Clara at 18 months

Clara went to the doctor yesterday for her 18 month check-up. She is healthy and happy, which of course we knew, although she is a bit sluggish in the weight department. She's 33 inches tall, still has a big noggin, but is hovering just below 23 pounds. Yes, friends, she is what my people like to call long and lean. I wonder where she gets that?

Fire Hazard

We hadn't used our baseboard heaters for a couple of weeks until just a few days ago. We turned on the one in Clara's room, since her room is by far the chilliest, and when we came to get her from her nap her room smelled really weird...like burnt kettle corn. We turned her heater on periodically with the same results and couldn't quite figure out what the problem was. Last night when we went to bed I felt uneasy about turning on her heater, so we turned on the heaters in the front of the house in order to warm the bedrooms.

And then I had an epiphany: Clara must have put something in the heater in her room. This morning, I pried the front panel off the heater to reveal this:



I gave Clara her pacifier so she wouldn't try to take a bite, but she was still pretty devastated when I took the crispy delight away from her. Kids...

Park Play

We have had a two-week string of beautiful spring weather, and we couldn't be more grateful. The leaves and the blossoms are exploding all over the city, and we have been able to spend more time outside in the last couple of weeks than we did all winter. I love not-winter!


Today we went to our favorite park to play and enjoy the sunshine. The highlight was going for a ride on this great cozy coupe. And as an added bonus, when Jeremy went to rent it he discovered that the previous rider had generously paid for the next user to ride for a whole hour! We rode for five miles along this beautiful lakeshore trail, and Clara was a big hit as she waved to passers-by from her perch.

Bye-Bye, Baby

Nothing signals the end of babyhood like a pair of pigtails, don't you think?

Boston Travelogue

We returned yesterday evening from a whirlwind trip to Boston, where Jeremy presented his paper, entitled "The Nature of Gentrification: Environmental Ameneties and Neoliberal Urbanism," to much critical acclaim at the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers. Woosh. We enjoyed our trip, although being in a city with a toddler who has food allergies adds an additional level of complexity to life, but we all survived, and Clara was happy to drink lots more juice than she ever gets at home. She also had to drink a lot of powdered soy milk, so hopefully the juice made up for that.

We visited three states on our trip, which concluded with an extremely pleasant visit with my cousin Paul and his family. And since this is definitely a travelogue, I'm including more pictures than usual. Please feel free to take a break halfway through the post if you get tired.

Moments after our arrival in Boston, we set up Clara's new portable crib so she could get used to the idea of being in it. She thought it was great, and slept pretty well in it. Jeremy and I spent our evenings in the dark, waiting for her to fall asleep. Quite memorably, we ate an entire takeout salad together while sitting on our bed in the pitch dark while Clara squirmed around, trying to fall asleep. I actually think eating in the dark heightens one's sense of taste, since one never knows what exactly will be on one's fork. Very exhilirating.


Eating breakfast. This was before Clara fell backwards and head-first out of her high chair, much to the horror of her mother and other concerned onlookers. Fortunately, I was holding onto her waistband and managed to suspend her in the air just short of the tile floor, which must negate at least some of my momentarily haphazard mothering.


At the Boston Public Library we met up with Jeremy and visited their wonderful children's section, which had lots of toys and toddlers, all of which Clara loved. When we found this little statue from the classic Make Way for Ducklings, we told Clara we could find lots of these little ducks if we walked to the park.


And we did! This is a wonderful statue in the Boston Public Garden. I have long heard of it and was happy to visit it myself.



We took advantage of some local knowledge procured at the Public Garden and headed to a neighborhood playground in the middle of some beautiful row houses (I have always wanted to live in a row house in Boston or New York...). The weather was beautiful, and we were certainly not the only ones enjoying the playground, but Clara didn't care. She got super dirty and loved playing in the sandbox.


One highlight of the trip was our relatively short visit to the Children's Museum. It was incredibly difficult to get to, I thought, but worth the effort (and the $11 parking and the $22 admission for the three of us!). Clara was on cloud nine in the special room for 0-3 year-olds, where she made stamp art...


...and played on a light table...and chewed on some plastic food (my mom is probably freaking out right now) and rode in a toy car and played on the jungle gym. This museum is truly fun--the best children's museum I've been to, in my admittedly limited experience.




After our two days in Boston, we headed up to visit my cousin and his family, and on Saturday they went to their soccer games while we headed to Maine for a fun day trip. We went to Portland, ate clam chowder, and took a ferry ride to Peaks Island. Clara was over the moon about the boat ride and walking on the pier, and almost certainly would've thrown herself headlong into the ocean if we'd let her.





We enjoyed going to church with my cousins before heading back to Syracuse, exhausted but happy at another classic adventure. And you will not be surprised to hear that we have another grand adventure around the corner. Check back for details!

