Adventure Day, continued

The plan was to go to the zoo, but since we had two other moms and their kids (and an extra tagging along) with us, and there was rain predicted (which didn't materialize — it's a gorgeous day), we went to the Museum of Science.

(I'm going to digress here just a wee bit and point out how much I love the fact that the Belmont library lets you check out museum passes! We paid $5 each for the adults; the kids were all under 3 and so got in free. Even counting drinks to go with our lunch and the pricey Boston parking, I got out of there having spent less than $20. Hooray!)

The MoS is way, way cool — everything from a push-the-button exhibit showing basic mechanical principles to race cars to a life-size T-rex (and his footprint, Beth pointed out) to semi-precious stones (Beth looooves picking up rocks, and these were really neat rocks — she thought they were flowers at first!) to shells and butterflies and lots of computers and buttons for little hands to push. Bethie and I spent quite a bit of time talking about what a museum is, how it's a collection of things that are similar to each other in some way, and we sat down at a hands-on exhibit that let kids classify objects: sort them, put them in boxes, write on a small chalkboard attached to each box what it was a collection of. She gets, now, that the collection of shells sitting next to the TV from last week's beach trip is a kind of museum. I asked her, "Beth, if you could go see a museum of anything at all, what would be in it?" and she answered, right off the bat, "Trees. And dolphins." So I guess some of our next Adventure Days will have to be to Habitat and to the New England Aquarium. (I'd love to know what Sarah wants to see, but she's not telling us just yet.)

The best part of the visit was last: baby chicks actually hatching out of their eggs! We stood around (and stood around, and stood around) and eventually everyone else wanted to leave, but Beth and I wanted to stay. I even told the other moms to go home, but they didn't — and eventually we did walk away, to see the monkeys and change Sarah's diaper — and then we came back, and one of the chicks had pushed halfway out of the shell! It was all wet and scrawny looking, and obviously tired (come on, pecking a hole that big and working your way out of your own shell has got to be hard), but it would rest for a few minutes and then wriggle more to get further out of the shell. So, so amazing.

See, this is the kind of thing I want my kids to see. You can read about chicks hatching, or puppies being born, or see pictures of rivers or know that glass is made out of sand at very high temperatures, but until you actually see it up close and participate as much as you can, you don't really understand. This sounds pretty trite, as I'm typing it, but it isn't a very complex philosophy, and that's why we're doing Adventure Day in the first place.

Beach babes

In an attempt to get some sort of schedule going on in our lives, I've declared each Friday to be Adventure Day, and we kicked it off last week with a trip to (gasp!) the beach. I know, I know — the beach is not the first thing I think of when I think of New England. But there it is, and I have the pictures to prove it.

Beth, after some hesitation (and some screaming and crying about NOT wanting to go in the water!), squatted down and started digging in the sand — eventually helping me make quite the rambling sand castle. Sarah, of course, had no qualms about any of it and scootched herself off the beach blanket immediately so she could scrunch wet sand through her fingers. She didn't eat any of it, but she sure enjoyed the texture.

And then we went to Wendy's for lunch — Beth shoving whole fistfuls of fries in her mouth, hungry kid! — and Sarah chowing down on as many mandarin orange bits as I'd give her. They slept the whole way home. I think we may go to the zoo this week, and I can't wait!

Indoctrination, of several sorts

We took the girls to the Bentley football game last Friday, and it was a hit! Beth got her face painted on the way in (a blue and a gold stripe on her cheeks), and she had a sausage sandwich and fry bread while sitting in the bleachers, and she made friends with the freshman guy sitting behind us (and ate half of his pretzel). Sarah got herself adored and held by the three Danish exchange students sitting in front of us. She lapped up the attention. Beamed, actually. She also got her first taste of a frozen strawberry pop, and was INDIGNANT when I finally took it away from her.

