Chef Tucker

Tucker made his first batch of chocolate chip cookies last week and is now firmly hooked on cooking. He helps me make his oatmeal or granola in the morning and is very enthusiastic about any shaking, pouring, stirring or squeezing activities.

I find his description of tastes particularly endearing right now--everything that is sweet tastes like chocolate (or sometimes, strawberries). The strawberry jello he made yesterday tasted like chocolate, according to my little man. The rootbeer lollipop from last week tasted like strawberries. He was so excited about making cookies that he insisted that even the flour that got on his hands tasted like chocolate.

P.S. The picture is Tucker getting ready for football season.

You are grounded

Ben is officially grounded for the next few weeks. We are confining him to the house with only supervised potty breaks and supervised outdoor time.

You may be wondering why he's lost his outside privileges. I have one word for you: dirt. The dog can't stop eating dirt.

Ben has always eaten everything, including occasionally munching on potting soil (always the store-bought kind) from our planters. But recently the combination of digging up the area for a patio behind our house and doing some grading around the foundation to improve drainage has proved too much for him. Ben has developed a taste for plain old red Virginia clay.

It may surprise you, but eating dirt all the time doesn't do good things to Ben's digestive system. Specifically, it does bad things to his digestive system that result in messy floors EVERY SINGLE morning. Yuck.

I hear it takes three weeks to form a new habit--I'm hoping it will only take three weeks of supervised potty breaks to form a new habit of not eating dirt. Silly dog.

P.S. FYI, I'm aware that new tastes for the inedible can be a sign of worms or dietary insufficiency so we're exploring those avenues, too, though with Ben's shiny coat and having never contracted worms in all these years of eating nastiness, I'd be surprised if those were the culprit.

Does this sound like naptime to you?

Tucker spent his naptime today driving his ride-on car around his bed, then standing on top of the seat and dive bombing onto his pillows. For some surprising reason, no sleep occurred.

Quote of the Day

"Daddy took my nose and hid it in the closet."
-Tucker

Quote of the Day

"I don't want to make real cookies. I want to make chocolate cookies."
-Tucker after I told him we would make real cookies together today (he usually just bakes imaginary ones in his oven)

Recent Projects

I've been doing a flurry of crafts recently... the things that I know I won't get to for ages and ages after the baby comes. I finished up my project for work before I left for Spain so I'm basically footloose and fancy free with respect to employment now and am enjoying the extra time.

Above are a few pillow covers I made (the chicken one I had on hand) for the baby's room... I made matching curtains with the fabric on the right. Below are picture frames I made out of one of our old windows that we recently replaced. We're going to hang them on the stairs (when I say "we" I mean Austin, because I don't trust myself to hang heavy items in plaster walls).

Further below is a tote bag I made on the spur of the moment after re-discovering some fabric I had that I really liked, and a tag quilt for the baby for Christmas (they were just giving the ribbon away at Michaels, and again, I had the fabric on hand... have I mentioned I stockpile fabric?).

Napping, and other accomplishments

After a hiatus of more than four months, Tucker has begun napping regularly again. I have been hesitant to put those words into print lest that jinx this new trend, but I am cautiously optimistic that my stubborn boy will continue actually sleeping during his rest time. Why is this so nice? First and foremost, we have had zero tantrums since the napping has become somewhat consistent again. ZERO. It is so much nicer to be around a well-rested two year-old than a cranky-hyper-tired one. Enough said. Second, dinner time isn't so much of a crunch. Without a nap, Tucker disintegrated at about 6 pm, which meant we needed to start putting him to bed by then at the latest, and to do a bath, much earlier. A 7:30 bedtime is much more civil for everyone involved.

Other recent developments in Tucker's young life include his interests broadening from all things wheeled. I've heard that you usually can categorize boys into truck boys, ball boys or dinosaur boys. Tucker has always been a truck boy, and he still likes his trucks, but the days when the trucks march all over the house and are inseparable from him seem to be gone, at least for now.

