December 7th, 2010

Today we went to the court house and told a judge that we would love our sweet Daisy for ever and forever... come to think of it, they were more concerned about until she was 18, but we agreed to do both.


It was a great day. One to remember always.

Our Lawyers have the pictures (they were the only ones who could sneak a camera into the court house). We'll show you when we've got 'em.


~P

Sesame Street:Song: I Love My Hair

6 then 7 months.

So, Daisy turned 6 months...then she turned 7 months.

At 6 months we were on the road making the big move!

Luckily we were able to keep the tradition alive at our dear friends house, who had the most amazing nursery that Daisy fit right into!

Such a lady now...then, at 6 months.

Ah, but then, as Maya Angelou says,

~

Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning.

~

Yup, time marches on.

Leaves change and so do outfits.
(I think that's what Maya was really getting at)

At 7 months we were at a cabin in the woods with dear and old friends. (not pictured)

It was lovely.

~P


PS
This one goes out to the ladies in Jersey! Miss you guys!

Sunday Soup

Lindsay has this book and every time she dips into it is satisfies, if not amazes. Summer is loosing it's battle with fall and there is an breath of sweaters in the air. Yesterday, I took my scooter out, just for a ride, in a cardigan, and I done near froze myself to death. The sun was out and I found myself hoping for red lights so I could stop and bask, like a lizard, and fill up my solar panels before skimming again into the cold air. I should be reading 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' but I am in the middle of 'A Handmaids Tale' and am glad. I never used to reread books, the idea that I was missing out on something new to do whats been done, but even though it's not season specific, it feels like the right book for right now. Maybe it's just the crisp back to school air that tells you, 'read something'.

~P

August gone. And with it Summer.

So here's the deal. We left NYC/Jersey and now live in Utah.

Lots of reasons: Daisy.

Lindsay has this moment where she has nothing to do but raise our daughter and write a 300 page book....which she can do from any where, so she's doing it from Utah. Daisy can be closer to her grandma's (not too close, we are living in Salt Lake...well, right now we are living in my mothers basement...again...which is wonderful and we are so lucky to have a place to absolutely CRASH which is an apt phrase when used here.)

So we took 13 days and drove our baby girl across America. It was beautiful, terrifying, wonder filled, and worthy of our pride. We took 600 pictures but all of our wires and stuff for putting pictures on blogs are in some box in my parents garage. It's worthy of a whole post anyway. This is just a little post to tell you where we are and that we made it safe and sound.

That's all.

Well, also I bought a scooter.

That's all.

A sweet little silver guy with brown leather seats.

Really all.

...

...

Lindsay wrecked it during the test drive. That's all.

Daisy 5 Months (FIVE!)

So, you know that we are making this page of this future book (each month a different theme and color story). That's why when you see pictures of Daisy she's all dolled (literally) up and sitting in some bunch of one thing or another. Well, today is no different!

Five months of absolute bliss.

~P

In Mourning

Our very best friends in the whole wide world moved away today.

Lindsay... who you all remember looks like this:

She took it hard.

But came out looking stunning!

Of course, as she has no other way to look.



Daisy, in the above picture, is now 5 months old but we never posted her 4 month pictures, but they came from far away, so they took some time to get here.

I live with the two most beautiful girls in the world.

~P

3 Months.

In the garden.

Well... sort of. A garden we made in the kitchen.

~P

I know...it's becoming that blog.

Last Night.

~p

2 Months.

So... I'm not crazy.

Well... Ok. Yes, crazy, but in a loving sorta way.

Our friends take pictures of their girls with little cards that say '1 month,' or '7 months,' and we love them.

Then they made this book, and on one of the pages was all 12 months all in a row. It's lovely.

We couldn't find the cards.

We looked.

And our printer broke.

So I thought I would make these little vignettes every month, and we'll put them in a book.

Now, is that crazy?


Really?!

~P

Nothing but Thyme.

