Giving Thanks

I’m thankful for a great overall Thanksgiving, for family and food and cooler weather.

I’m thankful that Trent, Rush and I avoided getting the stomach bug that half Trent’s family had (sorry nieces and nephews, I know you can’t be thankful for that this year...)

I’m thankful for getting to spend time with my cousin Per, who I don’t get to see nearly enough.

I’m thankful for Trent, Rush, and our new baby.

(Agh, who else has to go for a weigh-in at the doctor’s office a few days after Thanksgiving?!)

Thank you God for all these blessings. And thank you that Trent’s mom baby-sat for us so we could go see Harry Potter 7 part 1. And thank you that my mom and I found two huge boxes of donuts and bagels at Kroger for $1 each. Amen.

Cravings

If you were ever searching for the recipe for the most perfect, delicious chocolate chip cookies, your search is over.  I found it.  Surprise – it’s the recipe on the package of Kroger brand semi-sweet chocolate chips.  I ate a million cookies a day until yesterday, when the supply was finally depleted. 

Rush enjoyed them as well and when he says “cookie” he says it with real meaning, similar to Cookie Monster.  He learned to dip cookies in milk and really, really liked drinking milk out of a glass.  Not a sippy cup or a plastic cup, but a glass.  We’re trying to teach him good manners and apparently he’s embracing it.  I’m anticipating that he will expect his milk in a champagne flute during the holidays.  

In healthier food news, my grapefruit cravings are back.  Forget pickles and ice cream, I must get some sort of vitamin C deficiency while pregnant.  After going back and forth with Trent last night over who would run to the store for grapefruit juice, I finally just went to bed and this morning I went out for a jug of grapefruit juice and giant bag of grapefruits.  Lesson learned and applied from my first pregnancy:  the grapefruits and juice are good enough, I don’t also have to supplement with Fresca.  I wouldn’t turn down Fresca, but how much money can one family spend on grapefruit?

Only a few days until Thanksgiving and not only am I ready for turkey and dressing, I’m already thinking about my Friday leftover lunch, a sandwich made with one of Trent’s grandmother’s homemade rolls and broccoli rice casserole.  Even if I didn’t get to eat any turkey this Thanksgiving, I would be content to just look at this decoration that I found in Rush’s school backpack.  It’s one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen.  Well, it’s one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen besides Rush.

The Piles

Sometimes I look around our house and there are piles of stuff on every available surface. Right now at least some of the piles are useful or productive and not just stacks of junk mail and pliers and magazines and vitamins and pumpkin seeds in a Ziploc (actual contents of our kitchen counter right now, thankfully not pictured). I just remind myself that I never promised anyone a spotless home, nor did I ever even imply that it would happen, even slightly. Sometimes I have to remind Trent that when we started dating I was living with Kim, my potluck roommate during my freshman year of college who matched my level of messiness, so it’s not like I tricked him.

Trent often makes fun of me for my nightstand, which is full of useful things. That’s the only box of Kleenex in the house that he hasn’t hidden in a cabinet somewhere. In Trent’s mind, only old people have Kleenex around their homes, so he takes any boxes he sees and hides them. That one has slipped past his radar so far. I find it useful to have all my stuff out: The Night Offices for all those times when I’m awake from 3-5 or 4-6 AM, which has been my standard this pregnancy; a baby name book because we’re still working on that; magazines and the BCP, obviously; and Atlas Shrugged, which split in half when I dropped it on the floor at Whataburger the other day. It’s actually made it a lot more manageable to only have to hold 500 pages at a time.

In terms of piles of productivity, here’s my cardboard box of Christmas presents, in pieces, and other various projects. I could also go to the garage and take a picture of Trent’s pile of Christmas presents in pieces, but for obvious reasons I can’t show any pictures of end results yet. I keep adding layer after layer to my box; who knows what’s on the bottom. At least it’s contained, to an extent. There are similar bags of half finished craft projects around the house…

Rush has his own piles, mainly piles of comfort in his bed. I snuck in and took this photo a few minutes ago and it looks so cozy that I’m tempted to go make my own nest of books and stuffed animals to sleep in tonight. In fact, yes, I’m going right now. The second half of Atlas Shrugged is calling.

Ducks!

We had a fun visit from our friends the Harrises last week.  They have two girls, so Rush got a sneak-peek of what it’s like to have a sibling for a few days.  We spent a lot of time outside, so on Friday morning, Elizabeth and I took the kids out to a park near our house to feed the ducks. 

Rush mainly wanted to hand-feed the ducks and it took awhile to get him to throw the bread to them.  At that point he had also decided to start eating the bread.  Yum.

