How this city kid celebrates Easter

Unfortunately, there was no baby brother in our Easter baskets today.  He missed out on a lot of fun this weekend which is just as well I suppose since if he'd decided to make his appearance, we'd have missed out on this fun as well (though I'm sure we'd have had a totally different kind of fun).

Eric took off work on Friday to hang with Hannah who was off school for Easter break. Their daddy-daughter days are always chock-full of fun and very exhausting. On this one, they spent the first part of the morning at Port Discovery and then trekked down to The Aquarium before returning home half-asleep and happy mid-afternoon.

They rested up and then we brought new meaning to the term stoop sitting. Amy invited us to join in the egg-dying fun with her and Zoe and Nate, and since it was so nice outside, we took it to the sidewalk. It was a terrible spot to try to photograph since everyone was huddled in a very small half-circle facing the house, but we snapped a few, including some that Eric took by hanging out of the upstairs window.

Amy had these neat little no-spill, color coded egg-dying containers that the girls took turns plopping eggs into.

I wish Nate's face were in this one because I'm guessing, based on his hand gesture, that it was a pretty funny face.

Hannah had the official job of catching the eggs in a plastic mitt when they were finished soaking in the dye and then placing them back in the crate.

When nearly all were colored, I asked about polka dots...Nate ran in to get a candle and promptly started polka-dotting eggs in hot wax while Hannah watched mesmerized and continuously asked why it didn't hurt his fingers.

There were a few casualties that were far too cracked to be dyed which Nate and Zoey happily disposed of. Hannah had some bites of one but she's into a "no oak [yolk]" think lately so she left most of the egg-eating up to these two.

I seriously love Zoey's face in this one.

We spent yesterday at the circus (another blog post that I will hopefully get to before baby brother arrives), and then resumed Easter celebrations this morning with a whole-house egg hunt. Eric stashed some coins in some of the eggs, but we otherwise left them empty. As you know, I'm not into candy, even the less craptastic candy options are still unnecessary in my book. I allow the less craptastic options in VERY SMALL DOSES here and there (like a lollipop when we go to Trader Joe's), but I'm definitely not going to buy it and have it in the house. I'm also not into wasting money or house space on a bunch of junky toys just to stuff some eggs, though, quite honestly, if I were someone who shopped a lot and happened to be out and about and happened to come across something kind of fun and inexpensive, I might have given in on that one and purchased some junk. I wasn't going to make a special trip to the store though just to look for something to spend money on. And anyway, Hannah didn't care. She loved the thrill of finding the eggs and although she preferred the ones with change in them, she was happy finding the empty eggs too. As with the other holidays, we try to keep as much of the fun as possible without making more work for ourselves than is necessary. You can call it selfish if you want; I call it setting boundaries to maintain my own sanity. Whatever it is, it works for us so we're sticking to it.

None of the egg-hunting pics really came out, but here's one for posterity's sake.

Happy Easter if you're celebrating any parts of this celebration of spring, fertility, sex, resurrection, or whatever other threads we've woven into it over the centuries!!

Still hibernating...

Today Hannah said, "I'm getting bored of just wandering around with my parents. I want to see my baby brother." I told her she was preaching to the choir.  I know he isn't THAT late, but since his sister broke loose at 38 weeks and since my cycle is shorter than usual (25 days instead of 28), I thought for sure that this little guy would at least be a few days early, if not a few weeks. That his due date came and went 2 days ago is unreal to me.

With Hannah, I kept reading that first babies were always late, and I was counting on that being a fact so when my membranes ruptured 2 weeks early and the house was a mess with nothing ready, I cried. A lot. It is an understatement to say that I was not ready. With this one we've been ready for what feels like eons, and I've been huge and uncomfortable for even longer. I was far more capable with Hannah, and my lifestyle was far less compromised, so I didn't mind being pregnant. This one has changed my whole life and rendered me useless as a member of my former active existence. I have worked hard to make peace with my new couch potato existence, but I am so looking forward to being able to walk without  waddling and run around with Hannah without getting winded and peeing my pants. I am also looking forward to having all that glorious extra space in my abdominal cavity for things like breathing, digesting, and holding my bladder for more than 11 minutes at a time.

How do bears know when to stop hibernating?? Maybe there is a similar message I can send to this little guy to let him know that spring is here, winter is over, and it's time to leave his little den.

I walked down to The Avenue earlier today for some inducing acupuncture. I've been doing pelvic tilts and imitating hula hooping (not sure I could actually hula hoop or I'd have Eric get mine out of the garage). We are doing a few other things purported to encourage labor which I won't mention here. I guess the only thing to do now is just be patient and trust that he will come when he's ready...In the meantime, I'm trying to make peace with the fact that I may end up carrying him to his high school prom in utero.

The closest thing to a snow day in 2013

The rain that took over midday turned our one and only snow day into a bit of mess, but we enjoyed it for a few hours before everything turned into a soggy mess. Hannah and I started our day by building a snowman on the back porch (there was more snow back there than out front).

