First Day of School

Dylan's birthday, T minus one week

I met someone this weekend who asked how old my baby was. I said almost two, and she said oh, that's not a baby, clearly incensed by my false advertising. Now that I've been straightened out, there are going to be a few changes around here. For one thing, people who are not babies can tidy up for their own birthday parties, thank you very much.

Two, plastic bags are totally fine to play with.

Three, mimosas.

Also, it's time to learn how to break a stick over your knee like a real man.


And finally, it's time to undergo that rite of passage where we put a picture of your face on a cake and then cut it up and eat it.

Aaron pointed out that ideally the picture on the cake would have been Dylan eating last year's cake, but there's always next year.

Does it count as multitasking if one of the tasks is being awake?

Hey! You know what I hadn't thought of? Using the 3-4am time slot to write posts. Thanks to Dylan to making sure I didn't sleep through this opportunity.

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Dylan took her cue from the terms 'charming' and 'easygoing' and ran in the other direction as fast as she could. She declined to let me make dinner, even when offered the job of MICKING the EGG. Then she declined to eat dinner, let me remove her bathing suit, or let more than two minutes pass without emitting some kind of painful whine. I myself have spent the last two days whining, so I guess I can't complain too much.

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Did you see the article on food in the Finger Lakes? Anything that describes the Finger Lakes as the juicy center has got to be worth reading. She went to a bunch of our favorite places, so we must be on the right track in the stuffing our faces department.

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Dylan apparently hadn't realized that Uncle Josh and Uncle Ducky were two different people, not just one big fun unclejoshyduck. So that led to some initial skepticism and confusion when she saw them both in the same place this week. I think we've got things mostly worked out, but this is a kid who still mentions the plane that daddy works on most days.

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One interesting side effect of the driveway has been that we realized we actually had a front door. Visitors to our house may have noticed the somewhat annoying backup at the side door as we make everyone remove their shoes due to our longstanding cultural tradition of not wanting to clean very often. There is a lot more space at the front door, so I think this is going to allow for some innovative developments in entering the home such as: not tripping over a big pile of shoes and not being outsmarted by the foot pedal baby gate.

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Dylan has been up from midnight to 4am two of the past three nights. Please send help.

Flight path

Turning in my key

Here is our fridge. I draw it to your attention not because I still think of it as our cool new toy (although you know I do) and not to point out our cool new super strength fridge magnets (thus allowing for the display of 300% more 'artwork'), but to point out the presence of the newest fridge-dweller:
Up until this afternoon this name tag marked the doors of the four offices that I have inhabited in my department over the past three years. Okay, technically this name tag is a newer, fancier recent replacement for the name tag that marked the doors of my four offices, but the point is, now it's on the fridge. And my key, after a week of hedging and avoiding and negotiating one more week of office time, is now in the hands of one of the incoming graduate students. Or would be, had I been considerate enough to return it at a reasonable hour of the afternoon. It has been so many years since I first started there that it is going to take a real effort for me to remember that it is no longer an option to wander down the block to work at all hours of the day or night.

I seem to have passed my audit by the quality assurance branch of the ethics board this morning with no problems, but I have to say, the very fact of being audited by the ethics board makes you feel like you must have done something unethical. But those are the kinds of things I am unlikely to detail on the internet.

This week has been a scramble to get everything together before I start medical school again on Monday. I had wanted it to be a scramble of dissertation writing, but it ended up being all logisticating all the time, including many rounds of Where In The Neighborhood Is The Car Parked Now?, a game born of the the combination of the new driveway and our street's No Parking, Now Or Ever policy.

When I was writing my dissertation proposal, I fell into a schedule where Dylan would go to bed and I would work for another few hours in the evening. In trying to get the rest of the damn thing written I have been on the same all-work-all-the-time-makes-Kate-sort-of-whiny schedule. This time it seems more intense, and when I can't even find 15 minutes (or, um, longer on occasion) at the end of the day to put together a blog post I know I am stretched thin.

Luckily for my mental health, Dylan has been particularly charming and easygoing lately. I think it's the talking, like when she started being able to crawl, she's just so happy to be able to express herself. It is so easy and fun to spend lots of time with her, although she was sort of a mess today because she was tired, as evidenced by an episode of sitting down on the sidewalk on the way home and whimpering about the Sunder that woke her up from a nap several weeks ago. For a while I found it absolutely impossible to do anything in the kitchen with her around, but now I just have to give her a job and I can get a lot done.
She LOVES the new driveway, and stood chatting happily with it a couple days ago for longer than I would usually consider normal for a two-year-old's (almost!) attention span. When we parked the car on it for the first time today she jumped for joy.

Next week she is also moving on, after almost a year in her current room at daycare. She'll be in the two-year-old room with her buddy from the pictures from the other day, and we are excited for her. We are slightly less excited for me, because I will be exchanging years of 100% freedom and autonomy for...not those things. I am also taking a gamble that I will be able to finish my dissertation in the next six months or so even with med school, and it is something I am about 90% certain about, but we'll have to see how it goes. So anyway, one way or another things are going to be very different around here, and I think I will try a little harder to find 15 minutes every day.

This is what happens when you let the child watch Olympic Trampolining

Welcome to Snuffsterpiece Theatre

Two-headed two-year-old monster

Assorted

Is anyone else finding it difficult keeping track of what day it is, Olympics-wise? At night we get to watch stuff live, then we wake up the next day and the news is about the same stuff and other events that happened 'today.' As long as we're on the topic, where am I, anyway?

