tag:www.wachdorf.com,2012:/haley-blog/2 2011-10-05T15:11:28Z Movable Type 3.35 tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.747 2011-10-05T18:35:59Z 2011-10-05T15:11:28Z

Kate with our friend Abigail during our trip to Albuquerque. (As usual for me these days, I started writing this eons ago, so some of the information is dated. For instance, tomorrow it will be October. The trip I'm...

Kate with our friend Abigail during our trip to Albuquerque. (As usual for me these days, I started writing this eons ago, so some of the information is dated. For instance, tomorrow it will be October. The trip I'm talking about and showing photos of happened at the end of July. But the part about it being 108 degrees? Yeah, that happened, and it seems like it was just yesterday.) Recently we returned from a trip to Albuquerque, and while I am happy to say that our trip was a smashing success, I have been suffering a bit of post-high-desert depression upon returning to the absolutely smothering heat that is engulfing South Texas right now. The weather app on my phone says it is going to be 108 degrees tomorrow. One-zero-eight. That is just inhumane. So since my current plans involve camping out in my air conditioned home until January, I thought I would go ahead and share a little horror story from my recent brush with airline travel. I need to note at the start that I am acting in solidarity with my sister Hannah and my sister-in-law Kelly, who have both recently blogged terrible travel stories of their own. Both of their stories make me look like a whiner, but in the Rice family, storytelling is a sport and Kelly said she would only blog hers if I would blog mine, so here we are. Game on. We started making plans for a return trip to Albuquerque back in April. This is important because in April, Isaac was not walking. That small fact explains a lot. Specifically, it explains why I chose to have all four of us travel to Albuquerque together, but for the kids and I to stay in Albuquerque an additional three days after Dan went back to Texas for work. This means that I would be doing the return trip to Texas without Dan. In my mind, when I was planning this day of solo flying for me and the kids, I was picturing Isaac being happy in the stroller and Kate being the model veteran air traveler that she is. Isaac and his buddy Owen shared a snack at the Albuquerque Zoo. Well, it turns out that babies change all the time. I am not sure if you knew that or not, but it's true. You might want to write that down and tape it up somewhere in your house if you have small kids. Because by the time July rolled around and I was watching Isaac sprint all over my house like Thing One every minute of the day, I was starting to wonder what had ever possessed me to sign up for this. But tickets were already bought and there wasn't really any backing out of it. So off we went. Our time in Albuquerque was so much fun, so worth the travel and deserving of another post on its own. To illustrate that point, I will intersperse some photos from our trip through this post of us and our Albuquerque peeps. Dan went back to Texas on Sunday, the kids and I stayed a couple more days and then it was time for the big return trip. Since realizing what I was in for, I had spent a lot of time planning how I would survive, but in fact many of my plans turned out to be unneccesary because Mike and Susan, who were already hosting us for our trip, rode to the rescue, as they always do. It turned out that Susan was leaving for a trip on the very day we returned to San Antonio, and our flights left Albuquerque within 15 minutes of one another. It would have been amazing enough just to have another adult to go through the security line with me and the kids, but going above and beyond as they usually do, Mike and Susan managed the return of my rental car and helped me get us and all our luggage checked in. Then Susan, who could have been having a totally reasonable pre-flight period of eating a meal sitting down or reading a book, chose instead to go through security with me and my three-ring circus, then help us get breakfast and do bathroom breaks before it was time to board. May her reward be great in heaven. Seriously. Mike and Susan also hosted a cookout at their house during our visit and all these kiddos ran around in a screaming pack in the rain and had a completely wonderful time. Here they are in a brief moment of stillness. So my fretting was largely in vain, but when I was still in fretting mode I had come up with a solution for almost every travel issue that could arise, save one. I could not, for the life of me, figure out what in the world I would do if myself or one of the kids had to visit the lavatory on the airplane. We've all seen these things. You can barely fit yourself in there, much less yourself and a kid. Add a second kid in and the whole thing starts to sound like a clown car act. No, I decided, there was no way to do it, so I just wouldn't, Our flights were reasonably short. I would make darn sure we went to the bathroom immediately before boarding and just avoid the whole issue entirely. When I made this plan, it should have set off red flags in my mind, since every other parenting strategy I have ever come up with based purely on denial has backfired spectacularly (Santa, anyone?) but I really thought it was reasonable. Thus, on the morning of our flights, we made multiple trips to the bathroom. Minutes before we boarded I made one last trip for insurance. And, sensing my desperation, Kate did what any three year old would do in that situation -- she refused to go to the bathroom. I put her up on the toilet and sat there, telling her why it was important for her to go now. But all to no avail. She really didn't have to go, she said. Kate with her good friend Bonny, who mails her letters. I think you all know what happened next. We got on the plane. I performed the one-handed folding up of our stroller at the end of the jetway with Isaac in my arms. We got into our seats and got our seatbelts on. Then, in a miracle of timing, Isaac stopped bouncing around like a ping pong ball, nursed and fell asleep during takeoff. He was out like a light and I was starting to feel like there was a really good chance he would sleep through the whole flight if I just ignored the tingling pain of my arm falling asleep and didn't move a muscle. Kate was happily watching "Annie" on the i-Pod. We were about 45 minutes into the flight, and I was about to breathe a sigh of relief. (We celebrated Katie's Lilevjen's birthday while we were in town, which made me almost as happy as getting to see all the Lilevjens again!) And then Kate turned to me and said the words all parents dread hearing on a trip. "Mommy, I have to go potty." Well, that's not entirely accurate. What she said first was "I don't want to wear this seatbelt." Then when I told her she had to keep wearing the seatbelt because it is one of the airplane rules to be safe, she pondered that for a moment and then pulled out the potty trump card. I could see the thoughts forming in her brain -- "If I say I have to go potty Mom will have to let me out of the seat belt!" -- and it made me want to bang my head on the seat because I knew that it was total fiction. I don't want to give you more information than you need, but Kate has demonstrated many times since she got full potty trained that she can hold it for incredible amounts of time when she wants to. Key words: Wants to. My attempts to convince her to use her bladder-holding superpowers for good ended in increasingly high-pitched proclamations of "I need to go POOOOOOOOOTTTTY!" And really, to your fellow airline passengers there is no way to get through that without sounding like you are A) torturing your child and B) about to ruin a perfectly good airplane seat. So there was nothing for it but to unbuckle all three of us and start the trek to the front of the plane, where there was not, as far as I could tell, any line for the bathroom. Isaac woke up in the process and started doing that angry, disoriented thrashing move that small children do when woken from a deep sleep. Kate was doing little dance steps up the aisle while I tried to keep Isaac from kicking people in the head. It was a long walk to the front of the plane, only to find once we were there that the lavatory was, in fact, occupied. This fact was relayed to me by a flight attendant who I had not seen sitting there until that moment. "It's occupied," she said, glancing up from her book. I want to take a moment to state that I have flown a lot in my life, and never once have I been anything but charming to airline personnel. For the most part, they have been nothing but charming to me. And maybe this woman and I were just not having the best day, but we surely did get off on the wrong foot. Because when I paused there in the empty space next to the bathroom with my two children, trying to determine what would be the best thing to do in the probably 10 seconds before whoever was in the bathroom came out, Book Reading Flight Attendant glanced up again to say, "Ma'am? You can't stand here. You'll have to wait in your seat." Yes, she did. I don't know if I should be sorry that I could not contain the exaggerated eye-rolling that this statement provoked in me or proud that I did contain the desire to reach over there and smack that book out of her hand. Either way, we had a very tense exchange wherein I gestured to the back of the plane and asked if I could go back there and join the absolute CROWD that was standing around idly by that lavatory door. Seriously, there were two flight attendants and some other person just hanging out, shooting the breeze, and I didn't notice TSA coming to arrest them. So we started the long hike to the other end of the plane. Dance, kick, dance, kick, squawk of indignation from toddler, repeat. Man, people on that plane LOVED us. Me and my friend Erika in the blue light of the seal and sea lion exhibit at the zoo. The look on my face is one of joy over being with Erika. This stands in stark contrast to the look on my face during the incident I am describing.) Once we got back to the block party and pried the lavatory door open, I realized I had another problem. Airplane toilets are absurdly high off the ground, and there was no way Kate would be able to sit on one unassisted. Meanwhile Isaac had reached a critical juncture in his flailing that required him to try to bang his head on the walls of the plane. Clearly there was no way I could deal with him and Kate at the same time. Thankfully at this point a flight attendant redeemed the name of Southwest Airlines forever for me and bravely offered to hold Isaac while I helped Kate. Isaac, of course, was thrilled with this plan, right? No. He screamed his head off for the entire time it took me to assist Kate, which, by the way, I had to do with the lavatory door wide open because there was no way to get us both in and close the door. So in summary, flying with both kids overall went much, much better than I could have imagined. Except that the part about the bathroom was every bit as horrible as I thought it would be. I am trying not to read too much into this as I ponder attempting my first drive to Mississippi alone with both kids in the near future. I am assuming the whole two-kids-to-the-public-restroom experience doesn't improve much in, say, a gas station in rural Louisiana. I'll let you know. ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.749 2011-09-27T02:14:03Z 2011-09-29T02:11:50Z

