Belated Thanksgiving

We had a fun Thanksgiving this year - we had dinner with some friends and played games. Darren loved it because he got to share a plate with me - no baby food! Since I didn't take any pictures of Thanksgiving, I thought I'd post some pictures of our late October visit to Plymouth Rock. Very Thanksgiving-y, right? I thought so. Better late than never.

So, here's Darren (happily) hanging out at the rock. I...kind of expected it to be a little bigger, didn't you? There was a sign that I admit I didn't read, but I think it described how this is only a piece of the original Plymouth Rock.

Over the rock there's a structure with columns to give the whole thing a little more importance.

The bay at Plymouth was really pretty. Although not a whole-day's worth of things to do, it was a fun afternoon. We found a seafood shack for dinner - I tried some fried oysters, among lots of other yummy things.

Darren's First Halloween

Darren grudgingly allowed me to dress him up for Halloween. We went trick-or-treating to just a very few places on our street. Overall, I have to say that I enjoyed the whole experience way more than he did. I put his costume on and all was well for a few minutes...

Until things rapidly descended into this...

He was much happier once he could get out of the dratted costume.

Don't worry Darren! I promise you will enjoy future Halloweens much more than you did this one.

Here he comes!

Darren finally is scooting all over the place. It isn't exactly a crawl yet (well, maybe an army crawl) but we are very excited he is heading in the right direction. Check him out. All of us are enjoying the fact that he has his own little room now, too.

Christopher Cross's Biggest (and littlest) Fan

Paul used to work in a grocery store back in the day, so he is way too familiar with all of the soft hits that were played over the speakers. He put Christopher Cross's song "Sailing" on a CD that we were listening to while we drove all those miles across the country to move out here.

At some point, Paul began to notice that if Darren was crying, he would calm down if we played this song. I didn't believe him at first, but after trying it myself dozens of times, I can't deny it now, although it is so random. So after hours and hours of driving, if Darren started to cry we would put this song on every time. It was nothing short of miraculous the way the song would calm him down and help him go to sleep. No other songs work for him like this one.
We must have listened to it hundreds of times. Yes, I know all the words.

I had forgotten all about this until yesterday when Darren started getting fussy while we were driving home from the store on a crazy, rainy day. Sure enough, I put this song on, and he stopped crying within 5 seconds. Crazy, isn't it? Looks like he's going to be a 'continuous, soft hits' fan like his daddy.

our new home

I thought I'd post a few pictures of our new city. So far we are really enjoying being out east. Cambridge is just a few miles outside of downtown Boston, and it is a fun city to walk around in. In fact, since parking my car is usually a nightmare in Cambridge, I walk instead of drive whenever possible.

Here is our little lane in Cambridge.



Darren in front of our house, waiting for me to take him on a walk. Darren absolutely loves being outside, so I try to take him out every day. Our townhouse was built in 1920 - so it is almost 100 years old. i kind of like the oldness - it is definitely something new for us. But I do wish we had a dishwasher.
Our neighborhood is full of neat-looking old houses that have been really well preserved. Some of them are really big.
We live right by the Charles river. There is a walking trail on the side where I like to take Darren on walks.
I love the big trees of Cambridge. It will be beautiful when all of the leaves change colors.

We miss our families and friends, but are enjoying being somewhere new.

Our Late-Night Intruder

So here we are in Cambridge. So far, so good - we are starting to find our way around. It's a beautiful place to live, but more on that later. Last night I was happily sleeping, when Paul wakes me up. I looked at the clock - it was 2am. Not a time that anyone, anywhere should be awake.

Paul says to me "did you hear that bang?"
I shook my head, confused. I was already getting grumpy at him for waking me up.
Then he said "Do you hear that sound? Someone broke into our house. And they're in the basement, drilling or something."
I suddenly realized that I heard a sort of high-pitched whine, sort of like a drill. It was definitely some sort of machine. It was for sure coming from the basement. The townhome we live in has three levels, with the bedrooms on the top. There is a creepy-looking (but very useful) basement below where we keep our extra stuff.
Paul was convinced someone was down there - what else would account for the bang? And who with legitimate business would drilling something in our basement at 2am? I started to get afraid. After all, we did once have a teenage fugitive knock on our door in the night in California, who we proceeded to unwittingly help evade the cops. That's what you get for trying to be the Good Samaritan these days. That is another story entirely, but point being this: strange things have happed before on random nights. At any rate, I told Paul to go investigate the scary noise, as the man of the house. He started downstairs, and I decided to follow him.

As we went down through the kitchen and over to the door at the top of the stairs that lead into the basement, the sound was waaay louder. The sound was definitely coming from down there. So Paul tentatively opened up the door to the stairs, and we found our intruder.

It was the Swiffer Vac that I bought at WalMart the other day. It is a very handy item in case you were wondering, especially if you have lots of non-carpet flooring, as we do now. Anyway, one day after cleaning up I hung the thing on one of those plastic 3M hooks that you can stick to walls or wherever you want. I put the hook on the little landing at the top of the basement stairs. Apparently the Vac was too heavy and in the middle of the night its weight pulled the hook off the wall, sending the Vac tumbling down the basement stairs. In the process, the power switch somehow turned on. It is apparently powerful enough to sound really noisy in the middle of the night when everything is quiet.

So Paul looked at me, sort of like he was thinking about how I should have foreseen this whole chain of events and never hung the Vac on the wall. Lesson learned. And good thing it wasn't a real intruder. What did we think would happen? We didn't even have a baseball bat on hand to defend ourselves.

progress

We are getting sad that our fun time in Utah is coming to an end soon, although we are also excited for the new stuff to come. With all these people around all the time to hang out with, I've hardly felt like I had time to post anything this summer. (I'm sure all this will change once Darren and I are alone all day again- I'm sure I will also resume my old TV habits). But Darren is growing up so fast! Here are some of his latest developments:

Rolling! Darren is quite the roller these days. He is pretty mobile if he wants one of his toys badly enough. No crawling yet, although he sometimes lays on his tummy and flails his arms and legs all around like he might be getting the idea.

Darren is quite the stable sitter now. When he gets tired of sitting up he throws himself back because he doesn't know how else to get out of a sitting position.


teeth teeth teeth! He right now has six teeth already - four up top and two on bottom. All of the top ones decided to come in all at once.

Summer goes by too fast!