St. Ardalion

You can tell it’s been a busy week when you’ve been trying to write a blog post for days, but somehow it just never gets done, and suddenly it’s Saturday again, and you still haven’t hit the magic Publish button.  And for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you what made the week so busy.  Just it somehow was.  But now here we are on the other side, and to make up for my non-blogginess, here’s a picture of Sweet Pea being ridiculously cute, as she is wont to be.

Seriously, I think this kid may be the cutest baby who ever lived.  I know that, as her aunt, I am contractually obligated to say this, but still.  She is still so tiny, but already full of so much character.  She likes having her hands free so she can curl them up by her face, and she likes to push her head out of her bunting, stretching her neck out to try to see everything around her, for all the world like a little turtle sticking its head out of its shell.  She makes the most ridiculous faces, including the best little baby scowl that I somehow did not mange to take a picture of.  When she squinches up her face, she gets a little wrinkle just on the bridge of her nose which is amazing because I get the exact same wrinkle on my nose too!  We tried to get a picture demonstrating this miraculous likeness, but instead it just looks like we’re scowling at each other.

As for the news, well, Easter was good.  On Friday I got to go down to see Sweet Pea and Sae and Mr. T.  I brought Pizza Factory, and got to hold the baby, and hang out some.  On Saturday most of the clan gathered at St. Anthony’s for the Easter Vigil.  This year’s Easter Vigil bet was a tie between me and Mr. T – it came down to the seconds, and since all of us use our cell phones as our watches, none of us had a watch with a second hand.  If I were a little more unscrupulous I would declare it in my favor, but that darn conscience… gets in the way all the time!  14 even texted his bet in from Missouri, and he would have won, but he got it in too late, so it didn’t count.  Sunday was lots of family time.  Since we didn’t get to have the baby with us (she’s still much too little to be exposed to large groups of people), Boy-O brought the sugar glider he and his roommates adopted, and we got to play with it instead.  Which was also adorably cute, though not nearly as cute as Sweet Pea.

The rest of the week has flown by.  Thursday night was the first night of the Spring Theology On Tap series.  Adam Pasternak gave a really great talk on religious freedom, particularly as it applies to the current political situation.  I kinda love Adam, whom I knew back when we were both at UD, and it was a really great talk.  Unfortunately, I didn’t pay very much attention to it.  I was sitting in the back whispering and having fun with Pippi, and drinking really, really delicious Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale, which had a little higher alcohol content than I realized.  After a while Pippi and I decided to order a pizza, and when the break came, various vultures of the male variety came over to try to steal some.  Lately I haven’t been in the most charitable mood towards persons of the male gender (this may also have something to do with the not-blogging), so I really rather enjoyed denying them all access to the pizza.  All in all, it was one of the most fun TOTs I’ve been to in a long time!

And while we’re on the topic of Men Are Strange, it’s so bizarre that right when you’re feeling cranky about men in general is right when all the guys start coming out of the woodwork.  Friday morning, our new maintenance guy was totally flirting with me while I made his badge, and then the guy who comes to empty the shred box decided to tease me about my somewhat battered door sign.  I ended up chatting half the morning with Atlas, during the course of which he said he might start coming to TOT himself, and then when I went down to lunch the pretty cute and slightly geeky (a good thing) lab manager decided to sit with me.  In the afternoon, one of the other maintenance guys (the much too young for me but pretty cute one) decided to come hang out in the HR office for a while, just, you know, for kicks, and then the topper was getting a message from Sarge saying that he was very sorry he hadn’t been able to come see me yet that day, but they had a situation in the ED they had to deal with.  It reminds me of when I started wearing makeup, and suddenly had the two single guys at my old work in my office building towers out of empty pop cans.

Men are strange.

Sts. Mark & Timothy

Yesterday, I got off work as soon as I could (very nearly snarled at the last person who stopped into my office half an hour past my official closing time with “just a quick question”), jumped into my car and drove down to Cincinnati through the pouring rain storm to meet a certain little person.  On Thursday, at 8:32pm, Sae had given birth to her and Mr. T’s firstborn daughter, and I needed to meet her for myself.

When I got there, AnniPotts and one of Sae’s friends were also visiting, but I quickly took my chance to hold my new niece for the first time.  We just kinda looked at each other for a while.  I don’t know what she saw (except the grin that would not leave my face), but I saw a tiny baby (only 5lbs, 14oz) with a long, skinny body, and huge eyes that look very hard at everything.

All bundled up she looks for all the world like a tiny, skinny pea pod, just filling out with baby peas.  Which is why I’m going to call her Sweet Pea.

She also has tiny, perfect little feet that she kept poking out of the bottom of her swaddling blanket.  This is AnniPotts’ hand holding them.  I’m betting she’s going to be one of those people who has to be completely covered up, except for one foot poking out from under the blankets at all times.

