This one really isn’t as good as the one I can’t remember.

The kidlets and I visited some folks in town the other day, and for some reason, Liam was totally terrified of their dog. This was truly bizarre, because Liam generally loves dogs of all sizes … usually, the dogs need to be scared of him. But every time Liam spotted this tiny, fuzzy, friendly dog, his whole body would go rigid and he would emit a blood-curdling shriek.

Me, reporting back to the Husbandlet later: “I totally can’t understand it. Liam completely freaked out every time he saw that dog.”

The Husbandlet: “What kind was it?”

Me: “A little poodle.”

The Husbandlet: “The boy has good taste.”

Me: “It wasn’t all poodle … it was a mix of some kind. Cockapoo? Rottpoodler? Labrapoo retriever?”

The Husbandlet: “Rhodesian poodleback?”

Apparently, there is a reason for all the lush greenery of our new home. And if you don’t jump at every break in the rain to go outside, you might miss your chance for the next few weeks.

The Husbandlet and I had a very witty conversation yesterday morning, and I was all, “I have to blog this!” But now, I can’t remember it at all. It was witty, though! You would have been proud to know us!

Rhiannon won’t take a pacifier and isn’t terribly interested in giving her fingers more than a cursory mouthing. But! She LOVES cloth. It doesn’t even have to be in her mouth; if she can feel the soft fuzziness of cloth against her lips, she will smack happily at it, even in her sleep. Once in a while, she really scores, by figuring out how to get a handful of cloth into her mouth, and then there is bliss indeed.

Ngaire had another abdominal migraine episode on Sunday night. I kept her home from preschool just in case it was actually a stomach virus, but by about 8:30 that morning, she was fit as a fiddle and saying, “I feel all better. Now can I go to preschool?” Alas for her, not only did she have to take Monday off, her teacher is at a conference far, far away over Thursday and Friday, so she only got two days of school this week.

I used the four-wheel drive on our SUV, Persephone, for the first time today. “Roar,” said Persephone, and we totally conquered a big pile of torn-up dirt road, much to the delight of the kidlets in the back seat.

Speaking of the kidlets when they are in the back seat, we have discovered a new Sandra Boynton CD. I have to say that “Speed Turtle” is one of the Best Songs Ever, especially as it’s sung by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. I’ve always liked their sound. Ngaire likes “Singing in the Shower,” and Liam is especially fond of the Gorilla song (which is mostly just a lot of repetitions of “Banana”).

Due to a conveniently timed (for us) federal investigation into our moving company, it looks like we may be getting our belongings … they may not arrive for another month or so, but hey, at least they’re on their way.

Boy, I wish I could remember what that witty conversation was.

WHAT IS UP WITH THESE PANTS?

I am officially old. I do not understand the young of my species with their fashions.

Yesterday, on the way to preschool, Ngaire said, “There are so many pickup trucks all over my world.” Indeed, that is one feature the Frozen North can definitely boast. Also SUV’s.

Liam has a new favorite game: Under Liams (or “Juhjuh Mee-mins”) on the swing. Think underdogs, except as you run under him, you say, “Lightning McQueen!” And then Liam says, “Ka-chow!” The kid LOVES Lightning McQueen. If you ask him what his name is, he says, “Um, uh-Keent!” Everywhere he goes, he takes along his McQueen toy and also a toy ambulance. This leads to many fun times in the car when one slips out of his grasp and hits the floor. Oh, the weeping and the gnashing of teeth! And that’s just the Mommy, who is forced to feel around behind the driver’s seat to try and retrieve the fallen toy and make the crying stop, good gravy, while simultaneously trying to keep the SUV on the road.

Rhiannon is just about the most perfect baby in the history of the world. She smiles, she croons and coos, she laughs, she rolls over from back to front and is making intense efforts to start scooching. We’ve been going out wild blueberry picking whenever the weather is fine, and I wear her in a sling, with my rain jacket zipped over both of us, if necessary. Lately, her tiny hands have started shooting out of my jacket to grab passing blueberry leaves and twigs while I’m picking.

Ngaire is enthralled by all the wild berries to pick (we’ve also got some salmonberries around, which she and Liam love, though I haven’t acquired a taste for them yet). Both the older kids just look so natural in their new environment, scampering through the woods in various levels of rain gear, stopping to throw moss in creeks whenever Mommy and Daddy spot some especially laden bushes and stop to harvest for awhile. We’re freezing the berries, so far. Next year, I will have to learn how to can. I’m also making blueberry pie frequently; Ngaire, of course, was a fan from the start, but Liam had to be conned into taking his first bite (I threw him off by offering him crust with increasing amounts of berries mixed in, until he tasted a mouthful of just berries, paused thoughtfully, and then said, “More that?” Now he asks for “blue pie” all the time).