We cleaned off the camera today and found this video we forgot we took of Isaac dancing during Kate's birthday festivities. Kate had both of her grandmothers over for cake and ice cream, and after she got her Cinderella Wedding...

]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.748 2011-09-25T20:58:32Z 2011-09-25T22:09:38Z

As I am typing this I am sitting on my bed. Beside the bed stands Isaac, who is clawing the sheets, whining, stamping his feet and generally doing his 17-month-old best to convey the message that me ever writing...

As I am typing this I am sitting on my bed. Beside the bed stands Isaac, who is clawing the sheets, whining, stamping his feet and generally doing his 17-month-old best to convey the message that me ever writing another sentence in this world is down pretty low on his personal priority list and I should give it up. This is a pretty good word picture for what happened to this blog and any other writing I was doing. But having reached into the bedside table to hand Isaac a baby monitor charging cord, I have momentarily distracted him and so in spite of the very real possibility that he will use it to harm himself or someone else, I will seize the five seconds of quiet to tell you some very boring things. I will not overthink them and they will not be deep and whenever Isaac comes back I will hit "publish" and thus will have ended my two month long dry spell. Random thing No. 1: The shower in our master bathroom has been broken for going on four months. It looks a little better than this right now, but this was the view a few weeks ago: If my blog were anonymous, I would write the entire absurd story in detail with much commentary on the worthlessness of various supposed professionals, but since I am readily available on Google, I will just give you this advice: If a crack ever opens up in the floor of your shower, you should get out, dry off, walk out of the house, lock the door and never come back again. (You should probably also get dressed before that part about leaving the house.) You will have to find a new place to live and get all new stuff but believe me, that will be way less annoying and expensive than trying to fix the shower. Just walk away. Thank goodness we are renting. Random thing No. 2: Kate recently turned four and as her big gift from Dan and I she got this outrageous dress made by the Disney Marketing Mothership that is a wedding dress modeled on the one in Cinderella. It is pretty fabulous and she loves it, which is great. What is not great is what I discovered moments after she unwrapped it and put it on, which is that this dress has approximately 50 pounds of glitter embedded in the fabric and the decorations, such that her ever move results in a sprinkling of glitter drifting to the floor like magic fairy dust from the wand of a fairy godmother. Maybe this is part of the charm, but my OCD can't handle it. Now if I had to list my hobbies the first one would have to be "Researching the best ways to clean up glitter off every surface of my life." Random thing No. 3: The only thing Kate is more interested in than her Cinderella Wedding Dress right now is the movie Tangled. That is part of the reason why in the picture with the Cinderella wedding dress, she is wearing a blonde dollar store headband/hair extension piece. It's her long Rapunzel hair. I will write an entire post about this soon, using my newly-discovered method of making time for writing via ignoring my children and not editing anything. Random thing No. 4: Last weekend Dan and I left the kids with my in-laws and went on our first overnight trip together since Isaac was born. We went to a day of the Austin City Limits music festival and then stayed in historic Gruene, which is very charming in a flea market kind of way. We had a great time, we saw some great musical artists and the people-watching was incredible. Maybe I don't get out enough anymore, but that was almost my favorite part. However, it did remind me of my number one concert attendance peeve, and I thought I would share it here. At a festival the size of ACL, obviously you are going to be exposed to some artists who are not your all-time favorite. But here's the thing -- that artist probably is someone's all-time favorite, so it would be the height of rudeness for you to talk through that artist's entire set without interruption. Please shut it. And now it's time to make dinner. If I ever pull this off again, I can post some pictures of Kate's birthday party. Don't get too excited, though. I think we all know I am about as reliable as the people who have been fixing the shower for four months. ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.745 2011-07-08T00:59:04Z 2011-07-07T15:08:30Z

(I started writing this a couple of weeks ago and have been coming back to it since then to try to finish my thoughts. They still feel unresolved, but that is kind of the point of this post.) Every once...

