As was expected, Alana enjoyed a lunch of chicken tenders with lots of ketchup.  She then followed it up with a slice of chocolate cheesecake.  Pictures tell the story best, so I’ll let them finish out the event.

Alana prepares for lunch by drying her hair and getting all dressed up

After what seemed like a long wait for Alana, all three ladies are ready to go

The best part of any meal: dessert!

And, finally, returning home to enjoy her vintage baby buggy,  which was enjoyed by her mom some 30+ years ago.

Tim has been in Austin for work since Monday morning.  My mom, a.k.a. Grandma Marilyn, was here until Wednesday and helped me get through a few of the days without Tim.  We managed to stay fairly busy, making jam, soup, taking Alana to swim lessons (which started this week), and other things of that nature.

Alana had an itching episode on Sunday afternoon which did not go away.  Grandma observed that she was not sleeping well, scratching the night away.  I took her to the doctor’s office on Thursday to find it was a flair-up of eczema.  So, after $75 in prescription creams, she is sleeping better and not as itchy.

Thursday night, we headed to Leed’s Farm, a good-old fashioned farm with lots of non-farm kids stuff too.  From goats and pigs, to hay rides, zip lines, and a corn maze, the kids ran wild for 2 and a half hours.  The farm was rented out by the school, so it was all families from school, giving the boys plenty of friends to pal around with.  It was a really nice time.  Afterwards, Benton had two friends spend the night, and spent most of Friday morning assembling Legos with his friends and his brother.

Tonight, Benton basically saved the dogs from lots of ugly complications when he quickly realized that the dogs had eaten a bottle of Elwyn’s arthritis medicine that had gotten dumped on the floor.  I was in the shower, so he brought me the bottle and explained that the dogs had eaten them.  I quickly dried off and called the vet, who had me administer hydrogen peroxide to get them to vomit.  Molly took a little longer to vomit and Elwyn did not seem to vomit any pills, so to be on the safe side, I had to run them to the vet and get a treatment of activated charcoal to feed them.  By 7:15pm, about an hour and a half after the incident started, they were gleefully eating up the black, tarry looking charcoal that was mixed in with some canned food and thinking it was pretty yummy.  This part might have been overkill, but since I could not say for sure if they had vomited most of it up, I chose the safe route.  All in all, I am extremely thankful that Benton made the connection and quickly informed me.  The Mexican dinner which Benton was looking forward to became Wendy’s on the way home from the vets, so I owe him big time.  We will have to have that Mexican food later this weekend.

Molly, pictured here from last summer, ate at least 11 pills and did NOT like seeing me the second time I came with a syringe full of the peroxide.

Elwyn, also pictured from last summer, did not like seeing me with the syringe, but at age 13 is a little less able to do anything about it.

I am also extremely thankful that Tim is on a plane from Houston to Columbus as I write this.  It is always nice to have him back and another level headed adult to help me steer my course through each day and week.  Onward – to Halloween and beyond…….

It was a hit! Alana wanted to wear it without a shirt, but Julie insisted that she be more clothed:

 Unfortunately, when they returned home, Julie didn’t tell me this. And…Alana decided to put on her fairy outfit her way:

To see more pictures of Alana as a purple fairy, check out this Flickr set.

The picture below has two Grandma Marilyn pieces: 1) the parasol arrived with her on Thursday, and 2) the tap shoes (see the metal on the toes?) arrived a couple of weeks ago in the mail. There is a story of Marilyn being deprived of the opportunity to learn to tapdance when she was a child, and she finally saw her chance to live the dream through her granddaughter!

Benton, meanwhile, is a burgeoning experimental photographer. Carson and he set up a tunnel/fort in the basement with blankets and furniture. Then, they got out light sticks (2 each for Benton, Carson, and Alana), turned off all the lights, and crawled through the structure. Benton took ~5 pictures of Alana from 2-3′ away…in the pitch dark. It’s no wonder that she looks a bit perplexed.

Julie and I got away for the night on Saturday while Marilyn watched the kids (apparently, watching 3 kids was too ho-hum, so she called up and had Colin and Evan — brothers who are classmates of Benton and Carson, respectively — come over for a few hours. Julie and I left late morning on Saturday and meandered down to Cincinnati for the night. Along the way, we stopped for gas at a full-service gas station in Plain City (I had no idea those even existed any more — self-service was not an option, and the price was the same as we saw elsewhere on the trip) and spent a couple of hours at the outlets in Jeffersonville (Julie now owns a pair of heeled, knee-length leather boots! Patty will be so proud!). As tends to happen when we go shopping, my enthusiasm waned just as Julie was getting on a roll. But, all in all, we got some things we…er…”needed” at some great prices.

