Cold turkey

Meemaw and Poppop are in town for Thanksgiving today. Anticipating a boring day of cooking, Meemaw and I braved the cold to take our intrepid explorers to the park.

First snow

It was last Friday. We didn't get much, but it was enough to inspire a morning of wonderment for Jake and I while Isaac was in school.

Of course our junior gourmand's first thought was how to eat it.

Thanksgiving feast

Today was Isaac's Thanksgiving Feast at preschool. Daddy took the Jake and I got to stay at school with Isaac the whole time and help out! Leah's mommy stayed, too, and it is only through her forethought and kindness that I can bring you these pictures. I can't believe I forgot my camera.

Here's the whole gang at the start of school. They line up to enter their classroom for circle time. Isaac's in the orange turtleneck between his BFFs David and Leah.



After circle time we had to prepare the food for our preschool banquet, to which family and friends alike were invited. It was then that Ms. Jess and I learned we were actually quite necessary to the operation, as wielders of knives. Ms. Jess helped kiddos spread peanut butter in celery, while I cut the cheese (ha) and supervised the spearing of cheese slices with decorative rainbow toothpicks. Here Jess's daughter Leah is helping me while Isaac and his friend Evan pick grapes of the stem.



Later we played outside, indulging in a seriously muddy game of dinosaur chase. Then we came inside and worked out some more sillies to a CD.



Finally it was time for the families to join us. The kids performed some songs and poems for us and we ate our snack buffet, I mean Thanksgiving Feast.

Our first trip to the ER

And it was Isaac, the tame one! Daddy and I were so surprised.

It was a classic story of Boy jumps on couch, Boy bounces off couch, Boy lands ear-first on the corner of the coffee table. His earlobe split open, notch-like, and he additionally incurred a nasty gash behind his ear.

Our ER experience was pleasant and quick -- they glued him up instead of stitching, and we were in and out in 30 minutes. And every member of our family got an orange popsicle.

Here is a picture two days after the fact. Everything is healing so well, and he has never once complained. The purple line on his ear is his glued-up notch.



Jacob insists that you need to see a picture of him, also, though he is unscathed. He is doing a "silly dance".

Daddy and I are officially grown-ups now

Brothers in a corn field

The new roof

I have put off taking pictures of the new roof because Daddy was in the process of replacing some peely and rotting fascia on the front of the garage. He finished enough of that yesterday that perhaps pictures can do our gorgeous new roof justice.

First, I give you the "before" picture. I took this picture on a drive-by the day before Jacob was born. I was in early labor at the time, though I didn't know it.



The shingles were this gray-ey red blend Daddy tells me is called "cinnamon" in the industry. After many many years of laying peacefully under our mature trees, this light color showed stains like nobody's business. Daddy tells me the cinnamon shingles were placed atop existing shingles from the original, 43-year-old roof. He was concerned that the decking was sagging in places, surely from its age and the weight of two layers of shingles. Recently there had been a teeny leak over Jacob's room that led to a small oval stain in his ceiling. Glorious.

Over the course of 10 hours on October 8th, a small army of Costa Ricans and their Delawarean foremen stripped my roof down to the rafters, replaced the decking, flashed the chimney and outlets, and topped my house with 30-year architectural shingles in a greyish-green. They also stripped the white asbestos-board siding off the sides of our house, which Daddy himself later painstakingly resided with cedar. Here is the "after" picture, taken from a similar vantage point:



A close-up of the pretty shingles! Yay for green!



Many houses in our 'hood are brick ranches similar to ours. Almost all of the better-maintained ones have green roofs with green shutters, and we had always commented to each other how fantastic the green looked against the red brick. And, green is my favorite color.

Lastly, a close-up of Daddy's hard work, his pride and joy -- the cedar siding that will outlive him:



In short, our house is so pretty, and we are so broke. The joys of homeownership.

Receive the sign of the cross upon your stegosaurus

Since May, we've been attending services at a nearby Lutheran church. Our little church-going experiment has been a fantastic success. I think we've missed two Sundays since Memorial Day, one because we were out of town. The kids are so ridiculously well-behaved -- I'd like to blame it on the enormous sack of toys and books I bring along each week, but I know that's only part of the package. Now is the right time to introduce them to church, because now they both understand how to play quietly and how to wait patiently until it's time to go to the nursery (because my kids really are that good, Mommy's Iron Fist Rule dictates that they can only go after the sermon). Though they don't participate in the liturgy, we know they are at least halfway paying attention. Isaac runs around the house all week humming the songs.

After spending so much time with our church, we felt like we were ready to join. We started new members' classes last Sunday. As part of Reformation Sunday that day, we were also invited up to the altar to receive a special blessing. Two members of the church, both older ladies in the choir, stood in front of Daddy and I and, at the pastor's behest, made the sign of the cross all over us -- our hands, our feet, our eyes, our ears, our shoulders, and our hearts. I held Jacob through the whole thing. He held a stegosaurus. When it came time for my membership sponsor, Olive, to cross my heart, she instead crossed the dinosaur that lay upon my chest. He breathes fire upon sinners now. Kidding!

Seriously now. It's hard to put in words how content it makes me feel to be joining a church, especially one where my family and I feel so comfortably inspired. It's weird -- I'm almost 30, I've been married for over 7 years, I own a house, I have two kids. Yet I don't think I really understood what being an adult meant until Daddy and I decided together to join a church, to actively and publicly take responsibility for the spiritual upbringing of our sons.

The battle of tail versus booty

A TV and a dinosaur, coming to a door near you! You'd better have some candy. Their goateed bodyguard, he'll rough you up.



We had a great time trick-or-treating around our neighborhood last night. The boys were naturals. Jake caught on right away to the game, and often beat his brother to the "trick-or-treat!"s and "Thank you!"s. We enjoyed looking at the costumes of others as well as our neighbors' imaginative decorations. Of course, this being a blue state, we saw our share of Obama pumpkins:



We also have one guy in the neighborhood who is quite the connoisseur of creepy, setting up a decent-sized haunted house on his front lawn each year. Isaac and Daddy went in it this year, for the first time. I kept Jake outside with me and we watched the motorized crawling hand with fascination.

On the treating front, the boys were both labeled as ridiculously cute and made an appropriate haul. Jake got tired of wearing his TV suit early on and did most of his treating in a sweatsuit. He was not to be outdone by his fancy-pants brother, though. When Isaac would get oohs and aahs over his luxe dino costume, showing off even by shaking his rear to wiggle his tail, Jake stepped right up on stage. "*I* have a booty and it shakes! Wanna see?" And he would bend over and make a big show of shaking what his momma gave him for his candy.