Cold Spaghetti

See that tiny hole above?  There are a few more going up the wall, straight up from this one.  They leave the poo as they slowly eat up the board in the wall.  Thankfully, these are a slow-moving variety that tend to chew on one board and leave the others alone.  At least, that’s what we found out the first time the termite guys came and treated the wall.

They will return today and open up this, the exterior wall in Kate’s room.  Hopefully, they will do this from the outside.  And hopefully, this will mean the end of freaking out over finding termite poo on Kate’s pillow.

—–

UPDATE: No wall-opening required.  They found no actual termites during the visit (surprised us, too) and filled all holes completely (much more thoroughly than the first visit, actually).  *fingers crossed*  We’ll be opening the wall up eventually when we re-side the house.  Hopefully everything can wait until then.

On the afternoon of Day Two of Paul’s surgery recovery, we visited City Park.

The kids saw the paddle boats.  Paul said it was okay.  That he was okay.  So we rented a paddle boat and rode it around City Park for a half hour.

For the record, this is not a very good thing to do a few days after surgery.

Nonetheless, we paddled around the museum, the sculpture garden, the ducks, the pelicans in the trees.  Will paddled for a little while, too.  (I don’t suggest this to folks who want to be able to walk when you get off of the boats.)

The ducks were not afraid of the boats and swam right up looking for food, just in case.

We had to go under several low bridges, which Kate loved.

For the record, Kate is really cute.

Kate has had a huge growth spurt.  She weighs almost 30 pounds and is about 35 inches tall. She is finally into size 3T (for most things).

But she can still go to the store with her Daddy.

In the grocery bag.

You should see the look on people’s faces when her head pops up in produce.

Photos.

With a few notes.

I drew a face, Will and Paul carved a pumpkin.  (I don’t dig out pumpkins because the uncooked innards of squash and pumpkin make my hands swell up like big red mitts.)  Our pumpkin is the one beside the kids on the stairs in the picture below.  I drew the left eye over too far because I didn’t think enough about the curve of the pumpkin.

We ate veggie chili, pumpkin seeds (my first time making), and lentil soup with friends over seasonal colored lights.  And tricked or treated.  At one point, the group of kids and adults went into the range of 50+ people… “candy locusts” according to Paul.

Will finished first with a house and ran ahead the group.  We saw him climbing around the big base of an oak tree near the sidewalk.  At least we thought.  Conversations about appropriate bathroom spots for men followed.

Kate had to be rushed back for a potty break.

A house ran out of candy and started to give out books.  Will spent the rest of the night “reading” his book, page by page, while I held his candy bag.  The book?  MADAME BOVARY.

Happy Halloween!

(The very last picture is my favorite.)

Will had his second ear surgery on Friday.  It was a blow to miss his Halloween festivities at school — and with that, the opportunity to wear Luke Skywalker clothes — so Paul and I tried to make the morning as special as we could.  He watched a Transformers cartoon Movie, one that Paul and I kept remembering and forgetting (Wait, what? Optimus Prime dies? A machine that eats planets?)  We were very supportive and did not make fun of him on the Goofy Juice.  Even when he turned to me and said, “Mommy, I have to say something.  You have two heads.”

He did great.  Both ears were full of fluid.  Instantly after surgery his hearing improved.  Our instructions are to use Cipro drops, which are like liquid gold, to keep his ears clear.  Since it took 3 weeks for one of his last tubes to fall out and 5 months for the other to completely clog, we are looking at daily drops for a long, long time.  Have we put in the drops today? Is the new household mantra.  Please feel free to ask us, because we are likely to forget by tomorrow.

When he left the hospital at 2pm with a sleepy, sleepy kid, we were sure he wasn’t going to make a 6pm party.

HA.

Cookie making with friends trumps ear surgery.

Thank goodness.  We needed the night out, too.

I know it’s six months away, but who can resist the hat?

Once you open a loaf of bread in New Orleans, you have approximately 15 minutes to devour it completely before the humidity sucks out all the soft goodness and turns it into a wheat rock.  What a loss of good bread.  Our solution?  Throw it into the freezer at minute 14 — just in the nick of time — and save it for the animals in the park.

Like this guy, who I think just heard us tell Kate not to eat the moldy bread because it was for the squirrels.

Today’s high was 81.  In September, a high of 81 means it was an absolutely perfect fall day.

Way too beautiful to spend the afternoon inside.  So we picked the kids up from school and brought them straight to the park for a picnic.

Is this squirrel sticking is tongue out at us?

If you’ve spent time in Audubon Park, you recognize these three.  They are the park social committee.  We like to think of them as Agnes, Edna, and Beatrice.  They squawk with British accents.

The wood ducks are back (my favorites).  Will referred to the swan that followed him around as “big guy,” as in, “I need more bread to feed the Big Guy.”

Will also played around with the Photovoice camera and asked if I could set it on a timed release “so that we can get some family pictures.”  Okay, Will.  He set the camera on the cooler and got to work.

He was very serious.  So serious that we had to capture the intensity.  For the record, Kate totally and completely listened to every darn word the kid said.