When we came in the gates I said, "Look, Bethie! Cheerleaders!" and Scott asked, "Early indoctrination?" (Well, yeah.) After we got settled he pointed out the football players, and the fact that they were actually holding a football and running with it, and Beth was supremely impressed that they pushed each other and knocked each other down. This is big for a two-year-old, I guess.

I'm impressed with the measures the school takes to keep students out of trouble on the weekends. Freshmen aren't allowed cars on campus. A shuttle runs hourly to Harvard Square (where the action is, apparently). Football games — although the team's probably just above high school caliber — are a big draw. Admission to the game was free with Bentley I.D., and food (though not drinks or ice cream) were free too. Students with "Bentley Superfan" sweatshirts roamed the crowd giving out white pompoms (Beth was ecstatic) and offering white hair paint. By the end of the evening we also had two little snow globes with the girls' pictures embedded inside.

The cheerleading thing came up again because Halloween is coming up, and there are indeed cute little cheerleader costumes at Target (read: cheap) and although Beth maintains she wants to be a piggy (or maybe a cow), Scott's been pushing for her to wear something exceedingly girly ("Wouldn't she like to be a princess?"). I've been looking online for piggy costumes, and there's just nothing that's really, really cute. Which is a bummer, because I really like Halloween, even as a supposed-to-be-really-jaded-by-this adult, and Sarah's going to be a chickie, and if they were both going as barnyard animals Scott and I could have a really good excuse to go as farmers. But now I have to find her something else cute, and (here's the kicker) convince her that it's what she really, really wants. (And then find myself a costume to go with it.)

In retrospect, I realize that ALL PARENTS DO THIS, and my parents did it to me too ("Are you sure you want to be a cricket?" my mom asked, and I can just picture her thinking, How on earth do you make the legs? And the antennae? "Wouldn't you rather be a ladybug? Ladybugs are cuter."), and it's only about half as evil and manipulative as it sounds.

Beth's sleep troubles are diminishing again, which is good, and I'd like to think I even had something to do with it. For several nights in a row I asked her, "Can you have good dreams tonight?" and she actually did.

I woke her up Saturday morning with, "Did you have good dreams, Bethie-boo?"

"Yes!"

"What did you dream about?"

"Doggies." Pause, pause, pause. "And mommy and baby Sarah."

Then she had to go find her toy football, and run around with it and fall down, and pick herself up, run around with the football again, and fall down again. At one point she dropped the ball and Scott said, "Whoops! You fumbled!" and then she dropped the ball again and said, "Fumble!" Early indoctrination, indeed. Maybe we'll find her a little football uniform for Halloween. In pink, because she'll insist.

Chickies, and sleep troubles

So Scott starting teaching today — he has a Monday/Thursday afternoon class and a once-a-week Thursday evening class, which means that on Thursdays he's leaving by 8:00 a.m. and getting home well after the girls are asleep. I don't think it actually occurred to Beth that Daddy was gone all day today until it was bedtime and he suddenly wasn't there. I think she was more confused than sad, and she spent half an hour crying herself to sleep — though that was probably unrelated to the fact that Daddy didn't tuck her in.

She's had a rough few nights. I think she has night terrors — she starts screaming and crying, and even sits up in her crib, but she doesn't really recognize me if I go in to calm her down. She just stares right through me. This is heartbreaking.

We went to a (real) farm today! (I told Beth about it yesterday, and she's been talking about being a farmer for two days.) Drumlin Farm, operated by the Mass Audubon Society, a little working farm up in Lincoln with a few extras: sanctuary animals that can't be returned to the wild for various reasons. So Beth saw piggies (very exciting) and a bunny rabbit, a skunk, a woodchuck, several owls, some cows, horses, and a whole mess of chickens.

Sarah? I don't know how much of the rest of it she really got. But she definitely got the chickens. They were right at her level, and about her size, and up close — she was fascinated. Completely absorbed. Beth got all excited about the chickens sitting on eggs, and the baby chicks, and had to explain over the phone to her daddy and her grandma about the baby chicks hatching out of eggs. "They come out! Baby chicks talking to me. They say 'peep.'"

