As Bryan and I sat and watched the second episode of John Adams tonight, I moved most of winter and spring 2008 pictures onto Flickr. I’m pretty excited about the archive function on Flickr. You can look photos up by date on a calendar.
All my uploaded albums (called collections on Flickr) can be found here.
cool!
Photo insanity
Now that I’ve got my WordPress blog up and running about how I want it, I’ve tried to work on the photo gallery part of my blog. The problem is that since I switched to Gallery2 a year or so ago, it seems like the gallery has worked reeeaaallly slowly. And since one of the main purposes of this blog is photosharing, I’m really not OK with it being that slow.
So yesterday I did some research and compared Picasa and Flickr and other photo options, and I decided to switch to Flickr. So I got myself a “pro” account. Next step…move the 6,700 photos from the last four years to Flickr. No small feat!
Today is a fantastically beautiful day. It’s Earth Day. Andrew and I should be outdoors planting seeds. But I’m moving photos. And it makes me so happy!
My website has a new home!
I’m writing to you from a whole new blogging platform. Over the last couple weeks (thanks to the urging of my brother) I moved my blog from Mambo to WordPress. It’s been a good move. I still have some things I’m tweaking, but I was anxious to invite you all to my new space.
Please let me know if you run into problems or if you have suggestions for improvements. This is way too exciting for me. I’ve been completely obsessed the last week!
Andrew’s watching me type, and he’s been pointing out words he recognizes. Sweet kid.
Well, enjoy!
Photo download extravaganza
April 19: It’s Sunday morning. Sylvie is napping. Andrew and Bryan are playing Sequence. I decided to grab this peaceful moment to download the photos on my camera. It’s been over a week, and I had 650 images. Yikes. I hadn’t downloaded my Wichita photos yet. This is going to be quite a project.
The other night I was up until midnight working to on (drum-roll please) a new platform for this blog. I’ve been using Mambo for the last four years, but I’m having some serious problems with spam. I’m also kind of unhappy to be working on a platform that is no longer being actively developed. So I’m a-switching to WordPress. Databases have been created, migration has taken place (with a huge amount of help from my SQL-proficient husband). And I’m going crazy with all the fun widgets available.
Now I’m working to tweak the look of the blog. We still need to migrate comments, but soon when you visit here you’ll see a new look. I love developing web pages!
I’ll spend the rest of Sylvie’s nap splitting my time between photo processing and theme-tweaking. Ahh, bliss:)
A trunk, a horn, and hump
April 17: Andrew’s already extensive imagination has bloomed in a new area…animals are living in our house. The other day, Andrew walked into his room, stopped and whispered, “Look! A trunk!” Sure enough. There was an elephant in the closet. His trunk had been sticking out. And he helped Andrew pick out his clothes for the day.
Another time, again in his room, Andrew looked at his bed and his eyes grew round. “A horn!” he exclaimed in reverent wonder. There on his bed was a sleeping deer with a beautiful glowing horn. Andrew and Bryan approached the dreaming creature and carefully pet it while it slumbered.
Soon after, Andrew was walking down the hall when he stopped short, pointed ahead, and cried, “Look, it’s a HUMP!” Turns out that a camel was hanging out.
Just now, Bryan told me that upon walking into the sunroom Andrew said, “Uh oh, this is a really scary one. Tiger.” Bryan said he was afraid of it, so Andrew kicked it up to the moon.
Oh, and the other morning Andrew informed us that there was a T-Rex, a dragon, and an elephant in his room. “That must be pretty crowded!” I said. “Well, Mommy,” Andrew replied, “The T-Rex is alseep on my bed, and the elephant’s in the closet.” Apparently they’ve all got it figured out. What a kid!