A Rare Look...

...at Clara sleeping. What a sweet baby! We almost never get to see her sleeping anymore, since she nearly always wakes up when we come into her bedroom.



But she's also, obviously, still a sweet baby when she's awake. Later in the day we found her sitting in our closet trying to eat dry cereal with a spoon. That's what I call a tender girl.

Clara on The Periphery

An unidentified graduate student in Jeremy's department produces an underground, satirical newspaper called The Periphery on occasion. Jeremy discovered yesterday, during a browse of the archives, that Clara was recently featured in The Periphery as one of the leaders of a rogue group called "The Infant Outfit." (For background purposes: Clara's birth was the first in a bit of a Geography Department Baby Boom.) Please enjoy the article and be proud of our little one's early entry into activism and anarchy.

Rachel (almost) Wins!!!!

Every year in Jeremy's family we do a family bracket challenge for the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. I had never filled out a bracket in my life before marrying Jeremy, but some might say I'm a natural. Well, I have said that. On my second year of the Tourney, I correctly called all but two of the games in the first round. That, my friends, is really something, don't you think?

This year was not as successful, especially with the crushing disappointments that are Stanford and Duke. Luckily, though, I was really feeling Kansas this year and picked them to go all the way. And they did. And so...

Rachel (almost) Wins!!!

I came in second place in the family tourney, a wonderful victory for our little family.

It was important I do well this year to balance out Clara's bracket. This was her first year, and Jeremy helped her fill out her bracket by printing out the logos for each of the 65 teams, in color, then cutting them out and having her choose her favorite picture for each and every game. Her picks were not too good. Her Final Four were BYU, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, and South Alabama, with Vandy as her overall pick. What can we say? She really likes cats, and she really likes stars, so the other teams started at a disadvantage.

As proof of a reward for my victory, please consult this week's weather forecast:



Spring is in the air...

Zoo-rrific!

Clara and I decided to take advantage of uncommonly nice springtime weather by venturing to Syracuse's own Rosamond Gifford Zoo. I'd never been there, and it was fun to be outside--without jackets, no less!

I have to admit that I think zoos are kind of sad, and late winter lack of foliage doesn't really improve anything. At the same time, I love seeing the animals, so zoo-going always leaves me feeling ambivalent. But Clara thought it was a good time. She especially liked the lions and the "gigers" (tigers) and the primates. And the elephants. Yes. And she really liked once she decided to get out of her stroller how there were so many small curbs and ledges she could sit on. She really likes things just her size.

Homage to Montana

I've been finally uploading pictures we've taken over the past four or five years of our marriage (ever since we got our digital camera) to get printed and put into albums, and I am currently in our Montana stage of life, which makes me feel very nostalgic. And since this blog was started post-Montana, I'm sure many of you are just dying to enjoy evidence of Bozeman's perennial splendor.

Wiktionary

So the other day when I was looking for the link to my thesis online (I'm sure you've all been reading it and growing daily in enlightenment) I came across another google entry for my name on "Wiktionary," which is Wikipedia's online dictionary (I had never heard of it). Anyway, under the entry for decommission, you can find a line from my thesis that reads:

"Following the construction of the eight-lane Interstate 5 in the 1960s, the federal government eventually decommissioned Highway 99 as a federal roadway, leaving maintenance for the highway in the charge of state and local governments."

Too true. That was a bit from my thesis that is really just background--more of a tangent to the overall argument of that particular chapter. Nevertheless, it is listed as a nice content citation to help all of us better understand the connotations of the word "decommission."

This begs (at least) two questions: 1)Who collects these citations, and how did they pull that particular sentence out of an (let's face it!) obscure master's thesis? 2)What did we do with ourselves before the advent of the World Wide Web?

Chew on that for awhile.

Spring Arrives in Syracuse

April Fool's! Actually, what we're having today is one day of spring-ish weather, meaning that even though the temperature was in the low 40s yesterday and will be in the low 40s tomorrow, today the high is supposed to be 67! Wow! Of course, if it were going to be 67 and sunny, I'd be living high on the hog, but it's actually going to be warmish, rainy, and extremely windy.

It's just before 11:00 a.m., and the rain is just starting. But I felt like I couldn't justify wasting a little warm weather, so Clara and I headed out into the wind at 9:00 to go to the park. A good time was had by all! Clara, for whatever reason, loves a good, stiff wind in her face, so she was all smiles. She did not like the swing, but she loved crawling up and down the stairs on the jungle gym. And surprisingly we were just about the only ones there! I would've thought that other native Syracuse-ians like Clara would've jumped at a little warmer-weather park time. One mom and toddler did come by, walking an enormous long-haired black dog. Clara alternated between saying "ruff" and "baa," since the beast really did look a bit sheepish. As you can see, she was completely absorbed.