Ponytail and skinny jeans

Dash rocked quite the eclectic look this morning. He had the bottom half of a hipster in his skinny jeans and slip-on shoes. His torso went lumberjack chic in a plaid shirt and L.L.Bean fleece vest. And then there was the hairstyle which was inspired by his sister's ponytail so can fairly be described as a small bit of cross-dressing. I love this dude and his hilarious style.

Backyard play

When we bought our house nearly five years ago, we had neither pets nor mobile kids, so we had no idea what an advantage our fenced-in backyard would turn out to be.  Five years later, that yard gets heavy activity for all sorts of outdoor play.  

Dash's current obsession is the rain barrel.  He can fill up a tiny cup of water, carry it across the yard, dump it into another container, and go back for more for approximately forever.  He usually ends up soaked but it's a small price to pay for free, happy, outdoor fun.

Careful water transport

Ella uses the backyard as her own personal gym these days.  She practices cartwheels in the grass and does all sorts of dangerous leaps from the small plastic slide set.  She also continues her love of making 'cakes' from sand, dirt, and other detritus she finds in the yard.  They always sound tasty (chocolate peanut butter blueberry cake!) but I have thus far avoided having to actually eat them despite her pleas that I do so.

I used to be scared of her climbing onto the platform of this 

little slide.  Silly me, I should have saved my worry for the day 

(that has now come) when she insists on balancing on top of 

the side rails and then leaping off.

Working mother fail

Last week, I had to travel for 3 days for work.  Before I had kids, I used to love work travel. It was fun to get out of my routine and to see and do new things.  As soon as I had kids, work travel ceased to be much fun at all.  If I'm going to be away from my kids, I'd much rather it be for a vacation.  And the logistics related to work travel with young kids is exhausting for me.  We have to arrange additional childcare during the week, make changes to our carefully orchestrated routine of school and activity pick-ups and drop-offs, and then of course there is the simple fact that I miss the kids and they miss me when I am gone.  I used to think that leaving a little baby was much harder than leaving a bigger kid.  All that lugging of breast pump parts and arguing with TSA agents about the coolers full of milk and ice.  But I've come to learn that that was the easy phase of working mother travel.  Now, I have two people who are big enough to really miss me, and they are not shy about articulating their feelings of sadness in ways that make me feel horribly guilty.  Last week, I planned my travel so carefully to be home for bedtime on Friday night.  My flight was supposed to arrive at 7 pm, I didn't check my luggage so I could avoid baggage claim, and I even bought the seat upgrade so I could sit at the front of the plane and shoot out of there as soon as we landed.  On a good day, my flight can land at RDU and I can be in my house 35 minutes later.  But you know what they say about the best-laid plans, right?  I arrived home at 12:40 a.m., 5 hours later than planned.  Needless to say, I missed bedtime.

The goopy eyes

Dash has inherited Josh's penchant for getting clogged tear ducts and styes in his eyes (even though that makes a fun rhyme, it is not a fun condition).  As a preventative measure, we are supposed to put a warm compress on his eyes every day, preferably for 10-15 minutes.  He is a two-year old boy.  We are lucky if we get the compress on for 10-15 seconds.  That is, until Josh discovered that he will stand still for a long time watching digger videos on YouTube while we cover each eye with the warm cloth.

Things Ella knows

One of my favorite parts of parenting my children as they get older is when one of them busts out with some little piece of knowledge or new skill that I had no idea they had mastered.  When they were babies, I knew every little thing they could do and where they'd learned it. But as they get older, they pick up new things all over the place and sometimes they come as a real surprise to me.

Things Ella knows #1:  How to eat with chopsticks.  I took Ella and her best friend L out to lunch last week at our favorite noodle and dumpling restaurant, and Ella ate her entire lunch with chopsticks.  She didn't just use the chopsticks to stab at things but could actually hold them in a reasonable approximation to the right way and get her food into her mouth.  Amazing.

Chopsticks girl

Things Ella knows #2:  The concept of abstract art.  Ella was making a picture this weekend and it was full of very precise squares and lines and dots.  When I asked her what she was making, she said "This is abstract art, Mommy."  She then proceeded to write 'Abstract' on the bottom of the page, just to make sure I got it.

Brave girl

In a surefire sign that my little girl is indeed growing up, Ella has started facing all of her fears at the playground.  Slides and nets and structures that have previously been deemed too scary have all been conquered lately with no prodding from us.  Yesterday afternoon as we were walking to the park near our house, Ella told me she wanted to play on the big structure but didn't want to go on the net because it is too scary.  But once we were there, she asked me to help her with it which I did, just once.  After that, she climbed across it by herself time after time, clearly so proud of her accomplishment.

Net: Conquered.

Best part of my day

There are a lot of wonderful things about working from home.  My commute is short, I rarely have to rearrange my work schedule for deliveries or service appointments at the house, and my work wardrobe can be very very comfy.  Since we started doing a nanny share with the family across the street from us (and my kids go over there), I have discovered a new favorite moment of the day, courtesy of my home office set-up.  I love when our nanny pulls up in the Minivan and all of the children (5 in all! Did I mention our nanny is amazing at what she does?) spill out and run down the front walk to the house.  From my second floor office, I have the perfect view across the street of the all those little legs toddling and running.  They chase each other, they check out the birds and the squirrels, and they just look so happy and carefree as they tumble out of the van and across the yard.  It feels like a special secret treat to get to observe my kids without them knowing I am there and I love every day when I get to see this ten second show.

  View from my desk