In the meantime...
*This summer balls are quite the hit and he is very interested in throwing them, collecting them, rolling them and trying to catch them.
*Tucker's imagination is exploding. He rounds up his Winnie the Pooh characters and enacts things with them, talks to them, etc. Sometimes it's harder now to figure out what he's saying because half the time it's some imaginary thing that has no basis in anything close to what the conversation at hand is about.
*Tucker's love of dressing up continues to grow. His latest acquisition is a football helmet which he runs around the house with. He also likes to put on his mud boots as a fashion statement, and to dress us with hats. Poor baby sister--I fear she will be dressed funny by her older brother.
*Tucker is very into reading right now, and into snuggling in bed. He will get up on any bed, at any time, crawl under the covers and say its night-night time. He also loves to "read" to Ducky, and will read books by himself for long periods of time. He especially loves his Bible--but will only read the stories about Jesus. He gets mad when I try to read him other ones.
*Tucker's creativity is blossoming into the first artistic urges I've really seen. He sits at his table and methodically scribbles with his markers, and paints pictures that take more than two seconds each. He proudly presents them to me and waits for us to hang them up in the hallway upstairs.
*Tucker is also obsessed with his upcoming birthday. We began talking about it to get him ready to switch rooms (which will happen on his birthday), vacating the nursery for a big boy room... but we began talking about it so early that he is ready for his birthday NOW and it's still more than a month away.

Garden update

Our garden weathered our long vacation much better this year than in years past because we had house sitters this year. In fact, Ben the dog weathered the long vacation better than in years past as well--he always is hyped up and neurotic when we pick him up from the kennel, but I think he might have liked the house sitters better than he does us (more treats?). His welcome home to us was more like "Oh, you guys again?" (Okay, slight exaggeration.)

Tonight we were doing our mid-year garden review and here's how things stand:
-Great corn (looks like we'll be in business for a long time due to Austin's strategic successive plantings)
-Bumper crop of cherry tomatoes
-Regular tomatoes are bouncing back nicely from some rot issues and look like it will be our best crop yet
-Beans are a much better variety than last year, but we could easily eat double what we've planted
-Malabar spinach is a new type of heat-resistant green that is working out really well and is tasty
-The pepper plants we grew from seed turned out to all be weeds and so we have no peppers
-Our basil has been slower than hoped for--next year we'll jump start things with starters rather than growing this from seed--we haven't been able to make any pesto yet (and my boys can't eat the store kind because of nut contamination issues)
-Not nearly enough okra
-All of our squash (winter and summer) shriveled up and died--this is the same thing that happened to all but the earliest squash that we planted last year. Next year we'll have to do early squash, and the hardiest types available (zucchini and butternut)

As for the fall, we're set to plant four old stand-bys: mesclun, spinach, kale and brussel sprouts and we'll try three new things: rutabaga, turnip and fennel. We've also decided to switch back to buying all our seeds from a local mail-order seed company rather than scrounging packets together from the hardware store and big box stores. I think some of our lackluster garden performers may be due to seed quality and choice.

A couple videos from Spain

Here are a couple videos of Tucker getting into the birthday spirit, celebrating GoGo's birthday (he missed the party because it was too late at night but he certainly had enough birthday enthusiasm with all the party remnants).

Tucker-isms

I think my favorite Tucker quote from our trip was when he said, very seriously at the aquarium "I think one day I'm going to be a fish." It was like he was deciding that he would be a firefighter when he grew up... only instead, his chosen profession was being a fish.

The other most touching Tucker-ism from our trip was when he repeatedly asked to see Jesus in every cathedral we went into. The first time we went to one, Austin and I took turns going inside so that Tucker wouldn't disturb people. Tucker got really worked up and it turned out that he really really wanted to go in, too. He liked to sit and stare at Jesus on the cross once he found Him in each cathedral and several times didn't want to leave even when we were done looking around.

Tucker was not especially quiet on our trip, but Tucker is so delighted to be home that he has entered a state where he seems to be incapable of not talking. The first day we were home, he asked to do everything we do at home, all at once. He asked to feed the chickens and go to the garden before breakfast on Monday morning. But his most amusing request was when he asked to watch the weather at 11 am (note, watching the weather is a favorite Austin activity, not one that Tucker's ever really gotten into that I've noticed).

He also is on this streak where he likes to specify who he's talking to at the end of each sentence. So instead of saying "This is a popsicle" to us at dinner, he'll say "This is a popsicle, Mommy" and then he'll immediately turn to Austin and say "This is a popsicle, Daddy" and then he'll turn to Ben and say "This is a popsicle, Benny." Tonight at dinner he was narrating his observations to me and I counted him saying my name 7 times in one minute. If you multiply that by the number of minutes I'm around him in a day... let's just say I hear my name A LOT.

