I sat around half the day working on this online Eng class I am teaching and hanging out with the family. Donna took down the holidays decorations finally and balked at my lack of help. Then the phone rang. Laura called tonight. I guess she wins, since I had meant to call for sometime and she won. She called first, but seriously, who’s keeping track. I was excited to hear from our friends from the North. I was able to help set up their blog and Flickr so things work better together. They’re great people, so check them out here.

Oh, and yes, start emailing Donna to beg her to post again. Between Suduko & Bejeweled, I can never get her on this thing.

Thursday night we went over to Ryan & Laura’s house to help them pack the truck and say our final goodbyes (for now). It was really hard, and I think it began to hit when I said bye to Emma and realized that Claire will not grow up with her as a good friend. How soon will Claire forget Emma from not seeing her all the time? Laura cried and I wanted to. Ryan and I tried to be "men" about it with the man-pats on the back and all, but it’s still hard.

But it hasn’t hit yet, since sometimes we don’t see each other for a few days or even a week. But tomorrow we go to breakfast alone, and there’s no stopping by when we’re just in the neighborhood. And it’s so odd that I will never be in that house that I put my blood and sweat in to. I am trying to face up to this, but it hasn’t hit us yet.

We love you three. Good luck and my prayers are with you as you head north to Portland.

We have the cutest friggin’ kid in the world!  Claire dressed as a giraffe and paraded around Ahwatukee with Emma and Kendall to retrieve treats for Devon and me.  Yes, we admit it, we’re planning to eat all of her candy.  She can have the pretzels and goldfish crackers.  It was a good time and Laura made a yummy dinner.  Claire didn’t get cranky until after 8:00 pm and she passed out as soon as I put her in the truck.  Actually, so did Devon. 

I was very proud of Claire for picking up the trick-or-treat concept very fast.  After the fourth house, she would go up to the door, reach out her cupped hand, and say "peees" …  then she’d take the candy, shove it in her bag, say "bye-bye" and run back down the walkway. 

Here she is looking as cute as ever.

Tonight Claire had her very first sleepover.

Laura has come through for us in bind after bind, and this week they asked if we’d watch Emma one evening. Usually we’re sitting at home every single night doing pretty much nothing, but this was a wicked week (see the last post if you want more.) Tonight Ryan and Laura wanted to go out to see Pirates of the Caribbean and we offered for Emma to spend the night.

So for the last two hours Emma and Claire ran around the house playing, and it really kind of showed us how it would be to have two children. I, for one, kept thinking of how it must’ve been when Brian and I would run around Grandma Adams’ house when we were little, and I laugh at how big Claire is compared to Emma who is a year old than her. And I remind myself that Jaime, Meghan and I are three years apart (give or take).

Claire finally crashed around 9 and now we’re trying to get Emma down. Claire will sleep in our room tonight between us (and, as she grows, I wonder about our queen size bed) and Emma will sleep in Claire’s crib. So now Emma lies between us on the couch while we watch Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and her parents watch Pirates of the Caribbean 2.

Tomorrow the six if us will get breakfast.

I complained last week that I had too much damn work to do around the house, and one of the kids said, well, I do that kind of work. I asked how much, and he just shrugged. After I explained how much I usually pay, he quickly gave me his phone number. The last time I had someone work outside, he didn’t get much done because I didn’t stand there and supervise. That wasn’t happening this time. After checking with his father, this boy and I worked all day Saturday cleaning, trimming and weeding the front of my house. Five hours later the yard was clean, my wife was happy, and my head hurt. The headache actually didn’t go away until the next morning.

We went with Ryan, Laura and Emma to breakfast at Cracker’s, and they told us how their house still hasn’t sold. My response was Good! It’s not that we don’t want them to follow their dreams, but they’re our best family friends here at all. And we’ll miss them. We promise to visit, but we also promise to visit San Francisco and get there about every other year.

So after breakfast Donna and I laid Claire down for her nap and went into the new spare room that I affectionately call "The Billy Room", named after the brand of furniture we bought at Ikea to decorate the room.  We began working on building the book cases, extensions, and chest of drawers after noon and the next thing we knew it was after 4:00PM, and we had three tall bookcases from floor to ceiling and a nice chest of drawers in the corner.

I keep joking that we’re going to stick a copy of The New Testament from the Gideons in the drawer, and perhaps a Yellow Pages. Donna said it reminds her of a Chicago hotel room, and we’re planning to paint an oil painting for above the dresser where George lives.

How fun it is to build new purple rooms where everyone can visit. Stop by. We’ve got out light on.

I got my most recent job from a friend who got a job and then last year another friend of mine, Angelika, was being "let go" from her position and I got her a job with me. Now there’s this little gaggle of people I know who are all networked together like ants working for the queen in a miniature colony singing "hi ho hi ho, off to work I go" as if mining in some old Snow White movie. Sometimes I pound on the wall good naturedly when Angelika plays her Spanish music too loudly, but our families are close. A few months ago I complained that holidays suck without family in town and she suggested we come with her to her brother’s house for Easter.

Donna and I readily agreed and this morning we headed over to spend a pagan fertility holiday with a rainbow of fruit flavors. When Angelika’s son turned one we went to his birthday party and were amazed at how many different colored people were there. Angelika is half German and half Spanish so we had people whiter than me and then people almost black. We ran around, threw the kids in the pool, and had fun. So we were comfortable going back this time.