In Cincinnati, we got a good deal at the Westin downtown, managed to do a little ice skating in an outdoor rink right next to the hotel (my second time on ice skates — one semi-controlled spill and two spills-that-almost-were-but-from-which-I-recovered, so, overall, I felt pretty good about it), had a couple of absolutely terrible, yet overpriced, martinis at the Havana Martini Club (it’s just not a good sign when the brie is heated in a microwave and served with plastic plates and knives!), but then had additional appetizers and some great martinis and phenomenal service at the Boi Na Braza Brazilian Steak House. We will go back there! We slept in on Sunday morning, lounged in bed reading our respective novels for a while, lingered over a breakfast-from-our-college-days at Bruegger’s Bagels, and were still back in Dublin by early afternoon. As tends to be the case when we get away alone for 24 hours, we just couldn’t stop smiling at each other. I’m a lucky, lucky guy. And Marilyn is going to watch the kids on Valentine’s Day, too!

Since I have only one bed-rail for the bed, Benton got to sleep with Alana on Tuesday, to ensure that she did not fall out. Here is a picture of the sleeping duo a few hours after they headed to bed.

On Wednesday, she was going to sleep with Carson. This did not work out so well as “playing with Carson” was more descriptive. I ended up having to send Carson to his bed. It turned out that Alana did just fine with only one rail. This is surprising considering all the different directions she would sleep in when in her crib.

Today, I suggested that we could move her crib out and make more room for her Kitchen. She liked that idea and wanted to go tell Dad immediately. With Tim working from home, it was easy for Alana to make the request and get assurances that he would move the crib out this evening.

So, as of tonight, Alana has only her big girl bed in her room. This might explain why this was the HARDEST night to get her to go to bed. On the previous nights, I was able to convince her to cooperate in her big girl bed or else she would have to go back into her crib. Without the crib-option, she took full advantage, claiming at various times “I need to go potty” (three separate times), “I need to change my sheets”, and “I have to have Sara” (one of her 6 baby dolls).

This same week, Alana has been making great progress on the toilet training. I am not going to get too excited just yet, but Wed. and Thurs. were days of big girl panties with no white-carpet-staining incidents. We shall see. At the rate she is growing up, I expect she should start losing her baby teeth by this summer and will want to drive my car by Christmas.

Last night, we headed to downtown Columbus to an area called The Short North. Last night was the first Saturday of the month, which is the monthly Gallery Hop event — or the Holiday Hop due to the season. In Austin terms, the area/event has a Sixth Street feel with South Congress-like galleries in place of music venues. Julie picked up a World AIDS day ribbon, and we both signed a petition to get Barack Obama on the ballot in Ohio (no guarantees that he’ll get our vote in the primary, but he ought to at least have the requisite signatures to get on the ballot!). We had drinks and an appetizer at one restaurant, then did some more gallery/shop-hopping. Julie was quite chatty — striking up conversations with the staff in at least half of the places we stopped!

The most interesting conversation we had was with Paul Palnik. He is a cartoonist/satirist who does elaborate, poster-sized comic-like pieces. Many of them are heavy on words. Many have a ton of cartoon people. And many have both. Palnik is a lifelong cartoonist who, he said, actually taught art at several universities but gave that up because simply being an artist was more lucrative and that’s what he really loves to do. The pieces were fun, in that you literally could stand in front of them for an hour taking in all the details and chuckling here and there. The music playing in the gallery was a CD of Palnik’s son, Elijah Aaron, who is finishing up at the Berklee College of Music. We bought his CD and, I suspect, will be buying a piece or two of Palnik’s work down the road.

Over dinner — our favorite “dinner composed of a couple of appetizers with a shared light main dish” — we wound up kicking around some of our “relationship anecdotes,” including a story that I’ve told to many, many people over the years…but never to Julie, I realized. And, it’s about Julie. That may be a subject for another post, but I’ll need to get clearance from the main subject before that happens!

Stay tuned!

As it turned out, the peppermint stick ice cream…was due to be made starting the next day! Egad! That didn’t stop us from loading up on four pints of other flavors. And, I made a return trip this evening to get a couple of quarts of peppermint stick. This is not going to help our waistlines heading into the holidays.

But that’s not really the story. While we were standing at the window waiting for our pints to be packaged, a lady walked up behind us with a semi-sheepish look on her face. As she said, “Excuse me,” I was thinking, “Lady, it’s a good thing Julie’s here, because if you’re looking for directions, I work from home and know approximately three major roads in this town.” What she said, though, was, “Excuse me. Can you tell me where you got your bumper stickers?”

