Friday night lights

One of our neighbors works in ticket sales for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and he helped us out with tickets to the Bucs' preseason game against the Titans last Friday night. The only catch was Eric couldn't be too boisterous in his cheering for Tennessee. He gave us four tickets which meant we had to find people to go with us. We ended up inviting a guy that I met at a recent Wharton alumni happy hour here in Tampa and his partner and they were happy to join us.

Let me set the scene:

Most people probably know this but it turns out Buccaneers are Pirates! (Not those things the girl has to get for her date to the Homecoming dance.) The free Bucs schedule calendars that they handed out said Cannons Will Fire and it was true - they did. Eric was so startled he spilled some of his beer on his shoe.

Getting out of the house is not easy and we did not manage to pre-eat before rushing over to the stadium, so at the first break I went off in search of food. Our companions did a poor job of masking their horror but were good sports about accompanying me in search of reasonable, vegetarian sustenance.

I was trying to decide between a dinner of nachos, a soft pretzel or a Pizza Hut personal cheese pizza when one of them suggested we push on to the next set of food options, just to see. As it turned out, and I am not sure if he knew this or just got lucky, this was the vegetarian haven. I ordered a Sloppy Jane, a vegan sloppy joe made with tempeh, and a black bean burger. Eric would get to choose which one he wanted and I would eat the other. I also got two large beers to wash them down.

The presentation of the Sloppy Jane can be summed up in five short words: "cat vomit on a bun." This sandwich could double as a test of how imaginative you are. Anyone with any imagination at all would be incapable of raising it to their lips.

The black bean burger was dressed up pretty nicely with lettuce, onion, tomato and condiments and did not look at all disgusting. I believe Eric enjoyed it.

I went through a lot of my beer forcing down the Sloppy Garfield.

Sunset over our pond

While we were out celebrating my birthday our babysitter captured this sunset over our pond. This is the view from our pool and hot tub. This is definitely on the list of Florida goodness.

This same babysitter, who I like a lot, told me today: "I always thought I wanted to have children close together like this but taking care of these two at these ages is really challenging! It makes me think I might time things differently with my own kids."

Well, at least she still wants to have children.

Year of Sweetness

Eric took me out to celebrate my 34th year on Sunday. It was all top secret until the very last moment and I enjoyed the anticipation.

First stop was a cozy hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant with a fake brick wall painted up to about waist-high on the interior walls. The food was delicious and the house wine may as well have been coming out of a hose (in a good way).

Next stop was...the Seminole Hard Rock Casino. I'm not kidding. We've passed this place on the highway and always wondered about it. Now we know what is going on in there: lots and lots of gambling. It was the most crowded casino I have ever been to, and this was 7pm on a Sunday evening. A Ghostbusters slot machine game experience caught my eye and after finding an open one (it was popular!) I sat down, put in $20 and pressed some buttons. I got down to about $15 and then I won big: $12.85! I know when to cash out. I took my $7.85 and we high-tailed it back to the car.

The next stop was a super-sketchy drive-in movie theatre. Neither Eric nor I had ever been to a drive-in and it was something we have both wanted to do. In the era of home theatre systems and generally really large televisions, you can imagine what market segment remains interested in drive-ins: us and really scary people in pick-up trucks. Unphased by our viewing companions (our car doors lock, after all) we reclined our chairs, tuned in the radio signal for sound, dug into some brownie bites and shared red wine out of a white plastic coffee mug. It was divine. It was a double feature but after Dark Knight Rises we had had enough and headed home to relieve the babysitter and get some sleep.

When I turned 33 a lot of people told me it was my "Jesus year" I guess because that is the year that Jesus died and then came back, etc. Turning 34, I have decided that this is my Walter Payton year. In honor of his nickname I am declaring this a year of "sweetness."

A year in Florida

August 1 marked our first year in Florida. As Emerson says a lot these days: "Oh gosh!" (read: oh garsh!)

While a part of me welcomed the adventure of moving to a place as random as Florida, it has been no secret that I have struggled this past year to make Florida feel like home, or even a place that could one day feel like home.

I appreciate Florida a lot more now than I did a year ago. Having a wonderful home, albeit still largely unfurnished, helps a lot, especially since with the two little ones there are many days we don't even make it out of the house. But we swim in the pool, play tee ball in the yard, run laps around the house and play with water on the patio so we don't feel too cooped up. This is all Florida goodness.