about living in Texas and leave it at that. I love being close to our families and the increased contact my kids get to have with their grandparents now that there aren't two plane rides standing between us at all times. Dan's job is working out really well. We have found a vibrant church and been welcomed with open arms by a wonderful group of believers. I like our house. I like HEB grocery stores. Texas has amazing Interstates. I want to kiss whoever invented their frontage road system. But recently, after I had listed all those great things about Texas, someone asked me a slightly different question - "Does it feel like home yet?" and without thinking about it at all, I said no. No, it really does not. Now that sounds like a way of saying that we're not happy here, but that's not true. We are happy, and yet it does not feel like home to me. I am trying to just be OK living in that tension. Recently I realized that it's not just me who is still working on feeling at home. Just a few months after we moved here, my brother and sister-in-law moved to a town about 45 minutes away from us. It is surreal. After eight years living without a single family member within 500 miles, we now have several branches of the family nearby, and I cannot get over it. Today, the kids and I drove up to see my brother and his wife and check out their new place. It was really, really fun. We ate lunch in their apartment which is so pretty thanks to my sister-in-law and her excellent taste and impeccable style. (I would give my brother some credit for that, but I saw his bachelor apartments and they were not nearly this cute.) After that we loaded up and went to get sno-cones from a street vendor. You have not lived until you have fed a one year old his first blue sno-cone. Isaac was delirious with joy and sugar. It was hot, and the city was bustling and colorful and when it was over the kids and I went home. No sweat. No security lines. No luggage carousel. It was pretty much my dream come true. After the kids' naps, we loaded up in the van again and went to meet Dan for dinner. He is helping some of our friends from church pack their moving truck tonight. One of the things our life in Albuquerque prepared us very well for about our new life in Texas was the experience of having a lot of friends who are in the military and are, therefore, always moving. San Antonio isn't Military City USA for nothing, and more than half of the folks we are getting to know now are military and will eventually move away. One of our friends is moving next week. I hadn't been trying to keep that fact from Kate, but it just hadn't come up yet, and while Dan was buckling Kate into her car seat, he told her where he was going later. As we were driving away, Kate asked me why our friends had to move. I thought she just really wanted to know what their reason for moving was, so I was explaining that their daddy's job is to be a solider, and the military tells them where to move every few years as part of his job. I was expanding on that theme when I heard Kate kind of sniffling. "But why did we move from Albuquerque? I don't... want... to ... moooooooove! I miss Albuquerque!" I was completely taken aback. Since we moved, I have definitely had some conversations with Kate where she expressed sadness about the friends she left behind. I have encouraged her to talk about them and stay in touch in the ways that three-year-olds can -- nonsensical Skype conversations and mailing one another crayon drawings festooned with stickers. But it has been a long time since she has said anything about feeling sad about the move. Lately, when she refers to it, it's in a chronological way, like she is just talking about something that happened before we moved or after we moved. So I was shocked to stumble upon so much grief in her heart about it eight months after the fact. It never ceases to amaze me how these crucial parenting moments come up when you are in the middle of something else and you have to deal with the whole thing while multitasking. In this case, we were zipping along the freeway at 70 miles an hour in rush hour traffic. Not exactly a moment for calm reflection. So I said that frantic mom prayer that I am sure is uttered from the driver's seats of more minivans than mine -- the one that just says "Help! Help! Help!" Then I asked Kate why she was sad, and I tried to shut up and listen to her. She told me she misses our friends. And that it is hard for her to go to our new church because it is different from our old church. She asked me if I ever moved when I was a little girl and I told her that I moved to different houses but only moved to a new town one time and that was hard. We talked about how when we looked at our new house before our stuff came on the truck, our voices echoed off the tile and they sounded so loud and it made her feel scared. She asked when we would have to move again, so we talked about how we will need to move to a different house in San Antonio in a couple of years, but that we won't go very far away. She asked about what happened to our house in Albuquerque. Apparently, we never really explained that, and she had this sweet little worry in her heart that it was sitting there empty where we left it. I told her that no, some people who needed a home had come to live in it just like we had found our house to live in when we needed a new home in San Antonio. We talked about it all for the whole drive home, and I was struck by two things: how much Kate's grief about all the change is like my own, and how there are really no easy answers for it. So instead of rushing to point out to her all the reasons the move has been a good thing for us, I just told her that I feel sad about it all sometimes too, and I think it's OK to feel that way. By the time we got home, she seemed to have talked about it as much as she needed to, and since I needed to go start putting Isaac to bed I left her on the couch watching a movie. Then I walked to Isaac's room and collapsed onto the chair where I nurse him, wrung out by the sadness I had felt coming from Kate about something I thought she was done with. I think that is where I keep going wrong in this whole process. I want to be done feeling conflicted about all of it, and some days I think I am. But my grief about it surfaces at strange moments when I am least expecting it -- and I might need to start letting go of my timeline for how long we're allowed to feel a little weird here, those of us who are three and those of us who are thirty(one). So that is how I feel about Texas right now. The next day Kate got up and had a Skype tea party with her good buddy Lily, which did much to cheer her up, as do my Skype un-tea-party chats with Lily's mom, Erika. We are actually planning a trip back to Albuquerque next month, and I am hoping it is helpful for Kate to see that all of our friends are still there and not just on the computer. We look forward to seeing you all! ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.744 2011-05-09T12:02:38Z 2011-05-09T13:32:25Z

This is Kate's "robot" that she made out of a bunch of random things she found in a drawer in the kitchen. She worked on it for a long time and was very, very patient. I only helped her...