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I finally figured out what is bugging me about Michael Phelps. Anyone watch Heroes? Hmmm?

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I had one of my best ultimate games ever tonight. It would be better for me to have one of my best dissertation-writing evenings ever, but we take what we can get around here.

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At daycare, all the little girls coming running up to you when you walk in and smile and want to play. They all seems really cute and sharp, like they know what's going on. Meanwhile, all the little boys are these little roly poly butterballs who always seems to be doing the one-year-old equivalent of running into each other with pots on their heads. Aaron says it's just like a Simpsons episode and at this point I just smile and nod at such comments. Also, Dylan's moving up two classrooms in a couple weeks, to the two-year-old room. Actually it's the same week I'm going back to med school. We are going to have some grumpy and disoriented Bleisengirls around here in a couple weeks.

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The various and sundry noises and rattles that entertained me during all the driving last weekend turned out to be not bells and whistles so much as alarming signals from things such as: brakes. And tires. Many many dollars worth of brakes and tires.

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Speaking of many many dollars going to not fun things, they're paving the driveway this Friday. I've gotten a lot of questions re: are they finished with the driveway because it seems like they ripped it up and put some gravel down and skipped town, but just stop asking questions, okay?

DYLAN PRETTY DRESS

The Weekend: A Timeline: In colons

Friday Morning: Give comprehensive presentation regarding: all the problems I encountered in my field work [Title: Lost in Translation(al Research)]

Friday Afternoon: Scurry off to Ithaca (Dylan: "All Done Car")

Friday Evening, 7, 8, and 9pm: Put Dylan to bed

Friday Evening, 9:30pm: Attend 10th reunion, speak to several people I am not married to

Friday Evening, 11:00pm: Back at the house: Break up the party, wrestle Dylan to bed

Saturday Morning: Re-present presentation for family, enhanced by hooking computer up to new HDTV and also by intense grilling by: family members

Saturday Morning, again: Leave Aaron and Dylan in Ithaca to drive to a wedding in New Hampshire, home of the two lane winding road

One Hour After Arrival: Attend wedding (Congrats guys!)

Meanwhile: Aaron and Dylan attend more reunion activities, Dylan declared cutest child in secret unspoken ballot

Sunday Morning: Back to Ithaca, more driving through alarmingly deep waters during a sudden thunderstorm

Sunday Afternoon: Watch Olympics on HDTV, which I always thought was a scam but now I understand is a way to bring families together by getting everyone parked in front of the TV far more than usual

Sunday Afternoon, later: Back to Rochester, get caught in traffic for much of the way, like we live in a major metropolitan area or something

Sunday Evening: Move out of my office at school using Dylan's little red wagon, narrowly beat newest thunderstorm to rapidly descend this weekend

Sunday Evening, later: Bed! bed bed bed bed bed night night

Tip

If you marry someone in your high school class you will always have someone to talk to at your high school reunion.

the artful dylan

We are heading out town this weekend in a convoluted plan that involves all of us going to Ithaca and time with all three sets of grandparents and then a side trip for me to a wedding in New Hampshire. I have been spending so much time working at my computer in the evenings that spending time packing tonight feels almost luxurious. And working on a talk I'm giving tomorrow. Also, moving out of my office at school. That feels less luxurious.

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Dylan says her name all the time now. It is indistinguishable from "dinner" so you have to be on your guard to catch it. It is used most often in the phrase "Dylan help." She actually is quite helpful because when she is helping she is occupying herself with an activity other than "clinging to my leg and whining." Actually she is so fastidious that assigning her repetitive boring tasks is usually a wild success. I often generate a never ending pile of her laundry that needs to be brought to her room, which she will shuttle over piece by piece. Last time I did this I went in her room to put it in her drawers and couldn't find it because she had already shoved it all in one of the open cubbies in her room. Today when she found an empty box that had had some snack food in it she broke it down unprompted and put it in the recycling. This morning I was looking for Snuffy's food dish and wondered aloud where it was. She was like Car? And she was right, we had had it in the car the night before when we went to the park. She remembers other stuff too--this morning I was reminiscing about a bike ride we had a full week ago where we had a picnic by the canal, and I figured she wasn't really following but it was still nice to talk about. But then she said Ducks!, which I hadn't mentioned but we had spent a while talking about them while we were there and haven't seen since. It still feels bizarre to have her be so...sentient.

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I am starting to notice a pattern here...

dogs dogs dogs

ahem, dylan






shadowdog

Training Day

Back, for now

Hey! I actually thought to myself today, "I miss my blog." (That makes me sound cool and mysterious, right?) I have been so oddly devoted to posting every day, and usually I only miss days when things get crazy around here (= we are traveling and Dylan stops sleeping) and as of a couple weeks ago it's been two years of Bleisenblog. So. Taking even a few days off like that to do other work on the computer was weird. But I spent so many days completely focused on getting my projects written up that by the end of a long long evening the idea of one more mouse click was enough to send me over the precipice to the raging tantrum that's always just around the corner here at two-year-old Bleisenblog. Or is that Dylan? Actually, she doesn't have many tantrums. She has other ways. Most of which involve slugging us. Now that she can pronounce sowwy we're making some progress.

Anyway, this afternoon I tossed my adviser 130 pages of rough, rough, half-finished draft and discretely sprinted the other way. There was a split second of relief, but I have finished maybe 60% of what I need to do with it to get a real draft done, so it's not that exciting, and regular posting next week is still on probation. You know what is exciting? This shirt I got Dylan yesterday at the farmer's market.