Taking After His Dad

This morning as I was making Jack's breakfast he started rummaging through my mom's kitchen drawers. These cabinets and drawers are particularly exciting to him because they don't have child-proof locks on them the way ours at home do. It's pretty funny to watch him push a drawer back in. My mom tells him "watch your fingers - be careful not to pinch them!" and upon completely closing the drawer, Jack closely examines his fingers, showing us that they are all still there.

Anyway, this morning I was particularly amused to watch him pull my mom's potato masher out of the bottom drawer and then to get in a golf stance and take some practice swings. No kidding.

Moonlight Madness

This morning, I had the...um...privilege of joining thousands of other bargain-hunters in their annual Black Friday quest to ransack every store in town. The post-Thanksgiving sales are legendary for how they transform ordinary Americans into discount-hounds, sniffing out cheap deals with a level of productivity, organization, and zeal the likes of which are largely absent the rest of the year.

At one store, staffers were practically throwing TVs into shoppers' carts as they passed by on the way to grab Wii Fits or Bean Bags. But don't delay - getting to the store just minutes after it opens means facing the risk/unwarranted disappointment of missing out on the must-have items - big-screen TVs, pet sweaters, and Dora the Explorer scooters.

As a self-confessed Black Friday rookie, I faced the hypocritical dilemma of mocking other shoppers for their devotion to getting a top of the line vacuum cleaner for only $399 (the equivalent of a round-trip flight to Hawaii, I might add, but hey, it stops you from ever having to bend down or use those awkward dials) while standing in line with my new TV/DVD combo.

And we wonder why other nations laugh at us.

Exploring Our Neighborhood

Yesterday morning on our walk through the neighborhood, Jack, Shergar, and I saw three whitetail deer, just grazing in the woods a few hundred yards from our house. Surprisingly, Jack and Sherg were very quiet so we watched them for a while. On Saturday, Mick saw a few deer when he was walking Sherg and then we saw a few more that afternoon while taking a walk to the nearby playground. It's so strange to think that a month ago we had city buses and the occassional motorcade whizzing past our house and that now we have deer grazing so close by (yet are only 2 miles from downtown and the football stadium). I love both environments (and am really looking forward to Mick's and my upcoming weekend trip to DC!).

We had a nice weekend, still enjoying the unseasonably warm Michigan fall. I suspect this means we'll have a brutal winter but frankly, I cannot wait for snow. I had ten winters in DC where I sorely missed winter so I am excited to have a lot of good snow this winter. (I'm sure in April I will be moaning about the fact that it's still gray and that snowflakes are still falling...)

After watching (on TV) Michigan's sad, but not surprising, loss to Ohio State, the four of us took a walk to the elementary school that's just down the street. We tried out a new-to-us backpack carrier for Jack; he thought it was novel on the way there, but screamed and writhed when we tried to load him back in after playing at the playground.
Mick and Jack played for quite a while. From these pictures, you might wonder who had more fun between my two boys. I loved watching them.

We had Emily & Brian over Sunday evening for dinner, drinks, and conversation. Mick hand-crafted some delicious looking burgers for us. I say "delicious looking" instead of "delicious tasting" because we never ate them. While I was in the other room, Emily & Brian (who were seated at the table overlooking the back patio) suddenly gasped. One moment, they had seen Mick standing at the grill and the next moment, they saw huge flames erupt and a giant cloud of smoke... from which Mick emerged. The leg on the grill completely gave out which collapsed the whole thing and sent all of those yummy (but raw) burgers crashing to the ground. Mick was disappointed about those burgers but luckily we had back-up patties (store bought & nowhere near as good!) in the fridge. Really, once we realized Mick was okay, the whole thing was pretty funny.

Jack continues growing and is getting more and more verbal. Most of his words are still single words, though he does say "thank you" unprompted when we give him something (still working on "please"). He seems to add at least a word per day to his vocabulary, though as with most kids this age, only a few of us can tell what he's saying. During the move here, Mick's mum (who so generously spent the pre- and post-move with us and pretty much had full Jack duty during that time) noticed he was saying "gorilla" in response to a gorilla picture in one of his books. I didn't believe it until I heard it, but there's no mistaking it!

He's in a big "helper" phase right now and I'm taking full advantage of it while I can. I suspect that doing housework will one day lose its novelty for him. At the moment, he loves to help me swiffer (dry mop) the floors, dutst, open and close the microwave and press the start button, start my coffeemaker, raise and lower the blinds with me, take mail to and from the mailbox, and his favorite: feed Shergar. If he had his way, he would feed her ten times a day rather than just two. The best part about watching him feed her is that, before we fill her dish, I tell Shergar to sit and stay. Jack is very insistent that she stay, so he always holds his hand up to her and says "stay!" about five times before he finally decides to come and scoop out her food.

Two nights ago, I was making dinner while Jack and Shergar played "chase" around the house. For a while, Jack got really quiet (which should have suggested to me that something funny was going on) but I didn't pay much attention as he eventually came back to see me (I call this "returning to home base."). A few hours later, as we headed upstairs for Jack's bath and bedtime, I noticed what he was doing during the quiet time:
He apparently decided that the shoes should not be lined up on the rug inside our entry, but instead should be piled on a small table. I couldn't stop laughing.