A few days ago, let's see...I guess, more than a week ago, we planted our two window boxes with herbs. It's a whole thing, one box has 'thirsty' plants, one has 'drier' plants. So anyway, today Daisy Lu and I were kicking it, you know waiting for the laundry and deciding we were not the kind of people who watched 'The View', and I noticed some growth. So I took some pictures of our dirt.

The only one coming in is the thyme. But it's only been a week.

I'm blogging today, because I have been on leave for almost six weeks and Monday I have to go back to work. I do love my job but it's hard to hold a candle to spending my days like this:




But what are you gonna do? I will still have evenings like that...and some mornings...and every Sunday, but it's not enough. I have loved being this kind of Dad, and maybe all dads want to be this kind of dad but someone has to get out there and pay for the ponies. Which, for now, will be me. Luckily Sweet D will be not be alone.

I know, right?! They make quite a pretty pair.


And then there is Scout: Yesterday, L came into the bedroom and found Scout like this:

Take a good look.

She snapped that picture and, taking any chance to pose, he shifted to a more flattering position:

So L said, "Ok, good. Now give me contemplative."

~P

So, it's been a month...

You know those people who are interesting and witty and blog about themselves and you know it's a bit pompous, but they live far away and maybe they will post a picture or two and you'll be able to see what kind of hair they have now, so you pop in and read the blog every now and then and you see that they are going to have a baby and you think to yourself, 'Well there goes that blog turning into another, 'Look how cute our baby is, she kinda smiled and because we never stop taking pictures of her we caught her smile, which may have just been gas but now it's a perfect smile, 'cause our baby is so happy and we are so happy and everyone is so gosh dern happy that we have to blog about it to our friends and family' blog, which is the only thing worse than a self-indulgent blog in the first place but you wonder if these people, who had previously blogged about how really cool their life without kids was would fall in the the trap of kid blogging so cheezy and overdone that they pull their brother-in-law's curtains off the wall and do glamour shots with the week-old baby, who never asked for such a thing and certainly never asked to have such pictures flung on to the internet for her future employer is pull up and think, 'Well, she does have great qualifications, but there is that naked picture of her in the bath running around the web' and give the job to some guy named Stan, whose parents were strong and moral people who did not believe in exploiting their son's innate good looks from birth on, or, if they did, they showed the courage and character not to give in to such impulses which is why, because of this post, we have a president of the United States named Stan in the year 2053.

Sorry, Daisy.

a couple of friends.

coming home on the plane.

the naked election loosing picture.

I know.... but what?!
~p

Waiting for Daisy

So. We may have stepped over the line of crazy in our waiting. It's been a week, and the rush of utter excitement has given over to the paralyzing fear attached to adoption, to the euphoria of commerce, to fury over shipping companies, to the numb of the under prepared, the sweet sense that we know her, to the rush of utter excitement... needless to say, I made her a bunny. {pictured above}

...by the way...this is P... not L.

L is making all the bedding and has done a INCREDIBLE {I am not kidding} job. One of the best things about L is this: you know that little button in your head that goes off when you think about doing something you probably can't? Yeah, she doesn't have that. She does it in cooking, she does it in sewing, she does it in PhDs, she has no fear and truly believes, "What one person can do, another can do." I love that about her and it is proving, not only frugal in our current endeavor but adorable! {No, there are no pictures yet and won't be until we are all safe and home.}

Back to the bunny. I was off work and home alone and L's sewing stuff was everywhere all over the house {our friend said it looked like a beautiful sweatshop}. I was literally pacing the living room thinking about every thing that needs to happen and everything that can happen and every thing I do not want to happen. And I had a little feeling, 'Put your hands to work.' So, without much of a plan and with L's fearlessness, I started making Daisy a bunny. She {the bunny} took a few hours, and right when she was done L came home and I had someone to talk to...eliminating the need to make more bunnies.

~P

This is a good post.