She was so excited. And as I'm writing this, she's upstairs crying in her bed — one of those sobbing wails that tells me she's having nightmares but she's not really awake. I'm going to go up and pat her back and tell her everything's okay.

Sigh. Being a mom is hard.

Professor Daddy

Beth has taken to calling Scott "Professor," as in, "Professor, you come here right now!" and "Professor! Professor! Where are you? Oh, there you are." He loves it. We're living in Boston, I'm trying to teach her to say "wicked awesome," and she comes out with "professor." Love my kid.

Yesterday morning I caught her trying to feed Sarah toast. She'd broken off bits and was trying to shove them in Sarah's mouth (Sarah, of course, wasn't complaining in the least — her expression was more "Lemme at it!" than "Toast? I don't think so. Not yet, anyway.").

"Bethie, Sarah can't have toast yet. She can't chew it. She doesn't have any teeth."

A moment of worried concentration, then: "We'll buy her some!" Aha. The solution to all of our problems. I love how her mind works.

"No, sweetie, we can't. It doesn't work that way. Let's feed her applesauce, okay?"

Then Sarah took a morning nap (maybe her fifth? Ever?) and Beth and I were out on the front deck blowing bubbles. (This is hilarious: She can't figure out how to blow just right, so she either spits at the bubble wand or breathes at it.) Eventually I told her, "We're going to have to go wake up baby Sarah and go to Costco."

"And buy her teeth!"

Wow. Oh, just so you know: we didn't really look hard, but we're pretty sure Costco doesn't carry false teeth. At least not for babies.

Tuesday's splash park debacle really needs more explanation.

I'm trying to make friends, really I am. So I'm taking her to the ward playgroup, and the e-mail that went out about it said "splash pool," and I assumed (wrongly) that "pool" meant "pool" (as in short-person wading-style pool) instead of "overgrown sprinklers." She was terrified. Sarah would let me get her feet wet before complaining about it, but Beth just flopped down on her towel in sunbathing stance and screamed and cried when I even suggested going near the water. I kept my cool, though, and on our way out of the park I sat down with her on the grass and said, "This wasn't really a pool, was it?"

"No."

"Tell you what. Not tomorrow, but the next day, we'll find a real pool, you and me and baby Sarah. Okay?"

"Okay."

So (this being "the next day") we went. She had an absolute blast. The local pool is insanely, cliquishly, wonderfully local: you have to be a resident of the town just to buy a day pass, the red-suited lifeguards all look like they grew up swimming there in the summers, kids have to pass a swimming test to go in the deep end, and by late afternoon the place is chock-full of kids playing "Marco!" "Polo!" and swimming underwater and throwing beach balls around. Plus, it starts at just a foot deep, which is great for little Bethie who's only about three feet deep herself. We went this morning, slathered on sunscreen, put on hats, and spent an hour and a half walking around the kiddie half of the pool, coming back to our towel for snacks, and going back in again. Sarah finally lost it around lunchtime, so we came home, ate lunch (what's more appropriate for a pool day than PB&J?), took naps (all of us — I was wiped out), and went back. This time she was an old pro: she didn't need to hold my hand every minute, she went in up to her chin, and she even slipped while she was climbing down from the side of ramp and fell in. I thought it would be the end of things, but no — she kicked and splashed for a few moments while I hauled myself (Sarah in tow) from where I was sitting on the pool floor and righted her.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes!"

"Was it fun?"

"Yes!"

"Do you want to do it again?"

"Nooooo...."

Sarah, by the way (and I feel terrible that so many of my comments about Sarah are "by the way"s — she's tremendous, and calm, and tough as nails — "quietly determined" would be the right words for her), is a total water baby. She stood up in the pool, holding onto my hands; let me swing her around on her back and her tummy in the water, and played beach-ball catch with an older boy (six? seven?) who thought (correctly) that she was a cutie. She also has the cutest baby swimsuit ever. It's a purple patterned halter-style tank suit with ruching on the sides and red and orange beads on the halter tie. I want one for me.