We are headed up to my parents' house today and will spend the Thanksgiving weekend with them. We are having Thanksgiving dinner #1 at Andy & Sarah's tomorrow and then Thanksgiving dinner #2 in Big Rapids (with Trevor & Steph) on Saturday. We'll find out if Jack likes turkey!

Surprise Visit

Today, around 1:00, my little (well, not so little... just younger) brother, Trevor called. He wanted to know if I was around for a visit. He and his buddy were in Royal Oak, just about 45 minutes from Ann Arbor. A short while later, Trev and his friend were sitting at our kitchen table, having a cup of tea and some cookies with Jack and me while we shared funny stories. Mick was even able to stop by (from his upstairs office) for a ten-minute visit. I just keep thinking about how fantastic it was that Trevor just called and said "hey, are you around? I am thinking of stopping by for a quick visit." I mean, that's pretty cool.

Now almost three weeks in to the move, I am starting to feel a bit "homesick." Mick brought me a gift from his layover in DC on Tuesday: a copy of the Washington Post. That made me smile. This week in particular though, I really miss the DC friends who became first-time moms at the same time I did. There's just something about that bond that I won't be able to replace with new friends here. And a bit of that makes me really long for home... my old home.

But there are so many wonderful things about living here, my really old home (Michigan): a U of M football game on a beautiful fall day, an evening with my cousin Emily and a bunch of her friends, a lazy Saturday spent visiting with Andrea, Tim, and Luke, and Trevor's completely surprise visit. All of those things make me feel as if I'm home again.

Week One, Complete!

One week ago today, we woke up for the first time in our new home. It seems like much longer than a week ago that we pulled into our driveway, breathing a sigh of relief that the truck, its contents, and the five of us (Mick, Jack, Shergar, Julie (Mick's mum), and I) made it safely. What a fantastic way to celebrate our fifth (!!!) anniversary.

We had so much help with the move: Trevor, my dad, and Mick had the truck unpacked and returned within an hour and a half. The three guys got all of the furniture in, Mick and Trev unpacked the kitchen, my dad piped natural gas from the basement up to the laundry room to accommodate our new gas dryer (Jack "helped").

My mom and Mick's mum helped wrangle Jack. That is no small job. I think we were all ready to collapse each evening as Jack is an extremely active, mischievous kid. Our first full day in the house was on Halloween. Mick bought tons of candy (while rolling his eyes and telling me "you ladies are like vultures around the Halloween candy at the grocery store"), we decorated the front porch with the small pumpkin Trev & Steph bought for Jack, and Jack buzzed around the house and the porch, excited every time a trick-or-treater arrived (we had tons!).



On Wednesday, I hit my limit. Jack was especially high-maintenance (a bit crabby, really acting like a stinker and getting into EVERYTHING) and I felt as if I would snap. As one of my friends pointed out, the last month was a pretty stressful one and I managed a good deal of the move while handling a kid who was cutting molars and went on a hunger strike. So it was inevitable that a breakdown would come sooner or later. I thought that taking Shergar for a nice long walk in a nearby nature area would help me relax a bit and it did...

...until I walked back in the door to a screaming kid. So, I bit the bullet and asked my parents to take him for the weekend. I just need a few days to regroup, have a nice "staycation" in our new home with Mick, and get some childproofing done. (I've realized that one of the nice things about having lived in such a small house is that it was MUCH easier to keep Jack safe as there were fewer rooms to childproof.)

I thought Mick and I would have a bunch of fun date nights without Jack here... but the last two nights have seen me fast asleep on the couch by 9:30. I think the rest and the few days of uninterupted productivity will make me a much better mom to Jack when I see him again on Monday.

Tonight's Top Ten

On Thursday, we moved. That's right. We packed up the l'il ole 26 foot truck, threw the dog in the cab, and drove to Michigan. Ten hours, several awkward truck stop conversations, and a night in Cranberry, PA later, and we pulled up to our new house in Ann Arbor. With help from Tom n' Trevor (no, not the cartoon characters), we unpacked within 45 minutes and there we were...proud owners of the state's biggest cardboard box repository.

From my perch at the Holiday Inn - Oakville in Toronto (spoke at an event this evening), I thought I'd outline my top 10 list of things I love about our new house.

10. It has stairs. Carpeted ones. That lead somewhere you want to go.
9. The kitchen has an island. Our last house had a coconut called Wilson. Oh god, we're characters in Castaway.
8. We're trying to name rooms. The living room has become the "library" while the downstairs room with the hardwood floor is now the "media room".
7. Guests drop breadcrumbs to find their way back from the bathroom to the "family room"
6. The neighbours are nice; several dropped by in Michigan fancy dress on Saturday. Who knew that Skeletor was a Michigandian?
5. Shergar cant decide where to sleep.
4. Jack cant get into the cabinets. He can, however, run several circuits of the house.
3. Kelly loves it.
2. Even moving a snake from the downstairs window gives me a sense of homeowner pride.

And the Number 1 reason why I love my house is....

1. I have to think through which bathroom to use. Instead of thinking through how to get into our old bathroom.

Giddy up.