Day One

The epic 2010 Summer Road Trip begins. Today's progress was somewhat unimpressive:

And:

We had originally planned to leave yesterday morning but Eric discovered a fantastic academic conference "on the way" that he had to go to. Sounds a little nuts, perhaps--hitting a conference at the outset of a long road trip--but I agreed that he should go after hearing the roster of speakers. So we left this morning instead and drove a mere five hours to Emmittsburg, MD. Eric actually interviewed for a job at the seminary here so we are familiar with the area. The town is also home of the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton shrine. Mother Seton was the first American-born saint to be canonized. The school where Eric currently teaches was founded by her nephew who named it after her so we definitely feel a connection. While Eric went to his conference the kids and I played outside at the Shrine which was, of course closed. We've been to the Shrine about six times and found it closed four of those times. The schedule is posted, we just never check it.

Emmittsburg is just a few minutes south of Gettysburg so we drove around there for awhile as well looking for cannons. Then we spent some downtime at our hotel in Thurmont which you have probably never heard of even though it is the home of Camp David. Our hotel really plays that up and we are in the "Associated Press" room though from the looks of it the Reagan Room would have been more comfortable. We haven't had any presidential sightings.

Despite my record two blog posts in one night I don't promise a daily log of our wanderings but it should be an interesting trip: Colorado to Minnesota and back to New Jersey. We are driving 4300 miles over nine days for a total trip of almost one month. We'll be hitting five states I've never been to and I hope we'll do enough sight seeing to warrant at least a few more installments here.

Road trip prep AKA Mother's Day

Mother's Day began quietly this year and without any specific plans. We got to Mass early and then decided to just go for a drive. We've been having fun exploring New Jersey. Prior to living here my entire experience of the state had pretty much been confined to cursing holiday traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. We've found that we actually live in a pretty neat place. In April we spent one misty, foggy day driving through the small mountains in northwest Jersey. So beautiful. So for Mother's Day we headed south towards the "Pine Barrens."

This area of the state is pretty undeveloped and we were just starting to wonder what we could find for lunch, "Live Bait" seeming like our only option when we stumbled across the Red Barn Cafe. It proved to be the most perfect and delightful location for Mother's Day brunch I could have wanted. A tiny, rustic dining room attached to a plant nursery. The food was incredible, the pies (which are locally famous) were among the best we'd ever had, and when it turned out to be a cash-only establishment the owner handed Eric her business card and told him to mail her a check (we found enough between us once we emptied our wallets).

From there we decided to drive down the coast a bit but we wanted to find some shoreline apart from the beach town culture. We ended up all the way down at Cape May which is the southernmost tip of New Jersey. The beach there is protected and beautiful and there was something for everyone.

Eric caught me on camera pointing out the huge ship off the coast to Joseph.

William still hates the water but is loving the sand.

If you ask, Margaret will tell you she's a "beach fanatic." She loves everything about the beach and will go into the ocean water in May, will lie on her stomach and army crawl through sand and loves running around like some kind of seaside nymph.

Joseph loved the long boardwalk. You can see his hair blowing back from the speed he was using to careen down the ramp. Joseph is doing his best to turn my hair gray.

And the requisite unimpressive shot of my oh-so-photogenic family.

At the end of all these adventures we realized we'd spent about 13 hours traveling which was a much longer day than any we'd planned for our summer road trip. So we ended the day feeling optimistic.

She can sleep anywhere

When I took William up to bed this evening both kids were outside playing. Our Brazilian neighbors have a six-year-old boy who had finally come home after being out all day and we let them have some rare after-dinner playtime to celebrate.

From the upstairs bedroom I could heard Eric say, "Time to come in, kids. I'm going to bump Joseph up first and then it will be time for Margaret to come in." I hurried downstairs as soon as William was asleep. Margaret has been begging for my presence at bedtime recently and I indulge her while working on knitting projects.

Downstairs I saw Eric and Joseph but neither heard nor saw Margaret. I said, "Margaret didn't fall asleep already did she?" Eric responded, "Check the camera."

This is what I found:

Don't worry, she'd been relocated to her bed by the time I saw the pictures.

What's William up to?

