another milestone

Nina spent her first night away from both of us last night. I have spent one night away from her, but Larry was with her. So last night we had dinner at my mom's house, leaving Nina while we went contra dancing (more about that later). When we got home, Larry was banging around the house and I had to keep reminding myself that he was in no danger of waking her up. I walked into the bedroom where he was and said, "It's weird not to have her here." He replied that it was not new to him. Oh, right! He has gone on business trips without us and Nina and I have taken trips without him. It was just strange to me!

Anyway, we try to go dancing every week, so we hope Nina will spend the night at her Mima's house once a week.

wild kingdom in my backyard

First it was the raccoon, then a family of rats that I evicted from the compost pile last week, then a swarm of bees that moved into my sycamore tree (welcome guests, I love bees), now this morning I saw what seems to be a Cooper's Hawk (it was a raptor of some kind and the right size and colors to be a Cooper's hawk) in the sycamore tree. Sorry I didn't get a pic, but it might be the first time I saw a raptor that close not in captivity. It flew away before I was done looking at it (is there some sort of camera implant I can have so that I don't miss moments like this?).

it's all about the mental image

Lebanon is in the news often. And a lot of the time when the newscasters say Lebanese, I hear lesbian. It makes the news a lot more entertaining, though it makes a lot less sense.

Happy Chanukah!

You heard me right, we had a little early Chanukah in our house this weekend. For a while now I have been feeling inadequate because I don't play a lot of music. I remember that music was on a lot when I was growing up and I feel like it really helped me to love music. I thought a lot about why I haven't been listening to music much and all I could come up with was that it felt really inconvenient for some reason. There are cd's spread all over the house, by all of the little boomboxes I have and I can never seem to find the one I want, or then the cover to the one I am taking out of the boombox, you get the picture. The solution I came up with was to buy an mp3 player with big memory and just upload all the music to it and use a docking station with speakers. So when we went to Costco this weekend and they had the 80GB one for what seemed like a reasonable price, we decided to forgo Chanukah presents for each other and just buy it. I have been busily working on putting the music on it and am halfway through our collection (I have a lot of cd's from when I worked at Borders and got them free all the time). And I have been listening to music a lot!! Unfortunately, mine didn't come with Captain Jack Sparrow (I think that's false advertising, don't you?). Still a good investment, though. Anyone have a recommendation for a docking station that doesn't give them fuzzy ambient noise?

Big News!

Ok, so not in the grand scheme of things, but in our little house.
Nina slept all night in panties last night. A week and a half ago she asked if she could sleep in panties, so I told her we needed to get some extra sheets and mattress pads. They came in yesterday (being the geek that I am, I had to get organic cotton for each). So then we had a conversation about how it would work: I would open the door to her room and put a night light in the bathroom, and since we don't have any regular pajamas (footies only), she will sleep in panties until I can get some organic cotton ones. I didn't sleep very well, as I was always on the edge of sleep, listening. At about 5:30 am I heard her get up and go into the bathroom, so I got up to help her. Her bed was completely dry!!! I let her get into bed with us because I was pretty sure she wouldn't go back to sleep on her own, and we were both pretty excited. She didn't really sleep much (none of us is very good at co-bedding) but at one point she was spooning me with her leg hooked around my hip and onto my belly. It was priceless.

Yay!