While it is a lot better, there are still ways that life in Florida is not totally figured out. My professional identity is kind of homeless here and while I have moments of confidence that a fulfilling career is still within reach (without always traveling to work), I also spend more time than I would like to admit trying to remember that thing I was just going to tell you. It was really interesting. Just give me a minute.

And I am still waiting to make my first real friend here. Not for lack of trying. It seems I am too weird for some and not weird enough for others. But these things take time. More than a year, apparently.

I don't hate Florida. But I don't love it (yet?).

Let's give it another year. 

A few recent good ones

Here are a few of my favorite recent Emerson-isms. We are at the age where everything we say comes right back to us. For example, Emerson is now often heard saying: "Does that sound like fun to you?"

I don't know if I've been speaking in British lately but Emerson has started inserting "rather" in a very proper way. Would you like some yogurt Emerson? "Yes, I'd rather like that." I think he has thrown in "quite" here and there as well. Maybe Emerson is seeing too much of the Olympics with Eric while I am not around.

Just today I overheard Eric saying to Emerson: "Your brother is not a pinata," after Emerson said that perhaps he could hit his brother with a stick and candy would come out.

And finally my favorite one: in just the last few days Emerson has pretty much potty trained himself. He decided he was done with diapers and has been using the potty for all of his business with only a couple accidents. How great! So the other evening he is on the potty and we are expecting the evening poo but it hasn't arrived yet. I am reluctant to take him up for bath until he has pooed, and I think he can tell that I am wanting things to move along. He says to me:

"Mom. Put your hand on my head and push down really hard. Then that will make the poo come out!"

I laugh and, to be a sport, put my hand on his head and give it little gentle pressure.

"No!" he says. "Like this!" and puts his hands on top of mine, pushes down really hard and grunts.

It didn't work, but we did have a good laugh.

The hipster cure

In my ongoing quest to meet interesting people and do interesting things, we accepted a dinner invitation from a gay couple, one member of which I met at a Wharton alumni happy hour a few weeks ago. He suggested a spot for dinner that I had not heard of and it turned out to be a fabulous funky hipster type place with organic hamburgers and a band where the lead singer also played a washboard with her really long fingernails.

The dinner was made especially entertaining by the fact that Eric and I were both teetering on the edge of what turned out to be just moderate food poisoning, but we didn't know that at the time. As we were standing waiting for our dates to arrive, we both confessed to having eaten week-old Mexican left-overs for lunch and experiencing waves of nausea all afternoon, and then agreed that we would try to stick it out but we would warn them that there was a chance of abrupt departure. As it turned out, a beer and a polenta with buffalo mozzarella and tomato pepper relish appetizer was all we needed and we even managed to stay up long enough to have a drink on the patio with the steam-punk statue figure things that were all over, one of which appears to be waiting tables in the photo above.

I have not yet made a final ruling on if there are enough interesting people in Tampa to make it worth living here, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Where's that playground

We spent the better portion of this past week in Lancaster, PA visiting Muz (my grandmother) and my aunts Barbara and Penney. The kids had a great time exploring Muz's house, enjoying the hotel, and seeing new scenery from their carseats, but it was a deviation from our normal schedule of spending many hours per day at playgrounds around house.

The third morning in PA as we were turning into Muz's neighborhood, Emerson says from the back seat:

"I'm just trying to figure out how to get to the playground."

List of things I have just recently learned

Lifelong learning is my middle name. Here's some recent evidence that it is happening. In the past week I have learned that:  

Two people using pool skimmers in just the right way can get a very large turtle out of your neighbor's pool. The skimmers will then be needed to get the surprisingly large amount of turtle poop out of the pool.

You can get certified in Dog CPR and First Aid.

You can use something called neem oil on your tomato plants as an organic pesticide/fungicide/miticide AND as a natural bug spray on your skin (though I am not yet clear on if this should happen at different levels of concentration).

Dabbing vinegar on the mosquito bites you get in spite of wearing a suffocating amount of citronella and other natural herbs and oils instead of DEET makes them stop itching. 

The tomato plants will probably still die from the leaf miners that are munching swirly designs into all of their leaves even as I write this.

There's a red light traffic camera at the corner of Waters and Sheldon in Tampa. The fee for running a red light even though you would swear that they altered the photograph because you NEVER run red lights is $158. Boo.

Good job hookers

The grabbers have become the hookers, and Emerson congratulated them often during lunch today. Each time they helped him eat a pea or a blueberry he would gleefully proclaim: Thanks hookers! Good job hookers!

From one to the other

Emerson was holding a balloon in his carseat on the way to the playground today. I overheard this exchange:

"It's mine! No it's mine mine mine said the other hand."