After a while she fell asleep in my arms.  Which was pretty much the best thing ever.

You have to concentrate really hard on sleeping when you’re only a day old.  It’s true.  After a while Sweet Pea started to wake up, and it was time for her to eat.  So I said good-bye, and headed out.

When I got outside, the storm was over, and there was a double rainbow in the sky. And it was good.

St. Joseph

Sunday afternoon when we were at the Family Homestead for St. Patrick’s day brunch (we had reubens: they are corned beef & cabbage, after all), Sae asked me if she could borrow some shirts.  When she was buying her pregnancy wardrobe, she wasn’t counting on the ridiculously warm weather this year.  So all her larger shirts are long sleeved, and geared towards keeping her warm in cold weather.  Considering the current highs in the 70s, and realizing that she’s not going to immediately spring back into her pre-pregnancy shape for some time after this kid finally decides to join us in the sunshine, she needs a little wardrobe help.

I had coincidentally just packed up a big bag of stuff to take down to Goodwill, so I headed home to get it, plus a few other things I thought she might get some good use of.  And now she’s got some well-washed swing dance shirts in her wardrobe, plus one of the t-shirts I inherited from Jacob, plus the Our Lady of Guadelupe t-shirt she originally gave me some years ago.  And it was nice.

Sae is so ready to have this baby.  Her official due date was Thursday, so now she’s overdue.  Today while she was home, Mom brought out the bags of baby clothes she had stored, the very favorite things she’d saved through all her pregnancies, and kept for nineteen years since Boy-O grew out of them.  She also brought out the christening gown that all of us were baptized in – a delicate embroidered thing of fine white batiste, with drawn thread work, and tiny white matching shoes.  It was passed down on her side of the family, and hopefully will keep being passed down.

I wish that Big Brother’s son could be baptized in that gown too.  I got to see pictures of him for the first time earlier this week.  He is so sweet.  (You can see for yourself on Indy’s blog.)  He is also still missing a name, though the deadline is coming fast.  So hopefully soon we’ll know his name.

Speaking of our expanding family, Boy-O is also adding to the family.  He and his roommates have adopted a baby sugar glider.  It’s also still waiting for a name, though Captain Nutters is a strong contender.  I think even a sugar glider needs a better name than that.  But it’s three young men and a baby sugar glider, which is about as ridiculously cute as a small marsupial can be.  It’s also a recipe for a sitcom.  I predict hijinks.

Saturday night Flo came to the St. Patrick’s day hang out at my house.  She looked at me, and said, “What a difference a year makes, right?”  And I had to laugh.

The Holy Name of Jesus

On New Year’s Day, I was thinking how different this year has been from pretty much every other New Year’s Day going back just about as far as I can remember.  Usually, New Year’s Day means the Huge Family Party, in which we pull out all the stops to entertain about forty of our nearest and dearest.  This means that we would have pulled ourselves out of bed early after days of cooking and cleaning (plus one night of revelry), ready to face a tight schedule of more cooking, cleaning, arranging, and then entertaining.  It would be a great party, a great way to start the new year, and definitely worth it.  However, it would also be a lot of stress and everyone would fall into bed at the end of the night totally exhausted.

This New Year’s, I got up in plenty of time to make it to Mass at my home parish, ate breakfast at home, and then headed over to the Family Homestead in time to see Indy and Rosie off to the Bengal’s game.  After a little while of hanging out, the rest of us headed off together to watch Tin Tin, which was awesome.  When we came out, we decided to see how many of us we could squeeze into the instant photo booth.  The answer was five (see evidence above).  The Duchess, Sae, and I were on the bottom, and AnniPotts and Fleur were on top.  I’m particularly proud of the picture on the bottom, where I managed to get at least half of my face into the frame.

After the movie, we headed home and cooked a quick dinner of pork chops, sweet potato fries, green beans and salad, and ate together around the big table.  Then there was dishes, and then I headed home again.  It was a little surreal to be heading away from my parents’ house on New Years Day, so early and so rested, but it was nice.

The night before was very nice too.  Mariah had her annual New Year’s Eve Party, complete with breaking a pinata in the front yard.  The pinata this year was the most adorable dinosaur, with big brown eyes, and a long neck that made him look disconcertingly like a llama.  And how can you hit a llama?  It’s just not possible.  It was a good thing it was dark, and we were blindfolded, otherwise we might have been totally defeated by The Cute.  Still, somehow we were able to overcome.  :D

After the pinata was properly subdued, we all headed back inside for more fun until we crowded up stairs (that’s where the tv is) to watch the ball drop in Times Square and toast the New Year.  Then, of course, there were noisemakers and poppers on the front porch.  But there was more.  I had gone into the house, and was tidying up the upstairs room when PM came to get me.  While he was gone in the wilds of Indiana the past year, he was apparently so lonely that he resorted to ballroom lessons.  I had told him that I wanted to learn Hustle (which is his favorite), and he had decided that I was going to have a lesson right then.  I’m always up for dancing, so I followed him downstairs to Mariah’s dining room, where I got my first Hustle lesson.  And then, since turn-about is fair play, I taught him some East Coast swing.  And then all the girls who had been watching wanted to learn swing too.  So I ended up starting off my New Year by beginning to learn a new dance, and then giving swing dancing lessons in my sister’s dining room.  Not a bad start, that.