Speaking of which, before we left our old home, I had Liam tested for celiac disease, trying to explain not only his frequent, frequent non-virus-related diarrhea, but also why an actual stomach virus hung on with him for over a week (we’re talking diarrhea and vomiting for seven days, folks) and wiped him out for even longer. His blood work came back negative for celiac’s, so I stopped thinking about it. But after we moved, he started eating even more bread than ever before, and not only did the diarrhea come back in earnest, but he also broke out in a full-body rash that is still around two weeks later. Poor kid. So I’m taking him off gluten for a week or two to see if that helps. If not, we’ll have to start brainstorming what else could possibly be going on.

We’re still living in an almost completely empty house, because a) we sold most of our furniture before we left and have not yet found enough stuff at yard sales to replace it, and b) our moving company turned out to be scammers who have filled our last couple of weeks with threats and verbal abuse, as well as withholding our belongings in some unknown location, in an attempt to extort nearly $11,000 from us. So that’s been fun. I’ll blog more on this subject once everything … turns out.

Aside from that little glitch, we’re settling into our new stomping grounds pretty happily. More pictures to come once I take them.

Poor, poor neglected Ngaire: Her birthday was over a month ago, and I’m just now getting to her birthday post. She started preschool on Monday, and I was all, “Hey! I can blog about her birthday when I lovingly document her first day of school!” but here it is, days and days later and

AAAAAUUUGGGGGHHHH!!!

* We interrupt this post to squish a large, juicy cockroach who apparently stowed away with us on our move. Our old kitchen was full of them, and we keep finding a few who hid in our computer cases, booster seat, etc. Horror! *

Whew.

Anyway, here goes.

We celebrated Ngaire’s and Liam’s birthdays together at a local playground … local to our old home, that is … with cheesecake and brownies. It was definitely a great venue for a little kids’ party … plenty of play equipment and outdoors for sugar-high frolicking. Some time earlier, we had played birthday party with cake and candles made out of Play Doh, and the kidlets were so excited to be celebrating for real. They acted like old pros at the whole candle-blowing-out thing.

I can’t believe how grown up Ngaire is getting … her speaking and reasoning improves all the time. She is still incredibly strong-willed and we have some discipline issues from time to time, but it’s so much better. She has started asking us for stories, supplying the main characters and ordering up major events. She has also developed a Disney princess fixation and an inclination for pink.

She can count accurately to 16 … after that, it gets a bit chancy. We’ve talked a lot about peoples’ special letters, and Ngaire now goes around spotting her special letters on signs (“Mommy, I see an ‘i’! That’s one of my special letters!”), spelling her name out loud to people who ask what she’s called, and pointing out the numbers in road signs.

Our new little Frozen Northern town has a little Christian school, and we decided to enroll her for preschool. I homeschooled her last year, and, while I adored the curriculum and Ngaire was excited for the extra Mommy snuggle-read time, I found that my other attempts to teach her often met with major resistance. Ngaire seemed to feel like direct one-on-one tutoring put her on the spot, and she would dig in her heels. Then I put her in Vacation Bible School for a week this summer, and oh my goodness, the difference in her demeanor. She was so excited to go to school each day, and her behavior was pristine for the rest of the day after I picked her up. That combined with my own increasingly claustrophobic feelings toward being totally in charge of my kids’ education convinced me that we should consider putting her in school. And one thing you can say about private school in our new hometown: It’s cheap.

Anyway, Ngaire’s first week of school has been an unmitigated success. She can’t wait to go every day. Liam definitely misses her during her three hours away and has expressed a wish to join her (“Ngaire preschool? Preschool too?”). And the Husbandlet and I simply can’t believe that we are the parents of a big four-year-old preschool girl.

Here are the older ones just before we took Ngaire to her first day of school … they are standing next to our new SUV, Persephone. Note how tightly Ngaire is clutching her new Princess lunch bag.

The day before (of course), Ngaire was climbing on some rocks, slipped, and put a nice hole in her chin:

Now Rhiannon would very much like me to finish up this post and nurse her, already.