Too hot

Yesterday was a hot one here, like it was in most of the country. We were out in the yard playing tee ball for all of about 15 minutes when Emerson suddenly stopped playing and said,

"Dad, let's go inside. I will drink water and then I will feel better."

We are the 2% (No relation to the 1%)

I read in The Week this week that 98% of US households have a TV. We are not one of them.

The cable guy was here today because we moved the router to a different part of the house. We get internet service from the cable company but, having no TV, we do not get cable. The cable guy, a chunky fellow who I'm pretty sure had been in a dunk tank full of cologne before coming into our home, was more than a little weirded out that we didn't have a TV.

"Whoa," he said several times. "I've only seen this once before with family that was homeschooling their children and I was there hooking up their cable for the first time. It was crazy; these kids were so excited to get just 13 channels that their dad was giving them because they had been so good."

Sometimes it is fun to be the weirdest part of someone's day.

The Grabbers

We had some friends over on Saturday who have a daughter just a few months younger than Emerson. At one point they were vying for a small shovel which she was holding and Emerson was getting frustrated that his attempts to take it away from her had been foiled.

"These are the grabbers!" he suddenly proclaimed, opening and closing his little fists again and again in her direction. "Give them the shovel!"

Makes you wonder which he sees more often

The other day we were driving behind an SUV with a large dog hanging out the window. Emerson shouted out, excited:

"Hey Mom! Look at that goat driving that car!"

Undergrads say the darndest things

In addition to teaching a class this summer, Eric has four undergrad students who are doing research under his tutelage.

While instructing one of them in how to properly centrifuge a bunch of test tube things, the student asked if he had to put the cover on.

Eric explained that when the tubes spin they make the sound like when you blow over the top of a glass bottle but times 50,000 or some other ridiculously large number. If you don't cover them, he said, it sounds like a demon.

"How do you know what a demon sounds like?" the student replied.

It's a good question. And it became the first entry on the lab's Quote Sheet.

Now, I may not have an out of the house workplace right now, but I also hear a lot of funny quotes during the day and I think they need to be recorded. So this blog is going to function as my own personal quote sheet and also as the part of my brain that should remember all the funny stuff that Emerson says but which does not.

We'll start with this one when I went to get Emerson after his nap:
"Mom! (fake cough) I need water because I am coughing."

Look for the tag Quote Sheet to see them all together.

Father's Day funnies

I surprised Eric with a special Father's Day Eve date night on Saturday. After an excruciating departure from a hysterical Emerson, we made our way downtown for some fun sans kids.

We picked up tacos (three fish, three rajas con queso) from Taco Bus and ate them in the park over by the children's museum which overlooks the river and the campus. We washed them and the incredibly spicy salsa they came with down with a few beers poured into opaque cups. The temperature was perfect. We chatted some and spent some time just sitting quietly, watching people playing soccer and taking wedding photos and playing in the water.

After our mouths stopped burning we walked over to the Straz Center for a comedy show. There may have been some warning signs that it was not going to be stellar. It was billed as a four comic line-up of "up and comers." It was sold out but at showtime the auditorium was barely half full. But I wasn't worried; we used to go see amateur comics in SF from time to time and it was still funny, just sometimes not in the way they intended.

Let me just say this: all the comics' parents, and a lot of their friends, were in the audience.We may have been the only people there who didn't recently hang out with one of the comics.

It was almost really good. They had a lot of good ideas, they just didn't quite have their timing and language fine-tuned. One bit was about this guy getting mugged on a subway when the only other person on a subway was an 80 year old woman. And then some of the ideas weren't so good: one guy spent a good portion of his time doing an impression of Stephen Hawking in "unexpected" situations like at a strip club. He had the whole mechanical voice and everything.

I can't wait for next Father's Day.

Not our best parenting

One of the things I have really appreciated about being at home full time with the boys is that I can be completely focused on them and not always feel a little distracted. But, due to sleep deprivation and brain-melting hormones, results have been a little discouraging recently.

For starters, we continued the family tradition of letting our children crawl out of our bed when they hit around six months old. Eric started it with Emerson one morning when I left early to teach a 6:30am yoga class and Eric fell back asleep but Emerson didn't. Eric called me later that morning to tell me that he had awoken to the sound of a thud and then screaming. Unfortunately, I can now relate to exactly how he must have felt. On Saturday afternoon, I put Ethan down for a nap in our bed and then forgot to turn on the monitor when I came downstairs. I was deep in "In The Wood" on my Kindle when I heard a heavy thud followed immediately by very sad crying. He cheered right up once I scooped him up off the floor and I am optimistic that he is completely fine.

