Today we have been (and continue to be) busy packing. We prepped Anna yesterday, telling her that we would like her to help, or at least keep herself busy so that we can get done everything we need to do. For the most part, she obliged.

Tara has also cooperated by not learning to walk before visiting Grandma D. and her tile floors. She continues, however, to put anything in everything in her mouth. We recently found her eating the paint off the wall by chewing on the corner of the windowsill. I kid you not.

Then, starting with nap time, Anna had some very unusual behavior. When I gave her a five-minute warning of impending nap time, she opted to play by herself instead of to read stories. Five minutes later, she informed me that she was going to go up for nap by herself and that she would come down later after she woke up. She went into her room and didn’t come out for an hour. No idea if she slept or not.

Before dinner, she set the entire table (this involves her getting a chair to climb up on the counter to get dishes out of the cupboards), complete with glasses of water, and set out jars of baby food so that I could feed Tara. She then searched the nearly-empty refrigerator for food for her own dinner (Jen was picking up take-out), settling on bread with jelly and a cheese stick, which she sliced into rounds. I sat and fed Tara and marveled. After Jen arrived with the real dinner, Anna set out milk and cookies for Santa and sprinkled reindeer food¹ out so that Santa’s sleigh would be sure to find our house.

We don’t know what to make of Anna’s super Stepford behavior, but one thing we can be sure of: when the other shoe drops, Tara will pick it up and eat it.

Update: Oh wait… I get it… “He’s making a list / checking it twice / gonna find out who’s naughty and nice…’”

¹ Reindeer food is apparently quick oats mixed with glitter. If you park your car under a lamppost and find that the bird droppings are more festive then usual, you’re welcome.

I really dislike boundary conditions. In particular, I dislike dealing with the logistics of cooking before going on vacation. On one hand, I want to cook things that are quick and easy, but on the other hand, I want to use all the perishable food we have in the house. Tonight, there was about five minutes where I was considering making beefaroni for dinner because I swear we didn’t having anything in the house besides ground beef, macaroni noodles, and spaghetti sauce. Luckily I found a couple other ingredients and was able to make chili instead.

This is yet another post without much of a point, I just liked the idea of beefaroni as a threat.

In other news, Tara’s walking prowess has been upgraded from “Stephen Hawking on ice skates” to “giraffe on tightrope.”

Tonight Anna wished to sleep on the floor in her room as though she were on a sleepover. Fine, says I, we’ll just arrange your bedding on the floor. In the process of doing so, the following items were carefully accounted for and arranged in their requisite places:

• A Scooby-Doo blanket, Winnie-the-Pooh sheet and comforter, on which she would lay.

• Bear

• Two stuffed lambs, one small and one large.

• Two stuffed bunnies, one musical and one not.

• A stuffed dog.

• Bananacrackers the stuffed cat.

• One t-shirt each from Mommy and Daddy.

• Two boxes of Kleenex.

• A sippy cup of water.

• Two pillows, small one on top of the large one.

• Six other blankets of varying sizes.

• A stuffed giraffe.

I am not making this up. All this had to be carefully laid out so that she could lay down to sleep; some under the blankets by her feet, some in the crook of her arm, others on top of her, others in a row by her head. I wonder if this is just a phase, or if we are in fact enabling the development of OCD or something.

In other news, Tara took a step on her own today… She was standing next to me, holding on to the bottom of my shorts for support (or because she was going to pants me) with one hand, then she let go and took a step, and would have done a header into a pile of books had I not caught her first.

She does occasionally steady herself long enough to stand for a second or two at a time, but mostly she looks about as stable as Stephen Hawking on ice skates.

Now that’ we’re getting closer to Christmas, I thought back to last Christmas Eve, when Jennifer was seven months pregnant with Tara and had an allergic rection to mangoes. The resulting blog post is probably the best thing I have ever written, and it’s also the last thing I tagged as a Best Of post. Let’s see, December 24… hrm hrm eighteen… carry the one… I haven’t written anything good in about a year.

I struggle with writing decent blog posts to the point that a large portion of the blog is me complaining to myself about my own blog and the lack of quality writing in it. Of course, there is the occasional praise from friends and family and strangers–all of it welcome–but one is always one’s own worst critic.

For a while, I toyed with a more methodical approach to my writing by actually sitting down and planning out on paper what I was going to write. This takes a lot of discipline, and a lot of time, and in my case, the results weren’t any better. I do think I need to go back to it, because it does help to make the posts more readable, and I can see more clearly when I go to often between points of interest.

I think that a good reason that my own writing doesn’t seem as good to me is that I run across more and more really good blogs. There really are some spectacular writers out there…. some are listed in my about me page, but there really are like a zillion good blogs out there.

I grew up hearing how good I was at a lot of different things–playing the piano, reading, writing, drawing, using the computer. It turns out there are a lot of people that are good at all of those things. I also heard quite a bit about the importance of being better than everybody else, and for a long time, I was. Then the world got bigger, and there were a lot more everybodies, and there were a lot of people better than me at everything. I can’t even claim to have a decent self-image problem by comparison.