Truth be told, I’ve been wildly lazy about swapping out my left-leaning/Unitarian/socio-political commentating magnetic bumper stickers ever since we moved to Ohio. As a matter of fact, I was still sporting the same two bumper stickers that were on the truck when I arrived in August. That’s the same two bumper stickers that were shown in the pictures I took of my new vanity license plate a couple of weeks ago.

The lady really liked the “Democracy Is Not a Faith-Based Initiative” one. I was at a loss to answer her question as to where exactly it came from. I knew I had some bumper stickers from evolvefish.com, but I was pretty sure that one was not. Julie was the one who snapped to and pointed out that the bumper stickers usually include the company’s URL in small print (nice marketing, as we were in the midst of demonstrating!).

The three of us wandered back to the truck and pulled the bumper sticker off. I said, “You can have it. It’s been on there way too long anyway.” I then grabbed the stack of 20 or so other magnetized bumper stickers from my car, and Julie and the lady (did I mention that she had a companion with her who was sitting in their car watching this whole exchange with a semi-perplexed, semi-bashful look on her face?) started going through them and writing down the different sites from which they’d been ordered. The lady initially protested taking the sticker, but she acquiesced when: 1) she realized that bumper stickers are a rotating thing for me (she was still semi-protesting when I filled the newly-created blank spot with “U.S. Foreign Policy: We’ll Bomb that Bridge when We Get to It”), and 2) I pointed out that giving it away was going to make a much better story (do you agree?) than just giving her the URL to go and order her own.

I eventually wandered back to pay for our ice cream. Julie chatted with the lady a bit — found out she has a sister in New Braunfels — and we returned home…speculating as to whether or not my mother will restock my collection at Christmas or not…

Working backwards from my current position 30,000 feet in the air en route from Detroit to Austin.

First off, when checking in for the flight, I went through my ritual “check for better seats” (Northwest didn’t have the ability to do this from home, as far as I could tell). I was already in an exit row on the Columbus-Detroit leg, so no change. For Detroit-Austin, I wasn’t in an exit row, but I was in a seat that looked to have a vacancy next to it. On my last flight (Continental), the exit rows didn’t have any more leg room than the regular coach seats. So, this go around, I rolled the dice and stayed where I was. Bad call. I’m cramped, I have someone sitting next to me, and the exit rows have considerably more leg room! Lesson learned…

The Wilson Household just wrapped up the second of three consecutive weekends with company. My parents passed through en route to Maine last weekend. Julie’s mother drove in from Virginia this past Thursday, and then her brother, his wife, and their two kids came down on Friday from Akron. Once again, we were struck by how much easier it is to manage company in a house that has more than two bathrooms.

Next weekend, Julie’s cousin, Anne, will be visiting from Cleveland with her two sons. Anne’s husband is on call next weekend, and I’m sticking around Austin for the weekend to attend the 12th annual Columbus Day Party! at Camp Ben McCullough. So, it looked like a good weekend for Julie and Anne to get together with the kids. After that, though, I think we’re going to take a weekend or two off on the company front!

During my parents’ visit, my dad and I knocked out a number of honey-do-type projects, and we got a good start on a me-do project: building a workbench for my workshop. It’s a modified design of what Greg Phelps and I built for his basement in Chicago. The main change was that I made it taller so that it can work as a support table for my miter saw, while also giving me a work area that is comfortable to stand at — 42” is a much more comfortable working height for me than 36”. The design is sufficiently heavy duty that it could double as a bomb shelter, I think, which is…well…cool! Here and there over the past week, I managed to get it mostly finished up. By the time I left this afternoon, it was down to just needing the edges of the top routed with a roundover bit, and then I need to screw the top to the base. 30 minutes, and I’ll be done. At that point, I’ll be ready to post pictures of the workshop. To date, I’ve: run a new 220V circuit for my table saw, run a new 110V circuit with 3 fourplex outlets throughout the workshop, installed pegboard in 3 locations, and re-routed the drain on the A/C unit to accommodate rolling my table saw under the stairs without risking crushing the drain.

Kid Update

Still holding firm at three.

