Friday, January 28, 2011

Let the weaning begin...

I love Brooklyn, I really do. But in Winter? I understand why so many older New Yorkers flee to Florida as soon as they can.

Why?

Take a look at this picture I took outside my building.


That's the sidewalk & street.

Now, okay. Forget about driving. Who wants to dig a car out anyway? But walking? Try getting a single stroller through that mess, let alone my clunker of a double. So instead Mas, Eggberta and I have been trapped inside our once-spacious-seeming apartment for DAYS. All of our toys are boring.

But thank god for facebook/twitter: one status update and two friends I haven't seen since high school graduation in May '91 sent me a couple of recipes for home-made playdough. Sweet!

Mas is napping now--in his stroller, which is the only place he'll nap post toddler-bed transition--and so I took the opportunity to give little Eggberta her first taste of solid food: sweet potatoes. She loves it. In fact, take a look:


See that? She's grabbing the spoon and pulling it toward her face!

Unlike Mas at that age, who, upon his first taste of avocado promptly spit it out in disgust.


He likes food now, mind you. Particularly ice cream, but he'll also eat beans, lentils, and edamame. But man was it a hard row at first. He prefered mama's milk, you see. And food he could take or leave.

But I have high hopes for Eggberta. Two more days of sweet potatoes then we're moving on to avocados. Exciting times chez nous, non?

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Required Reading

Last night, after three rounds of The Hungry Caterpillar, I told now two-year old MAS that he could have one more book, then, yes, yes, it was bedtime after all. (Now that he's in a toddler bed, bedtime has become a series of carefully orchestrated negotiations and trade-offs. More on that in the coming weeks, though.)

So MAS toddles off to the bookcase where a series of his books & ours live intermingled. He spends a good minute or two carefully scanning the choices before he selects one and bounds back to where I'm sitting, a shit-eating grin on his face.

"Read," he commands and hands me this:



Wednesday, January 26, 2011

You're not going to believe it

Funny, reading that last post.

Two weeks after uploading that inspired little essay, I was put on modified bed rest. Fourteen weeks later my darling daughter Eggberta (don't worry, not her real name) was born via another emergency/scary c-section. How scary? They nicked my bladder during the surgery. I had to wear a catheter for a week while it healed.

The bed rest?  Sucked as much as you might imagine.

And here we find ourselves at the end of January. Little Eggberta will be 6 months old next week. Man. My mother was right: time speeds up as you age.

So yeah I lept. Lept and fell. Flat on my face.

Of course, there are a million stories lurking behind all that.  So many thing to tell, in fact, that I've been hesitant to even start. Plus, there's the full on catastrophe of trying to raise two kids so close in age in New York. Which also sucks as much as you might imagine. Especially in Winter. (For the record: snow + strollers do not mix.)

But I'm ready now. Ready to get back to blogging and writing and art-viewing whatever else it was I did before I stopped being just MinervaJane and became MinervaMommyJane.

So stay tuned. I have a lot to say.