Paul and I are barely holding it together, just seconds away from exploding into hysterics.  The Kid is directing us to put our heads together.

See?  I wasn’t listening.  I was suppose to move closer.  Okay, Will.

What unfortunately isn’t easily seen in this picture is the underside of Will’s cast.  He took a marker and wrote “DAD MOM KATE” in a line on the inside of the cast.  Underneath he wrote WILL, except that he made the W upside-down.  So really, he wrote “MILL”.  When he realized the mistake (“Will, who’s ‘Mill?'”  “What?”  “Mill.  M-I-L-L.  On your arm.”) he laughed like a loon and then simply wrote his name (complete with W) underneath.  DAD MOM KATE MILL WILL.

If that doesn’t sum up the age of 5, I just can’t think of much more that can.  Awesomeness.

I humbly requested a photo of Kate and Will.  This is the only one where one of them isn’t lifting the other, picking a nose, or bent upside.  It also showed that I am the only photographer no one listens to.  Not that this was ever in doubt.

Happy fall day, New Orleans! So good to be home.

A long, long, time ago we took the kids to Baton Rouge to visit the State Museum and Planetarium.

Okay, it was only last month.  But it feels like a long time ago.

The State Capital was across the street.  Very interesting fence.

The planetarium itself was very cool, with a good sky show. The kids loved it, which was fun for Paul I because we loved it (it was about the size and composition of the universe). Kate participated in a “building the city” event where kids got hard hats and “building permits” for different things. She built an animal shelter and we placed it in a spot in the city grid, where parents were busy building the biggest, tallest things they could “with” their kids. There was a special exhibit on handbags, which was surprisingly interesting and engaging. The Mummy was interesting as well, though the kids weren’t as willing to spend a long time in the tomb-like presentation space. Best part: no accidents from Kate, who is proving to be completely successful in potty training outside of the home, but not so much within the home.

Kate’s first caregiver, Ms. Gladys, (blog mentions of her are here) retired last week.  I used to hang out with Gladys when Kate was a baby. Usually it was to nurse (since Kate was adverse to the bottle and I am adverse to the pump) but sometimes when I’d go in for that afternoon feeding, it was hard to leave. I’d help out around the room, giving a bottle, changing a diaper, or rocking someone to sleep. The perk was that it meant I got to talk to Gladys. Gladys can tell it straight, but has a way of gently leading you to the answer so that you come to it in your own time. She is such a wonderful listener that it is easy to get carried away and babble on and on to her soft affirmations. Eventually, it got easier to ask her questions. This was how I learned about her daughter, Ardis, who died shortly before the Flood came and engulfed their home, taking with it most of their physical memories.

Abeona threw a big surprise retirement party for her last Saturday, with people there representing her 27 years of service.  We helped a friend put together a book, scanning pictures and sending photographs from Abeona’s first three years.  She did a fantastic job on the book, which included photos, stories from families, scanned art projects, and memories reflecting many years of work. But I wanted to do something else and asked for help from staff to make it happen.

As I understand, it took some serious work to get this photograph scanned — the last one taken of Ardis. 

As usual, I forgot about taking photographs of the process until I was well into the piece.

This was my toughest portrait to date, mostly because I was so very nervous to do it.  It felt very personal and, in a way, invasive to be doing this as a surprise.  She hadn’t asked me to do this because she felt I could do the job correctly — it was something I was just doing.  What if there was something I missed?

This is the only finished photograph I have — I didn’t take any of it in it’s frame.

Even now, I’m at a loss of what to say about it.

This is Ardis.  She was a beautiful, smart young woman born to an amazing, compassionate woman.  It was a pleasure to draw her.

Will’s last summer camp performance included the kids singing along to Jimmy Buffet. Paul and I felt that it was too strange to hear Jimmy Buffet without adult beverages, so we concluded that parents should be encouraged to play drinking games at kids performances. It would go something like this: Drink when your kid does X on stage.

Most likely, the drink list would include:
— Nose picking
— Tooth wiggling
— Crotch grabbing
— Lip pulling
— Butt picking
— Yawning
— Staring off into space while other kids sing
— Making excuse of stage time to hold hand of cute girl or boy,
or,
— Stage diving.

The stage dive wasn’t captured on video. Which is probably a good thing, as we’re trying to keep our un-insurable people ratio at 1:1.

Maybe he can get some extra points for speaking French?

Today is Bastille Day and, as one might expect for a French summer camp, there were school-related activities.  Sometime last week, Kate’s teacher sent home notes asking the students to wear costumes for Bastille Day for their party and parade.  Accordingly, I planned on not thinking about it until 8am this morning, roughly 30 minutes before leaving for school.

Thanks to a tu-tu stuck in the back of her closet, Kate was a cloud:

She is holding a Christmas ornament with a picture of herself in it at age 7 months.  I have no idea from where she took said ornament or why she insisted on posing with it this morning.

The white bracelet?  She made it at school last week.  I thought it gave her outfit just the right touch.