Avila and Hondarribia

Our last couple of days in Spain were pretty neat. After a lot of pretty mediocre cafe food, my standards got higher towards the end of the trip and we were a lot pickier about where we ate with much better results. In San Sebastian, we ate at the port twice and finally found some fabulous seafood. On a day trip to Hondarribia we found a little Basque cafe with no English on the menu where Austin was finally able to order fresh anchovies (that incidentally taste nothing like the anchovies that we think of). And in Avila for our last night we got to enjoy some amazing meat at a cook-to-order gourmet tapas bar (most tapas bars just put out sandwiches and other fried food for hours on the bar for quick food... I would definitely not dare to eat any of that stuff while pregnant). We also woke up in Avila to an amazing breakfast buffet with two kinds of Spanish omelettes, lots of chorizo and local cheeses and yogurts and surprisingly, even gluten free baked products (yay!).

But aside from the food, our last two days we visited a few really neat towns. The first was in the Basque country, Hondarribia, which is a little coastal town on the Spanish side of the coastal border between France and Spain. It felt truly Basque, and was just a delight to walk around in. The other big highlight was spending the night at a hotel in a renovated 16th century palace in Avila, the oldest and most complete walled city in Spain (the wall dates to 1100 or before). It was a real treat.

Why not to fly Iberia

We arrived back in the States last night, after quite the long trip home. Austin has been dreading flying with Tucker, and the trip back home fulfilled his (bad) expectations. It wasn't that Tucker was especially bad, it's more just that a lot of what could go wrong did go wrong. But at least we got on the plane.

I just want to say for the record that I never want to deal with the Madrid airport again. We arrived at the airport 3 and a half hours early, mostly because the drive to it was faster than expected. But the airport layout is confusing, the signage is awful, and you have to know what terminal you're flying out of before you can even return your rental car. Still, with some hassle we reached the terminal now three hours before departure to find the absolute longest airport check-in line I've ever seen. It took us more than an hour and forty-five minutes to check-in for our flight. Since our flight wasn't even listed on the monitor, we spent the first hour of that time standing in separate lines trying to figure out which line was the correct one to check-in at. By the time we got to the counter, we got issued boarding passes with no seat assignments and the instructions to check-in again at the boarding gate. I knew this was not a good sign, but given that no one spoke in English, there was nothing to do.

Thankfully, security went quickly, and we still had an hour before our flight. But after we got through security, we discovered signs saying it would take 25 minutes to get to our gate... apparently our gate was in a satellite terminal that required a long train ride, a visit through customs, a long walk, and then extra security procedures for flights departing to the US. (Keep in mind that we didn't have a stroller, and I sprained my ankle that morning and was limping pretty badly.)

So finally we reach the gate, only to find it mobbed with all the people they have overbooked, who haven't been assigned seats. In my printed itinerary, I have the seats that we had been assigned back when we bought our ticket in March, an assignment that they apparently revoked when they decided to select us as the overbooked "Standby passengers." The two agents at the gate spent the next forty minutes while the plane boarded ignoring the mob of people trying to get on the plane, and only spoke in Spanish so what little they said I couldn't understand anyway (but apparently, according to the people around me, even in Spanish they offered no explanation and no guide to what was happening to anybody).

There was a woman in the mob at the gate who needed to be back in DC for dialysis today, and whose life-or-death situation was being completely disregarded by the agents. She was sobbing uncontrollably for most of this time which added considerably to the stress and chaos.

Anyway, we ended up being allowed on the plane after boarding had closed, the last passengers to get on the plane (with our seats all split up)... but thankfully, the flight attendants on the plane were more capable than the ticket agents and had other passengers move around so that all three of us could be together.

It was the most stressful airport experience I've ever had, and the most helpless. We had planned on getting food at the airport before we left but by the time we got to our gate the only thing there was vending machines and the plane was boarding so we didn't feel like we could leave and get anything even then. So we began our 9 hour flight with no water, and only one little baggy of cheerios and a lollipop for Tucker, after missing lunch. Then things got worse when we discovered that the portable DVD player's battery has either lost its charge or was never fully charged in the first place and didn't work. Then things got worse when Tucker fought the Benadryl we gave him and was hyper and high maintenance for the first four and a half hours of the flight. He experimented with kicking the seat in front of us, demanding new surprises every five minutes, and generally acting his age. Thankfully, he ended up sleeping the last half of the flight so Austin and I could relax (but not move, because he was sprawled out on both of us).

