Halloween 2014

Alice has been looking forward to Halloween since her first time trick-or-treating last year.  She was looking forward to it so much that on Halloween morning, she woke up at 5am, saw that it was dark out, and decided that it must be time to go trick-or-treating, so she started shouting for us.  Zac went in and tried to convince her that it was not yet time for trick-or-treating, but she still cried and whimpered herself back to sleep.

When she awoke later at 7:30am and saw that it was light out, she cried again because she was convinced that she had missed trick-or-treating.  We eventually got her to trust us that trick-or-treating was still going to happen that night.

Halloween was complicated this year by the fact that our friends, Kristen and Dale, were having their Wedding-Halloween party that same night.  The wedding started at 7pm, but so did Trick-or-Treating. It was an easy decision, really, in that Alice would feel a lot of agony if she missed Trick-or-Treating, whereas our friends would not miss us much if we weren't at their wedding ceremony.  Nevertheless, we decided to compromise and attend the wedding reception after Trick-or-Treating. 

So we needed some sort of wedding attire-costume hybrid.  Our mall has a Halloween store, and a new play area, so we began the evening of Halloween at the mall.  Alice loved climbing on everything, and Simon enjoyed pointing out every "Star!" in the colorful carpet.

We got home, ate a quick supper, handed out a few pieces of candy to the early trick-or-treaters, then suited up the kids for an evening of candy gathering.

Alice really loved trick-or-treating: She liked the porches with jack-o-lanterns, she enjoyed being out at night, she had fun seeing the other kid's costumes, and she only got scared once at a house with a light-up football player with a moving arm. She did pretty well interacting with the strangers, but we spent the whole evening trying to convince her to say thank you to people's faces, rather than while turning around and walking away. Zac and I were annoyed by the houses that had their lights on but did not pass out candy (Don't they know how this works?). We took turns carrying Simon, and he was really happy and interested the whole time.  Both kids carried their green glow-sticks all night, and even when we got home Simon cried if you tried to take his away.

We got home around 8:15, and let Alice have one piece of candy, while we quickly gave Simon his bedtime snack and bath.  Lily, the babysitter, arrived at 8:30 and Alice wasn't the least bit shy.  We  put Simon to bed before we left, and gave the babysitter the instructions for how to process Alice.

Then we went to the wedding reception, wearing our newly-bought masks.  We had a good time catching up with friends without the distraction of children.

Harris Teeter

The new Harris Teeter grocery store they have been building near our house for the last year finally opened.  So we went there with the kids on the evening of opening day to check it out.  The store is really nice, with lots of free samples.  The best part was the brand new shopping cart.  You just get used to fighting with a cart the whole shopping trip, and don't realize how awful it is until you have a cart that actually pushes smoothly and turns upon request. It was amazing.

The kids did really well in the cart together, for the most part.  Simon would often try to grab Alice's steering wheel, and she would yank his hand off and tell him that he could only use his own steering wheel.  But the sibling bickering was pleasant enough, and perhaps I even said to Zac, "Look, they're fighting together!  It's so cute!"

Sunday play

Alice ate her breakfast of pancakes and applesauce really quickly, and Simon slept in until nearly 10:00am, so Alice started the art projects early today.  First, she colored with markers.  She still does a lot of scribbling, but occasionally she will say it is something.  In this picture, she has drawn a goblin.  She said all those vertical lines are teeth.

Then she moved on to play-doh.  She made her name, and was pretty proud.

Then she said, "Look, mommy, I put hair on it!"

Simon eventually woke up, happy as always.  He did not like the pancakes, so he just had his normal yogurt for breakfast.

Then we went outside to play.  In this photo, Simon is saying "Ball!" with much enthusiasm.

We used the hammock for a while and Alice's hair had some static.

Sometimes she dons the pink plastic aviator sunglasses Zac found in the bottom of Jordan Lake and just looks too cool.

