west coast thanksgiving

we were so lucky to have kevin's sister, mary ann, and our niece reese visiting for thanksgiving week. it's the absolute best watching the girls together. violet adores reese, who is so sweet with her. when i'd asked violet what places she wanted to take her visiting cousin, she absolutely insisted on the observatory. every morning she'd wake up asking if it was observatory day. i wasn't sure we'd really make it up there, but since reese wanted to see the hollywood sign, we made time and i'm glad we did. violet was so proud to show off her knowledge about telescopes: "this is a telescope!"

(side note on violet's outfit: once she pairs two items of clothing together, she refuses to mix and match them. she will only wear this zebra shirt with this flower skirt. she is also really into wearing her old toddler skirts over leggings "because that's how big girls do it.")

mary ann and reese stayed four days, and we spent two at disneyland. great decision of course.

after autopia we let the girls get their "own driver's license" in the photo booth, resulting in this amazing pic.

(violet's holiday sweater skirt and hula girl tank top are also a coordinated outfit, and never to be worn with other separates.)

at home, there was a lot of dressing up.

violet would model various outfits from her dress-up bin for us while reese played runway announcer. my favorite moment was when violet emerged shirtless wearing a supergirl cape and see-through tutu thingie that i think is actually a veil. reese's narration: "she picked this one out herself."

the kids took a pre-dinner bath on thanksgiving day and then put on their fancy clothes with boots. that brought me straight back to 8th grade dance when i wore my green satin tea dress with a flannel and converse. such a good look.

as you can see, thanksgiving dinner at our house was pasta and meatballs for the kids and a frozen lasagna procured at the local wine shop for the grown-ups. we folded out the ikea table all the way and everything!

fall back

we had a whirlwind fall that feels like even more of a blur now that i'm thinking of how to recap it. every time this happens, when i go a couple of months without writing an update here, i start sifting through the pictures and feeling that pang - it goes so fast. i mean, the hours don't go fast of course. i can feel that even as i'm being charmed by this adorable picture of violet in the fall leaves and remembering how we had a ball on that particular walk to the farmers market, because i know that she soon after complained that i wouldn't buy a balloon or a tattoo, even after a pony ride and the inflatable slide; she ran through the crowd and into an old lady's shins; she insisted i carry her along with our bags of potatoes and then pulled "the reins" of my hair to giddy up! the strawberries got smooshed, the plastic pony fell in the gutter, and i remembered my coffee was back at the egg stand. all those things happened, maybe not on the same sunday, i don't know, it doesn't matter. i look at the picture and remember the walk, and how violet gathered a pile of leaves, hid them in a bush, and then retrieved them on the way home.

some sundays i think i'll never leave the farmers market without a butter croissant handprint on my boob, but of course one day soon enough i will, sunday after sunday, year after year, until another mother is apologizing into my shins as her child runs off again, zoom.

violet has gotten brave on her scooter. she rides all the way to the blue mailbox, as fast as she can go, and then curves around the corner until she's an inch from being out of sight before she turns around and comes back. "get in the fast lane, mama," she said on the drive today. it does feel like we're always in a hurry, and i hate that. the best thing about sundays is dawdling.

what i know i'll remember most about this past fall is that violet's bestie, her nana, became a melanoma survivor. that was slow motion too, waiting and worrying, and then her difficult recoveries from two grisly surgeries, yet somehow it's already in the blur, between the lines, or between the pictures, at least, of nana in her cute new cap.

the bright spot was that my family spent more time together than we probably would have, and they all came up for the annual pumpkin patch outing.

it's always a bright spot for the dogs when a couch bed is made.

another bright spot for violet was getting to take the train to san diego for the first time.

and nana buying her halloween costume, anna from frozen. we couldn't find her size at the disney store, and as she looked longingly at the $90 coronation gown, which had plenty of sizes available, nana remembered some knockoffs at nordstrom, where there was, mercifully, one lone gown left in her size. violet wouldn't even take it off before dinner at yanni's bistro.

many people have complimented violet's unconventional choice of anna over elsa, and i've smiled every time, feeling a secret spark of pride at my little rebel, who recently informed me that her costume next year will be elsa.

please feel free to stoke my pride instead by complimenting my olaf, who eventually did get some stick arms.

violet posed with him before school and then aptly kicked off her day with some sugar.

shortly after i got to my desk, kevin texted me "what happened???" followed by a photo of pumpkin massacre. olaf had toppled when the mail was delivered. i mean, shit, right? so in a testament to how far i will go to avoid a major violet freakout, i bought another pumpkin after work and did a quick re-carve before dusk.