The next picture was taken a few minutes before Rush ran into the water, I’m assuming either because he wanted to pet a duck or because he’s used to the beach where he can run into the water.  I guess it wouldn’t be a trip to the duck pond for a little kid if he didn’t leave with soaking wet shoes and socks.  “Duck” is one of the words he can say, and I think he caught on to the fact that ducks say “quack quack” as well.

We had a great visit with the Harrises, but Rush did end up spending Saturday with what we refer to as “a case of the Caseys.”  That’s when you get so worn out that you spend all day barfing and sleeping.  It doesn’t happen to everyone, or probably even that many people at all, but knowing my sister Casey for the past 27 years I’ve seen it enough times to recognize it.  I think the stretch from Halloween weekend through the time change and last week were just compounded exhaustion for him.  I’m pretty sure he’s back to normal now, but we will be trying to stay as low-key as possible for the next few days.

The Little Chef

One of the greatest developmental milestones we have reached is Rush being able to stand on a kitchen chair and help cook.  If he ever opens a restaurant or becomes a famous chef, he can tell interviewers that he has been cooking since he was one.  I have to be careful to only say “Do you want to help me cook dinner?” if I actually mean it, because he’ll start dragging a chair across the room. 

A lot of his cooking involves stirring cereal and moving it from measuring cup to measuring cup.  He also likes to add spices and emptying the bread box.  But look, here he is with a zucchini.

I like how he’s presenting the illusion that he’s eating it.  He’s a great actor. 

I was really smug about it when he was a baby and would eat any baby food we put in front of him.  Now we’re in the stage where we offer him vegetables over and over again and serve him whatever we’re eating, knowing that sometimes he’ll eat it and sometimes he’ll give us crazy looks.  He’s pretty consistent about loving salad though.  The other day I neglected to put some on his plate during dinner and he was really offended.

Rush cooking with me is generally easier than letting him have free reign downstairs.  Because we’re hosting Christmas this year and I’ll be nine months pregnant, I was testing out a potential Christmas dinner recipe the other night.  Maybe I should have read every detail of the recipe before I started, but typically recipes from Everyday Food are pretty simple, so I just scanned it.  I missed the part that said "whisk sauce continually for ten minutes until it boils and thickens.”  I wouldn’t normally attempt a recipe like that anyway, and certainly not with a 19 month old who can open the pantry by himself.  Rush was great at entertaining himself through the long process of making the recipe, but in the end everything in the house two feet and below was on the floor. 

Maybe cooking is something he’ll always enjoy and he can cook dinner when he’s older…

Thirty

I celebrated my thirtieth birthday last weekend –November 7, the greatest birthday ever- with a dinner party with some of my nearest and dearest. It was exactly the way I wanted to ring in a new decade. After a night of eating, drinking, talking, laughing, the only picture I took was…

our empty dining room before anyone arrived. Super. Wouldn’t it have been nice to document a little more of the evening? Oh wait, I got this too:

Where are the photos of my friends? My husband and son? My parents? Oh well, I guess I was having to much fun to worry about the camera. Thanks to my mom for cooking and Trent for making not only a cake (with my name on it) but also a double layer pumpkin cheesecake. Big birthdays deserve two desserts.

Another highlight was staying up until midnight to actually turn thirty. I enjoyed it for about ten minutes, then set the clocks back to end daylight savings and turned 29 again for another 50 minutes. Thanks to Ben Franklin for coming up with the idea so I could enjoy an additional 50 minutes of youth.

I’m excited about being thirty. As my friend Catherine said, “The thirties are a fantastic time when you don't have to feel precocious about being as sophisticated as you are.” Well spoken. Being thirty is also going to make some things I say so much more effective, for example, “Of course I can make waffles, I’m thirty years old.” It just has a nice ring to it.

For now I’m off to enjoy my new maturity by playing Sequence States and Capitals with Trent while eating a huge bowl of popcorn. I couldn’t ask for a better evening.

Rush's Favs

Here's an example of what Rush's bed looks like in the morning:

It's actually a mild example of the stuffed animals. Since the picture was taken he has added every single stuffed animal in his room to his bed. I just line them all up around the sides and he sleeps cozily in the nest in the middle. Some of Rush's other current favorite things are: reading (especially You can Name 100 Trucks, BIG Little, One Upon a Potty, and any book with a title like My First 10,000 Words or My First 150 Animals), trucks, Halloween candy, cooking, and sorting through my button box.

The button box development has been great for me. Yesterday I was Reaganing and I finished two complete projects (Christmas gifts so I can't mention what they are), and while an post-Halloween three hour nap for an exhausted little boy certainly helped, Rush spending a few minutes moving buttons from box to box also made it possible.

Unflattering picutre of me, but it does demonstrate that we're now at 30 weeks - in approximately 10 weeks we'll have a new baby!