A modern-day horror story

Once upon this morning I went upstairs to feed the baby. Twenty minutes later Claire came up. She was totally naked. Noah was right on her heels splattered with paint. 

Here is a transcript of the terrifying conversation we had.

Me: what were you guys doing?

Claire: painting.

Me: Where did you get the paint?

Claire: The paint box.

Me: (panic rising in my voice) Where did you get the brushes? 

Claire: We didn't use brushes. We used our hands. 

Me: how did you get clean?

Claire: We washed in the bathroom. Noah painted the door.

Reason Noah is Crying

Reason Noah is Crying: I won't let him poop in the bathtub

Lucky for us Noah announces his intentions to misbehave ("I hit her" is a phrase we hear daily at our house).

A post 9 months and 5 weeks in the making

Miss Amelia Eve joined our family just about 5 weeks ago.  

It was a rough delivery and recovery but I almost feel back to myself.  She was nearly 9 lbs and 21.5 inches long.  She also felt like she needed to come out all at once (head, shoulders and torso all emerged on the same push).

We are adjusting to adding a third.  It hasn't exactly been an easy transition, but no one has ever felt like Amelia wasn't part of our family.  The kids LOVE her.  Noah talks about his baby sister almost constantly and they fight over who gets to hold her.  The hard adjustment has mostly been figuring out how to divide my time and attention and adjusting to the fact that I get almost no time to myself (I'm lucky to get 45 minutes the whole day long) but Amelia isn't the problem.

She is lovely and cooing (in between coughing and snorting. When you live with a 2-year old a cold in the first 3 weeks of life isn't uncommon and they doctor told me they typically last 2 weeks.  Heaven help us) and she just started smiling. The big kids now have a whole new reason to fight: who makes Amelia smile more.

Welcome to the world baby A

Fall

I wish it were fall here.

It's not.

The humidity and heat have been killer the last couple of days.  The conditions are perfect for mosquitoes.  The mosquitoes here in this part of the Bronx* have been thriving all summer anyway but the last few weeks have really set the population alight.

All week this cartoon has been running through my head.

True story Calvin.  True story.



*When you ask Noah were he lives he says, "the Bronx." And it's really just the most adorable thing you've ever heard.  I'll work on getting it on video.

Our First Day

We had our back to school dinner.  We (I say we but all of us know that the Hubbs sort of washed his hands of the project) had our back to school dinner.  We decided to go with something a little less sentimental than a family theme and fancy dinner.  We went with letting the kids pick dinner (mac and cheese from a box for the second day in a row), measuring them against the door frame in our bedroom, prayers said for good school years, a little pep-talk about finding the kids who don't have friends and being their friend and googly eye balls glued on rocks and delivered around the neighborhood.

Yep, that's right.  We glued googly eye balls to rocks and delivered them around the neighborhood so that kids on their way to school would find them and hopefully feel happy--a first step into helping other people. My first instinct was to subtly put them in half hidden places but Claire's technique was just to put them right in the open.  We've walked around the block to check on them since and Claire's technique was, by far, the most effective--every one of hers was taken but mine are still sitting in the grass.  The kids did insist that we leave one outside our favorite bakery.  I sincerely hope that whoever had to open the store saw it and smiled.

The first day of preschool was great.  Claire is in afternoon PreK so we started the day sitting at the front door, eating breakfast and waving at the big kids walking to the local elementary that's just at the end of the block.

Claire picked her own outfit for school and even decided she needed to do a test-run of it the day before.  It meant a little late-night laundry but it's hard to say no to someone on their first day of PreK.

I'm not excited about the 20 minute commute each way to PreK (there's no public PreK in our neighborhood) but overall I think we are going to love it.

These Days are Just Packed

Last week was one of those fleeting, end-of-summer weeks where it feels like the whole world slows down to give you enough time to pack everything in.

We took advantage.

As a last mommy/daughter date before school starts and before the baby comes Claire and I went to see Matilda.  We had so much fun (I would say that every single thing about it was fun except that no one in their right mind would call driving through Times Square fun.  I'd also list walking through Times-Square crowds when you are roughly the size of a small car as "not fun."  I'm not saying "small car" in a derogatory type of way either; more literal.  I've reached that phase of pregnancy where instead of seeing a cute pregnant person people have started staring at me in the horror of having to witness my water break right in front of the them.)

We picniced in the front yard 

We welcomed some of our favorite San Diego Friends to the East Coast.  They spent the night here and we went to the Giants game.  We hired one poor baby sitter to watch all 5 kids but we didn't feel guilty because we paid her nearly twice her normal rate.  I'm quite sure that Claire didn't spend a single instant in her regular clothes and since the Moyles left she has asked me to play dress-up with her every day.

We also had our cousins visit for the long weekend and we finally made it to the Roosevelt Island tram (which is fun and which is, luckily, located very close to Dylan's Candy Bar).

And then, of course, there was this.

School starts this afternoon and I feel like this is the moment to say goodby to summer but as it was 80 degrees with 80% humidity yesterday at 9 am I think we can hold off wishing summer farewell for a few days at least.

Stay-cation

This week the hubbs took Thursday and Friday off.  We would have loved to have spent all of our time together doing exciting things but this whole family has been battling a horrific cold and on Friday the hubbs was struck down.  We did manage to go out and do some totally awesome things as a family.

Noah had an awesome birthday.  Per his request we went to the farm with our friends.

In the afternoon we went to go and see a historic ship that was docked in Yonkers.

And there was cake.  Oh there was cake.

The night before Noah's birthday Claire reminded me that I needed to hang streamers in his doorway (something she had seen one of their cousins do).  I scoured the house and all I could find was Halloween crepe paper.  That, along with the Christmas wrapping paper should pretty much secure me some angsty  teenage years with him.  I can almost hear the arguments now--"You didn't even love me enough to buy birthday wrapping paper!"

We tried out the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk which was packed but really fun.  The hubbs was at home in bed trying to beat the cold but that was probably for the best as it was incredibly crowded (turns out Connecticut schools start on Monday so we weren't the only people trying to take advantage of the last day of summer.

Finally, we convinced the hubbs to come with us to the Natural History Museum.  We've been members of the museum since Christmas and this was the hubbs' first visit.  I'm pretty sure he was impressed (we also found street parking which was a minor miracle).  When we go to museums we try to spend time in the actual exhibits but mostly we spend time running around outside.

We walked into the gem room and Claire gasped and said "I love gold jewelry!"  She then proceeded to to take pictures of every one of the gem cases