she had stopped arguing and was doing the work with no complaint. Now, she actually seems excited to sit down and do school. (Of course, this is in addition to all of the unschooly things we do every day, but it seemed like it was time to re-introduce some discipline back into our days, for both of us.)

Today, she suggested that instead of doing the one page of reading in the workbook, she could read the Magic School Bus book that my mom had just sent her. I told her that was a great idea. She read every single word in that book to me, without hesitation or angst. We paused several times to discuss additional information she’d gleaned about the subject (teeth) from Wild Kratts (you might want to turn your volume down before clicking that link). The reading moved from the dining-room table to Elliora’s bedroom briefly when there was a diaper change, and Annalie didn’t even blink, just moved, made herself comfortable in the nursing chair, and kept reading.

Something seems to have clicked for Annalie with both reading and math recently. She’s had the skills for a long time, but it was almost as if she wasn’t emotionally ready to read on her own. Now, she’s suddenly doing multiplication and adding two-column numbers in her head with ease. She’s reading pretty much everything she sees without much difficulty at all. She still isn’t what I’d call a reader, which makes me a little sad, but that’s okay. I imagine that there are a lot of people who would shake their heads at all the hours I spent indoors reading books as a kid when I could have been outside enjoying fresh air and sunshine.

I think when she’s ready, Annalie will discover chapter books and how reading them is like seeing a movie in your head. (Also, she’ll discover the house rule that kids have to turn off the light at bedtime…unless they’re reading. That’ll probably motivate her to read more!) Until then, there isn’t really a reason to rush. One of the best things about homeschooling is that kids have the freedom to move at their own pace. And I’ve been doing this long enough now that I know Annalie really will move ahead. She doesn’t really do slow and steady. Just when it seems like she’s been stalled in the same place forever, she’ll leap and bound far ahead of where I would have expected her to be. And that’s absolutely, totally okay.

In addition to the ease with which we’ve been getting schoolwork done every day, Annalie has gone from surly and uncooperative to pleasant and helpful when it comes to unloading the dishwasher, playing with Elliora while I make dinner, putting her toys away, running downstairs to fetch me a Coke Zero, whatever. I suppose her change in attitude is partly because she’s consistently getting more sleep, and partly because she’s not seven and a half anymore (she’ll be eight in two months). But mostly, I think it’s because we’ve gotten a good routine going.

Annalie knows that when she wakes up, she can play games on my laptop or watch one of her shows until Elliora and I come out for breakfast. She knows that after breakfast, she can play till 8:45, when I’ll ask her to unload the dishwasher if it needs doing. She knows that after that, we’ll sit down and do some schoolwork until it’s time for Elliora’s morning nap, and so on. And knowing what’s coming next seems to make her happy.

It makes perfect sense, really. I’m the same way. I can handle unpredictability better than she can, probably, but I am a lot happier when I know what’s coming up, even though I resist schedules. That’s why I am writing this post: to remind myself, when I start to slide away from the routine, that it really does make things easier. And if we have a routine, then we get to experience the best part about living a predictable life: doing something unpredictable! Being spontaneous is about a hundred times more fun when you have a routine to break away from.

We’ve never been big on Valentine’s Day around our house. I’ve always told Troy that I’d rather he buy me a $10 bouquet of flowers on any random day of the year than spend $50 on roses on Valentine’s Day. Restaurants are too crowded on the 14th, and all the good candy is half-off on the 15th.

Then last night Troy came home with the news that he was going to have to stay late at work tonight because of a meeting his bosses are having. He doesn’t have to go to the meeting, mind you; he just has to sit around waiting for it to be done just in case they need him to do something after it’s over. That’s pretty typical of his job right now. We don’t love that aspect of our life, but we’re used to it, sadly. And at least we knew ahead of time that he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner, so we were able to eat at one of our favorite restaurants last night with the girls and call it an early Valentine’s Day dinner.

Today, Annalie and I made PB&J Valentine Cookies (while Elliora looked cute in her too-big apron and begged chocolate chips) and they are delicious. Later I might try making some Compost Cookies (despite the gross name, the recipe sounds delicious), and after the girls are in bed Troy and I will have a late supper of spicy California rolls and roasted asparagus and Annika‘s baguette drizzled with olive oil, topped with dark chocolate and coarse sea salt, oven-toasted. We’ll probably watch the second half of the BBC production of Sense and Sensibility that features Dan Stevens (the actor who plays Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey!) as Edward Ferrars. Not a bad night, Valentine’s Day or no.

I’ve been a little blue lately, thinking about how we were supposed to be moving back to San Diego right now, until our move got pushed back six months. Although we do like being close to some of our friends and family here, and we enjoy taking advantage of the great museums and monuments in D.C., we don’t love living on the East Coast. It’s far away from most of our family and friends, and we just plain like San Diego and are eager to live there again.

The biggest reason we’re ready to leave is the long hours Troy has been spending at his job. We knew when we moved here that it wasn’t going to be a cushy shore job, that there would be periods of time when he’d be working late many nights in a row. And the first year we lived here, that’s what it was: periods of time, with long breaks in between where he was home in time for dinner and for a couple hours before Annalie’s bedtime nearly every day.

For the past year that is not how it’s been. Troy has been working long hours, just barely getting home in time to tuck Annalie in around 8pm most nights. Family dinners are a rare occurrence. We’re all burned out and ready to be done with this phase of our lives.