This is Kate's "robot" that she made out of a bunch of random things she found in a drawer in the kitchen. She worked on it for a long time and was very, very patient. I only helped her a little at the end by adding a clothespin so the whole thing would have some stability and stand up like she wanted. A few snapshots of life with Kate at three-and-three-quarters, in no particular order: Last night, after we had celebrated Mother's Day, Kate and I were lying on her bed talking before bed time and she asked me "When am I going to be someone's mom?" I told her when she is a grown up married lady we hope she'll have some babies of her own. Kate told me she wants to have seven babies when she grows up and that I will come and help her. Having settled that, she asked me if she will live in this house when she is all grown up. I was trying to explain to her that she and her seven children will probably need their own place to live, but she has a long time to figure that out since she's only three now. I actually remember the first time it occurred to me that I would not live with my mom and dad forever, and I remember that I was sort of upset by the idea, but Kate was largely unfazed. I thought she was done thinking about it all together until she stopped me while I was singing to her before bed and told me to put my hand on her tummy and feel how many babies she has in there. Evidently there are three of them and one of them will be born soon but the others need to stay in a while longer. I'll keep you posted. Kate's preschool, in their ongoing commitment to celebrating every holiday on the calendar with great enthusiasm, hosted a Mother's Day program and ice cream social on Thursday, and it was pretty adorable. Kate's age group sang "I'm a Little Tea Pot" and I am so, so sorry to say that I did not get video of it because I was laughing too hard at Kate's dramatic version of the hand gestures to get in position. I thought she was going to knock the kid next to her down with her teapot impersonation. They also had the kids answer some questions about their moms and they gave us a laminated piece of art work with their answers on it after the program. Kate's answers about me made me laugh. My mom's name is: Haley My mom is three years old. My mom's favorite food is: mac and cheese. My mom always tells me to: eat my dinner (So true. I could write an entire post about how much time I spend telling Kate to eat her dinner, but I won't.) My mom's favorite thing to do is: To go to Shamu. (Can you tell someone recently went to Sea World for the first time?) My favorite thing about my mom is: She loves to play with me and take me to Shamu. Kate's Shamu fixation continues, almost three weeks after our trip to Sea World. Mondays are usually a day when we stay home and I catch up on laundry and house stuff after the weekend. Last Monday I came into my bedroom to find Kate wearing her swimsuit and arranging every single pillow from my bed and hers into a big square on the floor. This, she announced to me, was her Shamu pool. She got a stuffed Shamu toy at Sea World and she spent most of the morning having it do tricks in the pillow pool, which required her to jump back and forth from pillow to pillow. Isaac got in on the fun by lying on the pillows and kicking his feet. This game is hard on the pillows, but I have to give them points for creativity. The other thing Kate saw recently that made a big impression on her was (I know you are going to be shocked): The Royal Wedding. Oh my goodness. I am not sure if it could possibly have been any more fascinating to her. It was just icing on the cake that the bride's name was actually Kate. That Friday I was cooking a bunch of food for a family get together the next day, so after Kate's nap I pulled up footage of the wedding on You Tube and put the computer on the table so Kate could watch it while I was chopping vegetables. She sat at the table for an hour and a half, mesmerized, through all that music and talking and ceremony. It was actually kind of educational, since we got to talk about who the Queen is and what the big church was and why it was a big deal for the Prince to get married. I wasn't quite sure how to explain the British fixation with giant hats, but Kate thought they were great. I really enjoyed all the music and was surprised by the highly religious nature of the ceremony. It's just unusual to hear the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost invoked repeatedly on anything being broadcast around the world. I kept sort of doing a double take at the screen and thinking "Wow. That was true, what that guy just said about marriage." Let's hope the happy couple were listening. Playing wedding is a big pastime for Kate already, but after the royal wedding, she has added a couple of features to her game. Specifically she now needs someone to carry her train ala Pippa Middleton, and she climbs into a carriage after the wedding is over. Dan is in so much trouble when this child does get married. And now the Princess herself is waking up, so I need to go. It's Monday. Happy Shamu Day to all of you! ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.743 2011-04-25T20:33:06Z 2011-04-26T20:45:04Z

The kids have started holding hands and laughing in the car. It is unbearably cute and I am going to give myself a back condition turning around to try to photograph it. Which I only do when Dan is...

The kids have started holding hands and laughing in the car. It is unbearably cute and I am going to give myself a back condition turning around to try to photograph it. Which I only do when Dan is driving, for the record. April has been a busy month around here. I don't have a lot of profound thoughts about it, but I do have some pictures and I think those are what most everyone wants anyway. You gotta give the people what they want. We've had extended family in town this month including my brother Ryan and his wife Rebekah, of whom I managed to take exactly zero pictures. (My bad, Ryan Rices. Next time I will get out the camera.) I also didn't take a photo on our anniversary, but we celebrated eight years on the 19th with a nice night out at a restaurant where they took two hours to bring us our entrees. We didn't even care because we had appetizers and wine and we had a whole conversation where no one was interrupting us every four seconds to say "Mom! Mom! Mom! I need juice! Juice! Juice!" This is the kind of perspective that small children will bring to your life. Slow service? But I have a babysitter? Oh, no problem then. Take your time. Around that same time, Dan's grandparents came down for a visit from Chicago to see this branch of their many great-grandchildren and meet Isaac and Baby Ezekiel. Dan's sister Hannah and her husband Josh drove up from Texas with their kids, Chi, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and Dan's other sister Dinah came from Ft. Hood with her daughter, Mercy. All together, there are six grandkids under four on this side of the family, and that number will grow to seven in July when Dinah and Chris welcome Baby Naomi. As you can imagine, it is loud around the family lately, but also very entertaining. From left: Jeremiah; Nana, who has on her lap Ezekiel and Mercy; Kate, Isaac, Papa and Chi. Last Thursday, we took all the kids to Sea World. I didn't get many pictures because I was busy pushing Isaac around in a stroller and wishing someone would push me around in a stroller by the end of the day, but here are Chi and Kate waiting for the Shamu show to start: Isaac's first birthday was on Saturday the 23rd. He was not very enthusiastic about his cupcake once he realized we were not going to let him have the lit candle, but loved his new toys. Here are some general shots of fun with cousins. One last picture. On Easter, Dan stayed home with Isaac, who was a little sick. When Kate and I got home, the two of them were sacked out on the couch asleep in front of the TV. You have no idea how many times I told Kate to be quiet and not wake Isaac up so I could take this picture. Dan accommodatingly pretended to be asleep again so I could get this. ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.742 2011-04-13T15:27:43Z 2011-04-13T19:39:35Z

Dear Isaac, Back when your sister was a baby, I used to write a letter every month documenting all her accomplishments and providing copious photos of her every smile, wiggle and scoot. When I got pregnant with you, a...