We came inside to warm up for a bit, and then I took her over to Kylie's house to play in their backyard and build another snowman (and a baby snowman). I went home to sit down and relax my very sore lower back and hips, and Kevin sent me this super cute pic of the ladies and their finished products.

After that it was off to the parking lot of The Rotunda for some city rat sled riding. I suited back up, grabbed the camera, and walked over to meet them. Adrienne stood at the top of the hill and helped the girls onto the sled, and Kevin stood at the bottom and caught them before they tumbled off the curb onto the parking lot, which was just wet and not at all snowy. I was only there for two runs and didn't manage to get any good pics during either, but I'm sharing two anyway.

By this point the falling snow was incredibly wet, and in spite of snow pants and a snow coat, Hannah was soaked through. When the girls got to the bottom of the hill on the second run that I was present for, they all slid slowly over the curb and toppled to one side while Keven struggled to get one hand out of his pocket and catch them. Hannah stood up and said, "I'm fine. Mommy, can we go home now?" So we came home, and she warmed up in the bath tub and then had some grilled cheese and tomato soup.

The snow turned to rain, and the snowman spent the rest of the day drooping and sagging. His button eyes sunk back into his head, and his carrot nose catapulted forward into the ground in front of him. The fun was short-lived, but I think we can say that we sufficiently sucked the marrow out of that snow (half) day bone!

The transformation of Hannah's art gallery

Hannah's art gallery received mixed reviews while it was up. Some raised their eyebrows, plastered on a smile, and said "Oh wow...how nice" in a tone that indicated the opposite. Some suggested nicer ways of displaying her art, you know, frames and such. Then there were those who, like me, loved the kitschy chaos of it all.

I'm not much of a decorator. I don't feel like spending the time or money required to print photos, buy art, buy frames, coordinate frames, hang stuff...I paint the walls, hang whatever framed stuff I've inherited over the years, and leave the rest of the space blank. It's not that I don't want there to be something there, it's just that I don't have it in me to prioritize it.

When Hannah started school in the fall, she also started coming home with a new painting every day. I followed the Montessori way and made comments like, "tell me about this" and "I see a lot of dark lines in this corner" and "is that an 'H'?" instead of slathering on the praise with a simple, generic "good job!" I wanted to show that I was proud though, that I admire her work and creativity, and also that art is a broad category inclusive of many different styles and artists and she should feel free to consider herself an artist if she so desired, so we started taping her work to the wall. She loved it, and so did I because that long, bleak blank space in the dining room was finally filling with color, and the only effort required of me was a little tape ripping.

As the wall filled up, it became clear that Eric had joined ranks with the first group mentioned above. To some extent, I knew it was getting a little out of hand, especially since a lot of the earlier stuff was ripped and barely hanging on to the wall, but there was still blank space that needed to be filled! Sure, I'll admit it, my slight OCD had started to take over, and I wanted to see just how far we could take it. I had never intended to leave it up forever, and in spite of my last post in which I admitted to being an obsessed parent, the gallery wasn't some sort of shrine in her honor or anything. I never had any intentions of keeping all the paintings (the vast majority went out the with the recycling this morning); I really just thought it was fun. 

When the only space left on the wall required a ladder to reach, and the piles of new paintings started stacking up on the floor, I took the above pics and agreed it was time for a new decorating scheme. We went to Ikea and picked up five $5 frames. I picked my favorite five paintings, trying to choose one that represented each color phase and also each style phase (she started with blobs of color, then progressed to lines, the letters, then random swirls and lines and blobs combined). I kept a few more favorites too, and I also kept some of the smaller craft projects she did which I don't have frames for yet.

My goal was to create a framed collage on the wall like this or this or any of the ones at this site so that we retained that element of kitschy chaos that I like so much but in a more acceptable manner, but I don't have any idea how to do that. I mean, do you take a methodical approach and measure your wall and then your art and graph it all out using various standard frame sizes and then take that plan to the store to purchase frames? Or do you just buy a random assortment of frames that look good together in various sizes and bring them home and hope you have stuff to fill them? And once you have the frames, how do you decide how to arrange them on the wall? Do you measure then and graph out a game plan or do you just start hammering in nails and hope it looks awesome in the end?

I haven't given up, but I did decide to start small in a manageable way. These frames weigh next to nothing so we used tiny nails and can totally move them around later when we have more frames and a game plan for making the collage thing happen. In the meantime, we went just lined them up horizontally.

So, artsty fartsy friends, who wants to help me create a Hannah art collage on the dining room wall??? Anybody??

Hannah obsession

There are multiple moments in every day when I look at Hannah and am overwhelmingly enamored with her. Yesterday I was working and she was sitting right next to me on the arm of the couch watching TV, and I kept feeling the need to squeeze and hug and kiss her. She seemed so adorable and grown up all at the same time. Maybe it was the pony tail still in her hair from dance class. Maybe it was the jeans, which she never wears. Either way, I put down the computer and took a picture.