balance restored

I have a bunch of things to wrap and package and label and our house is chaos since we redistributed all of the bedroom furniture tonight to prepare for new flooring installation tomorrow (I’m sure I’ll have updates on that adventure soon. We are nuts.) So, I don’t have a thoughtful announcement and I don’t feel like scanning in fuzzy, hard to interpret ultrasound pictures at the moment, particularly the weird one with little white lines among other little white lines that are labeled “LABIA” in cap locks. Yes, it has been confirmed that we are having a girl. Gender balance will be restored in this family and, hell, if you count the dog, the ladies will actually be ahead. Not that any of that matters. Really. I was surprised how ok I would have been with either outcome but I think this will be great. A new adventure for sure. In more important news, the ultrasound went well and all of the measurements, etc. were right on. So, no baby worries for the moment. Now if I could just get someone else to take care of this holiday crap, I’d be all set.

Also, we are clueless about names at this point. We have months to decide but if anyone wants to offer suggestions (except maybe you, BC) I am open.

minor adventures

So, I guess if I don’t feel like I have to write then I don’t do it. Actually, I think the bigger issue is that I am taking my laptop into the office every day and by the time late evening rolls around I have no interest in even turning the thing on at home. You would think my house was getting cleaned in all that free time but sadly that’s not the case. In fact I have been complete miserable at cooking and cleaning all week and that’s just how it goes.

Last weekend we had some holiday type adventures with a trip to the Dutch Store, which included a visit with Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) and Zwarte Piet. I won’t go into the story of these two but it’s one more reason I love those crazy Dutch. We would pick up and move to Holland in a heartbeat if we could figure out how. We hadn’t really introduced Henry to the concept of Santa Claus very well so he was suitably freaked out until they gave him a bag of treats. Even then he was cautious and when we put him on Sinterklass’ lap his cheeks turned bright red. Ultimately I think he survived it just fine.

Henry with Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet. I much prefer this to the mall Santa photo from last year.

If it had been up to Henry we would have come home with shrimp chips and dried galangal root.

The following day we drove out toward Mount Hood and went to a tree farm. We really like the family who owns it and it was a very nice morning. Henry was entertained looking for a tree until the saw a tractor and started bitching nonstop about “Henry ride the tractor.” We figured that wasn’t going to happen and got a little sick of it but we finally found a tree and it ended up being big enough and far enough from the main road that a tractor was used to move it and the guy let us hop on the back of the trailer. We got a really nice tree for a great price and even though it’s too big for our house and required a significant effort on Jason’s part to make it fit in even a very large tree stand, it was a very good Christmas tree gathering experience for all.

My boys among the trees.


We both look like dorks but, hell, we're being pulled by a tractor.

Cool ice formations. Jason says this is called frost heave. He always has technical terms for such things.