Claire played in the dirt and the grass, met some pigs, chickens and goats, and moved around the yard with the best of them. She even got to jump up and down on the trampoline.  Her Easter dress got thoroughly soiled and we wished that we could’ve thrown her in the stainless water trough with the other kids (and didn’t because of the tubes in her ears), but other than that it was great. She was even able to partake in the Easter egg hunting contest. She found three whole eggs that I pointed at blatantly and thrust her towards before she grabbed at them with her pudgy fingers and tried to lick the dye off of them.

I wish I had the kind of job where I can wear jeans daily. Of course the only person I know who has that kind of luxury is my best friend, Dan, who is permitted to wear cargo shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops every single day if he so chose. His work even has Hawaiian shirt Fridays. Now don’t get me wrong, I can wear jeans on Fridays and sometimes slip a pair in on a Wednesday or the rare “teacher workday”. But usually it’s some other kind of pant.

So I am living vicariously through my daughter and dress her in denim whenever I can. My wife thinks I should dress more “professional” and now she sometimes complains when I put Claire in jeans several days in a row, to the point last week that Claire was required to wear stretchy purple pants and a pink shirt to day care. She must’ve disliked the outfit as much as I did since when I picked her up they said half way through the day she pulled her pants off and ran (read: crawled) around in her diaper and t-shirt.

Liza’s son, Trevor, is a little older than Claire and he’s huge. His dad’s pretty tall and he will be like him. So Liza is teaching him different words, like “caca” and the other day he came hobbling into their living room (more than likely without his pants). And he pointed to the back of the house while something that sounded like a guttural “cccccc” came out of the recesses of his throat. Eventually his dad followed him back to Trevor’s brother’s bedroom where there was a pile of crap in the center of the carpet. Instead of picking it up and carrying it deliberately to the toilet to flush, so Trevor could learn the lesson, he chucked it in the trash.

Now I don’t expect Claire to crap everywhere and sure hope she doesn’t ever do that (of course, the ferrets think this is their single goal in life, but that’d be a whole ‘nother post), but you never know what it’s like with little kids in the dead of a fast approaching summer. Just yesterday the bank sign said 80 and Donna still wraps Claire in warm fleece hats to cover her ears, just in case they get infected for the umpteenth time. But soon enough our driveways will be hot enough to fry eggs, and I will be having my black lab shaved more frequently by the local groomer who pays close attention to his nether regions, much like Claire and Trevor and all of the ferrets.

Isn’t it nice when friends share information about their life?  Isn’t it weird when they share too much? 

I work with a delightful bunch of individuals who enjoy discussing parts of their personal lives at work.  We also like to discuss other people’s personal lives, because sometimes it is just more fun.  When one person is not feeling well or having a bad day, a family problem or wants to go to lunch – someone is immediately there to serve.

One day the topic was one’s health and how to rid your insides of all the toxins we consume.  Yes, people, I’m talking about colon cleansing.  We had a talk at work about poop.  One co-worker even sent links to a colon cleansing website.  I didn’t think much of it at the time (I was trying to ignore the conversation), but curiousity eventually got the best of me.  There are pictures online!  Of poop!  See them here then come back and finish reading – if you are not in the bathroom heaving.

After you have children, it’s hard to imagine your life as
it was beforehand. Donna and I were cinemaphiles in our B.C. days, and now it’s
amazing if I ever get to see any movies. Last weekend was our 6^th annual
Oscar Party, and I scrambled to see the few I could before the big night. Our
friend Kerri doesn’t mind babysitting, and I am sure she enjoys other people’s
babies so she can go home to her quiet house at night. Our recent outings are
usually to our friends’ house who has a 2-year old daughter, or to other kid
friendly places. Even our Oscar party had Emma, Ian, and Trevor running around
in circles as I followed them with my eyes, praying that the meatballs squished
in their little fists would make it to their mouths instead of onto our newly
cleaned carpets.

So anyway, we decided to have Kerri and her husband, Jim,
come over for a “game night” full of good wine and good friends. Claire’s been
on ferrous sulfate, and the directions are like don’t give it to her an hour
before this and 30 minutes after that and while the moon aligns with the
seventh sun and all other kinds or parameters that make it nearly impossible to
give her this medicine. So she’s sitting in her highchair drinking the
iron-laced juice while the four of us play an incredibly boring game of
Scrabble to the sound of the first rainstorm in Arizona in 143 days. Claire loves to throw
stuff on the floor just so we can pick it up, and today actually watched me
stick out my tongue at her before she began mimicking me back. She chucked the
sippy cup across the room a few times and almost made a new record of getting it
the whole 4 feet past the throw rug near the dining room. When the next baby
Olympics comes around, she’ll be ready.

She eventually went to sleep and we proceeded to switch from
Scrabble to Taboo. As the wine flowed after the Bacchusious banality of that
Scrabble game, we drank more and more red wine and continually shoved Breton
crackers with cheese from Costco into our faces. In the background I thought it
would be nice to listen to some digital music from Cox. I figured we’d listen
to “Adult Alternative (Uncensored)” which turned out to be some of the
goofiest, droning babble we ever heard, to the point where Donna switched the
channel to Classic Rock, which played The Who over and over again. We eventually
agreed to some light-80s kind of music. Jim began humming along and all was
good. We drank and ate and played until finally we decided to put off the game
at 11:30 (about three hours after our usual bed time). Donna and I won the
game, waved goodbye to our friends and cleaned up five empty bottles of wine.