An(other) Hour in the Life

In an effort to document our lives every so often, I've opted to take another hour and post it through pictures. Here is what life is like at the Hart household on an average Monday during one late afternoon hour.

The babies start the hour off by watching Baby McDonald or "eee iii oooo" as Liam calls it.


Nico contemplates, long and hard, whether he wants to eat some of his gingerbread house or leave it how it is. (And by "long and hard," I mean loooooooooooooooooooooong and hard. He was there for at least 30 minutes before this picture was taken.)


Ellie does her homework. She is very studious.


Having finally decided to eat his Christmas tree brownie, Nico does so and then goes off to spin on the office chair and look at his Ninjago cards.


Liam saw me eating a Gogurt and wanted one.



Anders saw him eating a Gogurt and wanted one.


Nico saw them eating a Gogurt and wanted one.

Being a frozen Gogurt, it gave Nico "Brain Freeze." Nico is pounding his forehead to alleviate the "Brain Freeze."


Ellie is doing her homework.



Liam is sad because he wanted more Gogurt.


Having seen me put the Gogurt wrapper in the garbage, he tries to retrieve it, hoping (I suppose) that there is more yogurt in it. As I'm not to keen on the twins excavating things out of the garbage, I blockaded it. Liam is doing his best to move my 100 lb. tower of flour. It didn't go very far.


Anders was very sad and needy and clingy, and therefore ended up in the backpack. Shocking.


Ellie is no longer doing her homework, but is instead doing a workbook of homework type stuff, all of her own choosing. This is after having regaled me, on the way home from school, with how much she hates school because they always give so much homework. Hmmmm....


Giving up on the flour, Liam attacks the Kleenexes.


Utilizing the assets at hand, Nico is either surrendering, polishing his sword, or raising the Title of Liberty.


Fresh from the backpack and ready for action (and apparently left unsupervised for a moment), Anders is joined by Liam in his exploration of the dining room table.


Ellie does more extra work.


Whining again, Anders goes back in the backpack.


"No, no, Liam." I'm not sure he knows what "no" means.



She "haaaattteeess" homework.


Still there.


Green Monkey!


Shortly before Anders tried to put this cracker in my ear. He's crazed for ears.


Really?!

Mine!


Ellie, finally done with her homework and extra work, pulls Nico and Anders around on a blanket. They LOVE this activity.


Liam likes it too.

My super-cool designer husband.

Okay, so you know your husband is a designer when his comment after watching "The Lion in Winter" is, "Wow, I really liked the font used in the credits!" Or how about when he gets his new cell phone and rhapsodizes about the packaging. "Someone put a lot of thought into this. This is great!" Or when he goes to put the new sim card in and rhapsodizes again about the inside of the phone being designed well. My husband is a designer.

And, he must be a good designer because he has an awesome new job starting Monday. In case you don't know, Alex has been the Director of Landscape Design for Manhattan for about a year now. No more. On Monday he starts as the second in command for landscape architecture for all of NYC Parks. My husband is cool. And smart. And awesome. And good at what he does. Congrats Alex on a job well done!

The Happy Dance

November deserves many posts, but I have not gotten to them yet. I will. In the meantime, please enjoy this. Liam does this dance whenever he gets really excited and also when asked to. Enjoy.

Mmmmm.... cookies.

It turns out that Alex "isn't a big fan" of chocolate chip cookies. He prefers them with lots of add-ins like nuts, and other bits of things. So, when Alex made a quick trip to Utah a couple weeks ago, I went ahead and had a Chocolate Chip Cookie-Off with some friends.

Each entry, and there were many, was rated on flavor, texture, chip-to-cookie ratio, and appearance. I must admit, I am a big fan of chocolate chip cookies and eating lots of them was a wonderful way to spend an evening!

The spread.


Ellie and Abby contemplating their ratings.


Nico contemplating his.


At some point, Nico turned to me and said, "Mom, I don't want to eat any more cookies." It turns out Miles felt the same way and off they went to play legos and playmobils instead.



All the contenders.



The winner turned out to be Alton Brown's "The Chewy." Mmmm... Good stuff!

Thank you to all the various Merceds and nee Merceds for a wonderful evening!

Onwards and Upwards: Part 1.

Anders = Upwards

Every morning, one of the first things I do is lay (lie?) all the chairs in my house on their side. Here's why:

random baby pictures!

It has begun.

School that is.

Actually it began a week and a half ago, but I'm just now getting around to this post.

Most years, I'm really sad to see my kids go off to school. I was still a little sad this year, but it was VERY apparent that Ellie and Nico needed a new project in life. And what better project than school.

Ellie started 3rd grade this year. At first she was disappointed she didn't get the teacher she wanted, but once she started, that has all changed. She loves her teacher. Ellie says she makes things fun. After meeting her at meet the teacher night, I can confirm it would indeed be fun to be in her class. Here's hoping it is still fun come June.

Nico started kindergarten. Yup, that's right, he's in school for real. Alex and I were a little apprehensive to see how he would do. However, our worries seem to have been needless (thus far), as he LOVES school. LOVES it. He gets excited to go. He comes home off the bus cheery. He's in his element. He did, however, ask me yesterday when he was going to learn something at school. I attempted to explain to him that sometimes the most important things we learn in kindergarten are how to be a student and how to be around other people. I think he was hoping for calculus.

And now, here is what you really came to this blog for... pictures!

Happiness is a green monkey.