Now I am in the midst of my last week at Job1 and Job2.  Tomorrow is my last day at Job2, and I’ve gathered that there is going to be some sort of good-bye luncheon.  No one has actually told me this, but they keep accidentally copying me on the e-mails.  Then I’ll take down the things on my bulletin board, return the cup I borrowed from one of them when mine disappeared, make a few last contract files, and say good-bye.

I really hate good-byes.

Sigh.

Bl. John Alcober – the 5th day of Christmas

The past few days have been full of Festivity.  First there was my parents’ Anniversary (they’ve been married now for 41 years).  It was a laid back sort of affair – hanging out at the Family Homestead and watching movies all together.  Mariah brought over most of her truly impressive alcohol collection, and we mixed Gin & Tonics with St. Germaine, and concoctions of ginger liquer mixed with Creme de Cacao or orange juice, plus many, many Shirley Temples for Fleur.  We watched A Muppet’s Christmas Carol together (I cried at the “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it. I am sure that we shall never forget Tiny Tim, or this first parting that there was among us. “ part, and so did Mariah), and then we watched Raising Arizona, which was much more cheerful.

On Wednesday we had our Family Gift Day, which was mostly lovely, the first part, anyway.  This year AnniPotts and Boy-O collaborated on their presents, which included cleaning out the used book store.  Apparently they found a whole series of really ridiculous romance novels with nerdy heroes (The Nerd Who Loved Me, Nerds Like It Hot, Talk Nerdy To Me, My Nerdy Valentine, etc.), and gave one to each of the girls in the family.  Except Fleur.  She’s not old enough for even the most ridiculous romance novel.  Mariah had already given me my Christmas present (two very nice cardigan sweaters when I was freaking out about not having an office-y enough wardrobe), but she threw in a license plate cover from Fiber Works that says “I’d Rather Be Knitting.” I thought that was pretty cool.  I gave up on trying to finish Mr. T’s cabled socks, and instead gave him a gift card to Olive Garden.  I figure the socks will have to be a birthday present after all.

The hard part was that after we’d done all the fun present giving, Mariah brought out the last of the boxes of Jacob’s stuff, the ones that have been sitting in her living room for months, ever since we moved them out of Sae’s basement.  It seems like no matter how much of Jacob’s stuff we go through and distribute, there’s always more.  Or there was.  I have it on reliable authority that this was the last.  And it better be.  It took us five and a half hours.  It felt like infinitely longer.  At one point I thought we were never going to get out of there.  But we did.  I now have custody of what was Jacob’s stuffed R2D2, his George R.R. Martin books, the letters I wrote him while I was on NET, his The Tick figurine that used to balance on a bit of plastic wall until somehow we lost the wall, and his Baptismal candle, among other things.  And now we’re done.  I think.  I hope.  Please, God, let us be done!

Thursday was better, though I felt like I had a hangover most of the day from the emotional overload the day before.  I kinda just wanted to go home, crawl into bed, and not come out again until the next day, but CO2 was in town for Christmas, and had volunteered to lead our Catholic young adult group in a Posada.  This is a Mexican (and other Spanish speaking countries) tradition in which you act out the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.  Afterwards you have a party, complete with a pinata.  I love pinatas!  So I packed up the vat of Buffalo Chicken Dip I made in my slow cooker, crackers, napkins, rope, and a whiffle ball bat to hit the pinata with.  And I was glad I did.  There’s nothing like whaling on a pinata to chase the holiday blues away.  And our pinata, a very jaunty blue pony, put up a fight!  Everyone got a turn blindfolded, and then we started whacking on it without the blindfold.  It was pretty sweet.  Once it was finally eviscerated we cheerfully adjourned to our meeting room for food & hanging out.  And it was good.

Tonight, in a few minutes I’m heading out to the Welcome Back Dinner for PM (my long lost Minion).  After dinner people are heading over to Tank’s, but I don’t think I’m going to.  I’m just tired.  I want to stay in and, I dunno, paint my nails.  Or something.  Tomorrow is Mariah’s Big New Year’s Eve Party, and then New Years Day is another family day.  We’re not having our Huge Family Party this year.  (We’ve thrown three weddings this year.  That’s enough parties for a while.)  But we’re still going to get together and hang out, and probably go watch Tin Tin.  And somewhere in there I swear I’m going to get some sleep.  Really.