Cold Spaghetti

Horse and buggies awaiting passengers at Jackson Square, Vieux Carre 

Paul and Will play in the Witches’ frog-stew!! Frog Exhibit… Aububon Aquarium of the Americas

Will and the Eel… kids were startled by this eel that pops out of the coral when a button is pressed. Will would go from pressing the button to grab the eel’s nose to jumping in surprise when the eel appeared. We spent a lot of time with the eel today… 

Will… the frog prince? 

Will, at the coral grotto play area in the Aquarium! He played here for a long time… pressing the buttons and playing on the display (it is meant as a play area for little ones his age).  

This is about the only picture of me (at least where you can see my face) to show I actually was there today! The rest of the time was spent chasing Will… see here how he is launching into a run out of my arms?  

After a morning of work, Paul and I decided to have some quality family time. So around 3pm, we packed Will up and headed downtown!

First: the Aquarium of the Americas! It was everyone’s first Aquarium trip and we had a blast (love that member’s pass!!) Will had more fun running around from exhibit to exhibit. We’re not sure if he really got that there were actual animals to be seen in the Aquarium, but he did enjoy pressing all the buttons to hear fish sounds and stories. There were lots of things to climb on all through the Aquarium… he liked that, too. (Will’s favorite were the penguins, of course!)

Then: we walked over to Jackson Square via the riverwalk park along the Mississippi River. Will munched on a Ziweback while we watched the Natchez steamboat go upstream and enjoyed the musicians and artists along the way. I bought a “Lucky Dog” at the Square and walked around Aunt Sally’s Praline shop (Will really likes Pralines — and Aunt Sally’s has unlimited free samples!) checking out the N’Awlins books while Paul bought a bag of beignets and chickory. We met back up at the Square and took in the street performers… breakdancers! Will tasted his first beignet… and boy did he like them!!

After our snack, we walked through the Square, around some of the shops in the Quarter and back to the car. We left just before 6! It was so cool that we can do so much and enjoy so many things in our incredible city… in such a relatively short period of time! We had a blast!!

Playing Peek-A-Boo at dinner, Friday, February 25

Last night, we hosted the doctoral students for a “dinner’n’dish” evening. We doctoral students decided we needed time outside of the school to talk about the program, get ideas from those ahead of us on how to get through the program, plan for comps, strategize about selecting a committee, talk about our research, etc. So, our house got selected for location and I cooked! I made 2 huge dishes of Grandma DiMarzio’s Ziti (a huge hit), salad, and sliced peppers and cucumbers. Feeding 14 didn’t take as long as I thought it would and was a heck of a lot easier than I would have believed. (Having Paul as my official salad-prep man was definitely key!) Will was great. Some of the ways he entertained us:

– Escaping to the bathroom when our eyes were turned for a second and being found a few seconds later, both hands in the toliet, covered in toliet water
– Showing off his moves from “Riverdance” in the middle of our talking circle in the living room
– Walking around person to person, saying “HI!”
– Getting into a peek-a-boo contest with Jennifer Wheeler (fellow student)
– Chasing after “gato” and making everyone dive for their drink glasses before he crashed through

Stats: Turned 15 months on Monday the 21st. Has wellness exam next Tuesday… my guess on his height and weight? I’m going to say he’s 25 pounds… no idea on height.

Teeth? Oh yeah… He’s working on his molars and is doing great chopping away with the 10 he’s cut.

Words: Becoming more and more clear. His favorites change day to day… he likes to pick a word and use it all day long. It is not uncommon for him to say the day’s favorite word, non-stop, for several hours at a stretch. (This may sound like something that gets old, but for right now, we actually can’t get enough of his talking.) Lately, “ah-pull” is his number one word. El-mo is also popular. He’s getting better about saying “Da-Da”, much to Paul’s delight. Other fun words… “Peek-A-Boo!”, “WOW!”, “Ah-cha!” (which means “good” in Hindi), and “Doh!”

Energy level: Think Energizer Bunny. To make him stop, we literally have to run him around until he falls down asleep. He walked my parents several MILES through our zoo on Saturday, for real.

Hair: Still red/strawberry. It does seem to be getting more blonde color, but we’ve been saying that from the moment he was born, so who knows?

Dirty Diapers: 5(!!) within 4 hours this evening. Whoa, mama.

Brothers/sisters? I can’t believe I’m even getting asked about this. Let me survive comps.