Simon played on the porch for a while.  Here he is trying to feed the cat a piece of catfood, and saying "Umm!" just like we do when we try to convince him to eat something.

After helping Zac wash the cars, Alice needed to change clothes and she wanted to wear her ballerina outfit.  She twirled around the living room a lot.

I should also record that Simon finally started calling me "mama" today, although mainly just when he wanted a drink of water. He's 15 months old and I don't know how many words he knows now, but I'd like to point out that he also said "harmonica" today too.  So I was not on the top of the list.

Walk

We needed ginger for the stir fry, so while Zac got supper started, the three of us walked to S-Mart to buy ginger.  Alice loves going there because they have live fish, and in this case, she got to push Simon in the stroller.

Name

When Zac went in to get Alice up this morning, she was so proud because she had written her name in the condensation on her window.

Simile

Zac likes to mess with Alice a lot, to keep her on her toes.  So when Alice asked for a banana, Zac pretended to have no clue what one was.  He said, "A banana?  What's a banana look like?"

Without missing a beat, Alice responded, "It's like a straw you can eat."

Zac gave her a banana.

She had been using a bendy straw to drink her water all day, so the image was already in her mind, but I was surprised at how quickly she came up with it.

The tortoise and the hare

Simon has a turtle jacket and Alice has a bunny jacket, and as we were walking out to the car this morning, it occurred to me that they were like the tortoise and the hare.  So we had to take a picture.

Alice's artwork

Alice's drawings are progressing from scribbles to actual pictures.

N&S in NC

Nelson and Stana came down for a visit, conveniently timed so they could watch the kids for us while we were in DC for the wedding.  We weren't sure how the kids (especially Simon) would do without us for so long, but according to the grandparents, everything went fine and the kids were great.  They took the kids to the park every day and on walks and bike rides around the neighborhood. In fact, when we got home, the kids were playing together so happily they didn't even notice we'd returned for a few minutes.

S&Z in DC

Our friend, Laura, was getting married in Washington, DC, so we decided to make a weekend of it and abandon our kids for two nights and three days.  Nelson and Stana came down to watch them, while we enjoyed a weekend sans children.  The funny thing was that even though the kids weren't with us physically, they were always with us.  We kept commenting, "Oh, Alice would love this Spinosaurus exhibit!" or I'd think something like, "Simon would've gotten a kick out of that stuffed chicken."  Of course, there were plenty of times that we also said, "Thank goodness the kids aren't with us.  Could  you imagine them in this restaurant?"  The whole weekend felt like a time warp back to the time before kids, and brought back so many memories of our former life as travelers, where wandering around a new city was normal.

Friday afternoon we arrived at our hotel and checked in, then went to the National Geographic museum about a block away where we saw exhibits on the Spinosaurus, food, and the robots that landed on Mars.  For supper, we found a Nando's nearby, thus marking the third continent we'd eaten at that Portuguese chicken restaurant (Namibia, Malaysia, USA).  The food was awesome.

On Saturday morning, we walked down to the mall and took selfies in front of famous landmarks and visited the Hirshhorn modern art museum.

Saturday afternoon, we went to Laura's fancy wedding.  It was beautiful, fun, and well-planned (she has a teaching background and it showed).  The meal was delicious and we were lucky to be seated at a table with someone who worked at the CIA, so that was super fun.

On Sunday morning, we went to the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum out by Dulles International Airport.  We saw the plane that dropped the Atomic bomb, the Discovery space shuttle, the Concorde, and a Blackbird, among many other aircraft.

But I think my favorite object was the Airphibian: part car, part airplane.  As the guide explained, although technically it worked, so many compromises were made in trying to be two things at once, that it was not actually a success.  This could be a metaphor for many things, but to me it is symbolic of the trade-offs one makes in trying to maintain a work-family balance.  I'm not great at either, but technically it's working.

Thomas

Alice's daycare always does Halloween early for some reason, so on Friday we put on her Thomas the Tank Engine costume and took her to school.