In spite of that, I am happy that people enjoy reading my blog, family and strangers alike. I am glad to have photography as a hobby that I can enjoy and share with others. I can’t say enough good things about familyhood, even though I need to find a way to spend more time feeling like a rock star, and less time feeling like a roadie.

If I were a really good writer, or if I had spent the time to outline this post, I would here include a witty and poignant closing which leaves the reader with a warm fuzzy smile. If you want that, go read some of those zillions of better blogs. I’ve decided instead to be happy with this post just as it is.

Tara gets closer every day to walking. For a couple of months, she has greatly enjoyed walking around while holding on to mom or dad’s hands. A month or so ago, she started pulling up on her crib bars, toy bins, and now walls. Lately, she is showing improved balance, and can even stand for short periods before plopping down on her bottom or on her hands and knees. Still, her favorite activity is still to take our hands and stagger around like Ted Kennedy on St. Patrick’s Day.

In other news, Anna’s fever subsided and she actually went to school two days this week. In a related story, Tara now has a fever. Be sure to tune in next week when mom or dad will undoubtedly be sick. Ah, parenthood.

The last month or so has seemed terribly busy for me, and I can’t really say why. What I do know is that I have felt completely out of it; like I have been tremendously occupied with this routine of moving kids from place to place and going to work and coming home and making mediocre, last-minute dinners, and fulfilling obligations.

Tonight, Anna (who is still sick) was cleaning up the dining room (”spring cleaning,” as she called it) while I sat at the table processing a stack of outgoing Christmas cards nearly a foot high. When I realized that it was getting late and that I should start getting Anna ready for bed, I told her so. “I’m busy, Dad. Let me finish cleaning up first,” was her reply. I managed to pick my jaw up off the floor before she swept up with her broom, and return to the Christmas cards for a few minutes. “Anna, it’s time to go up,” I said. Without looking up she ran out to the laundry room and came back with the dustpan, “I’m almost done, I’ll be ready in just another minute.”

It has always been entertaining to see Anna imitating us, using the same facial expressions, phrases, and physical gestures, and she was brushing me off using the same language I’ve used with her. To be sure, this is not nearly the first time she’s been “too busy” to go to bed, but this time it struck me a little differently, to realize that her interest in Mom and Dad is on the decline. It made me uneasy for a moment, and I paused, staring at the stacks of photos and envelopes and stamps and labels in front of me. “Anna,” I said, “you’ve done a wonderful job cleaning up the dining room. Let’s go upstairs and read a story.”

On Saturday, Anna had a fever, which I attributed to the flu shot she had earlier in the week. Sunday morning she was pretty much back to normal other than a continued runny nose, but her temperature shot up again before bed. Today, she has been up and down between 101-104.5 degrees, but she has been feeling pretty well despite the temperature. Jen took her to the doctor, and the initial strep test was negative.

Tonight was the preschool holiday show; Anna didn’t go of course. Bummer. She had been practicing for weeks.f

Hopefully tonight doesn’t go too badly. We had a good sleep streak going.

I would have thought that the Wall Street Journal would have some of the finest customer service on the planet; after all, their subscribers are some of the most powerful people in the world. In practice, the most powerful people have people to call the Journal for them, so the service is just as crappy as every other company.

Nevertheless, I believe that I have four different editions of the WSJ on their way to me in hopes that one of them will have the article I appeared in. Now if only I could commission Noli Novak to draw one of those little hedcuts for me.

Update: As of 12/21, I received exactly zero copies of the Wall Street Journal. It’s officially time to print up my “I appeared in the Wall Street Journal and all I got was this lousy PDF file” t-shirt.

I’m trying to remember all the stuff that went on this weekend, but I’m sure that I’m going to miss a bunch. To me, it seems like all the weekends end up that way; we bounce from thing to thing, and lots of good, interesting stuff happens that I really want to blog, but I never seem to have time.

Thursday night, I was to go out and play volleyball, but the gym was closed, so I ended up going straight to the bar where the crew would have gone after the game. Friday was Jen’s night to go play at the same gym, and while the it was open, there was nobody else there to play. She ended up going for a walk.

Saturday, the two of us went out for a nice dinner in Del Mar. After two individual nights out, it was really nice to have some time together. Jennifer has done a great job of setting up date nights each week for the last month or so.

Sunday, our friends M. & K. dropped off their son C. for the night, as they were scheduled to give birth to their second baby early this morning (Monday). We still haven’t heard how everything went. As Jen was putting the two four-year-olds to bed, I went out to meet my friend R. As I write this, I’m realizing just how many nights I’ve been out this week–very unusual for a married-with-children guy like me. This coming week won’t be much different, as there are more evening events on the way.

Tonight, for the first time since college, I actually went into a library for the purpose of checking out books. As I spend time looking at great pictures on Flickr, I am very envious of some of the artistic ability of the photographers. I would really like to develop that ability for myself. I’ve generally approached photography as a way of capturing and preserving some of the beauty I see in the world. I would like to take the next step and develop the ability to create rather than merely capture. I checked one book on the history of photography; it has a nice selection of classic photos, and was one of the few books they had that was not about Ansel Adams. The other book was drawing tutorial; I think learning how to draw would help me plan out images I would like to create.