But the fact is, we need to hang in there for another six months. We have reason to hope that the long hours will taper off this summer and things will go back to a more normal schedule. In the meantime, we’re trying to think positive. Being here another six months means we have that much longer to visit our local(ish) friends and family. We have the spring and summer to enjoy the Smithsonian and national monuments. And we have a little more time for visitors, which we always love. And it could be worse; Troy could be deployed on a ship and gone completely for the next six months. So there are many reasons to look on the bright side.

Huh. Not sure how this post turned into a rant. Then again, pretty much everything I say these days comes around to this topic of how much I am over Troy’s long hours and how tired we all are and how ready we are to move on. I’m a broken record, a boring broken record. I even annoy myself.

I’ll focus on the good things instead. Like Elliora’s enthusiasm for eating a whole peeled apple, or Annalie eating—and liking!—pasta with eggplant, or the vanilla sea salt caramels Troy brought home for me.

Happy Valentine’s Day from all of us to all of you!

Annalie drew these teeny portraits of our family on something, and I knew immediately I would use them for return-address labels on our Christmas cards. She draws stuff like this all the time that surprises and delights me. It’s fairly awesome.

You know what else is fairly awesome? You guys are. Thank you for sticking with me and continuing to read through the past year of baby-induced blog neglect; supporting me and saying kind things when I am frustrated or troubled; cheering me up with your funny stories when I need to laugh; and just generally being some of the nicest people on the internets. I wish each and every one of you a happy, healthy new year full of good things. May 2012 be the year you learn to tango, go on your dream vacation, see your kids succeed wildly, eat more vegetables, own your beauty, read life-changing books, find a new favorite drink, or whatever it is you think about when you wish upon a star.

View large.

p.s. New-old banner, by Brenda as always.

I could easily make a list of my favorite hundred children’s books. But instead I’m going with the first one that leapt to mind.

The Saturdays, by Elizabeth Enright.

This book was so important to me as a kid that I can still remember coming across it on the shelf in my elementary-school library. I remember which bookcase it was on, and that I had to reach up to pull the book down. I remember reading the copy on the book jacket and having my interest piqued by the idea of a family of four kids—aspiring actress Mona, 13; mischeivous, piano-playing Rush, 12; dreamy artist and dancer Randy, 10; and solid, unflappable Oliver, 6—forming their own club. (I only have one brother, and although we love each other, we’re different enough that as kids we spent more time bickering and annoying each other than playing together. I could only barely imagine a family where your best friends were your siblings.) Then I opened the book and read the first page, and was immediately charmed by the description of these kids sitting in their attic, listening to the rain hissing and sizzling as it came down the chimney and complaining about how bored they were. I could relate to that! Also, I loved rain even back then, so that was guaranteed to pull me in.

Then I kept reading, as they discussed and rejected ways to relieve their boredom. They decided, at Randy’s suggestion, to pool their weekly allowances and take turns using the whole amount to have an adventure each Saturday afternoon. They came up with a clever name for their club: the Independent Saturday Afternoon Adventure Club, which they could airily refer to as “I.S.A.A.C.” around others. I goggled even back then in 1982 at the amount: adding up each of the older kids’ allowance of fifty cents each and Oliver’s ten cents, they would “have an adventure” every Saturday with the grand sum of $1.60. One dollar. And sixty cents. I don’t think any economics lesson could have taught me more memorably and clearly about inflation since 1941 (the year the book was published).

The adventures they had were fantastic to my seven-year-old Midwestern self, too. Randy went to the art museum and wound up having tea and petit fours (the first time I’d heard of those) at the cafe with a slightly mysterious old lady who’d known their father as a boy, and hearing all about the time she ran away with the circus when she was a girl in Paris. Rush took the bus to the Met to see an opera (a 12-year-old boy, voluntarily going to an opera!?) and ended up rescuing a bedraggled stray dog whom they adopted and named (natch) Isaac. Mona went to a beauty salon and recklessly decided to cut off her waist-length braids, accidentally winding up with a scandalous blood-red manicure which eventually had to be removed at home with perfume (you better believe I tried that a time or two). Oliver hoarded up the dimes the other kids gave him and calmly went to the circus all by himself one day, causing a panic at home when they realized it. After that they decided to go on their adventures as a group, for safety.

This book used to make me long to live in New York in 1941, when I would have been allowed to go operas and museums by myself at the age of 10 or 11. I still re-read The Saturdays and the other Melendy family books every year or so, and they still kind of make me feel that way. What strikes me most about them now, though, are two things in particular: (1) these children in 1941 aren’t really that different from kids now—they bickered and played with their siblings, complained about eating vegetables and doing their chores, swam in the summer and ate ice cream till their stomachs ached; and (2) they didn’t have a television. Sometimes I think my slight disdain for television might stem from reading these books about all the amazing things they did back when they didn’t have TV. I doubt I.S.A.A.C. would ever have been invented if there had been a little black-and-white television in their attic playroom that first rainy Saturday.

I’ve been waiting for seven and a half years for Annalie to be old enough for me to read The Saturdays out loud to her. I think 2012 might be the year. I can hardly wait.

I’m taking part in a blogging group called Reverb Broads that will be suggesting daily blogging prompts this December. I won’t do it every day, but I’ll be using them occasionally throughout the month as they tickle my fancy. If you want to join in, feel free! Go here or here to learn more.