Later that day, we went out to do some errands together as a family. We were several minutes into the drive when Emerson chirped from the back seat: "Uh oh! You're not strapped in!" (He still thinks "you" refers to himself, since that's how we always refer to him.)

Yup. He was sitting in his carseat but not restrained at all. We pulled over, buckled him up and vowed to get a better night's sleep that night.

Goodbye Johnny Stef

I learned this morning that my dear friend Johnny Stef passed away last Thursday. John was my favorite person (by far) in my five person learning team at business school and my friendship with him was one of the best things I got out of going to business school. After scouring airline websites and thinking creatively about childcare options, I am sad to say I don't think I will be able to make it to his memorial service on Tuesday in New York city. But just because I can't be there doesn't mean I can't spend some time remembering my good buddy Stef.

John was one of the most decent and big-hearted human beings I have known. What I mean by decent is that he was someone who was more honest than most of us and didn't shy away from difficult conversations or doing the right thing even if it was uncomfortable or hard. He took good care of people and he went out of his way to help people, but in a quiet way that made it clear that he was doing it for them, not for himself. He was "hip" in the best sense of the word: always impeccably and boldly dressed, always knew what was going on and had a knowledgeable and thoughtful take on it. And he was quirky too: ask him what he is reading and he is as likely to say The Peloponnesian War as The New Yorker.

I have fond memories of spending time with John during business school. Beyond the many group projects our learning team worked on, we spent more than a few nights out in Philly with classmates and friends drinking and dancing until late (the song Magic Stick was a favorite, and I seem to remember more bhangra than one would expect from a white guy who grew up in New York). John and Suhana's wedding reception was also a highlight and I felt honored to be there to celebrate with them.

When I lived in DC I was often in New York and could meet John for brunch or fancy cheese with wine in the afternoon or even the occasional live music show in a basement in Brooklyn. He always had some funny story to share and a spot-on critique of a recent movie and I always felt more cultured and in the know after seeing him. My move to San Francisco meant I saw less of him, but we still managed to meet for coffee on one of his trips to SF and that was when he told me he was going to be a father. The last time I saw him in person was right after his son Henryk was born, back in July 2009. I had never seen him so happy. He had not thought he would be able to have children and he truly cherished Henryk.

I knew John had had a stint in the hospital with pneumonia a little less than a year ago but he didn't tell me until he was out and "fine." I guess I should have known there was more to the story but I believed him when he said he was OK. I was shocked this morning to see in my email a note from a mutual friend letting me know that Stef had passed away. I am so sad that he is gone and I feel even worse that I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. And, not to make this about me, but I am horrified with myself that I wasn't there for him during his final fight. I have spent the whole day doing little more than wishing I had known what was going on so I could have been as good a friend to Stef as he always was to me.

I missed my chance to say it in person, but here is what I would have said:
Yo Stef. I am so glad that I knew you and got to be a part of your life. I really admired who you were and how you lived your life and I felt lucky to be your friend. I always felt like you were looking out for me and taking care of me even in ways I wasn't aware of. Thank you for being such a good friend. I wish your son could have grown up knowing you. As a mother of a 2 year old myself I can hardly imagine how hard it must be for you to leave him. I hope that he will grow up surrounded by people who knew and loved you and who can share with him all of the wonderful memories so he will know how lucky he was to have you for a dad, even if just for a short time.

You will be greatly missed.

It only took us six years to find out

On Saturday night Eric and I went out on a date. And because we are parents in our early 30s living in Florida, obviously that means just one thing: we went mini-golfing. 

What we didn't know was that it was National Miniature Golf Day. A whole game of mini-golf was just 99 cents!

If you haven't heard of National Miniature Golf Day before that might be because it only started in 2007. It is always celebrated on the second Saturday of May, which I think means it might always be the day before Mother's Day.

Perhaps we have a new family tradition.

Never hurts to ask

During nap times on our very successful camping trip, we drove around a bit so the boys could sleep. After many hours at the beach, we decided to get some ice cream at the camp store. Eric was driving so I ran in and ordered a cone with mint chocolate chip ice cream.

The woman started to scoop up the cone and determined that there wasn't enough ice cream left in the bucket to make a whole cone. (This was not really true. There was still at least a pint of ice cream in there, it was just all in the corners where her big scooper couldn't get.) So she pulled out the bucket and put it on the floor.