Well, we made it to the Frozen North, and holy cow, is it beautiful here. We arrived last Tuesday after a 17-hour trip that included three plane-switchings and the excitement of almost missing our connecting flight in Chicago and the creativity involved in trying to eat a Wendy’s Mandarin Chicken salad on a plane without a fork. We brought Liam’s carseat on the planes with us, and that was one of the best decisions we have ever made … instead of writhing, wiggling, and fleeing up and down the aisles, Liam sat quietly (well, mostly) in his seat, sucked his fingers, and slept on every flight but one. Indeed, all three of the children were positively angelic in their behavior. The Husbandlet and I behaved pretty well, too.

We arrived in our new town and were met at the airport by a nice man from the Husbandlet’s new work, but none of our luggage. (It arrived seven hours later.) He introduced us to our new SUV, a blue Dodge Durango whom we have christened Persephone because of the number of months during the year that will be cold and dark here. Persephone took us to our new house, which is very big and currently excessively empty. It had also not been cleaned by the seller … I mean, it wasn’t that they hadn’t cleaned well, it was that they hadn’t cleaned at all. There were meat juices in the fridge, dog hair in the freezer, Kibble on the floor, hairs in the sinks, thick dust on every surface … Jordana became very meepish. (She also started referring to herself in the third person, an odd side effect.) Though I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of it, the sheer ickiness of the house and the dauntingness of cleaning it after two weeks of nonstop cleaning and packing at our old abode led me to contact our realtor and ask her to negotiate some cleaning assistance from the seller. The seller obligingly sent over her 18-year-old, and between the two of us, we knocked out the main level of the house and I made a start on the upstairs. I haven’t begun on the lower level (not really a basement; the house is built on a hill), but we have no reason to go down there as yet, anyway.

The scenery is absolutely glorious here … the Husbandlet arranged to start work August 31, so he has a couple of weeks off as we settle in, and we’ve spent a lot of the time taking long walks and picking salmonberries and blueberries in quiet, mossy woods that overlook the bay. I think it’s the combination of a big house and a magical out-of-doors that must account for the fact that the kidlets don’t seem to be having any angst during their adjustment to a new place. Liam woke up crying during the first two nights … but he woke up at 2 a.m., which would be his normal 6 a.m. wakeup time back on the East Coast. Once he started sleeping through the night here, Ngaire began having night terrors, waking up screaming and asking for a snuggle once a night. Rhiannon (who, let it be noted as I’m unlikely to get to the gleeful post it deserves, is now rolling back to front and front to back, and has also started laughing) has had a couple of 12-hour-sleeping nights, and a couple of wake-up-a-zillion-times nights, so who knows.

Coming soon: The drama of our moving company. Until then, pictures!

After reading a book together, Ngaire and Liam and I were having a hug on the sofa. Ngaire said, “I love Mommy and Liam.” I said, “I love Liam and Ngaire.” Liam said, “And Baby On-in and Daddy.”

Ngaire made up her first poem on July 30. Note the logical consistency, which may not be apparent at first.

“I ate all my food,
I’m halfway done.
May I have a treat now?
Yum, yum, yum.”

Today, a big truck came and three guys emerged from it and loaded on most of our stuff. We’ll be following our worldly possessions to the Frozen North on Monday … that is, the Monday that is five days from now. We have been crazy busy (especially the long-suffering Husbandlet) wrangling the details of a house and car purchase, as well as attempting to sell our two cars here and navigate the myriad of other details associated with a move. But every step gets us that much closer. And on the other end, I will have high-speed Internet! No more sloooowwww dial-up! So perhaps I will blog more often! No promises, of course! Maybe I will just check Facebook a lot more!

The Husbandlet and I had an atypical courtship, the sort of courtship conducted by people who can’t get their act together enough to fall in love while living less than three thousand miles apart. However, when we did develop the serious hots for each other, those hots were hot, if also long distance (see above re: 3,000 miles). We were rather embarrassingly cuddly when together, and almost got arrested one time for making out in an airport car park in Virginia (Dear family members, Sorry you just read that last sentence. Love, Jordana). But most of our engagement was spent far, far apart, and as a result, we clocked in a lot of hours on the phone, getting to know each other in depth. I would never say that I had an exhaustive knowledge of the Husbandlet when we married—I don’t know that I would say that now—but for me, at least, all that talking established our relationship on a footing that was pretty different from any of my previous dating experiences. In other words, I pretty much bypassed the starry-eyes stage, replacing it with the incredibly-close-friendship-which-included-hots stage.

Our first year of marriage involved a lot of adjustments on both sides, but my moments of disillusionment were rare-to-nonexistent. Did I have the odd “What was I thinking?” moment? Sure. Did I occasionally think, “But this shatters all my ideas of his/our relationship’s perfection”? Nope.