Shortly before I left Utah, my mom gave Nico and Ellie green monkey stuffed animals. "Great," I thought, "something else to pack." Ellie and Nico however, really liked them, so I didn't even try to leave them behind as I did certain other plush toys (ahem LaRayne!).

Upon arrival in NY, the monkeys were happily slept with and were the animals of the moment for Ellie and Nico for a little while. Perhaps Anders saw the older kids carrying them around or perhaps it was the monkey itself. I don't know. All I know is that Anders got hooked. He carried it around all the time. He cuddled with it. He saw it in the swing once and climbed in to be with it. He laughed with it. He loved it. So much so, that we told Ellie she should consider giving her monkey to Anders, since in this case, possession was 10 10ths of the law. She graciously did give up her stuffed animal and Anders happily continued on with his monkey shenanigans.

Enter Liam. Liam is a bully. Liam routinely steals everything Anders has. If Anders has a toy, Liam takes it. If Anders has food on his tray, Liam takes it. If Anders has a binky, Liam takes it. Even if Liam already has his own binky, or food, or toy. Liam is a taker. Needless to say, Liam took the green monkey. Over. And over. And over. Anders was very sad.

All was not lost however, since there were two green monkeys about. Thus both babies happily tote around a green monkey. Nico even gave his monkey to Liam. Ellie and Nico are awesome big siblings.

Anyway, all this to explain why this is often the scene in our house:





Having learned super parenting skills from several friends, I asked my mom to get me a couple "back up monkeys" should one be lost, destroyed, or what not. They should arrive shortly. I simply do not want a Mino or Kiki incident on my hands in a few months.

Guess who Ellie and Nico have discovered...

This is how I find Ellie and Nico most mornings... and afternoons... and evenings lately. These giant tomes are the only Calvin and Hobbes books the library had. Ellie and Nico don't seem to mind.

Farewell, Irene

And that's about it! Irene turned out to be much friendlier than everyone feared. We suffered no real damage here, and most of our neighbors had a similar experience. A quick tour of the neighborhood showed branches everywhere and the occasional tree down, but I couldn't find any examples of damage to homes. From what I could tell, the only areas that flooded were right by the shore.

Transit in the NY metro area remains down, and will probably stay that way through tomorrow at least. Reports from friends and coworkers in the city suggest that damage was limited in there as well.

So, we are feeling relieved. This was a good practice run for the next big storm!

Irene is here!

We made it through the night with no adverse circumstances, although one neighbor lost a big tree. Our trees came through unscathed, and even the sunflowers are still up. But the main body of the storm is just now arriving, so we are not done yet. The wind is definitely picking up again out there.

Many on Long Island have lost power, but our neighborhood is still online. Crossing our fingers there. We had some heavy rain last night, but no flooding.

Irene's center is now predicted to pass directly over my office in Queens. I wonder how the Olmsted Center will do with that?

Update: LIPower says that out of 617,612 customers in Suffolk County, 206,997 are currently without power. Our power lines are still up, but we've had about five brownouts in the last hour. I suppose it's inevitable we will be added to the outage list at some point.

Irene's coming

As you may have heard, we are about to be smacked by Mother Nature. As I type this, just after 11pm Saturday, we can see the beginning of Hurricane Irene forming outside.

It's been calm here today, even with the mandatory evacuation of the south half of Patchogue (not our half, fortunately). There were a few little rain showers, but nothing to stop us from getting everything ready. Or at least as ready as we can be -- it's hard to know what to expect.

The forecast has changed from time to time. At the moment they are saying that Irene won't even be a Category 1 hurricane by the time it gets to us, merely a strong tropical storm. But those in charge are very worried about the slow speed of this storm, meaning it will be dumping lots of water. We are bracing for extended power outages and possible flooding. Unlike New Orleans, we're above sea level -- slightly -- and the island has a good pitch down to the bay. We also have the benefit of Fire Island between us and the storm, which we all hope will absorb a lot of the storm surge.

Still, what can you do but prepare as best you can and deal with things as they come up. Before I left the office Friday, we moved all the computers away from the windows and covered everything as well as possible.

My office is in a low-lying area, so it may well be flooded. Also, they've never really fixed the roof after last year's tornado drove several trees through it. Unfortunately we ran out of tarps, and had to cover documents with whatever we had at hand.

Naturally even a hurricane is no excuse to let any deadlines slip!

We spent most of the day today preparing everything here at home. Our garage sometimes has minor flooding issues, so I had to make some improvised dams. The Chevy gets to stay in the garage since it doesn't have comprehensive insurance.

Harriet also gets to stay in the garage. No insurance on her either.

Ami planted sunflowers that did really well this year. We will miss them. I'm also very worried about all the new plants I put in this spring, including some great (and expensive) trees.

The main body of the storm is supposed to hit us tomorrow around 8am. Right now it is raining lightly, with a light wind moving directly west. The clouds are moving much more rapidly. It's kind of eerie to feel such a little wind while the clouds race past silently. We are east of the projected center, and the storm is rotating counterclockwise. So the wind starts out east to west, then it will shift around from the south and end up west to east as the bottom of the storm comes up.

If we still have internet access, we'll give another update tomorrow during the day. If communications go out, don't worry, I am pretty sure we'll be fine here. We have lots of water, batteries, and enough food storage to last through several hurricane seasons (thanks Marge). So we'll try to put something up as soon as possible. Here we go!