William is most definitely not up for walking. He has no interest whatsoever in getting around on two legs. But, as my grandmother said the other day, "Don't make trouble for yourself." He's easier to keep track of for now and I don't think there's anything wrong with him.

He has gotten super communicative lately. We're really trying hard with baby sign language because he is a shrieker. I've seen bystanders visibly jump when he opens his mouth to let loose and just today I ran into a total stranger on the street who recognized us from church and asked, "What was wrong with him on Sunday?" What was wrong was that he wanted to be outdoors and I had the gall to keep him in the church building. William cannot get enough of being outside. He wakes up in the morning or from his nap and gleefully points to the bedroom door. Then he points to the stairs. Then he points to the stroller. I put him in and he points to the door. So we've been doing a lot of this:

He's definitely not to the posing for pictures stage yet. He was neither asleep nor sad but very happily hanging out while the kids and I worked on a project. Sometimes Margaret pushes him around a bit. And I've been looking for a good excuse for a walk every day lately because he's so happy outside in the stroller.

One of the signs William has mastered is "more." It's always a big hit for "baby's first sign." He recently exercised his powers of communication to get lots of his new favorite food:

No, that is not my hand in the picture. I would never dream of feeding one of my children Nutella for breakfast.

Although William has definitely arrived at the demanding, shrieky stage of babyhood he is generally a really happy, incredibly sweet little boy. He loves to give hugs--especially to Margaret and I. He prefers to fall asleep cuddled up next to me with his arm around my neck, and we're all having a lot of fun watching him learn and explore.

And does it make me a really bad mother that I snapped a picture before rescuing him when he got stuck in the plastics cupboard today?

Sprucing up the Place

Ouch. Has it really been over a month since I last posted? Is anyone still reading?

We've been busy here surviving the last few weeks of winter and enjoying the spring (summer?) weather. I don't have any pictures to prove it but we had a wonderful Easter spending Sunday with a priest friend in Manhattan. We went to a fabulous Mass with wonderful music and then took a long walk in Central Park with about 4 million other people. We have a real knack for picking the most popular holiday destinations--we went to Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas Day.

At home we've been busy making our house work better for us. We briefly considered aggressively pursuing home ownership because we'd love a home that works really well for Joseph. But we decided instead to save up for awhile and make our current rental work better for us. We love this house and its location so we don't mind staying put for a bit.

Our biggest problem was that the kids were sleeping upstairs. Joseph is getting too heavy for me to carry up and down stairs and we want his bed and clothes and everything to be more accessible to him. We suggested to him that he could sleep downstairs in what we'd been calling the "playroom" which is right off the living room but he didn't want to sleep alone and we couldn't figure out how to fit two beds in there given the constraints of the piano and our "fireplace" (hating that thing more all the time!). It finally occurred to us to try bunk beds. We hemmed and hawed about Margaret being on top but finally decided to go for it. They were a big hit with the kids.

The beds were plain, unfinished pine. I don't particularly care for light-colored wood and they were getting grubby fast. I spent last weekend finishing them and I'm pretty pleased with my first try at staining and coating wood furniture.

Before:

After:

I think it's a big improvement and I'm excited to try my hand at some more wood-working and home improvement.

But, first . . . .

Putting the kids bedroom right in the main living space (there is just a double doorway separating this room from the living room) is awkward for using the living room in the evenings and it meant losing our "guest room." The futon is still in the kids room. We were also left with an empty upstairs bedroom. We moved our bedroom into where the kids used to sleep. It's a bigger room and the design works much better for us while William is still sleeping with us. There is room for our king-size bed, a toddler bed, three large bookshelves and two dressers. The room at the top of the stairs we turned into a sitting room with some on-sale IKEA chairs:

The braided rug was made by Eric's grandmother (Eric's mom made the one in our living room) and the bookcase has been around forever. I'm hoping to refinish it with the help of my new power sander :) The coffee table came to us courtesy of bulk trash day. Twice a month the city will collect anything you leave on the curb and one morning we were headed out to Mass and saw that our neighbors across the street had left out this perfectly good coffee table. Our furniture budget was maxed out after the beds and chairs but this room really needed something. Eric almost broke his back hauling this wood and metal piece up our stairs but it works pretty well.