Dear Isaac, Back when your sister was a baby, I used to write a letter every month documenting all her accomplishments and providing copious photos of her every smile, wiggle and scoot. When I got pregnant with you, a few people asked me if I was going to write you letters too. I am pretty sure I said yes. I mean, why wouldn't I? What could possibly prevent me from doing the same thing for you that I did for your sister? I really have no idea how these people kept from laughing directly in my face. Because here we are, less than one month from your first birthday, and if I actually manage to finish writing this letter and hit "publish" before your turn two, it will be the first letter I have written for you in your life to date, not to mention the only completed piece of writing I have turned out in a couple of months. We should probably just print it out and call it your baby book, since I think we all know I don't make those anyway. Obviously there is a lot of ground to cover. When we are out in public with you, the most frequent thing people say to us is some version of "Wow, that is the happiest baby I have ever seen." And it's true. I've been waiting for months for you to snap out of it and start acting like a normal fussy baby, but apparently you just really are that happy. I am thankful that you are my second born. If you had been my first, I surely would have thought I was the world's most amazing mother. Why else would you be so content, so happy, so joyous about everything? Yes, it's a good thing I have your sister to keep me humble. Six months into my parenting experience with her, I was deeply in love but knew that I was also in way over my head. I still feel that way most days, probably because everything she does represents a first both for her and for me. Trying to keep things in perspective is the ongoing work of my life as her parent. But I must be making some progress, because with you I have found myself more able to relax and have fun. Since you are a second child, there is no end to the ways in which we constantly compare you to your sister. I'm sorry. I've heard this is bad for kids if you do it in a competitive way, but that's not how we're doing it. We're just continually fascinated by how different you are from your sister, both by personality and by virtue of being a boy. I am currently contemplating taking every book and knick knack off every shelf in this house lower than three feet from the floor due to your overwhelming desire to plunder. If you see it, you must put your hands on it and preferably put it in your mouth. Lately, once you've done that, your next move is to start hitching your foot up to see if you can climb it. Your sister made some messes in her day, but she could also be pretty easily deterred by a simple "No no." You are deterred by nothing, and your favorite phrase to mimic is "No no no" (which you pronounce "Na Na Na."), probably because you hear it constantly. At least you smile when you say it. In related news, we purchased the first baby gates we ever owned in our parenting lives shortly after we moved into this house. We just never really needed one for Kate. For you, we have no purchased two. That about sums it up. Which brings me to the next most noticeable thing about you aside from your pervading happiness: You are the most patient, persistent baby I have ever seen. We are probably biased, but we are starting to suspect you are pretty smart. If you're working on something, be it figuring out how to stack blocks or trying out a new motor skill, you will sit in one place and do it over and over and over again until it works. You don't fuss when you get frustrated. You are not easily distracted. You especially want to know how things work. The other day I found you lying on floor with your cheek pressed against the cold tiles so that you could get a good look at the wheels on the bottom of your walker. First you would touch the wheels, then you would sit up and push the walker a little and watch it roll. Then you'd get back down on the ground and study the wheels again. A friend of ours from Albuquerque tells us that he was like this as a child and that it will all be fun and games until you arm yourself with tools and starting taking things apart to gain further insight into how they work. I don't doubt it. And I will be hiding the toolbox at least until you get pretty good at putting things back together. For such a little person, you are also very independent, and this part of your personality intersects with your patience level to create what could best be described as a quiet stubborn streak the size of the Grand Canyon. The best example of this I can think of would be the Great Spoon Standoff. Here's how it went. Sometime around six months, I started feeding you baby food. That went OK for a few weeks and then you started refusing any more food. Would not have anything to do with it. That was fine with me since we were pretty busy anyway and it's not like I would want to eat pureed squash either, so I would wait a few weeks and then try again. But I never got any better results. Over and over again, I would present a spoonful of food and you would turn your head, clamp your little mouth shut and that was that. Around the time we moved into our new house, I just gave up entirely on trying to give you solids. It wasn't worth the time and the mess involved. But occasionally, to keep you occupied while I did something else, I would put you in your chair and give you some little finger foods to toy with. And lo and behold if you didn't eat those right up, you little stinker. I have to give the credit to your daddy on this one, because sometime around February he said "You know, I think what he really hates is you feeding him with a spoon. If he can pick it up himself, he'll eat it." And he was right. As soon as you mastered the art of feeding yourself, you readily embraced solid food. Cheese, bread, pasta, meat, you'll eat just about anything that can be cut into tiny bite sized pieces. But yogurt? Nope, it comes on a spoon. Applesauce? Spoon. No. Oddly, your prejudice does not extend to forks. You love forks. Right now, you want to sit in your chair with a fork and try to spear pieces of food for yourself. You pick food up with your hand and then try to put it on the fork. You get about one out of every ten pieces into your mouth, but if I know you, you'll be eating proficiently with a fork in a matter of weeks. But definitely not a spoon. You are a speed demon of a crawler, but as of this moment you don't show a lot of interest in walking. We've noticed that you can let go and stand by yourself perfectly well. You can also walk really fast when we hold onto your hands. But I think crawling is serving you so well that you just don't see the point in trying to walk. The only problem with your extended crawling phase is that you are constantly finding things on the floor and then putting them directly in your mouth. Maybe I should be thankful that only one terrible thing has happened as a result of this. Last month when we visited Gam and Geez and the family in Mississippi, you somehow managed to pick up a wasp off the floor and put it in your mouth before I could stop you. The look of horror on your face when you go stung on the inside of the mouth was the only thing more upsetting than having to shove my fingers in your mouth to retrieve a mostly-dead wasp covered in spit. But another interesting thing we have learned about you is that you have a really high pain tolerance, and in a few minutes you were back to playing while sporting a fat lip. Meanwhile I hyperventilated and sat on hold with the nurse line to find out what in the world one does about insect bites on the inside of the mouth. I notice that every time I tell this story to the parent of a boy, they nod knowingly and say something to the effect of "Oh, just wait." It is not reassuring. Speaking of little boys, here is a photo of you with your cousin Clark. Your Geez has nicknamed the two of you in the grand tradition of the Rice family. You are Buddy. Clark is Possum. So I think you got the better end of that deal. True story: Recently when your Geez was out in public with Clark and his parents Aaron and Kelly, he walked up to Clark and said "Hi, Possum!" A woman who was walking past them overheard this and turned to her husband to say "Did he just call that baby Possum?" The most rewarding part of the last couple of months for your dad and I has been seeing your relationship with your sister start to emerge. Having had little brothers myself, I know that there's going to come a day when the two of you fight, and we've already had some pretty serious skirmishes over toys. But on the list of the most adorable things I have ever seen in my life is your pure giddy joy every morning when I get you out of bed and we head down the hall to Kate's room. She's usually talking or singing in there and as soon as you hear her, you start bouncing up and down in anticipation of the moment when we open the door. You throw yourself down on the bed and climb all over her and roll back and forth on the bed giggling. Kate laughs and that makes you laugh even more. Some days I have to break up the party after ten minutes or so just so we can go get some breakfast. It is not at all a bad way to start the day. About this time last year, as I was getting into the final weeks of my pregnancy with you, I remember having an emotional meltdown fueled by my sadness that a really special time in our lives was ending -- the last of our days as a family of three. In the fall and winter and spring when we waited for you, a completely unknown new person, I found myself really wanting to hold on to our last moments of the way things were. I am glad that I really did soak up that time. Back then I thought that the only major change on the horizon was you. What I didn't know was that within six months of your arrival, we were going to sell our house, leave the town and the church and the friends that made up the backdrop of our entire life as a family and move to a new state. I think in some ways God was letting me begin to grapple with the idea of change long before I really knew what was coming. Don't misunderstand me: We were thrilled to know you were coming and prayed and hoped for you. But although I felt guilty about it, I had this small worry in my heart because I knew you would change everything. I was right about part of that. You changed our family forever. But also on the list of things-I-didn't-know-then was what a joy and a comfort you would be when the real upheaval started. You started smiling your first real smiles around the time we put our house on the market. By the time we went to San Antonio you were sitting up and scooting. There were weeks upon weeks of unpacking and feeling like we were camping out amid piles of our own belongings. My natural inclination at times like that is to want to work and work until everything feels normal again, and to wish that I could blink my eyes and be past it all. But knowing that your babyhood was passing before my eyes forced me to just slow down, enjoy you and cherish even the hard days. We got sick a ton this winter and struggled with feeling isolated and lonely and missing so many friends. Watching you and Kate grow brought some much-needed joy and redemption to days that were otherwise pretty tough. On this side of everything I was afraid of a year ago, I see how unbelievably good God was to give you to me just when he did. I am so thankful for every minute of this year we have had with you. You are just what we needed. I love you, Mama ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.736 2011-02-25T02:24:09Z 2011-02-24T16:45:13Z