One of the nice things about this is that I’ve gotten to see our marriage becoming more perfect, rather than mourning because it’s less perfect than I had imagined it would be. I’m not trying to set us up as some paragon of happily married life, but I can truly say that I love the Husbandlet so much more now than I did on August 3, 2003. And I’m even more in love with him, too.

Two Saturdays ago, we were falling asleep—I was particularly excited to do so, because Rhiannon was in her crib rather than in our bed—when the night was rent with Liam’s shrieks. We rushed in to find him covered with vomit. One problem with being married to an optimist is that I wound up cleaning up a lot of vomit that night (the Husbandlet: “I’m sure he’s done! Let’s put him back in bed/let him wander about the house!” Me: getting out the cleaning supplies again a few minutes later). But let it be duly noted that when we decided that one of us should sit in the bathroom holding Liam until he finished puking and fell asleep, the one who did so was the Husbandlet. Dates are fun, I love chocolate and jewelry, but best of all is being able to say with only a minimum of irony that I would rather take care of a sick child in the middle of the night with the Husbandlet than be wined and dined by anyone else on earth. Happy anniversary, my love.

Liam turned two on July 5, and of course it’s taken me until now to get his birthday post written.

On Monday, Ngaire started her first Vacation Bible School. The littler ones and I took her to the initial meeting in the church’s gym, then followed her to her classroom to make sure all was well (it was). Then I took Liam and Rhiannon outside to the church’s playground to make up (to Liam, at least) for the extended stroller time.

Their playground had not only a pole and a twirly slide, but a tall, twirly tunnel slide, AND a bouncy airplane on a giant spring.

Liam did his mischievous, exaggerated creep into the middle of the playground, where he stood, shouting, “Pole! Slide! SLIDE! AIRPLANE!” over and over. He was beside himself with ecstasy. He couldn’t even decide what to play on first. Eventually, he went for the plane, then tried to tear himself away, but kept getting off, walking toward the slides, and then running back to the plane. After awhile, he tried out the twirly slide. Then he clambered all the way up the stairs to the tunnel slide, came whooshing out the bottom with his hair on end with static and a huge grin on his face, and after that, it was a big loop: up the ladder, up the stairs, down the slide, repeat.

He has a new game, called “Mommy Down!” It involves climbing to the highest point of an arched ladder, letting himself down till he’s holding on by his armpits and elbows, then calling piteously, “Mommy Down!” When I go to help him, he pulls himself back up and finishes climbing. So I’ve stopped going to him, which, believe me, gets me some dirty looks from other mothers. Methinks he does this on purpose.

His new word is “Okay,” and he uses it appropriately. As in,

Husbandlet: “Liam, do you want a vitamin?”
Liam: “Vitamin! Vitamin too! Okay!”

At night, after I zip up his crib tent, I say, “Where’s Mommy’s kiss?” and he lifts up his little face to kiss me through the mesh. One night I forgot to do this, and a few minutes after I left the room, his cries of “Kiss! Kiss!” rang through the house.

Ever since I weaned him, Liam has had a fascination with my belly. He will come up to me and say, “Beep?” and then proceed to lift my shirt, pull down the waistband of my pants, set the palm of his hand against my stomach, stick his two sucking fingers in his mouth, and relax for a few minutes. This is just One Of Those Things, as far as I’m concerned, and only becomes awkward when he wants to expose large portions of my vast, wobbly postpartum belly in public.

He has suddenly become rather picky about food. Some days, he seems to survive on animal crackers and fruit leather. This has led me to pick up some kinda-sorta healthier snacks at Trader Joe’s, snacks with the word “veggie” in their titles (even if, upon inspection of the ingredients list, one discovers that the “veggies” are limited to tomato and spinach powder). I’m beginning to wonder if he may have some food allergies that we haven’t pinpointed yet, because the little guy seems to get diarrhea an awful lot. So we’ll be visiting an allergist on Thursday, which I’m sure Liam will adore.

He really is just the sweetest, happiest, lovingest little boy. I’m so thrilled to be his mommy, to have this special relationship with a little guy who can light up anyone’s day just by walking up and turning on the full force of his smile. I love you, my little Stinker Pinker!

Liam got up from his nap this afternoon and had a snack. He took a bite of bread and said, “Nummy bread.” He drank some rice milk and said, “Nummy na-nuk.” Then he leaned over and bit his tray and said, “Nummy tray.”

All this after seranading me with “The Song of the Cebu.” He’s cute. I think I’ll keep him.