Beth played catch with three kids. She wants to take swimming lessons this fall. She pled with me to let her stay when I told her it was time to go home for dinner. Yay!

Brilliant kids, spacy mom

Sarah's almost, almost crawling. She'll get up on her hands and knees, rock back and forth, study the floor in front of her, then flop herself down like a little inchworm to get her hands farther forward. It's working quite well. I expect her to actually figure out how to alternate hand movements within, oh, a week, at which point we're going to have to buy baby gates to keep her off the stairs. Yikes!

It's been such a week.

Saturday was just awful. One of those days when I shouldn't be allowed around heavy machinery or loaded weapons or small children. It was hot (90-plus degrees), humid, and I had no ability to focus whatsoever. First, on my way out of the house to the grocery store, I actually backed the car into the deck (itty bitty dent on the bumper, no damage to the deck). After battling two children, cramped aisles, long checkout lines and Beth crying most of the way home because she wanted to drive (but wouldn't actually climb in the driver's seat while I was loading the groceries — it was "Too hot! I burn myself!"), I clipped one of the side mirrors trying to pull into the garage.

Grr.

The mirror was still (mostly) attached to the car, but I figured the universe was telling me to stay inside for the rest of the day. So later in the afternoon, I got domestic and homebody-ish: I decided to finish cleaning the oven.

(The oven was absolutely grimy when we moved in. I don't think anyone's cleaned it since it was installed eight years ago. And this is a self-cleaning oven. All you have to do is set it to the clean cycle and wait four and a half hours. But I digress.)

I ran a cleaning cycle a few weeks ago, and while it mostly worked, it also left some still-icky spots that I figured I'd get with some spray-on oven cleaner. So I took the pizza stone out of the oven, picked up the blue spray can, covered the inside of the oven door with foam, recapped the can, and looked at the clock so I'd know when my two hours of soaking the grease-encrusted mess would be over. And then I thought, "Wow, that oven cleaner really smells good," and I looked twice at the blue spray can, and realized that I had just covered the oven door with spray starch.

Grr, again. I wonder: Should I include stories like this in the article I have to write about our family for the ward newsletter? "Libby likes to read, play the violin, and have completely spacy days where she does everything — everything — wrong."

We got new cell phones, which is a source of endless wonder for Beth. "Is that Mama's new cell phone? I want to hold it. I call Aunt Gigi?" Last night Scott was trying to set up his new Treo (ooo, the tech geekiness we exude!) and had the instructions laid out in front of him on the living room floor.

Beth marched over and picked up the paper. "I have to read it," she explained, and proceeded to peruse the instructions. After quite a bit of deliberation, she gave the paper back. "It says 'cell phone.'" And she walked away.

(For the grandparents who are convinced of her budding brilliance, it didn't. She can't read. It said "smartphone," and it had pictures.)

But today after our wearing trip to the park, where Beth was afraid of the sprinkler-type water play area, and another grueling grocery run (don't ask — it's too painful to tell — but it involves me forgetting to change Beth out of her swim diaper before putting her in the shopping cart), we still had to stop by the tailor shop to pick up Scott's pants that we'd dropped off yesterday morning. I found a parking spot a few doors down from the shop, hauled the girls out of the car, and told Beth, "We have to find the tailor shop. Can you help Mommy?"

"It has a number eight on the door," she said.

And so it did. I'm going to let her park the car next time.

Farm girls

We went to a farm! The ward playgroup was held at a farm out in Natick today. Beth thought it was glorious. As soon as she heard we were going to a farm she started talking about piggies.