I realize that it is February and no one wants to think about Christmas again until several weeks after all the stores start playing Christmas music on Halloween, but we had something of a holiday-related parenting fiasco back in December...

I realize that it is February and no one wants to think about Christmas again until several weeks after all the stores start playing Christmas music on Halloween, but we had something of a holiday-related parenting fiasco back in December and I have been meaning to write about it ever since. If you can stand to transport your mind back to the mother of all holidays I think you might enjoy the story. This also gives me an opportunity to belatedly show off more of the photos my brother-in-law extraordinaire, Daniel Meigs, took on Christmas morning. All of the images below are his work. Kate on Christmas morning with her new tricycle. Which most definitely did not come from Santa. In retrospect, I can see that it was naive of me to think that we were going to get through Kate's third Christmas without deciding whether or not to tell her about Santa. I should have realized that since this was the first year she understood what Christmas was and noticed things like decorations, it would probably also be the year she started wondering who in the heck all the jolly fat men in red suits were. But as I may have mentioned a few thousand times, it's been kind of a hectic year for us and as the holidays rolled around I was pretty much in survival mode. I realize that Santa is one of those parenting issues you're supposed to have strong feelings about, especially if you go to church. My own parents told us Santa wasn't real and while I don't feel traumatized about it, I'm pretty sure my cousins do. That's because one year my brother took it upon himself to inform them that Santa Claus was a figment of their imaginations. He argued with our cousin Shelley about it until she got exasperated and ended the fight with "Well, if you keep talking about Santa like that, he isn't going to bring you any presents!" Which was pretty hard to argue with, really. Kate in the awesome pajamas my Aunt Emily sent to her from Shanghai, where my aunt and uncle are living right now. Thanks, Aunt Emily and Uncle Gil! But somehow I can't get too worked up about the Santa issue. I don't want to dress Dan up in a suit and wig to perpetuate the myth, but I also don't feel the need to carry on as if Santa is evil and in direct competition with Baby Jesus. Sometime in December I did read an article that summarized what I thought would be a reasonable approach for talking about Santa in the future. I shared it with Dan, and you can go here to read it. The basic idea is that you tell your kids the historical truth -- that today's Santa story started with the life of Saint Nicholas, who was a man famous in the early church for his generosity. For the record, what I like about this approach is that it avoids the Santa-is-evil extreme on the one hand but also allows for a clear distinction between the harmless cultural fun of Santa and the true purpose of Christmas, the celebration of Christ's birth. For this year, the idea of a past person who once gave people presents and whose memory was later edited to include flying reindeer and red velvet seemed a little complicated for Kate, who still divides her life into things that will happen "before my nap" and "after my nap." And I really thought "If we just don't make a big deal about it this year, it probably won't even come up. I mean, it's not like anyone is going to sit her down and tell her about Santa." Then one day at preschool, they sat her down and told her about Santa. Well, technically I don't know who brought Santa up. It could have been another kid rather than the school staff. All I know is that on the last day of preschool before Christmas break, I dropped Kate off for her Christmas party and was halfway home when I realized she had left her jacket in the car. Since it was pretty cold, I turned around to drop it off, thinking I would just slip into the classroom, put the jacket in her cubby and leave. But when I got into the classroom, Kate's teacher said "Oh, it's actually a good thing you're here. We were talking about Santa and Kate says she doesn't want him to come down the chimney to her house." "Well ... is she upset about it?" I asked. "A little," said her teacher. I didn't really know how to respond to this. It didn't seem like a great moment to reassure Kate that Santa is totally imaginary and is under no circumstances going to come to her house, what with 8 other kids sitting there who probably believe in Santa. This was the moment when I saw the giant hole in my logic up to that point. In the back of my mind I had assumed that if Kate did somehow hear about Santa, we would just roll with it and she would have one of two reactions: Either she would think it was great and be happy (normal kid reaction to news of loot brought by a magical man on a sleigh) or she wouldn't care too much (normal three-year-old reaction to ideas that do not have immediate physical consequences). What I completely failed to anticipate was a third reaction -- anxiety over the idea of a strange man who comes into your house uninvited in the middle of the night. If you think about it, this is actually the rational reaction. I mean, we don't let other people in the house at night. It doesn't matter if they have a sack. At the moment, Kate seemed fairly absorbed in her finger painting, so I just left and went on with the morning. But when I picked her up from school, the first thing she said was "Mom, I don't want Santa to come to my house!" I had to decide right there in the car what in the world to tell her about that. This was bad, mostly because I am a horrible verbal ad-libber. When required to answer a question I am unprepared for I ramble, wander and just generally babble in a completely unorganized way, all while hearing a voice in my mind screaming "Stop talking now before you say something really dumb! Too late!" I think one reason I like to write so much is because of the beauty of the backspace key -- the ability to just delete all the crazy and sound concise and well-spoken. So, reverting back to the last organized thought I had on the Santa topic, I started trying to tell her about Saint Nicholas. "Well, sweetie, a long time ago there was a man named Nicholas who gave people gifts because he loved Jesus, and Santa Clause is kind of a pretend story about him." "Today?" "No, not today, baby. A long time ago." "After my nap?" "Umm. Not really. Anyway, people pretend that he brings their presents, and that's fun." "He will come to our house? No! I don't want him to come to my house!" This is when I saw the other thing I hadn't factored in -- Kate has no idea what pretend means. This is one of the funny things about kids at this age. They pretend things all the time, but they don't have a word for what they're doing, so when you try to explain that something is "pretend," they don't know what you're talking about. About 10 minutes into our increasingly circular conversation, realizing I needed to back up and define my terminology, I got the great idea to try to explain the concept of pretend by bringing up various cartoon characters Kate is familiar with. "OK, Kate, it's like when you watch Curious George on television. He's not real, right?" "Yes, he is. He talks." "But he only talks on the TV. You've never met him. He's just fun pretend. Like Santa." "But he moves his head." Yes, clearly if something talks and moves its head, it is real. By the time we got home, I had given up trying to explain the historical intricacies and had started doing exactly what I had wanted to avoid doing - telling her emphatically that Santa wasn't real and was definitely not going to come to our house -- not because I really want her to reject the whole idea, but because I don't want her to be scared about it. But I think my inability to stick with a story convinced Kate that I had no idea what I was talking about at all and that it was her job to set me straight. So in the week leading up to Christmas, every time we saw a Santa, which was about every ten minutes, Kate would point and tell me, "Look Mom, he's real. He moves his head," like that proved everything. Santa would be on TV. "Look Mom, he talks. He's real." Santa was on a billboard we drove past every day. "Look Mom, he has a nose. He's real." Eventually I stopped arguing with her, which I hadn't wanted to do anyway, and she seemed to talk herself into being OK with the idea that Santa might be real and might come to the house, which may be all she needed to do in the first place. I'm hoping that by next Christmas, she will have forgotten this little incident and we can start over on the Santa issue. In the meantime, preschool is apparently going to give me lots of opportunities to practice how I discuss mythical characters who come to your house in the middle of the night. This month, they are having Dental Hygiene Month. As a special treat for the kids, the Tooth Fairy is coming for a visit. Kate has already started telling me she doesn't want the Tooth Fairy to take her teeth "when they fall out after my nap." That's my girl. Kate trying on the helmet we got to go with her trike, which totally did not fit because of her exceptional noggin girth. I love this shot. It's of Kate listening to my dad read the Christmas story from the Bible before we open gifts, like he has done every Christmas morning that in my memory. I can't look directly at this photo for very long without getting choked up. ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.740 2011-02-22T03:25:11Z 2011-02-22T03:42:22Z

