On Thursday, I took Andrew over to Jeni's house while Jacob was at Joy School and Andrew and Emi made valentines (with much help, of course). I think it says a great deal for Andrew and Emi's respective personalities that Emi divided *all* of the candy hearts in front of her into envelopes for her grandparents, while Andrew grudgingly allotted a meager three hearts per envelope and refused to consider more (he was much more interested in trying to eat all the hearts himself). For the most part, he and Emi played well together, but we (Jeni and I) were thwarted in our plan to have Andrew stay until Jacob came home by Andrew himself, who (possibly under the influence of too much sugar) hit Emi with a wooden plane, pulled her hair, and, his crowning achievement, tried to push her down the stairs. At that point, I took him home. I'm not sure if it's Andrew, his age, his sex, or what, but he's become quite agressive in the last week or so and we're constantly having to tell him not to hit, bite, kick, etc. He does show some promise of his mother's linguistic interests by claiming, when we tell him not to hit, that he was "smacking," not hitting.
Thursday evening, our fancy Valentine's day plans included making stir-fry for my parents (a stir-fry that included shrimp, I might add, which I do not like and would not normally include in my menu for a romantic evening out), putting Andrew to bed, and then putting the finishing touches on my dissertation (me)--I've finally turned in the completed electronic version and I'm just waiting on a permissions letter before sending in my remaining stuff to the PSU graduate office. And then I'm done!!! (I'm just a little excited, if you can tell).
We did celebrate Valentine's belatedly, by taking Andrew to dinner at the Macaroni Grill Friday night. We rarely go out to eat, so this was a special occasion for us. Dan and I both enjoyed our respective pasta dishes, but Andrew seemed to particularly enjoy his spaghetti with a giant meatball--he made funny little excited noises as soon as he saw his food and put a substantial dent in the pasta. It's nice to have a kid that enjoys his food so much. :)
Saturday morning Andrew walked right into the corner of the door. He didn't cut anything--or even bruise his forehead--but he was pretty upset so we put a bandaid on it to help him feel better. So he walked around with Jar Jar Binks (courtesy of an old box of Star Wars bandaids) on his forehead all morning.
That morning we drove up to Salt Lake City to spend the day with Sarah and her family, the more so since Robert and Trisha came up for a spontaneous visit. We had lunch at Olive Garden--Robert was *not* impressed with our service, but you can read about that on their blog, if you're interested. All the other adults ordered the unlimited soup and salad, I had pizza (apparently I'm still not on board with the Eves family fetish here), and the kids had macaroni and cheese or pizza. Andrew ate nearly everything in his bowl--and this after an entire breadstick. Andrew kept us (me, Dan, Robert) entertained with his constant chatter on the way to and from the restaurant. On the way to the restaurant, Andrew did his usual questioning of where people were that he could see (i.e., "where's my daddy?"). To give him a hard time, Robert reached over to Dan and said, "This is *my* daddy." Andrew responded with an instant and vehement insistance, "No! You've got Bubby."
Andrew pre-food.
Afterward, we took the remaining breadsticks and some old bread Sarah had on hand to a nearby park where the kids had a wonderful time feeding the Canadian geese, ducks, and a score or so of sea gulls who swooped in on the crumbs. Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of the big event, because we accidentally left the camera at the restaurant and Dan had to go back and get it.
We had a wonderful dinner of sandwiches, chips, grapes, and carrots--the sandwiches were made with yummy fresh bread and fresh vegetables, a hard combination to beat. After dinner, we headed back to Provo and put Andrew to bed. Dan decided to finish cooking the rest of Thursday's shrimp before it went bad, with the result that, when I went downstairs, the entire basement smelled like shrimp. (The basement tends to concentrate the smell of anything we've cooked down there). Not a bad thing, if you like shrimp. But if you don't like shrimp and you have an oversensitive olfactory organ (pregnancy induced, of course), then this poses a problem. We (I mean Dan--I couldn't stay in the basement b/c of the smell) fumigated the place with some febreeze and then boiled cinnamon on the stove before I could stand to spend any time downstairs.
Our final event of the week was the blessing of my friends' (Karin and Mat Bean) baby, Nolan Mathew Bean. Since the blessing was in Alpine at 3, and we had church from 11-2 (and I was teaching the Relief Society lesson), Dan got Andrew out of nursery early and put him down for a nap. We then left him sleeping happily with grandma while we went up to the blessing. The blessing itself was at the Holmes' house, and it was a beautiful little blessing. Nolan was alert and quiet for the entire blessing. Afterwards, I had a nice chat with Karin (well, aside from the five minutes we both spent in "time-out," where Karin had been put by her almost three-year-old, Ezra). We returned to Provo, expecting to rescue grandma from Andrew, only to find that both Andrew and Grandma were still sleeping! That must be the easiest baby-sitting gig my mother's ever had.
After dinner, Dan and I helped entertain Andrew by putting together grandma's train set (bought for the grandkids, of course), and Andrew had a wonderful time playing engineer. (Even if I couldn't get any good pictures of it).
p.s. Justin's blog this week concludes with a note about singing "We are a Happy Family," which reminds me of our recent discovery that this is one of Andrew's favorite songs. It's actually rather endearing to listen to him try to sing "I love Mommy, she loves me, We love Daddy, yesiree . . . " except for the fact that he usually insists on us singing about every single member of our family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins--Eves and Collings) before we can quit. (That's twenty-seven people, if anyone's counting. Twenty-eight, if you include our coming baby, which we sometimes do to make verses even). If we forget anyone, he reminds us. In fact, sometimes he has us sing about the same person twice, just to make sure we don't forget anyone.
2 comments:
If nothing else, you at least had a lot of good food last week. :) Congratulations on having your dissertation all turned in! You're amazing!
What a funny, newsy post! Congrats on the dissertation, and I must add that I totally understand about the stinky basement thing. I like to call it "Super Pregnant Nose" and it can be very annoying. Most recently I spent an entire sacrament meeting trying not to visibly gag because of the overpowering (to me) perfume of an elderly lady sitting in front of me!
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