Glorious
“Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don’t have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step
April 16: Spring has come at last! We have run around barefoot all day. My first daffodil bloomed. My cats are going insane. Ahh, spring. How I missed you. On Monday I took the kids out to play but had to retreat indoors after a short time because my daughter’s hands were turning purple, I was rather grouchy that it could be mid-April and Iit was still so cold that we couldn’t play outdoors even with full winter garb (minus Sylvie’s mittens which she won’t wear). But today all is forgiven. All my windows are open. And some crocuses that I planted last fall are peeking out of the grass like miniature blades of grass.
I owe lots of pictures, but they are still on my camera. I’ve been knitting a gift for a very special little girl who is turning one next week. And I’m also preparing a surprise for my blog readers (that’s you)!
Vomit at 25,000 feet
April 12: We’re back home after spending a wonderful weekend in Wichita visiting with Bryan’s parents, Melanie and Ben, and seeing all Andrew and Sylvie’s Wichita great-grandparents. I love traveling and visiting people we care about. The hours we get to spend in their company are definitely worth the, er, discomforts of traveling with two small children. And on the flight home, those discomforts were particularly wet and smelly.
Our flights home took us through St. Louis on our way home to Madison. Sylvie isn’t the kind of kid who likes to sit still or read books or play with toys, so flights with her are substantially more challenging than they were with Andrew. She cried gustily for a good portion of our first flight. I try to find a zen place and keep her from walloping me in the face with her flailing head. When we’re in the airport, though, she’s generally great (if she can do whatever she wants). She’ll walk (I just wrote crawl, but she’s stopped crawling all together now!) from person to person and waves and blows kisses and makes ridiculous faces to make them laugh. So layovers with her are pretty good…if I can keep her from toddling in to the men’s restroom without igniting her fury.
Our flight from St. Louis to Madison started out good enough. There was a good-looking guy sitting behind us. And Sylvie loves cute boys. So she spent a good 30 minutes flirting with him by peering up over the top of the seat or by peeking around the side. He was kind enough to engage her. But on our descent into Madison, things really fell apart.
Sylvie had been having a big snack, including drinking lots of water. At one point, she gagged on a piece of a goldfish cracker, and for the first time in her life, she threw up. All over herself. I caught some of the sour-smelling mucusy water in my hand, and we sat there together for a stunned moment, watching the liquid slowly, goo-ily drip down onto my pants.
I glanced over at Bryan, my mind scrambling for an idea about how to clean up this unfolding disaster, and he looks around and hands me the cocktail napkin from under his drink.
A cocktail napkin.
I encouraged him to GET THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT, and when he seemed to be trying to get her attention by hand signals, I said, “This is one of those time when you use that button over your head.” Within a moment, she was there with a battalion of cocktail napkins, I was able to empty my hand of its gooey contents. Sylvie’s dress was soaked, but I didn’t have back-up clothes, so I put my hands under her dress to keep the cold fabric off her skin. It was about that time that she lost it.
I think it was mostly pain-inducing altitude changes that caused her distress. Well, I’m sure that wearing a vomit-soaked dress didn’t help. In any case, she was inconsolable for maybe 20 minutes…until we landed.
Andrew was such a sweet big-brother, offering her toys and trying to cheer her, but she was in an eyes-closed, no-cheering-accepted state of mind. Eventually, my boy fell asleep as a coping mechanism.
After we landed, Sylvie cheered up again. The two of us smelled rather sour, however, until we got home and tossed her straight into the tub.
We had a wonderful time. I’m happy to have the traveling part of our vacation behind us once again:) I’m looking forward to a run-of-the-mill, quiet week at home. Stay tuned for a re-cap of our fun times in Wichita!
Happy Easter!
April 8: Tomorrow morning at 5am, our crew is headed out to the airport to fly to Wichita, Kansas for the weekend. Bryan’s grandparents all live there, and we haven’t seen them in a year, so it should be really nice to have a visit. Bryan’s mom’s parents both turn 90 this spring, so we’re having a 90th joint birthday party for them on Saturday. I’m looking forward to seeing Bryan’s cousins…I may even get to meet some cousins I’ve never seen before.