Here's what Isaac got into this afternoon while I cooked dinner. I turned my back on him for maybe 30 seconds and then heard the unique scattering sound that 200-some-odd Cheerios make when hitting the tile. It probably says a...

I turned my back on him for maybe 30 seconds and then heard the unique scattering sound that 200-some-odd Cheerios make when hitting the tile. It probably says a lot about how completely wrapped around his baby finger this kid has me that I took a picture instead of telling him no. Then I let he and Kate sit there and eat the Cheerios straight off the floor for a few minutes because A) They were happy and I could finish cooking dinner and B) Hey, it was a couple dozen fewer Cheerios for me to clean up. Apparently, this is something my kids decide to do at exactly ten months based on this blog post from when Kate was Isaac's age. Also, except for Isaac's overall chunkiness compared to Kate's petite baby style, I think they look a lot alike. ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.738 2011-02-15T21:36:10Z 2011-02-15T21:51:13Z

For everyone who is way more interested in seeing the kids than in hearing me talk about how sick they've been, here are a few videos of them that I've taken over the last month. You know how it's a...

sick they've been, here are a few videos of them that I've taken over the last month. You know how it's a little bit hilarious when you watch a musical and some character will be talking in normal dialogue and then just burst into song? I know that's the whole point of a musical, but it always struck me as funny. I mean, who just goes around singing whatever they want to say? Well. Kate does. Here she is cooking a pretend meal, musical theater-style: This first video called "Isaac starts crawling" really only shows a tiny bit of crawling, followed by a great deal of enthusiasm for the crawling from Isaac and Dan and I. I think for a while he thought that was really the only point of crawling -- to get us to clap. And now that he crawls everywhere all the time, I've gotten used to listening for the sound of a door closing, followed by a few moments of silence, and then very upset crying. This means that Isaac has crawled into a room, shut the door behind him and then panicked because he can't get out. I always go and rescue him and sometimes I sit with him and let him play his little game for a while just to get it out of his system. At least he can't reach the locks on the doorknobs yet. ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2011:/haley-blog//2.737 2011-02-15T16:15:44Z 2011-02-15T17:34:46Z

If there is some kind of category in the Guinness Book of World Records for whose kids got sick the most number of times in a three-month period, I am pretty sure we are close to upsetting the former title...

If there is some kind of category in the Guinness Book of World Records for whose kids got sick the most number of times in a three-month period, I am pretty sure we are close to upsetting the former title holders. A friend of mine who moved to a new city one fall and then had an incredibly long winter of illness upon illness speculated that the stress of a move may make you less able to fight off sickness. I think she might be right about that. Whatever the reason, we have been sick more in the last few months than we have ever been in the history of our little family, and it's going to be hard for me to look back on this period of our lives without smelling pink amoxicyllin and Children's Motrin. On the most recent sick visit we made to our pediatrician's office, he opened the door to the exam room, saw us sitting there (Again.) and joked that we should just open up a tab. I laughed and said I'd rather get my own parking space, but I only laughed because I didn't want to cry in the office. (Again.) On that particular day I was there with Isaac, who had broken out in the most spectacular rash I have ever seen in my life after having a bad reaction to the penicillin-based antibiotic he had been on. This episode started out a week earlier with a cold that morphed into an ear infection and a whopping case of bronchiolitis which required a super-fun Saturday night excursion to what I now think of as Pediatric Urgent Care Purgatory. If you have small kids, you know about this place. This is where you wait in a tiny overheated room with the sickest kids in three counties for two hours while debating whether you should just sprint out the door before you catch something even worse than what your kid has now or keep waiting to see the doctor. Thankfully you don't have too much time to think about that dilemma. You have to focus all your energy on keeping your sick child from getting down on the floor and licking the toys thoughtfully put in the waiting room for the amusement of I don't even know who, because no one is letting their kids play with those toys. At this point in my parenting experience, waiting room toys look like giant germ lollipops. That night in urgent care I think I actually earned the distinction of Sickest Kid in the Room. Isaac would cough and all the other parents would cringe and cover their kids' faces. Isaac probably could have had the run of all those toys and no one else would have let their kids anywhere near them once he touched them. Usually, the point at which you go to the doctor and get medicine is rock bottom and from there things improve. Usually. This time it was the start of a week-long experiment at the end of which we learned that Isaac like his mother before him is allergic to penicillin. First there was epic throwing up of the medication. Then that stopped and the medicine stayed down for a while, which was good in that the ear infection subsided. But on about day eight of the antibiotic, I got Isaac up from a nap and noticed these red welts on his chunky little thighs. I didn't think much of it until I changed his clothes a while later and noticed that the rash was spreading -- rapidly. It was like if I kept looking at his skin, I could see new bumps popping up before my eyes. I called the doctor's office and was told to just keep an eye on it and call back if certain other more alarming symptoms popped up, which they didn't. But "alarming" took on a whole new meaning the next morning, when Isaac woke up looking like he was made of pink velour. I wish I had a picture of this rash. It was unbelievable. It was so incredible that our doctor asked if he could take Isaac and show him to another doctor in the practice, just so they could marvel over the splendor of the rash from a medical standpoint. Like I said, you could put us in a book. To fast forward through more whining, I'll just say that right now we're all healthy. Of course, the fact that I just typed that sentence probably means one of us will come down with a rare tropical illness in the next 12 hours. If that happens, I am glad to know that there will be plenty of people who will help us out. During the worst of Isaac's illness, which eventually turned into some form of a cold for all the rest of us too, I did get to learn that we are not alone even if we are new here. My in-laws took Kate to church with them the Sunday after I spent half the night in urgent care with Isaac, giving Dan and I a much-needed few hours to just focus on taking care of him. In the following week our community group from church prayed for us and brought us a homemade meal that tasted like heaven in the midst of a week that had contained way too much cold pizza and takeout. The week after that, my mom came for a visit and played with Kate and did all our laundry and let me take naps. It's amazing how much better clean laundry and a couple of hours of sleep can make you feel. It was a hard month, and I had a pretty terrible attitude through a lot of it, but every day God let me see little mercies, small things that made me think I could probably keep going for another little while after all. It made me thankful that we're really healthy most of the time and that my kids have only ever had run-of-the-mill childhood illnesses. I'm thankful for Dan, who kept telling me it would be OK and who sent me out of the house by myself a few evenings just so I could remember what the outside world looked like after days shut inside with sick kids. Now that we're well I find myself giving thanks much more frequently for health and the ability to have a totally unremarkable day when our schedule hums along with play times and nap times and dinner-making and laundry. Praise the Lord for normal. It has never looked so beautiful. tag:www.wachdorf.com,2010:/haley-blog//2.734 2010-12-31T22:11:56Z 2010-12-31T22:03:53Z