violet loved trick-or-treating as much as she did last year, and almost as much as kevin and i love taking her. here's the crazy goth house

and here's the candy haul that she's thankfully still too young to keep strict tabs on.

as usual, i'm running out of time, but i keep meaning to post violet drawing her self-portrait

for "all about me" at school, where the teachers compiled each child's answers to a series of questions about themselves.

the last question was about what you and your family like to do together. her teachers must think we're pretty militant, but hey, violet doesn't draw her e's backwards anymore.

she is apparently also tired of being featured on this blog eating pastries.

four!

whenever violet makes a wish, she whispers it to me. of course i've told her that your wish won't come true if you tell anyone what it is. except your mom, she insists. she came up with that rule all by herself, and as you can imagine my heart nearly bursts every time her little voice chirps impossible dreams into my ear. thanks to that mammoth imagination of hers, the wishes always come true. we have herds of unicorns living at our house!

i managed to convince her that some years you have a big birthday party, and some years you have a small one, so we just had cake with my family in san diego this year, which was lovely. we did sweeten the deal with a weekend at legoland. the first day was kind of a bust since she woke up before dawn, bouncing off the walls with excitement, and then melted down by lunch time. we were in the water park, and when she realized she'd have to put her wet bathing suit back on after going to the bathroom, she lost her shit, so we left to go nap. thankfully day two was awesome. we managed to ride every ride she had really wanted to do. here's a photo of the screen where they project the coastersaurus pics that we were too cheap to purchase:

she spent a huge part of the day in a water play area not actually inside the water park

and probably went down this water slide twenty times.

she was definitely the smallest fry going up and down the stairs by herself. the overall structure is a huge pirate ship, and she did ask kevin, in his street clothes, to climb it with her. we didn't realize that at the top is a giant bucket that periodically dumps hundreds of gallons of water down on the whole thing. violet was delighted that daddy got soaked.

speaking of pirates, she ran out of her room wearing this get-up one night:

she has a pouch full of fake gems and doubloons, which she likes to hide around the house. we made a "treasure map of the dread pirates lynn" that led to her booty, buried in a ziploc under the slide in the backyard.

and speaking of booty, she is into the potty talk lately. i haven't helped matters by cracking up when she tells stories of how boys at school are getting into trouble for saying things like "a skunk poo'd on your head." "pooped on whose head?" i ask. "POO'D! POOOOO'D!" one day i picked her up from school, and she was messing around hiding under my dress while i was talking to the program administrator. at one point i said, "stop, you're going to show my underwear!" to which she replied, "i was just looking at your PAD, mama." wonderful.

in other news, the sensory issues still flare up here and there but have mostly gone away after a month of crazy intensity. i'm still pretty convinced that really bad virus had something to do with it, since she went from zero to NO SEAMS!!!!! meltdowns everyday, only willing to wear skirts or dresses, and is now back to wearing all kinds of underwear and leggings without complaint. there were other things too, not that easy to explain. she was just saying some really SAD and MAD stuff that was jarring coming out of a kid her age, like "life would be funner if i weren't alive" and "i wish i was born to other parents than you" and "i don't like to look at my reflection because i don't think i look pretty." what?! now, poof! she's been back to her regular self for over a delightful month.

amid the sensory drama, however, she insisted on her first ever haircut because her hair getting stuck under her armpit was driving her into hulk rage.

the first haircut wasn't short enough, so after a week of complaints, we went back for more.

she looks adorable, though yesterday she told me that she wishes her hair would grow back faster. hopefully she'll go back to wishing for unicorns.

vacation, with ice cream

i have so much to catch up on, and first up is the belated vacation post! i was a little worried that i wouldn't be able to remember july now that it's october, but as it turns out, this was a memorable trip that all came rushing back as soon as i started flipping through pics. love that. ahhh, so much ice cream!

our flight was early, so i was nervous that violet would be grouchy with her 5am wake-up call, but instead she launched into a delightfully loopy mode and was all about my suggestion to stay in her pajamas. 

i thought she'd change at the airport or on the plane, but she went pjs all the way to the dulles curb.

i can't remember much about the flight which indicates that she was good. we don't really let her use the kindle unless we're traveling, so when we do let her have it, she's super psyched, and i get to blissfully stare at the road or my tray table without having to perform my dozens of (still awful) character voices, as i do on our daily commute(s) when she dictates an imaginary narrative and tells me what to say in whose voice. her favorite genre right now is bunny crime. usually max and ruby and their scrappy crew are pitted against "the ten year olds," two bumbling home alone-style delinquents who are constantly stealing things from them, especially hammers used to construct campsites in the woods. violet's very favorite plot point is when we chase down the ten year olds on our bikes, and max lassos back the pilfered hammer and we escape back to our tent, and then when the ten year olds try to find our tent, they encounter all sorts of booby traps that we left for them (with our magic powers) like tigers and sharks that can breathe out of water. usually this ends when we pull into the preschool parking lot and violet hurriedly insists we must "go to grandma's house" and tattle on the ten year olds for all of their "snatching," and then grandma bunny chastises the ruffians by saying "no scrambled eggs for you for nine weeks!" which delights violet to no end because the ten year olds don't even like eggs, naturally.