"You aren't going to let that ice cream go to waste, are you?" I asked.

"I'm just going to throw it away," she replied. "What, do you want it?"

Guess what I said.

The best part was the looks I got while sitting on the curb with the bucket waiting for Eric to circle around and pick me up.

Going camping

Once Commencement is over on Sunday, Eric will have completed his first year of teaching and we will be celebrating by going camping with our two small children. As I get us ready for this first-time-camping-in-Florida adventure, I started thinking about what might be different about camping in Florida compared to other places. 

In San Francisco, living indoors is all about keeping out the wind (oh how I hate that cold cold wind!).

In Florida, shelter is first and foremost about separating people and all other living creatures: people in, everyone else out. The AC is nice too, but the critters send people indoors well before the heat does. 

And I am not just talking about all the bugs - though there are a LOT of bugs. Maybe it is the alligators swimming around in my backyard, but Florida seems to me to have more than its share of deadly creatures, or at least creatures that can really hurt you. Or just really gross you out. Bad.

Our plan is to go for two nights and three days. We will be camping on a beach and are crossing our fingers there will be some shade for a nap during the hottest part of the day, or the tent might actually cook us.

Banjo night

This is Banjo Night at the Elks' Club in Pittsburgh.

I was there. I took this picture:

What you can see in the picture:

• Lots of white people
• It was an uncommon mix of older folk, iron city hipsters and people who love banjos.
• A large American flag.
• This picture was taken in the Allegheny Room. 

What you can't see in the picture:

• "DJ Divine," an octogenarian with a fabulous gravelly voice who sings with the banjo crew, apparently quite regularly. She sang two songs the night I was there, one of which was "All of Me" alternately known, she said, as "the fat girl's song."
• My brother and his girlfriend Brin knocking back a pitcher of Yuengling like someone is going to steal it.
• An old guy wearing a dark red silk bathrobe over his pajamas standing in the doorway. Is there housing at the Elks' club? I didn't think so but this makes me want to know for sure.

Kindness of strangers

Every time I travel by myself with two children I am trusting that there will be a helping hand when I really need it. And so far, it always has been, even if sometimes it is the pilot himself helping me carry Emerson's carseat to our seats. (That was on Southwest. I didn't realize he was the pilot until after I had asked him for help. He was very nice about it.)

Of course, I do try to minimize the amount of help that I need, which is why when I arrived at the Pittsburgh airport for our flight home and discovered that the Ergo baby carrier, a central part of what makes flying alone with two children possible, was not in the car, I felt dismayed (read = total freak out curbside).

It turns out that the more help you need, the more help those kind strangers will provide. And a little luck doesn't hurt, too. The plane had open seats and the guy checking us in at the curb not only let us take Ethan's carseat on the plane (without paying for an additional seat) but he personally carried Ethan from the baggage check desk onto the plane and into a seat. He was my total hero for the day until he mentioned how much he loved Rick Santorum but I choose to forget that part and just remember how nice he was. You will not be surprised to hear that he has five children of his own, with a sixth on the way.*

So there I was, settled into a middle seat with a child strapped into a car seat on either side of me. Not bad, really. Until a flight attendant came up and informed me that car seats are not allowed in the row behind the exit row.

We needed to move. 

This is the part of the story where all the kind strangers are off getting a coffee. 

This being Southwest, hundreds of people have boarded since I sat down and the only way to get three seats together is to go the the very back of the plane. I can't carry two car seats and my bags all by myself so I ask the flight attendant for help or to at least block the boarding traffic for a moment so I can get the three of us moved. That doesn't really happen and I am frantically trying not to leave any child alone for too long while running back and forth down the aisle carrying heavy, awkward carseats. By the time I go back to get my bags there are already people sitting in the seats shoving my stuff to the side with their feet like trash.

I may have lost it again, just for a moment.

And then it was all fine once we got settled back in. About halfway through the flight a different flight attendant from the one I yelled at came to check on me and offered me wine.

Faith in humanity: restored. 


*He actually announced the latest pregnancy to the gate agents as we arrived at the gate and they congratulated him, then one of them turned to me and said in a hushed conspiratorial whisper "His wife's not counting right!"

Some updates

It has been longer than I like since I wrote words here so I am going to further postpone finalizing our taxes (that's what extensions are for, right?) and see if I can remember what interesting things have happened over that last month.

