June happenin's

So Opal had her first plane trip to Oregon,

A photo of one of the eighteen seconds Mommy and Opal got to spend with groomsman Daddy at the wedding

 

One of the other eighteen seconds, aw smoosh



What you see when you look up "ideal baby girl."

 

and now we're back!

See ya later, Mt. Hood

 

She was good on the first three planes, cranky and crying for a good chunk of the fourth plane, which was fortunately the last and shortest leg of the trip.  But boy, did she require a lot of jostling and amusement, and girlfriend barely slept at all.  Between all that aviatory exercise and not eating six pound breakfasts plus ten pound dinners plus hitting up the old-timey M&M dispenser for the first time ever while visiting Oregon due to dietary restrictions, I actually managed to lose a pound and a half while I was gone, even though I did eat a ton of chips the one time we went out for Salem must-have Mexican.  (I'll put up more pics of Oregon later this month on Facebook of course.  I'm trying to figure out how to keep a blog but not be redundant with pictures now that I'm posting pics of all the kids over on the ol' FB profile too).

 

So it's been me and two three and four here for the past week now.  Things can be a lot easier with Wolfie keeping Zeb out of my hair all day, but I have to remember Wolfie is five and half the time he's throwing his shirt up in the air and spazzing the sheets off all the beds in the house while babbling nonsense about peeing or butts or whatever.  I also have to remember to try to keep up with the good work he was doing in school.  He was asking for blank flags of the world to color in like he was in class, and so far he's done Central African Republic but declared Tibet too hard after begging for it.

 

All the boys were really impressive on Father's Day when we went for a walk to the school playground and played a game of state trivia using the giant USA map that's painted on the ground near the kindergarten playground.  We called out state names and Eli and Wolfie raced each other to the correct state on the map.  Then when we were done with just calling out names, we started throwing out trivia questions, like "This is the state where Aunt Sally and Aunt Lizzy went to college" or "This state is home to the Grand Canyon."  They pretty much immediately knew every single state, even though they weren't labeled or anything.  Zeb even knew a bunch of them.  I think that's really something special.  I'm pretty sure I only recently as an adult figured out how to identify the inland states based on shape and location alone. 

 

We actually mostly celebrated Father's Day the night before at Cheesecake Factory since Dad went to the US Open on Father's Day proper.  I think it was my first time back at the ol' Factory since my ritual night before C-section gorging session back in December.  Of course this time I had to thoroughly research the menu ahead of time and bring a post it with the five or six things I could actually eat, but it was still a really good time.  Zeb passed out on his worshipful aunt's arm,

 

 

probably foreshadowing his assumption of the "dude who passes out every night at dinner on the ship" role on the Alaska cruise next month, a role previously played with great success by Wolfie on the New England cruise of October 2011:

 

 

On Father's Day itself, besides the traditional Giving of the Ties and the trip to the playground, we finally introduced Opal to solid food.  Well, overly boob milky rice cereal.  She's been jealously watching us eat for months, and recently started making Popeye-like faces while gumming the air, which is baby face language for "put some food in my belly!"  She liked the cereal okay on Sunday, but it mostly dribbled down her face while she grabbed the spoon handle. 

 

 

But last night we made it a lot thicker, which she seemed to really enjoy.  I guess she was like "forget this dribble, I want real mush!"  Also Nic started playing the computer game I gave him for his birthday (Bioshock Infinite).  It's a good one to spectate (while the boys are sleeping or busy of course), which is always the best way for a game to actually get played in this house.  Not so good - the Voodoo Donut bacon maple flavored beer by Rogue Brewery that we brought back from Oregon that we drank while Nic played.  Tasted like the smoked pig ears my dogs used to chew growing up, and Nic says he was burping it up well into the next day at work.  Yum.

 

In other Zeb news, his grimey orange dog-like teeth necessitated an early trip to the dentist.  His first appointment was pre-Oregon at our regular dentist, but Mr. Stereotypical Toddler was far too "busy" to sit still long enough for our dude to be able to get in there and do the deed.  So we had to make another appointment at the circus-like office of a pediatric dentist last week, where Nic says he did fine until the necessary scraping part at the end, where they gave the option of giving him knock out juice, but Nic opted for a good old fashioned holding him down while he screams bloody murder.  This caused him to throw out his arms and scream out a classic gem on the way home - "It's a STINKY WORLD!"  Stinky, of course, being Zeb's recent favorite negative adjective to apply to any situation - "This show is stinky!" "You're stinky, mama!"  Of course, his even newer toddler rage phrase, acquired while we were in Oregon as far as I can tell, is "You're fired!"  As in, dropping to the floor in the middle of a tantrum, then pointing at the offending parent and screaming "You're fired, Daddy!"  His extremely silly haircut and puffy little face make him scarily Trump-like when he does this.  Another Zeb gem - he recently noticed and became fascinated with the mole on my forehead.  He likes pointing it out, touching it, and remarking on its circularity.

 

Tomorrow is Eli's eighth birthday.  Eight years ago today at this time I was in a ton of pain, about 24 hours and halfway through a failed induction.  I tried to tell Eli that this morning, but he made a point of ignoring me and saying in a typically surly fashion "I'm not obsessed with baby stuff!"