(It's not really that kind of a farm. It's a pick-your-own-apples kind of farm, but lucky for us there's a petting zoo section with a single placid cow, some ostriches and emus, a big collection of sheep and goats, and a solitary sleeping piggy. Beth was afraid of the ostrich, and when confronted with the big ugly guy's head shrank back and said, "I don't know him.")

She got to pick her own apples off short apple trees, and ride "trains" (a long motorized peoplemover thing, plus a kid-sized caterpillar one), and pet the goats, and play on a playground, and have lunch with some new little friends who are just older than she is.

Sarah sat up in the front seat of the stroller and watched everything: the animals, the other babies, the apples. She wasn't really thrilled about the stroller — Sarah would much rather be practicing her hands-and-knees maneuver right now — but she was patient with our needs to get out of the house.

On the way home Beth had to sing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" over and over and over. (She was pretty creative with it, too — used a bunch of the animals she'd just seen — didn't resort to kitty cats for several miles.)

Late September is apparently Asian pear season, so we'll be back for that. And we saw pumpkins nestling low in their big leaves, so we'll be back for that too.

Yes, all the synapses are in working order

Grandma was taking pictures of the girls and their baby cousin tonight when the itty-bitty digital camera slipped out of her hands. Something was obviously wrong with it — she couldn't turn it on or off — so I said, "Let's try reseating the battery."

At the word "battery," Beth's ears pricked up and she toddled off toward the kitchen. We fussed over the camera and she reappeared a moment later holding out a big D-cell battery on her open palm. "Here you go."

Smart cookie, that.

Swimming Sarah

Sarah's having such a blast with the hardwood floors — she can scoot around quite easily on her tummy, mostly backward. And she'll pick up her arms and legs, balance on her tummy, and do a lovely Superbaby. Such a cutie!

The big move

Highlights from the past week and a half:

• Scott asked me to pack up the clothes the girls would wear on the trip up to Boston, and I replied with, "Yep, I'll pack Beth and Sarah tonight."
  
  Beth, who had been watching (and occasionally helping) the whole packing process, got this totally worried look on her little face and said, "No, mama, don't put me in a box!"
  
  "Oh, sweetie, no," I said. "I won't put you in a box!"
  
  "Not baby Sarah either?"
  
  "No, not baby Sarah either. I'm going to pack your clothes in a suitcase so that you can have them on the trip."
  
  "Oh. Okay."


• Forget the Waldorf-Astoria — my favorite hotel is now the Homewood Suites. There's a kitchenette, enough room for two portable cribs, a swimming pool, breakfast every morning, and dinner most weeknights. It's clean. There are highchairs. It isn't too terribly expensive, especially after you add up what you'd spend on those meals. And the girls lovedlovedloved going swimming last Tuesday night. Sarah, who hadn't been swimming before, was apprehensive for about two and a half minutes before deciding that she was born to be a water baby. Seriously. She kicked her legs and waved her arms around and giggled. Seeing her in a swimsuit is about the cutest thing ever.


• We read the last Harry Potter book all the way up to Boston and then all weekend while we were waiting to get into the house. Excellent, excellent book. (And if you haven't heard my rant on this before, you're getting it here: What is with the crazy evangelical folks who think the Harry Potter books are evil? Come on.)


• Beth didn't throw up in the car. Yay Dramamine!


• Beth did, however, throw up in the Friendly's in Sturbridge. I think I'm at fault for giving her too many fruit snacks to keep her quiet while I was reading Harry Potter to Scott.


• We figured out on the second day of our drive that listening to a tape of old Sesame Street songs will keep Beth quiet and happy for hours on end. No exaggeration, no kidding.


• Closing on the house? Totally anticlimactic. We signed a bunch of papers, the girls played in the corner, the sellers' agent was woefully unprepared and glaringly unprofessional. Our agent, whom we adore, actually handed us her garage door opener and let us stay at her house for four days before our furniture arrived.


• Boston is impossible to get around in. We bought a GPS unit for the car and improved our navigational skills only marginally. It's just bad.