This past week Eric called me from work to tell me that he had made a student throw up. Not from the quality of his teaching, I was glad to hear, but on a field trip to a local wastewater treatment facility with his mircobiology lab class. Apparently the intense sewage smell was too much for this delicate flower and she tossed her cookies. Another prissy girl loudly declared their tour the "worst field trip ever" but those who breathed through their mouths and paid attention learned a lot and Eric was pleased with the applied microbiology lessons to be learned from turning sewage into potable water, with a few useful byproducts like nitrogen fertilizer.

Somehow I still have not seen the Hunger Games movie though I really really want to see it even though I already know I will be disappointed because the version in my head from reading the books is so much better.  But I must go see it soon.

With help from Emerson, I started a bunch of plants indoors from seed. While the seed collection I brought with us from SF was a little heavy on cool weather crops like spinach, chard and lettuces we picked out some of the warm weather crops like tomatoes and peppers that grew poorly in SF and should do well here. We've been ambitious and started five different heirloom tomato plants, a container variety jalapeno, two plants of basil, one mint, one serrano chile and just for fun one zucchini plant. The seedlings are all doing well and now I need to figure out where outside we will put them. As summer gets hot I may need to arrange a shade canopy to keep them from burning. This is all just a big experiment to get us started on gardening in Florida.

I have been reading the news from a new perspective recently. I had what I am referring to as my "mushroom-induced revelation" a few weeks ago after eating a lot of mushrooms one day and then sleeping poorly that night and doing some deep thinking while lying awake. The short version of the revelation is that I don't have a responsibility to reside in my anger about all of the despicable, unconscionable, horrible things going on in the world. I can read the news and be horrified and then I can let it go, rather than carrying all that anger about how wrong everything is around with me all the time. For the particularly terrible stuff, I will choose to do something about it. But the rest of it doesn't get any better just because I am pissed off about it. In fact, it probably makes it worse because what this world certainly does not need is another really pissed off person. This revelation has freed me up to read the news and be interested in what is going on without the oppressive emotional experience. I have thoughts on whether the Supreme Court is playing the right role with regards to Obamacare (no), whether student loans should be forgiven (no), whether it is OK for Secret Service to bring prostitutes back to their rooms (no), whether "stand your ground" is a helpful law (no), and whether Ann Romney works (this one is complicated), but you won't see me shaking with fury once we're done discussing it.

In related news, I am back to doing some yoga when I can squeeze it into my current life. I don't know how I survived so long without it. It definitely contributes to me being a better, happier person. It does, however, compete with blogging in those few minutes every day when I can do something that isn't taking care of children.

Two close calls with the gators

A few days before we went to Chicago, I was nursing Ethan on our back porch while Emerson was napping upstairs and the neighborhood kids came running by in a pack chasing a dog that was off leash. The dog was hot or thirsty or maybe just feeling playful and decided it wanted to go for a swim in our gator-infested pond to get away from the kids. The moment the dog jumped into the water I was sure I was mere seconds away from witnessing a Discovery Channel-esque nature drama in which the dog gets ripped to shreds by the gator. In a stroke of luck for the dog, the gator was at the other end of the pond when he began his swim and the kids and a neighbor were able to lure the dog out just as the gator approached. I breathed a sigh of relief for the dog.

Not long after that, Emerson and I were playing in the front yard when Emerson was suddenly struck by the urge to throw a rock into the pond. He darted off toward the pond and I ran after him as fast as I could while wearing a sleeping baby and shouting for him to wait for me, which only made him giggle and run faster (we are at that age). He stopped a few feet short of the water and threw his rock in. As I came up behind him I could see the gator sliding into the water not ten feet to the right from where we were standing. I nearly had a heart attack on the spot.

Emerson and I went inside and had a serious talk about a) listening when Mom says Stop and b) staying back from the edge of the water.

Definitely not

We flew home from Chicago Monday evening on United. We were settled into our seats and getting ready for the flight when an announcement came over the PA system.

"Will Elizabeth M. in 10E please gather your belongings and come to the front of the plane."

How odd, I thought.Am I getting ejected from the plane?

"Gathering my belongings" was simply not a quick or easy thing to do so I asked the woman next to me to flag a flight attendant for me. One came over to our seats and told me I had been upgraded to first class.

"That's awesome!" I said. "It will just take me a minute to get packed up and I will need help moving his carseat up front," I explained, indicating Emerson in the seat next to me.

"Ummmm," she said. "We only have one seat up there."

"Oh," I said. "Well I guess that won't work."

(Pause.)

"So you definitely don't want the seat?" she asked me.

"No, I don't."