Carson: After being given a couple of Yugio cards (that’s phonetic; I assume I’m butchering the spelling, but I can’t check offline), became obsessed with getting his own starter set, which he spent some of his money to order. If you’re not familiar (and, truth be told, I’m not all that familiar), Yugio is sort of a combination of two popular male pastimes from my youth: marbles and Dungeons & Dragons. Kids build up their sets of Yugio cards. Each card represents a fantasy character of some sort – each character has different powers and strengths. The goal is to get others’ cards. So, through playing a wildly complex game where the cards face off against each other and do battle, you win or lose your cards. The “marbles” part is that it’s an on-going thing. You can sit down and play for 30 minutes or an hour, and then walk off with whatever cards you’ve won (and without the ones you’ve lost) and pick up another game some time later with someone else. Julie thought Carson might be happy to just play with the cards…but he actually wants to learn the game. Julie quickly realized a problem: no one else in our house has Yugio cards, so he has to loan us some of his in order to play.

Still on Carson, and still on the gaming front…Carson challenged my dad to a game of chess while my parents were in town. I didn’t know Carson knew how to play chess. My dad didn’t know how to play chess, but he gamely jumped into the instructions that Benton had printed out from the internet. The good news was that Carson didn’t get wildly upset when he lost. Not that that phase is entirely passed. I did a little fast card-swapping during a game of Sorry! with Carson and his cousin, Tyler, to prevent myself from coming from way behind and beating Carson after he was on the cusp of victory. It just wasn’t worth the risk! Tyler won a game straight-up and Carson didn’t have a problem with it, which was good.

Benton : Benton has found a good friend who is in his class at school and lives in the neighborhood (close enough that Julie and the kids rode their bikes over one afternoon). Conveniently, Colin has a younger brother, Evan, who is in kindergarten — not in Carson’s class, but same school and same afternoon schedule. They also have a sister who has dance lessons on Thursday afternoons, so it’s looking like a regular occurrence will be for the boys to get off at our bus stop and play for an hour or so — saves their mother a bunch of shuttling around, and keeps our kids happy!

Benton is struggling with some of his on-going homework assignments. He has to keep a “math log” and log 80 minutes of math work that he does in his everyday life. The rules are pretty loose — making a batch of cookies counts because of the measuring out of the ingredients, counting how many seconds he can balance on a big green exercise ball in the back yard (a game invented in conjunction with his cousins) counts because it’s counting. You get the idea. Benton-the-anal-rules-interpreter, though, struggles. For instance, if he’s counting how long people are staying on the green exercise ball, he says he can’t count the 15 solid minutes they were playing the game — he feels like he can only count the time where he was counting seconds. In other words, Benton could spend 3 hours scoring a baseball game and insist that it was only 10 minutes of math, because that was the amount of time he spent recording balls and strikes.

This doesn’t stop him from pitching a fit when it’s 15 minutes past his bedtime and he hasn’t done his math yet. Julie’s been turning this back to him — making suggestions during the day, and when Benton balks at them, saying, “Well, fine, but you’re not staying up late tonight to do something. You can take an incomplete.”

"Yeah, Tim, so how’s that working out for ya’?”

Alana: Alana is, of course, still cute as a button. We’ve now made our second father-daughter trip to Walgreen’s for her to pick out new nail polish. She is an incredibly decisive shopper. And she knows where the nail polish is. Fortunately, Walgreen’s doesn’t have the pricey stuff down at 2-year-old level. We also moved on from painting just her toenails to also painting her fingernails. She sits surprisingly still for the exercise. Her collection now includes: red, purple, and blue. We haven’t applied the blue yet

Sadly, Alana has pretty much given up giving me hugs on demand. Or giving me hugs at all. I’m pretty sure she’s just a burgeoning economist, and she’s exploring the demand curve for her affections. I still get high fives from her fairly consistently on demand at no charge, but I have a sneaking suspicion she may be the first 2-year-old with her own credit card within a few months.

Alana has also semi-officially given up her afternoon naps (“semi-“ because neither Julie nor I want to completely give up hope just yet). This is not a great thing for 2-year-old, but she seems to hold up okay, and is starting to go down fairly well in the evenings. She also sleeps in in the mornings so, hopefully, is getting enough sleep. She is prone to busting out the ABCs song (all the way through, “…next time won’t you sing with me?!”), and she has taken to wanting to read books to herself. Her current favorite is A Good Night Walk (“by Elisha Cooper!” Alana always says), but she is also fond of a book about a pig who walks around to different farm animals asking if they like her. They all rattle off different things about the pig they like. Alana “reads” that book out loud cover to cover and does a pretty good job of sticking to the correct narrative. It’s a stitch.

We’ll try to get some updated pictures up one of these days. Again, the technology (or the technology that we have) isn’t quite to the point of making that seamless. Yet.