• Oh — if your profession depends on an internet connection, e-mail access and a collection of software your husband is unlikely to have on his computer, just don't move. Ever.


• Stephanie, you were right: Bear your testimony the first chance you get in your new ward. All spirituality aside, it gives people a chance to size you up. (Thanks for the tip, girl.) Someone from church actually recognized me today at Costco and said hello. That random enough?


• Scott got to use his cordless drill to take apart a window on the second floor. Then he and the movers hoisted our couch up over the balcony and squeezed it through the window to get it into the living room. Fun to watch.


• Today's the first day it's actually been bearable to be in the house without air conditioning (which we only have in the bedrooms, thanks). Ninety-plus degrees in Boston is just hot.


• Beth and Sarah had been increasingly frantic about the move. The first few days were like a vacation, then Mom and Dad got serious about something, then we took them to an empty unfamiliar house and said, "Hey, this is where we're going to live! Won't that be fun?" Then we didn't actually get to live in the house for a few days, and then it was hot and humid and everyone got cranky and a bunch of men were moving a lot of things into the house and it was past naptime and everyone got hotter and crankier.
  
  In the middle of the moving-in-the-furniture chaos, the phone/internet/TV guy came to hook everything up. (Somehow this house made it to 2007 without getting cable...but that's another story. And we have co-ax cable draped and duct-taped around the moldings until we can get a contractor in to embed it in the walls. Again, another story.)
  
  But the technology all eventually got hooked up, and the TV got unpacked and put on top of a great steamer trunk we bought in Pittsburgh, and Mommy found the on-demand kids' shows and found (drum roll please) an episode of The Wonder Pets. And everything was immediately, miraculously better.
  
  Beth slumped down in her chair — I could actually see her shoulders relax — and five minutes later she was asleep. Poor kid. She really needed it.


• Oh, we have a terrific downstairs neighbor. She's been saving Bed Bath & Beyond coupons for us, she's fed us dinner twice, and we just genuinely like her. We're counting our blessings.


• First room to be almost completely set up: the kitchen.


• Second room: the guest bedroom. We're hoping for lots and lots of visitors (and you know who you are).

Mad skills

Sarah's swimming! I put her down today within visual range of Beth's wagonful of blocks and she managed to squirm herself over to it, bat a bunch of the blocks out with her arm, and then play contentedly with the blocks. Hooray! She's learned a new skill. She's so determined. And so determined to be self-sufficient!

She's also started to play peek-a-boo. If she's sitting in her car seat or bouncy chair with a blanket, she'll grab the blanket with both hands, pull it over her head, and then pull it back down under her chin. That's when the big silly "I'm so proud of myself!" grin shows up.

We're cleaning things out as we're packing, and Scott found my big makeup case full of, well, makeup. Old makeup. There were five or six pieces I wanted to save (including my vial of Lip Venom, yum). The rest of it got tossed — but not before it was thoroughly inbethtigated.

Beth loooooves makeup. Part of our morning routine includes the two of us putting on lip balm together. So she had to go through every single tube and pencil, take off the cap, and probe around. She ended up with lipstick and eyeliner all over her face, and she was very, very serious about the whole process. This was important stuff.

'Course, I'm not about to let a two-year-old run amok with makeup. I left her with a bag of makeup sponges, a brush, and two new tubes of lip balm. And the big boxlike makeup case, which zips shut and has a mirror in the lid. She's thrilled. When Scott was putting her to bed she pled with him, "Want makeup!"

"The makeup's downstairs, Bethie."

"No, put makeup in crib!"

So she either wants to sleep with it or put it on in the middle of the night so she can (mad skills alert) climb out of the crib, open the door to her room, and sneak out to hang with her delinquent friends. (Okay, I'm just kidding about the sneaking out part. But she can do the rest.) Sigh. We'll try to keep a lid on this makeup thing until she's, say, thirteen. But it's cute.