When she had walked away the woman in front of me, also a mom, turned around and said "I can't believe she asked you if you wanted to leave a two year old alone!"

Emerson is a great traveler but I don't think he is ready for his first flight alone just yet.

Penny for my thoughts

This is an actual check I received in the mail. How silly!

Traveling plus two

I took Emerson and Ethan to San Francisco by myself last week to visit friends. By the looks I got walking through the airport you would think I was some sort of circus sideshow - hideous, fascinating and impossible not to comment on.

Every single person I interacted with started the conversation saying "You've got your hands full!" or some variation, usually in a half-cheery half-horrified voice. I would smile and agree. I relied on the kindness of strangers and was happy to find many kind strangers on my journey, along with plenty of spectators, too.
 I had Ethan in the Ergo the whole time and Emerson rode in his car seat strapped to a rolling carry-on suitcase. It was actually quite manageable except for the part from the airline door to our seats. Thank goodness for Economy Plus.

Several women, upon seeing us, ordered their husbands to help me immediately. 


I got lots of comments on how well-behaved they both were, and it was true. Ethan slept 90% of the time, like he always does. Emerson was a great sport about traveling and the worst he did was a wee bit of kicking the seat in front of him.

Emerson's last flight was the move to Florida at the end of July and he didn't seem to remember it, which meant he experienced this as his first airplane flight. Our first take-off he held my arm and seemed a bit nervous but after than he was unphased by the ups and downs of airplane travel. 

I am glad that we did it and proud that I made it work. I am not sure I am quite ready to do it again, but I will have to get ready in time for our trip to Chicago in a few weeks. 

Actual wild turkeys

Eric pointed out that my previous wild turkeys were actually Muscovy ducks. Oops.

Then as I was driving last Thursday I came across a grazing flock of actual wild turkeys and they do look a lot more like turkeys than those ducks did.

Picking strawberries

On Saturday we went to a small farm about an hour south to pick strawberries. It was such a small operation that it sort of felt like going over to someone's house to pick berries. And pet their pig Copper and their chickens, which we did too.

The farmer was very welcoming and happy to talk about how everything works. These strawberries are grown in pots stacked vertically about 5 high, which was a welcome improvement from my image of us spending our morning hunched over row after row of earthbound strawberry plants. The strawberries are actually grown hydroponically though I didn't know that until well after we had left because it looks like they are growing in soil. The farmer asked us to use scissors to harvest only the reddest ripest berries. Emerson loved finding berries in the low pots and snipping them off with the scissors and a little help. Only once did he take off running while holding the scissors prompting the parental observation from Eric: "He's running with scissors."

The strawberries above, minus a few that got eaten along the way, turned into this much jam (plus another jar we gave away before I took this picture):

Won't you be my neighbor

Our neighborhood, The Shires, is currently embroiled in a heated referendum about whether or not to update the white, wooden mailboxes, many of which are actually green and rotted, with black metal mailboxes, which look like they were designed for mid-century central London as opposed to a Florida subdivision.

There was a neighborhood meeting about this hot topic, and some other neighborhood issues, this past week. Ethan and I went to check it out and see who our neighbors are in this funny little community.

There were about 25 people there, out of something like 235 houses in the neighborhood (which is one of 28 or so neighborhoods that make up the "master planned community" that is Westchase). The crowd was mostly older folks and I was the only "young parent" there. I was really pleased to learn about what kinds of things are happening and was particularly happy to hear some of the ideas coming up like a playground area that would be a 5 min walk instead of a 45 min walk away.

I did have to nurse Ethan part-way through the meeting, which I was able to do very discreetly. After he was done, I was getting him re-situated in my lap when he let out a resounding three-part burp any frat boy would have been proud of. I cautiously raised my eyes to find every eyeball looking my direction. Before I could say a word the guy next to me, who I had never met before, spoke up.

"That was me."

Hammock Park

We have been trying to explore the parks nearby on nice days and one outing on a recent weekend took us to Hammock Park which is about 25 min away in Dunedin.

Hammock Park is of the "intact ecosystem" variety of park as opposed to the "large lawn" type and they have trails cut through it to aid exploration. As we were walking along down the trail we noticed orange peel strewn around. "Litterbugs," I sneered. "People should know better than to leave their picnic waste lying around."

As we kept walking, we kept seeing orange peels. And whole oranges laying by the side of the trail. It quickly became clear that something else was going on.

It was Eric who first noticed it*: there were wild orange trees and wild clementine trees (or whatever the real name is for those cute teeny oranges) all along the path.