Andrew is over the moon about seeing everyone. He’s an excited boy.
In other news, Sylvie has really taken off walking the last couple days. She’s walking from one end of the house to the other. There’s still lots of falling down, but today walking was definitely her main form of transportation. A toddler!
Mom’s birthday
April 7: Today is my mom’s birthday. She’d be 57. To celebrate her birthday, I had Dad, Terry, Tom, Michael, and Lisa over for dinner last night. We ate Dutch babies (puffy pancakes with apples), sausage, and a rolled spinach omelet. Then for dessert I made a chocolate sheet cake. It used 3 3/4 sticks of butter. It was….delicious. Mom would have approved:)
This afternoon I read Andrew one of Mom’s favorite stories, Heckedy Peg by Dawn and Audrey Wood. It was one of those times that as I was reading, I was crying so much I couldn’t really get the words out. The story is about a mother who saves her seven children from a witch (Heckedy Peg) who had turned them into food. Here’s my favorite part:
The witch pointed to the table.
“Here are your children,” she said. “If you can’t guess them right the first time, I’ll eat them for my supper.”
Keeping her feet tucked beneath her, the mother crawled to the table. How would she ever guess which food was which child?“In despair, the mother looked in her basket. Here are the things my children wanted, she thought, and now they will never have them.”
“Hurry!” said the witch, “I’m hungry.”
The mother looked at the food on the table.
“Speak up!” said the witch. “My supper grows cold!Suddenly, the mother new what to do. Taking the things from her basket, she said, “I know my children by what they want.”
“Bread wants butter. That’s Monday.
“Pie wants knife. That’s Tuesday.
“Milk wants pitcher. That’s Wednesday.
“Porridge wants honey. That’s Thursday.
“fish wants salt. That’s Friday.
“Cheese wants crackers. That’s Saturday.
“And roast rib wants egg pudding. That’s Sunday.”Quick as a wink, the children turned back into themselves. They hugged and kissed their mother, then hugged and kissed each other.
Mom loved that the mother in the story saved her children because she knew them. Boy did Mom know each of us kids. It’s an amazing thing to be known so well by another person. That’s one of the things I miss so much about having her gone. I’d like to be able to call her to confirm what I think:)
Mom’s birthday today is a sunny day. We picked up some flowers at the grocery store yesterday for her. Happy birthday, Mom.
Mornings
April 6: Dawn is coming earlier these days. Spring is creeping its way up toward Madison.
These mornings when the clock shows 6:30, my mind unwraps from its cocoon of woolly sleep to hear the pitter-pat footsteps of one young Andrew as he makes his way from his room over to our bed. If I’m lying close to the edge of the bed, I’ll wake to a kiss on my nose as he lifts up the blankets and climbs into my sleepy nest. I’ll doze as he wiggles and pats and snuggles, jiggling more insistently as the minutes tick by.
Before too long, Sylvie rises, and I hear her call, “Mmmmmaaaa MA! Mmmmmaaaa MA!” She isn’t calling for me per se. It’s more the one phrase she uses to indicate that she wants something. In this case I translate it as, “Hey everyone! I’m awake! Someone come get me so the party can begin!” I’ll throw back the covers and go to get her, with Andrew running ahead calling, “HI SYLVIE! Good morning, sweetie girl!!” Then he climbs on the side of her crib and attempts to kiss her. She in turn attempts to dodge his kisses and instead tries to levitate into my arms. She sometimes reminds me of the way that Toad would jump in Mario II; kicking off and fluttering her feet after liftoff.
I bring both kids back to bed. Sylvie climbs over me to peer at her dad, tilting her head to the side to examine him. Andrew lies between us contemplating breakfast (raisin muffin or eggs and toast today?) Sylvie might have a little nurse in the bed, but she’s often too excited to explore. Both kids pull back our black-out curtains…full of anticipation about what the day will hold.