Rice Pudding is a Dish Best Served Cold

I don't know if that's really true. I just wanted to say it. Because I made rice pudding. With FORBIDDEN RICE (Aaron keeps saying he's not allowed to eat it, and then I ask him why. Similarly, every morning Dylan asks me if I'll pick her up and every day I say no, you're too big and I'm already holding Ollie, and then she stares at me, and then I realize she means at the end of the day). Because I'm not eating dairy again. Or chocolate. Because Ollie: it's time to man up about the gas thing, okay?

The rice pudding was okay. It was the kind of thing where you eat one bite and it's fine but then you keep eating it and it grows on you but you still don't really like it that much. You know what else doesn't have dairy? Melted peanut butter mixed with sugar.

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Two more travel stories and I'm done.

Dylan kept asking if our San Francisco plane was going to land in the ocean. We kept shushing her because STOP SAYING THAT AS THE PLANE IS LANDING. Aaron astutely realized that we had just spent five days watching sea planes take off and land from our hotel in Vancouver so it was actually a reasonable question. Answer: no.

The piece de resistance of our travel strategy was a personalized Dora book with Dylan's name and picture on every page. It was awesome. We stashed it away and carried it the whole trip and waited until she started melting down halfway through the five hour flight on the way home. She immediately perked up and was happy and cheerful for the rest of the day of traveling. We win parenting. I can't show you a picture because she stashed the book at school to show everyone, but I'll try to retrieve it tomorrow.

Dylan's adjusting back to east coast time pretty easily. Ollie remains on Hawaii time.

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Ollie has been scooting around the room for a couple weeks. He often ends up under furniture. It's like what I imagine having a roomba would be like. Today he took some actual crawling steps forward. I don't think he did any vacuuming though. Upon our return home it became clear that I do not need to refer to the archives for further instructions. It is time for the Not Quite So Little baby stuff. The baby gates have been called into service, as has the booster seat. The bouncy seat has been retired due to escapability. So has the cradle swing. We're swapping out to the bigger car seat as soon as we get around to it. One thing I've noticed is that when Dylan was starting to crawl we did not have a three-year-old around, dangling delicious choking hazards before the baby at every turn. Should make things interesting this time around. She's trainable, but not exactly open to criticism. There was much weeping this morning, for example, when I suggested that giving Ollie fistfuls of tissues was not a good idea, even though he had spit (spitten? I like it) up.