Eric picked one and we all sampled its incredibly sour taste. I guess the squirrels and the other hikers already got all the sweet ones.

*I claim "still dumb from pregnant brain" on this as well as on a lot of other stuff like not being able to remember that thing I was going to do when I came into this room.

Lies I need to hear

I was pushing Emerson on the swings at the park today while juggling Ethan and generally looking exhausted and disheveled. A mom swinging with her daughter started chatting with me and asked how old Ethan was and then how far apart the two kids are. Her kids are the same age apart but are older now - her younger one looked about four.

"People tell you it gets easier but they're lying," she informed me.

"But they are such kind lies," I said, deciding to continue believing them anyway.

Florida's Oldest

There's more to Florida than old people. There's old places as well. We checked out two of Florida's oldest establishments this past week.

Columbia Restaurant is Florida's Oldest Restaurant (1905). We went to the Ybor City location to have dinner with a friend of Eric's who was in town for a meeting, and several of her colleagues joined as well. It is a monstrously large place - I believe the restaurant is a full city block - and Eric said that it seats 1,500 people for dinner. It is Spanish food, which makes sense, since they were some of the first non-native people in Florida. It could be considered a tourist trap but the food was actually quite good and those who had the made-at-the-table sangria (extra $2 for the Sangre de Toro wine) reported it was worthy as well. They have two nightly flamenco shows and we dined in between, catching the just beginning of the late show on our way out. At the risk of sounding a bit geezer-y myself, I was kind of glad we weren't seeing the whole show because it was very loud, what with all the stomping.

After a beautiful afternoon at Philippe Park on Saturday, the four of us went home the long way with a stop at Dunedin Brewery, Florida's Oldest Craft Brewery (no year given). The brewpub-chic main restaurant area was full so we found seats in "the nook" (official name, with a sign on the wall), a shabby-not-chic secondary bar area. We ordered the sampler so we could taste six of the beers on tap that day and had to explain to Emerson several times that the small glasses did not mean it was all for him. My favorites were the Apricot (I'm a sucker for apricot-flavored beers) and the Pale Ale. They also had a Nitro Stout and a Nitro Pale, which are carbonated with nitrogen like Guinness to give a creamy head. The Red and Brown ales were fine but not remarkable. Again here we left just as the live music was getting started and while I don't know for sure, I expect it would have been louder than my current grandmotherly taste in live entertainment.

Other old things I am interested to check out: oldest Starbucks and oldest old person's home.

Shot of Wild Turkey

Took a walk around the neighborhood and spotted these guys hanging out. Note to self: if times ever get hard for us financially, these birds don't seem like they would be very hard to catch.

Things that have happened since Ethan was born

Contrary to what this blog would suggest, life did not screech to a halt when Ethan was born. We have been enjoying a steady stream of visits from friends and family, enjoying a range of holiday celebrations and in our downtime we are adjusting to life as a family of four. A lot of what we have been up to is well-documented on Emerson and Ethan's blog. Here's a few of the other things that happened that you won't read about there:

• Kindle plus newborn breastfeeding plus husband watching older child = lots of time to read. I read The Hunger Games trilogy obsessively and finished it far too quickly. I know it is not great literature and I am not sure I liked the third book at all but there is something about those books that is seriously addictive and weeks later I am still jonesing for a fix. I'm not sure the movie will help but I look forward to seeing it with all the local teenagers. I have also read some other books but nothing worth mentioning.
• Two nights out: Eric and I (and Ethan, who slept the whole time) have been out to dinner twice so far. Once just us and once on a double date with neighbors who took us to their favorite gastro-pub where I got to drink a Boddingtons, a favorite beer of mine from my days living in London. Eric ordered the fish and chips but then swapped his regular "chips" for sweet potato fries for reasons I have yet to understand.
• Birding! Starting in our own backyard, we are getting to know the birds of Florida. Our pond frequently hosts anhingas, little blue herons, wood storks, white ibis and more and we have a front row seat to watch them eating, swimming, strutting around the grass and flying around. We even went on a bird walk in Lettuce Lake Park with a guy who is apparently a bird expert and about twenty senior citizens, many of whom commented on how nice it was for Ethan to be getting such an early start at birding.
• A long journey completed: Two and a half years after we started watching it we finally finished the entire series of Battlestar Galactica. It didn't have to take that long but we got distracted after watching season one and only just returned to it a few months ago. I mostly enjoyed the show, though at times I found it too realistic to be a good escape - too many gut-wrenching decisions and dealing with sadness, loss and life not being the way you want it to be.