Maine, Grammy

While I've been away from here, I've been super busy doing things. Calina and I took our first trip together (of many, I'm sure). We flew up to Maine to enjoy some cooler air, some woodsy fun with long-lost friends, and some beautiful coastline. I took loads of video that needs to be pared down, but I'll whet your appetite for visuals with a snapshot:

Needless to say, traveling with an infant alone is very, very hard. Thank goodness I had the help of friends on the other side to help us with the impossible bits -- there is NO way I could have managed to carry a suitcase, a diaper bag, a stroller, a baby, AND a carseat onto an airplane. Just couldn't happen. Thankfully, I was able to secure a borrowed carseat on the Maine end, thanks to Chris's lovely mom Julie, and what was probably quite a lot of legwork by his sister Natalie.

We spent most of our time at Chris's family's "camp" which, translated from Northern-speak, is basically a little house on a (gorgeous) lake, with an extra cabin on the side. Jess, Ben, Jhonen, Calina and I had the cabin all to ourselves. We were a bit worried about the babies keeping each other up all night long, but they actually did quite well. I think Calina slept about what she usually does these days: 7pm-7am-ish with a half-dozen breaks for snacks.

Our second day there was filled with a fantastically fun and perfectly lovely day -- a big get-together to celebrate Chris & Leslie's wedding (on the anniversary of the ceremony we all missed going to). Perfect, perfect weather, great food, beautiful water, fun conversation, awesome cake. It was so nice to just enjoy the company of a ton of people who were all pleasant and having a good time.

Having just barely survived a 4-day trip on my own with Calina, I'm thinking it might be a while before I try it again... Though we are planning a trip our to Oregon at some point in September. At least Colin and probably Gramma will be going along for that one, though, so... That should be much easier. It was really just the fact that I didn't get any break whatsoever. She'd scream if I put her down for even a second to use the bathroom or take a shower.

She seems to have hit a little bit of a rough patch the last couple of weeks. I don't know if it's helmet-related (if this one's getting too small), or teething-related, or illness-related, or just baby-getting-older, but she has been so much more difficult lately. Crying a ton, having trouble sleeping, drooling, chewing, eating a bunch then spitting it all up, and basically being a grumpy mess. Super fuss-face.

She was in rare form for Colin's Mom who came to visit over the past few days. I'm not sure if she's still recouperating from our trip or if she's really just taken a turn for the worse, but she's just terribly touchy, scared, exhausted and unwilling to nap, and antisocial with everyone except me and Colin (and gramma to some extent). She's decided that napping will only happen either in the Moby wrap on Colin or me, or on gramma's shoulder in her new rocker. Maybe in the carseat if she's really tired, but if she wakes up in the car, it's all over.

It was still great for Peggy to get to see her only grandchild for a couple of days, I just wish she had been in better spirits.

The Home Stretch

We're getting close to making our house manageable with all of this jumbling. I was foiled by Ikea (as tends to be the case with that place): I ended up coming home with one of the wrong pieces for my new desk, so... We have to go back yet again to exchange it. Which is OK, really, because I had to go back anyway -- they were out of something else I wanted. Grrr.

I spent a little time getting some videos off my camera... did a bit of uploading to youtube:

This is pretty much a nightly occurance:

Trying to get Jhonen to say "yeah yeah yeah". He totally did it.

Right now, this is Calina's favorite activity:

So, sure, it's a lot of babies. But... that's pretty representative of my life right now. And, who doesn't love watching babies?

A Day of Doctors

Today we took Calina to get her helmet adjusted (she's doing really well), took her to a followup appointment with the neurosurgeon and the plastic surgeon, and then visited our friend Jacquie at Winnie Palmer Hospital who just had a new baby boy on Monday.

The hospital has a cool entry:

Those things pretty much took all day. We stopped by Ikea to pick up a shelf for our new office, but they were totally lame and closed up shop at 5pm (3 hours EARLY!) to train their employees on new products coming in. We would've been really, really pissed if we'd come all the way from home to get kicked out the minute we walked in. Luckily we were only a few miles up the road at the hospital before heading there.

Starting Over

After living here for 3 years, I think we've finally decided to move in.

You know how sometimes, after living in a place for a while, you start to really get annoyed at the way things are... and just HAVE to fix them? We're totally there. So I'll probably be writing a lot over the coming weeks about the stuff we're doing to rearrange the house to make it more enjoyable for all of us to live here.

Part of the issue, of course, is that there are babies to worry about now... And the house is absolutely not baby proofed in the least. It's an outright danger zone! So, step #1 is creating a design around safer, more organized, more kid-friendly ideals. Step #2, unfortunately, is reorganizing all our s-t-u-f-f, and probably selling a ton of it. (Thank goodness for Craigslist, right?)

Today's project was the garage: we still have piles of stuff lying around from the gelato shop we just closed out (because we weren't sure what our successor would want of our stash exactly). So we finally just gave up and piled a bazillion plastic gelato cups in the recycling pile. So sad, but... There's really no one who will take them off our hands, and I'm not willing to spend money on shipping them somewhere.

Our garage is also filled with things that my gramma insists upon keeping even though there is no way in the world anyone in their right minds would want any of these things. Like a box of rocks. Literally. Or broken picture frames. Or a collection of old dental tools she might someday use to make wax moulds for casting jewelry. Or a "thing that pilots use," she told me when I held up some sort of unidentifyable mathematical tool. And about a million woven baskets of every shape and size (many with handles, so they don't even stack). And, of course, her giant collection of hundreds upon hundreds of seashells in tupperware stacked to the ceiling. And still, she really, truly, thinks that she's brutally whittled her stockpile of junk. These things are just "the essentials". And she can't understand how Colin could refuse to get rid of 2 of the 4 pieces of furniture that he owns. "But that dresser is so hideous." Hilarious. I love her, but she needs a serious intervention.

Can we get the Clean House TV show to come fix her? I don't think they'd do it. Our mess wouldn't make for good TV; her packrat-ism is too sneaky, because she's really good at hiding things. Like, filling up the entire garage, for example. Or the floor of her closet. Or filling all her dresser drawers -- rather than with clothing -- with her mother's old dolls, a "real indian papoose,"dozens of silk scarves and hankies, or a box of trilobites.

I'm not sure our house redo will actually even address a third of her stuff (it's so well hidden away I'm not sure I could even find it), and 80% of the third we find, she'll fight for. In the meantime, we can pretty easily address the mess we can see: the collection of video game boxes and action figures filling the top 2 feet of our game room; the random collection of not-particularly-attractive knick-knacks filling our foyer's bookcase, and by selling off all of the furniture that we hate (and replacing it with fewer, nicer pieces).