Maggnificent Monday

So we’re in Texas visiting the Collins Grands. That means a 5 hour plane trip preceded by a half hour taxi ride and followed by a 45 minute car ride. With our can’t-sit-still baby. Ready for a tale of harrowing hair-pulling? Well, then go somewhere else because Maggie did great. We sang in the taxi. No problems. She slept through the first flight. Thank you 4 AM wake-up call. On the long flight she played with wrappers and magazine pages and toys, then ate a lot, then napped until landing when I poked her awake. She complained not once about pressure changes (we made sure she was swallowing a lot during take-offs and landings). Passengers and flight attendants oohed and cooed and peek-a-booed. She was just a real trooper about the whole thing and at the other end were Grandma Sue and Grandpa Scott and Moose!

Oh, and guess what! Maggie turned 10 months old yesterday. How time just flies and flies and flies.

Foragers


We are now those weird people who live down the street. Every day we walk down a particular block and spend 15 minutes bent over, searching through the fallen leaves, looking for any shiny brown globes peaking through: chestnuts!

It’s been a couple weeks of this activity, and one or two chestnuts a day makes for quite a haul over a long period of time. One day after a windy night we found 35! Now we can make chestnut turkey soup and chestnut butter and who knows what else.
The poor squirrels will just have to make due with acorns because we now have the foraging bug. Chestnuts galore!

Maggnificent Monday

We are in the midst of The First Cold. No, not a snap in the weather, although that has been lovely and cool. The common cold. A runny nose. Watery eyes. Snuffles. Low fever. Sleeplessness. Maggie has actually been quite a trooper. She’s been mostly her normal playful self; just a little clingier and more easily tired. And then when she’s tired, she’s not really able to sleep very well. We have raised the head side of her mattress by stuffing a pillow underneath and she’s being allowed to fall asleep while nursing (which is usually verboten). Except for last night when we were up a lot and walking a lot and singing a lot and patting a lot and sleeping not a lot, we’re pretty unscathed. We’re mostly grateful that we’re not flying on a plane until next weekend. When everything will be back to normal.
Other than that, Maggie’s doing great. She’s added beets and rye and broccoli and yogurt to her food repertoire and has begun to think it’s fun to chew on the furniture. Still not a lot of progress on “no,” by the way. But with lots of supervision, we do still have a coffee table.

Bitter Disappointment

I so look forward to opening up the laptop in the morning. I’m trying to get up an hour before Maggie does in the mornings so that I have a little bit of time to do things that need to be done and things that just make me happy. So when the laptop snaps open at 6:30, I eagerly look down at the dock of program icons.

There is my email program with a counter that tells me how many new messages I have. It’s not an account I use very often; I broadcast my other address to most friends and companies and online sites. But this one I use for the blog. Whenever someone comments on a blog entry, the little light goes on and a number 1 appears over the email icon. Sometimes, if I’ve been an especially good girl, there’s a number 2, or once a 3!
So I open up my email to see which entry was commented on and go straight to that day on the blog. How fun that people are reading about our lives and interacting with us all the way over here!
Except no. For the past two months, there have been maybe three friendly comments and the rest are internet scam comments. People phishing (if you can do that via a blog), advertising themselves or their stupid business, leaving bogus comments that have nothing to do with what I’ve written. Here’s an example that I got today: “Hi buddy, your blog’s design is simple and clean and i like it. Your blog posts are superb. Please keep them coming. Greets!!!”
And I find myself singing an old children’s song: “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms.” Are any of you peeps still out there and interested? Do you still like us?

Twins

Remember the mother dove on top of our drain pipe? Well, she hatched herself a little birdy, right after I posted the blog entry about her. Then before you can say downy feathers, he grew all up and flew away. I never got a chance to get a good picture of him. So you’ve been in suspense all this time, I know.
Well, another bird moved in. Or maybe the mother moved back to her empty nest. In any case, there has been a dove on the nest riding out hurricanes and windy days and staying warm and safe up there. Then, one day I went to throw away a diaper and saw this:

Twins! And I thought the nest was too small for the mother and the one baby. This had to have been one crowded nest; lots of windows maybe, but only one bathroom. These guys have now grown up too. Flown away and we have an empty (and dirty) nest once more.