When we got to her classroom though, we discovered another Thomas!

Dancing with Alice; Simon at work

Just another Sunday morning

Our friends Kate and Rob came over for supper last night.  Kate was cleaning out junk from her basement and brought a box of stuff for the kids.  It included a giant pop-out book of an Edwardian house.  While Simon was napping, Alice played with it for a lot longer than I expected.  She especially liked taking the paper dolls up the stairs, although she was frustrated that mom doll did not fit up the stairs very well.

Alice's imagination is taking off and so she is quite good at playing now.  She's still pretty high maintenance sometimes, but when she gets into something, she can be engrossed for a while.

Batman

I showed Alice how to make a batman face, but she couldn't figure it out at first.  Then, one morning, she was so excited when we went to get her out of bed because she had figured it out.

Marbles

Although Saturday was a beautiful day, it had rained a lot the night before, making most outdoor activities untenable.  So we headed to Marbles.  Our strategy these days is just to split up, since the kids are at such different ability levels.  I took Simon this time, and he played a lot in the toddler room.  What he likes the most these days is steps with something to hang on to.  He will go up and down a bunch, just practicing that skill.  It seems to me he should work on just walking on flat ground first, but I guess the steps are fun for him.  He also had a lot of fun playing in the farm animal area, with the plastic insects, and with the wooden trains.  Even although he doesn't walk, he can still get around and enjoy the activities with a little bit of help.

According to Zac, Alice spent a lot of time painting and sawing.  Not much new with her.  As we were leaving, they had set up pumpkin carving stations in the main room, with local surgeons doing the carving.  It was a pretty awesome idea, actually, although a bit creepy.  This guy carving Alice's pumpkin is a pediatric surgeon.

Light-up Shoes

I had a half-day at work Friday, so I used the afternoon to run some errands.  Among other things, I had to get shoes for myself for a wedding coming up, and I had to get some white shoes for Alice, since she only inherited pink shoes from her cousin, and sometimes they clash with her outfit (1st world problems).  At Target they only had one kind of white sneakers for girls, so I found Alice's size and bought them without much thought.  After supper, Zac was asking how my errands went, and I started to talk about my first stop, a shoe store where I was looking for shoes to go with my dress.  Alice immediately interrupted and asked, "Did you get me shoes, mommy?  Did you get me light up shoes?  Murphy and Elsa have light up shoes.  I want some light-up shoes.  I like them!"  This was the first time she had mentioned her deep desire for light-up shoes, so  I was preparing her for disappointment, by saying I did get her shoes, but not light-up shoes.  However, when we took them out of the box, we discovered they were in fact light up shoes.  It didn't say anywhere on the box that they were light up shoes and I hadn't jostled them around enough in the store to notice.

Alice could not have been happier.  She had to put them on right away and run around with them.  She turned off all the lights and stomped around the house to activate the lights on her shoes.  Every two minutes, she would say, "I like my light up shoes.  Do you like my light up shoes?  I like them.  Thank you for getting me light up shoes, mommy!"  Over and over and over.  I've never seen her this way, and it was all by accident.  I think if I had set out to buy her light up shoes, I wouldn't have been able to find any.

Alice and Chewbacca

Some friends of ours got Alice a Chewbacca doll for Christmas two years ago.  If you press its belly, it "talks" like Chewbacca too.  Alice was first afraid of it, then indifferent, and now Chewbacca is her best friend.  It took a week of correcting to teacher her he is a Wookie, not a lion.  

Simon, who calls Chewbacca by the last syllable of his name, was also initially afraid of him, but now will occasionally work up the courage to touch him.

Safety first

You can never be too careful when eating peas.

Sunday morning at the park

 It was a beautiful fall day, so we walked to our neighborhood park, bringing some sand toys with us.  It's so nice now that even although Simon is still not walking, he can play in the sandbox and crawl around and enjoy the park.

Having mastered most of the basics, Alice is now finding new ways to interact with the playground.