Beth the acrobat

After being an acrobat at the backyard circus a few weeks ago, and literally dozens of Mommy-assisted somersaults, she finally figured it out on her own! (She went over to hug my friend Margaret after her first somersault at the library this week, but she's had plenty of hugs for her own family since.)

Share the joy, people. Here you go:

Life's rosy! And pink.

Two things:

1. Scott defended his dissertation today...and passed! (I know, I know — no one's surprised. But it's such a great milestone that we have to celebrate it.) Things are looking nice and rosy for our little family of four: a completed and defended dissertation, imminent graduation, then a move to a Real House and a Real Job.


2. I took Bethie and Sarah to the pediatrician's office today. We all (and I mean all) have pinkeye. Glargck. We've been fighting off this awful unrelenting cold for nearly a week, with its sniffles and migraines and sore throats and swollen glands and fatigue and general malaise, and now on top of it we all have drippy itchy eyes and a few rounds of antibiotics. So, so gross.

Independence Day

Bethie celebrated her own independence by holding not one but two sparklers at the picnic we went to. It was a solemn little celebration: Beth and a sparkler and a few tentative waves of same. But a celebration nonetheless. She ran around with the other kids, chased the puppy someone brought along, slid down the slide into the wading pool (after the splashing big kids got out), asked for and received a chocolate chip cookie and a sippy cup full of grape soda.

It's kind of a week of firsts. We took the girls to see Ratatouille on Monday night, their first movie at a theater. Sarah nursed for a good chunk of the movie. Beth said "Uh-oh!" during the scary scenes and cried during the sad ones. (Beth, incidentally, loves popcorn.)

Tonight she got on the phone with her Aunt Gigi and told her about the movie: "I saw movie! There was a rat. He cooked cookies! And his friends." If you're going to cook, her reasoning goes, it might as well have chocolate chips involved.

The circus!

My friend Brooke, who has more good ideas eight months pregnant than most of us have when we're in fabulous physical and mental shape, organized a backyard circus for the kids. It was darling. And hilarious. Beth was an acrobat (she did Mommy-assisted somersaults and then climbed Daddy) and Sarah was a clown (strictly a sideshow act, but boy did she look cute).

Beth's buddy Eleanor did a magic act (soooo cute to see a two-year-old do magic tricks!) and had this fantastic moment of "Oh, wow, people are paying attention!" when she got applause. There was a brief flirt with being shy about it...and then she just lapped up the attention. What a kid.

(Tangent: My mom sent Beth another round of books and Grandma-reading-books-on-tape, including a really cute one about Gossie and Gertie, two little goslings who are best friends and do everything together. At the end of one of a whole bunch of readings of the story, I asked Beth, "Do you have a best friend?"

Well, duh. "Eleanor!")

Back to the circus. There was an elephant trainer (with a daddy as the elephant), and an unintelligible but quite dapper ringmaster, and a few trained monkeys, and a trapeze artist, and even a tattooed strong man (those tattoos looked suspiciously like Crayola marker, and I heard several remarks about the incongruity of a CTR tattoo). Afterward there was homemade ice cream, and kids running around the backyard, and the sun hadn't even started to go down when we left at 8:00. Ah, summer!

The wheels on the bus

I went in to get Beth up yesterday morning and found her sitting in her crib, back against the side, legs stretched out in front of her, with her blanket and dolly Annabelle sitting in her lap.

"Mommy! I'm riding on bus!"

My super-literal child's little imagination has finally kicked in — and it's a wonderful thing to watch. She's starting to play with Play-Doh (which usually means picking apart a ball of the stuff or having Mommy make something for her), she wants me to make her a blanket tent in her room (where she'll sit for, like, half an hour with her dolls and books), and she's having good little conversations with her dolls when she goes to bed at night (Scott encourages this when he puts her to bed: "Can you tell Annabelle and Baby Margie what you did today?"). She's building some new skills, too: besides the potty endeavors, she's learned to put on her own shoes — as long as they're slip-ons like her "skate-rat shoes" (the Vans my sister gave her for her birthday) or her rain boots (which she insisted on wearing yesterday and had on her feet while she was still in just a diaper and tee shirt). During my Saturday cleaning mini-frenzy she helped me wash out the bathroom sink. Took her job very seriously, too.

