A Little Bit O' Country

For the past several Octobers, we've had the little tradition of squishing in the Gilmore van and taking a short drive upstate to pick ourselves some pumpkins.  It's always fun-crisp air, a hay ride, apple cider, homemade doughnuts, and a real country experience.  Or as close as you can get to a country experience an hour and half from they city.   

This is what our real country pumpkin patch looked like.  The pumpkins grow nestled in a green, grassy field.  No dirt, no vines.   

I kind of like it because Lucia could crawl around without getting too dirty and the orange on green sure made for a pretty picture.  

                              
            
Our real country experience also included a decent crowd of people and even someone directing parking.  Ha, ha! Look at Lucia's face in this picture.
                                                  


Fun on the hayride.

And for even more fun, pictures from one of our first pumpkin picking adventures.  My how things have changed.  Look how little Ruby was!

                                      


And pumpkins used to be exciting enough to draw Luke out of the van.   To be fair, it was much colder  this year.
                                                   

The Little Red Lighthouse

Ezra received this lovely little book for his 2nd birthday from our friends the Cromars.  He has loved reading about the little lighthouse flashing it's light "one second on, two seconds off." It is one children's book that I really enjoy as well.  It's a good story(too bad it's not exactly true) and the writing is pretty.  The illustrations are really fun as the ships and the lighthouse and even the fog have subtle human characteristics.  

 Every September they have a Little Red Lighthouse Festival.  Of course, we had to go.  We met our friends the Maroon's and rode the train up to the Washington Heights.  There was a old-fashioned trolley-bus that shuttled us down to the river.  Emma and Ezra loved it.

The Gilmore's showed up later on and Ezra got to spend some time with his "best friend" Aunt Becky and his cousins.  We at food, threw rocks in the river, and did a lame-o "craft" which consisted of putting a white plastic cup on top of a red one and calling it a lighthouse.  The highlight, of course, was getting to climb up the STEEP spiral staircase and ladder to the top of the lighthouse.  Ezra thought it was pretty cool and Martin's fear of heights set in (it's not that high!)

Here we are inside the lighthouse.

And here is our happy boy.  Isn't that smile gorgeous?

(Lucia, although there is no evidence of such, you came too.  You had a fun time crawling in the grass and being entertained by Max and Ruby.  Next year we'll let you come up with us.)

Hurricane Weekend in Vermont

We decided to escape Hurricane Irene by spending the weekend in Vermont with the Gilmores. We left Friday night and had a wonderful day on Saturday doing Vermont-y things.

Picnicking, cheese sampling, farm visiting....

Oh, the novelty of grass for a city baby!

We went to a petting barn and the highlights for the kids were the baby chicks and an old silo that was filled with feed corn for playing in.

I love these pictures of Ezra. He easily spent a very focused hour in the silo. Note that this is how little kids play in the corn.

And now for big kid play.

And then, it got a bit out of control. Somehow, Max convinced Ruby that she wanted to be buried in the corn, even after Luke's turn had just ended in tears.

This is a photo of Ruby, her presence carefully camouflaged by strategically placed tractors and buckets. Ruby's face is under the bowl on the left side of the pictures.

Ruby's face after the bowl was removed.  Not suprisingly, she cried too.

Saturday night we stayed in a cute little cottage and while we heard rain all night long, it wasn't until we got on the road in the morning that we began to realize that we did anything but escape the storm.  I've seen flooding many times before, but nothing like the flash floods that ravished little Vermont.  The expected three hour drive home turned into an 11 hour maze of a drive as we were forced to turn around again and again because of washed out roads and flooded bridges.  While I was tempted to feel sorry for myself because I was stuck in a car with a crying baby, our discomfort was nothing compared to the loss that we saw that day. My heart goes out to all the people who were impacted by the terrible flooding!  

One Bedroom Apartment

It's hot outside and so I am sitting and enjoying the only room in our house with a good AC. The only room that has been livable the last few days-our bedroom. When I say "our bedroom," I really mean "the bedroom".

It may seem crazy, even by New York standards, that we all sleep here. I realize that it's a pretty un-American sleeping arrangement. What about teaching our kids independence? What about personal space? But the truth is, I love it. I may not love it forever. I probably won't even love it for another few months. But right now, it is heavenly. Martin and Ezra have fallen asleep next to a pile of books. Ezra is gently snoring. (He is so beautiful!) Lucia is sprawled out on her stomach in her pack'n'play. My little family, all here, so close.

How does it work, with different schedules, with a teething baby? Magically, night after night, it just does. Lucia cries, and Ezra may stir but immediately drifts back to sleep. Martin knows how to slip in and out silently in the morning as he readies for work. Somehow Ezra and Lucia always seem to magically wake up at the same time and love to spend the first few minutes of their day rolling around together on the bed, Ezra telling Lucia that he loves her in a voice that is much too loud.

But loud voices are a morning thing, right now I just hear a chorus of quiet breathing.

And if you still think I'm crazy, it may make you feel better knowing that our bedroom is quite large... by New York standards.

Last Saturday

Last Saturday was one of those days, or I guess I should say nights.  I was eating an ice cream cone and holding Lucia at the same time.  I thought it would be fun to let her have her first taste of ice cream and she was begging for it with her baby body language.  What could it hurt, right?

It ends up that she had a pretty quick allergic reaction-eyes red, swollen, and itchy.  She got hives all over her torso and back.  I started to worry about her breathing and ran and got the Benedryl. We gave her a dose and then Martin gave her a blessing.  While we worried over Lucia, Ezra found himself with the opportunity to get into some unsupervised mischief.  In the bathroom, I found Ezra and a mostly empty bottle of Benedryl.  We asked him if he had drunk  the medicine, and like any good one-year old would, he said yes. Chances are he dumped it down the sink, but we didn't want to take any chances.

A taste of ice cream turned into an evening in the hospital for Papa and Ezra.  The gave him a charcoal drink to absorb his stomach contents and kept him under observation for several hours.  The doctor said he doubted that any child would be able to tolerate drinking that much medicine and then he saw Ezra down the charcoal like it was nothing.  He said he had never seen anything like it.

Everything ended up being okay and Ezra talks about this hospital time fondly. What's better than one-on-one time with your dad, a cab ride, Jell-o (his first experience with it), and as much t.v. as you want?

Father's Day

Our neighbor, Jamie, had a great idea for Father's Day. Not only did she share her idea, she also offered to take and edit the photos.  To top it off, she did this kind thing not just for us, but for many families in our little playgroup. Sweet Jamie keeps on proving again and again to be an extremely thoughtful and talented person.

Getting the kiddies to look at the camera and hold the letters just right was challenging, to say the least. To complicate things, Lucia was still not a sitter at the time, so we kind of had to prop her up. After the photo session, there weren't any pictures of Ezra and Lucia together where both were looking or that Lucia wasn't tipping over. Jamie ended up having to Photoshop Lucia's head onto her body. Take a good look at the second picture. You can't even tell, right?

Papa loved his gift!

Rocks with PePaw

I haven't posted anything for months and so here I am playing catch up. I ran across these photos that I took in the late afternoon on a gorgeous, April day. I love how the low sun makes long shadows in the grass and how the silhouetted figures show Ezra and his Grandpa engaged in one of Ezra's favorite activities in the whole world--throwing rocks in the creek. A warm sun, a crisp breeze, and a bubbling, singing creek. It was one of those afternoons when the world truly seemed carefree and perfect. (Especially since Ezra didn't take an unintentional swim, like he had the day before.)