Soooo..... it's happened...or, at least, it's happening. We were matched with a birth mother who is due on February 24th! So, what does that mean? Well, so far it means we walk around with glossy eyes and slanted grins, bumping into things. So far, it means we whip up a nursery following our new and simple mantra: '9 months of nesting crammed into 3 weeks!' Truthfully, we wouldn't want it any other way; the waiting is the hardest part. There are lots of things that can happen, we know, but this is an amazing time of planning and thinking and picturing and wondering and choosing and guessing and smiling; it won't be spent worrying about all the 'what ifs'. So, there you have it: our biggest adventure, by far! She will be born in Missouri and we will get a call saying, 'the birth mother is in labor, come out now!' and we'll drive like crazies across some of America and pick her up.

Yup, she' s a her.

We'll name her Daisy.

~P

Let's pretend this never happened.

So...What? What can we say? We haven't posted in a long while and then the fact that we didn't post made us not want to post and have to say, "Sorry we haven't posted in a while, we're real busy, there's stuff we're doing and it makes it so we don't so this. So blah blah we'll never do it again." But then I went out and read your blogs and it made me want to blog and some of you haven't posted in WAY longer then us so...I may not post for 10 months after this but today, this Sunday morning, I am.

...So they moved our church to 2:00. I know. It's an Abrahamic Sacrifice that we swap every year with the Spanish ward. One ward gets the 10:00 slot for a year and the other trudges on into the dark evening hours plastic smiles on their faces when arriving to see the other ward, happy and full of promise of a Sunday afternoon, filing out still singing (as a reminder to those coming in) 'Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel, Push Along.' Luckily our ward is WAY worth it. We have been churching with them for, what, 5 years? And they...or, rather, we, continue to surprise. The other day, someone referenced the 'bishop sleep'-- you know, when the bishop and/or councilors doze off a bit on the stand, and my first thought was, 'Our bishop is literally sitting on the edge of his seat in case he has to rip the microphone out of some blasphemer's hand'. It would be hard to fully illustrate what I'm talking about, but here are a few of my favorite quotes from Fast and Testimony meeting, AKA "open mic night":

"Brothers and sisters, we need to kick Satan where the sun don't shine."

"I know the bishop is gonna get mad at me for saying this, but I think I need to...but the bishop's not going like it if I say it from up here, but I think...wait, I think the bishop's not going to like this at all, but here goes..." At which point, the bishop got up and whispered in the bearer's ear, "If I'm not going to like it, maybe we should save it for later."

And my very favorite:

"I took a bite of the banana and thought, 'Oh my God...it's fast Sunday.'"

If I seem condescending, please know that I deeply love this ward and all the people in it and we are loved by them. I was co-vice president in charge of the Christmas program (those are the callings up for grabs here in Jersey) and we put together a pretty nice little program, and the morning came to perform it, and it had snowed all night and the streets were a mess and it really is hard for lots of our members to get to church; we take the bus or the train or depend on someone to share a ride, and so a big snow storm can wipe out early morning church with one cold breath. So, we were up, looking out the windows and thinking, 'there is no way this thing is going down today.' but my phone buzzed and we got the text... "Church is still on!" (just like pioneer times, I'm sure), so we packed our Honda hand cart and made the exodus to the building (and by "building," I mean the second story over a 99-cent store). At 10:00, there were about 5 people who did not come in our car sitting in the seats. But more came, and we worked our numbers up to 50, maybe 75, and we did our Christmas program and it was really lovely, and the spirit was there; even for so few of us, the spirit was there. Lindsay (who was one of the narrators) said at one point she looked out at the people who were there and they were people like us, who are far from family or have made this ward their family and who thought, 'Snow or no snow, I have to be to church this morning' and we were all quiet and we all listened and everyone wanted to be there. And Thurman, an 8-year-old who stood up and sang 'Were you There?' with no music in his hand, only his dad to stand and sing behind him, may have had to close his eyes to forget that we were all there looking at him, but even with his eyes closed, we were all still there, and it was wonderful.

~P