Thanks to my friend Brooke, I'm also flexing the imagination muscle and learning some new skills: she had the terrific idea of getting a group together to make our own quiet books for our kids, and we've come up with this fabulous Pittsburgh-themed book: all the things a little kid can do in Pittsburgh. We have three pages done now: sort the fruits and veggies into the right colored bin at Stan's Market, zip Mr. Rogers' sweater, dig for dinosaur bones (and assemble the dinosaur) at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. More to follow. Mine will be the carousel at Schenley Plaza (move the animals up and down the poles on the carousel) and a button-the-wheels, open-the-door-and-see-the-driver Port Authority bus page. Beth loves the Stan's Market page (she hasn't seen the other two yet) and will contentedly sit at the dining room table taking the little felt pieces off and Velcroing them back into the right place. Somehow I've become the resident sewing expert for the quiet book group, which makes me laugh — taking sewing in high school was one of the ways I kept sane, but it's been, like, 17 years! I'm having inordinate amounts of fun, though.

It's baaaaaack!

Okay — temporarily. And somehow I missed four episodes.

Sarah and I got home tonight from our quiet book making frenzy and a grocery run, and Scott bounded downstairs and asked, "How much do you love me?"

Turns out he found Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and recorded a new (!) episode tonight. NBC is airing the rest of the season. They started May 24, so I'll have to find the episodes I missed, but hallelujah! At least I get the rest of the season.

I am such an addict.

Hey, Sarah can sit up (propped on her hands) for about a minute at a time. And she's discovered her feet — she'll grab them while she's sitting in her bouncy chair, hang onto her toes, and grin. Happiest baby in the world! She's growing like crazy, too. She's outgrown her cradle (the lovely one my mom made for my oldest cousin over 40 years ago) and is sleeping tonight in the Pack-n-Play (which will be her bed for a few months until Beth gets a big-girl bed and passes down the crib). And her long, long feet! They're actually a bit too long for the size 2 shoes she wore today, but they're so narrow I don't know how I could keep size 3s on her feet. (She always looks so proud of herself when she gets a shoe off...especially if she can stick it into her mouth afterward.)

Numb. Confused.

I just finished reading/proofing Scott's dissertation.



It's actually fascinating stuff. He starts with pointing out that while organizational computer security measures are usually concentrated on technical solutions, anything that's in place can easily be compromised if people who work for the organization don't follow security policies. He's right — be honest now — how many of you have jotted down a hard-to-remember have-to-change-it-every-three-months password on a Post-It and stuck it to the front of your monitor?

Then he goes into his research question: why don't people follow security procedures? What factors influence people's decisions whether or not to follow procedures?

After over 150 pages of truly mind-numbing literature review, methodology, data collection details and construct reliability and validity (gack!), he gives his conclusions — among them, that people consider punishment for not following procedures to be more motivational than reward for following them (interesting), that there's a high prevalence of apathy (probably because the IS people who make up the policies don't have day-to-day management responsibilities for the people who are supposed to follow them), and that the way people perceive risk and what they actually do about it have a really, really dysfunctional relationship.

The end is in sight — defense scheduled for July 11th. It's not really a spectator sport (thought technically it's open to everybody). Maybe I'll invite people after all, and we can sit in the back and do the wave.

Go Scott!

Poop!

Yep, that's right...Beth finally went poop in her potty. Twice! She did it yesterday and then came back for a repeat performance today. She's so, so proud of herself.

And I am so, so regretting buying the big container of blueberries yesterday at Costco.

Zoo pictures...

...are up, here. A few are even included on the zoo post below. Finally.