All photos are by my brilliant brother-in-law Daniel Meigs. Special credit belongs to my sister-in-law Kelly Rice, who jumped around behind Daniel waving her arms and singing songs and just generally making a fool of herself to get my...

All photos are by my brilliant brother-in-law Daniel Meigs. Special credit belongs to my sister-in-law Kelly Rice, who jumped around behind Daniel waving her arms and singing songs and just generally making a fool of herself to get my kids to look at the dang camera. Someone had to do it. On Wednesday when we returned from our trip to Mississippi for Christmas, I was putting together a grocery list to get us through the remainder of the week. After staring into the distance for a good five minutes trying to come up with something to cook for dinner on Friday evening, I remembered that tonight is New Year's Eve and therefore something of a festive occasion. I turned to Dan and said "Hey! Friday is New Year's Eve! What do you want to do?" I meant this mostly as a question about menu choices, but Dan apparently thought I was asking him to go clubbing as judged by his response, which was, and I quote, "Are you actually going to stay up until midnight?!" "Oh no, of course not" I said. "I just mean do you want to make guacamole and watch a movie or something." I have been thinking of sending out change-of-address cards, but clearly I should just wait until next week, when we will be moving to The Home. Allegedly a person gets one year older every calendar year but after 2010, I have decided that some years age you by a minimum of five years and other years, like this one, make you feel like a senior citizen at the ripe old age of 30. It has been a doozy, 2010. This was the year in which we surveyed the upcoming challenges of having a new baby and a three-year-old and decided that it just wasn't going to be crazy enough for us. No, you know what would really be great? If we put our house on the market three months after the baby was born and then two months after that moved to a new state! That would be exciting. Boy, was it. I am never going to recover from all the exciting. My sincere hope for 2011 is a little boredom. A whole lot of normal with a side of average. Some sleep would also be amazing. But even though 2010 has thoroughly worn us out in every way, it has been a year of God's overwhelming blessing and provision in our lives. So here, in the form of blog posts, are a few of the highlights of the year for the Wachdorfs. It's definitely the closest thing I'm going to do to writing a newsletter. Pretend you just got this in the mail: Kate turned three this year. She is very very three. (Three will be the subject of an entire post at a later time. Like in ten years, when I can laugh about it.) And it really was a big year for her. She got a baby brother! She got potty trained in spite of my best efforts to fail at that. She continued channeling her inner diva. On my list of accomplishments this year are the continued survival of the kids and then a series of screwups and fiascos: Isaac was born. His main accomplishments so far have been getting born, being adorable and doing the usual baby things. So he can get his own category next year. Back to me: I almost lost the monkey. I called roadside assistance for the first time ever. And survived more flying with small children including the Chicago Incident. Dan and I celebrated seven years of marriage in April. I read somewhere that moving is one of the top stressors on a marriage. Also on that list? Having a new baby. Hahahaha. Ha. Ha. While surviving Year Seven of being married to me, for which he deserves a medal, Dan also managed to: Get a new job. Pick out a great name for our son. Proclaim for months and months that he was not ever going to buy me a minivan. Buy me a minivan. As you can tell, we have a lot to be thankful for this year, and on that list are the wonderful friends and family who have loved and supported us through all of this change. We are so thankful for all of you. May our great God bless and keep each of you in 2011. If you find yourself in Texas, come on down and see us. Love, Dan, Haley, Kate and Isaac ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2010:/haley-blog//2.735 2010-12-31T15:55:04Z 2010-12-31T16:01:11Z

Two new babies and a new sister-in-law since last year, everyone in one place, and an amazing photo by my brother-in-law Daniel Meigs. We had a great Christmas and I hope you did too....

Daniel Meigs. We had a great Christmas and I hope you did too. ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2010:/haley-blog//2.733 2010-12-20T00:01:57Z 2010-12-20T00:11:30Z

Apparently I have decided that the December Photo Project is an every-other-day kind of deal for me this year. But I have some cute baby photos to make it up to you. When I watch Isaac scoot himself across the...

But then he makes faces like this and I think he must be OK. And our cousin Mercy came by today to show Isaac how to do the real thing crawling-wise. She is an expert. And she also likes to get under tables. ]]> tag:www.wachdorf.com,2010:/haley-blog//2.732 2010-12-18T02:40:02Z 2010-12-18T02:48:53Z

While I was writing my opus about the car, I got behind on the December Photo Project. Here are the catch up photos. They were both taken today, the 17th, but let's pretend they are for the 16th and 17th,...

In the days -- only days, mind you -- since Isaac got his army crawl perfected, he has built up a lot of speed. He puts that speed to good use, like making it halfway under Kate's bed and then making me drag him out by his fat little cankles. Life just got a lot more complicated to say the least. ]]>