my memory of our vacation chronology is somewhat hazier than my memory of the case of the missing hammer, so i'm just going to hit a few highlights. it rained! that's certainly a novelty. we doubled up with sprinklers.

mary ann (kevin's sister) lives on the edge of golf course, and the cousins (and wilson the labradoodle) can play on the green after hours, as long as they promise they won't run in the sand trap, which they promise, and then they chase wilson until he runs into the sand trap and they just haaaave to go in and grab him. rascals.

dan and elizabeth (kevin's older brother and his wife) planned the most ridiculously perfect 4th of july for the whole family -- box seats at the nationals game followed by rooftop fireworks at the army navy country club. seriously! it was so much fun. it was violet's first baseball game, and as dan said, we're in trouble because she's going to think it's always like this:

it was so great to see kevin's parents and all their kids and grandkids together

and while it would have been great anywhere, the view didn't hurt.

speaking of amazing views, by some miracle dan and elizabeth won the country club's lottery wherein a small number of members get seats on the roof overlooking the washington monument for the fireworks. elizabeth's parents have belonged to the club for over 20 years and never won tickets, and we impostors scored seats, what?! i took a bunch of amazing videos of the limbo contest and hula hooping on the roof, but i don't really have any pics. a couple cute ones of the cousins.

violet skipped her nap of course, and after the baseball game, pool, bounce house, an undisclosed number of hot dogs and ice cream sandwiches, and the rooftop party, she should have been ready to drop by 9:30pm, but she somehow managed to keep her eyes open for the entire fireworks display. every time she blinked, i could see the effort to lift her lashes up again. so cute.

other rad family events included a stop at great waves

where violet kindled what i can tell will be a lifelong love of water parks. (side note for so cal old schoolers: wild rivers 2016!) violet only had a couple major meltdowns on the trip, and the biggest one happened when we finally had to remove her bodily from the wave pool as she screamed, "i never want to leave here! i want to sleep here tonight!"

another awesome day, the whole family gathered at the quarterdeck for crabs, as they have managed to do on every one of our visits since my first in 2005. i was evidently too butterfingered to handle my iphone during the feasting this year, but we got a couple cute pics after declan's auntie kate walked the kids to the convenience store for, what else?

if it wasn't already clear that we wanted this vacation to be a SUMMER VACATION, we also drove out to the coast and spent a few days on rehoboth beach.

mary ann and reese joined us, and i have to say, we killed it. lots of seafood, boardwalk pizza and fries, beer, late afternoons on the beach, frozen custard (so much! so good!), and of course funland, the rickety old carnival where not much has changed since kevin and his siblings were kids. this place epitomizes summer nostalgia in all the best ways.

once again i didn't get a picture, but on the second night, violet was determined to ride reese's favorite "big kid" ride, paratrooper. it's kind of like a tilted open-air ferris wheel that spins around fast, forward then backward. you can see it in the background of this pic of her and mary on a car ride:

with her "high heel" sandals on, violet cleared the height requirement for riding with an adult (lucky me, since kevin had already gone with reese on the big seadragon swing). she was just squealing with laughter the whole time and immediately declared "i want to go again!" i gently explained that i was "too dizzy," and if you're guessing that's a euphemism for "too much white wine at dinner," you win a prize!

violet also won a prize at whack-a-mole, which she played as a team with dad. after a couple of nowhere near wins, the kind game operator nudged kevin to "play against" violet because they only require two players to have one winner. i helped violet wield her... what would you call it? giant whacker? and of course she beat kevin handily (at the game) and won a stuffed toy.

violet was pretty much on west coast time, so here are the girls with their kohr bros at 11pm on the walk back to the hotel.

i don't think the 1.5 frozen custards did much to help my pre-bedtime hangover, but they were very tasty.

that reminds me, our vacation wouldn't have been complete without a stop at hovermale's for a dip-top cone. so many memories from this trip, but the one that tops them all took place in the parking lot where everyone stands around eating their ice cream because there isn't anywhere to sit. a couple of thuggy dudes ran over to us with huge smiles on their faces and grabbed kevin's mom for a squeeze: "mrs. lynn! you were my FAVORITE teacher!" twenty years later. such a great moment. melting ice cream, melting hearts.