Also gracing this room is the antique roll-top that has been in my family forever (and that door goes to the stairs):

And Joseph's old bed:

We intended for Joseph to use this bed on his bunk but when we tried it out we discovered that it was about one inch too long. I don't think it's an official "extra long." It was given to us by someone from Canada. I made a bunch of nice pillow covers for all our spare pillows and put a king-size fitted sheet around both mattress and box spring and it passes for a day bed. That's pretty much our only closet there to the right.

This big rearrangement actually makes us more guest-friendly. We can now have a single guest sleep in this upstairs sitting room. Or, if a whole family visits, we can move to the futon in the kids room and offer the entire upstairs to guests. I know you all loved that futon but I hope we can make it up to you somehow on your next visit.

Eric made me promise to finish making curtains before tackling any other furniture re-finishing/building projects. We have horrible vertical blinds in our house. They are so popular in this neighborhood but they are definitely not our style. I've been replacing them with simple curtains in most of the rooms in our house. The top picture in this post is our new kitchen windows. I have only our bedroom left to do. It's nice to make this place our own a bit more. And maybe all these projects will get me posting more often.

Help me out here . . .

I need help convincing certain adult members of the household that this baby just wouldn't look this cute in pinstripes.

Christmas 2009

Getting the Christmas post in just under the wire here . . .

We always put up our tree on December 23rd and decorate the next day. Getting the living room ready for our tree required some rearrangement of the furniture and looking for places to set our Christmas decorations required some cleaning. After living in our house for almost five months it finally felt like we'd finished unpacking and I snapped a few shots of our main living area for those of you who haven't been to visit yet.

This first shot is taken from the living room--about where the tree ended up--into what we've called the "play room." The futon is usually down in "bed mode" for guests and also because the kids like to play on it that way. The room was pretty trashed and uninviting but for Christmas became a lovely second sitting room.

The other corner . . .

And the other corner. The "fireplace" is fake and extremely ugly. We removed the linoleum "hearth piece" and the "logs" but that is as far as the landlord would let us go so we're living with it for now.

Then from the playroom to the rest of the house . . . You can just see the tree poking out where the rocker usually is. To the left of the hutch is the basement door. The beautiful french doors lead out to a large entryway and Eric is looking at me from the kitchen. The staircase goes up to two large, railroaded bedrooms.

So, there is the bulk of our home. Sorry to be tedious but I know some have been wanting some pictures.

All three kids helped decorate the tree.

William was actually great with the tree and has been spotted the last couple days pulling down a favorite golden star, sucking on it a moment, and then trying--in vain--to rehang it. So cute.

Christmas Eve we attended Mass at our parish down the street and then came home for cookies and eggnog.

Christmas morning we had our traditional Caramel-Pecan Rolls and pomegranates. The kids love pomegranates and found some in their stockings this year. That day we were on our own and decided to go into Manhattan. We had thought that some of the touristy Christmas attractions would be less crowded on the 25th. We were wrong. It was a very nice day anyway but we had a very brief visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral and a very brief glimpse of the tree at Rockefeller Center alongside thousands of our closest friends. We returned home in time to make a simple but spectacular dinner and then proceeded to get ready for a fun weekend of hosting. Eric's Dad and his wife came for most of Saturday and my whole family was here Sunday. We just love being close to family.

We stretch out the gift-opening through the whole Twelve Days of Christmas because the kids get very overwhelmed by endless gifts all at once. Epiphany (today) is when we exchange gifts for each other. Here are the kids enjoying their new game of Chutes and Ladders. Joseph and Margaret have gotten really excited about games over the last month and they are well-matched. Margaret has a better sense of the big picture--how to win--and Joseph remembers the rules and can read numbers better.

Eric and I gave each other books and William is so excited to dive right into mine:

I am a little too proud to say that I first conceived of the idea of getting this cookbook and cooking my way through it early last summer before I'd ever heard of Julie and Julia. I first learned to cook at all that way: by getting a cookbook and making everything in it. That had been a vegetarian cookbook and I've been anxious to do more with meat and learn about traditional sauces. If only I'd come up with this amazing idea a few years ago and started a blog about it . . . Anyway, I'm looking forward to working with this book although I won't be sharing the results here. Maybe we'll finally see that movie now that life has calmed down a bit as well.

A very happy Epiphany to all!