Ahoy, Matey!

Hey, guess what’s not as easy as it looks? Bill and I are taking sailing lessons from MlT (it’s free for students and a guest!) and we had our first experience on the water yesterday. I was originally hesitant to take this class because I was a wee bit intimidated by the pre-class handout. There’s so much terminology and lingo and knots. Not to mention the phrase “death roll or capsize” was used a fair number of times. Bill kept saying, “Ah come on, it’ll be fun! Just relax.”

After yesterday I’m no longer afraid of drowning while trapped in a soggy sail below an overturned boat. But it’s not really the peaceful float on a river that either of us imagined it to be. It’s work! When we climbed back on dock, both of us had wobbly legs — not sea legs, but tired tired crouching muscles. And it’s a lot of thinking too. Maybe that will improve once we have a better feel for things, but right now my brain is constantly going “wind blowing this direction; need to tack; tack by turning into the wind; push the tiller away; scoot over; need the wind to blow across the side of the boat; wind blowing this direction.”
It didn’t help, I don’t think, that there was no wind yesterday. That may seem like a perfect time to learn, but it’s not. It’s just frustrating. It’s like learning how to drive a car without turning it on. Put it in neutral and a guy pushes from behind. It won’t really teach you anything. Except patience and humility.
I think when we sail around the world (as was the reason for taking lessons, of course), we may hire a skipper and a crew and we’ll concentrate on fishing and cooking. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Maggnificent Monday


Monumental Firsts of this week:
A new piece of furniture in the house. Maggie now has her own special high chair! She’s not necessarily a super big fan of it yet (it’s a very passive toy for such an easily bored baby), but she’s learning that when she sits in it, fun things happen. Like squash or bananas or green beans (but no more avocados or cereal for awhile). Or helping Mommy cook with her favorite kitchen tool.
Toenail clipping. That may not sound all that exciting, but consider this: I cut her fingernails about every 3 days, and have been doing so since her second or third week. Her toenails had yet to grow to the point where cutting was necessary. Finally she put some effort into the little buggers and I got to trim a few! What a big girl she’s getting to be!
Mother’s Day. Of course it was my (and her) first of such holiday. She slept really well the night before. We went to church where she napped like a dream until communion and then woke up happy to receive a blessing from the pastor. A family walk in the afternoon. A board game over her afternoon meal. Cheerful playtime until her bedtime snack. And then she went right to sleep in her crib. A wonderful day!

Maggnificent Monday

Okay. So I wrote a whole entry about what a perfect little girl she is. How perfect she seems. How perfect she looks. How perfectly she’s growing. All her learning actions and little baby parts and her laugh and smile and those big big blue eyes — perfection. Then it got lost in the ether of the Internet. It was very poetic and lovely and gushing and all that stuff. You’ll just have to trust me.

She still has her moments, believe you me. Like this morning on my run where I strapped her into her stroller just to have her fuss and then cry and then scream. I took her out of the stroller and walked home with her in my arms where she was happy until a block from home where she commenced the screaming until I held her juuuust right for her to fall asleep while pacing the living room. Does there have to be so much drama to go to sleep?
But she’s still so darned adorable (I guess maybe it’s in that puzzling you’re-my-daughter way), and I still want to take her out and set up a booth where people can simply come ogle her and ooh and aah. Perfection.

Maggnificent Monday


Well it’s been an interesting sort of week. Grandpa Frosty got into a bicycle accident late last week and has been in the hospital with a broken collar bone and 4 broken ribs. They’ll let him come home when he’s not in danger of contracting pneumonia. Grandma Rhonda has an abscessed tooth and is scheduled to go in for a root canal next week. In the meantime she’s been downing the painkillers. I came down with the stomach flu yesterday and so I’ve bee kind of out of the picture. Bill brings Maggie to me when it’s time for her to eat. And Bill left for DC for a conference, where it’s safely disease free and he can sleep an entire night through.
And Maggie is wonderful. She’s teaching herself to army crawl little by little. She’s blowing raspberries and making gurgling baby noises all the time. And she’s completely unaffected by the whole household being in sort of dire straights. Hopefully she’ll stay that way. All I need is a sick baby on my hands too. What a little ray of sunshine though. Makes you feel better just to look at her.