The bookend to our trip was landing in Dulles to discover that our luggage, of course, hadn't arrived and there was another long (not moving) line/mob for another Spanish-only Iberia agent who was very limited in her helpfulness. Allegedly we're going to have our luggage delivered tomorrow, but I have to admit I'll believe it when I see the bags.

Surprise Party

Even though it wasn't my mom's actual birthday on the trip, it was close enough to celebrate... and we had the added advantage that she wasn't expecting it! It was a bit challenging to make 60 miniature cupcakes (you can guess why I picked the number 60...) without measuring cups or spoons, in a cheap celsius oven that didn't actual bake very well. But it was very easy to get everyone behind the idea of a surprise party, and we collected a lot of eclectic decorations. Poker, limbo and cake: what makes a better party?

San Sebastian

We've spent the second week of our trip in San Sebastian, a resort town on the northwest coast of Spain in the Basque country. I think most of us agree that this week in San Sebastian is even a little bit better than the last one in Sitges; the temperature is not so hot (but still good beach weather, at least the first couple of days), we're in the center of a city so it's not a big walk to go places, and the beach out our door involves people with clothes on. San Sebastian is also just really beautiful with an old promenade stretching two miles along the beach, lush mountains all around and some of the old architecture that makes it all seem so romantic and distinguished. We've been having a lot of fun.

We've visited various "unremarkable" cathedrals according to our guides, which seem quite remarkable to us Americans. We had a couple great beach days (look at the pics--I've never seen a beach this crowded at low tide!). The beach even had rafts that you could swim to and diving boards and water slides off the rafts into the ocean. The promenade has a carousel on it that Tucker loves--his favorite is the spinning tea cup which he can spin so fast he made Austin feel really ill. On top of a hill overlooking town is a small castle that has a section as old as the 12th century.

Yesterday was a rainy day and we visited Tucker's first aquarium which was surprisingly good. At one point a worker got in one of the tanks to work and Tucker sat on my lap and watched her for ages. We haven't had tons of great restaurant food on our trip (a lot of cafes with okay to good food) but yesterday we had an amazing seafood lunch at the port. Mmmmmmm. Every night a different family has rotated cooking dinner for the whole group of 18 of us and I think our earliest night here has been leaving the family party at 11 pm (and remember, Austin and I are the boring ones--we never shut anything down). :)

Another big highlight was visiting my great-grandmother's village in the mountains north of Pamplona in a little Basque village named Linzoain. House is a big deal to the Basques, bigger even than genealogy or last name. What house you come from is essentially your heritage, so it was really neat to find her actual house (she lived in the house that has the name of the town on it!). People still live in the house and the village was really neat with a Basque pelota court and narrow streets and courtyards and lots of window boxes with bright red flowers. The uniformity of the architecture and the neatness of it makes a big impression. When my aunt and uncle and cousins went to look at the house in the early evening, the owner of the house was just arriving home from work and gave them a tour, telling them what was original and what was not and giving them cokes and beers--when I get the pics, I'll post them!

Of course, there have been some low lights to the vacation as well. The day we visited Linzoain we went to Pamplona, but Tucker had his first just disaster of a day. He had taken a late nap the day before and gone to sleep late and gotten up early and was just tired. We got to Pamplona just as he was about to fall asleep in the car, and he responded by throwing a tantrum that he basically didn't recover from the entire time we were in Pamplona. I think we were only able to walk about half a mile from the car, to a mediocre cafe with laughably bad service. (At least the cafe was strikingly beautiful--it was one of Hemmingway's hangouts.)

But that was actually the better of the lowlights of that day. The truly worst experience of the trip happened later, after Tucker was in bed for the night. He was (finally) asleep and we were hanging out after dinner at the adjoining apartment with all the family. The two apartments share a foyer and there's an exterior door past the foyer. We've been essentially using the two villas as one and not ever shutting the individual apartment doors, just shutting the main foyer door. That meant that when the wind whipped through our apartment (where Tucker was sleeping) and slammed our apartment door shut at 10:30 at night, all the keys to that door were safely inside the apartment. We were locked out at 10:30 pm, with Tucker inside. In Spain. Arghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thankfully, we were able to reach the person managing the apartment who sent over someone to unlock the door within 20 minutes, and Tucker slept through the whole thing. But I felt sick to my stomach for the rest of the night... given the pace of service in Spain it felt like it could easily have been 12-14 hours to find a key or a locksmith or to get someone to answer their phone and respond. Thank you, Lord!!!!