Library Days...

We've been going to the downtown branch of the Providence Public Library every Tuesday for the last few months for a little story-time, a little playtime, some germs (two colds so far, picked up from glomming onto plastic foodstuffs...)

Zora really enjoys the stories, likes a bit of the toys, but more than anything, she likes to try and escape. At least three times a morning she tries to log into the librarian's computer and then, while I'm moving her away from the desk, she takes off for an attempt at the Young Adult wing. Or the doors. Or... Who knows?

I had the chance to record one of these forays. Enjoy!

Late Halloween Updates...

Halloween was two weeks long this year-- or so it seemed. Between the parade, a costume day at the library downtown (no photos, unfortunately) and the actual Halloween Candy Gorge, Z got a lot of chances to wear her R-made costume and smudge her face-paint.

Many thanks to our neighbor Diane for the great Halloween-night photos of Z. As you can probably tell from the first photo, chocolate was consumed. Yes.



And here's a non-Halloween photo... from last night, when Rachel threw Z in a basket of toys.

Halloween Parade

This is Z without her ears on doing her best lion growl.

Yesterday they held a little Halloween Party at the park. There was face-painting, beanbag tossing, sugary snacks, a pet costume contest (ugh), punkin'-chuckin' trebuchet, mutant elephants, potato people, a human fly and a giant ear of corn. Typical Providence.


Before she went away for the weekend, Rachel put together a cute little lion/cat costume for Zora. I bungled the whiskers, but most everyone got it. Some people called out "bear," so I had to show them her tail, but everyone thought it was cute.

A few photos from my camera (it's still on life support).



So there was a costume parade, which Z took very seriously. She insisted on walking most of it and had a shaker that she kept going most of the time. The Corn Guy led the parade and the Elephant and Potato guys showed up midway. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of their arrival, because it was pandemonium. Some kids burst into tears and some attacked them. It was a good show.

Tail end of the parade, where the insistent short-strides coagulated.





Here she is with another neighborhood toddler, Kyle. I've never known a kid (he's a few months older than Zora) who can speak like he can. I swear he uses the subjunctive better than I do.

...

The arrival of the Elephant Guy.



...

She fell asleep on the walk home, of course.

October update

This week, cousin Jamie's Bat Mitzvah in Jersey aligned with a long holiday weekend, our pending wood anniversary, and a desperate need to use up those accumulating vacation days. We've taken the opportunity to traipse up and down Route 95 a little bit, including several hours each getting over the George Washington Bridge and then the Lincoln tunnel. Zora really appreciated the opportunity to get an up-close, slow-motion look at our nation's crumbling infrastructure.

Even more so, she appreciated the foods of the Northeast Megalopolis, with great gusto. At the Ethiopian place in New Haven Friday night, Doro Wat was a great hit, as were lentil samosas and great wads of injera. We don't need to mention the chocolate cake for desert.

At the kiddush in Leonia, NJ on Saturday, she found that the flavor of the pickled herring in sour cream was very much to her liking, but not so much the texture. The challah, fruit salad and a black-and-white cookie were more her speed.

Saturday night in Brooklyn, Zora really appreciated the lasagna with home-made ricotta and fresh-baked semolina bread whipped up by Auntie Stef, not to mention the awesome gen-u-ine caesar salad created by Marc, with real anchovies and everything. After a short walk to Blue Marble ice cream, we failed to prevent her from consuming 3/4 of a butter pecan ice cream cone (Keem! Keem!).

Sunday morning, Zora was up for dim sum. Clams in black bean sauce, fried noodles, chive dumplings and sundry other delicious treats were a huge hit.


She really is surprisingly adept with chopsticks, and is very adamant about using them instead of a fork. There ends up being a huge mess, but we've got to laud her effort to be culturally sensitive.

She's pretty excited about the new shoes we found in the same neighborhood.


Chinatown was, frankly, a little overwhelming.

Wild Child

Zora cast aside the shackles when she awoke Saturday. She slipped out of bed quietly and decided to have an adventure. While her parents did the unthinkable, sleeping past 7 AM, she exercised her freedom.




WITH SOME LIPSTICK.

Here she is in the bathtub.

Events preceding an early bath, in play form:

R: ZZZZ.

C: ZZZZ.

R: Honey. Where's Zora?

C: ZZZZ!

Zora passes by bedroom door. Looks in. Walks toward box of cereal that is on the kitchen floor for some reason.
Z: Beebapo peez kay.

R: Oh. Do you want some cereal? Just a second. Honey. Hand me my glasses. You can't have that kind; that's Daddy's. You want some (Nature Happiness Brand O-rganic O's) O's?

Honey. Hand me my glasses.

C fumbles for glasses, hands them over to R. ...

R: OH MY GOD!

C: WHAT!

And... SCENE!
So not only did Zora try out her mother's favorite lipstick, she had to extract said lipstick from her mother's purse, which was on the table. The middle of the table. So she had to pull a chair out, climb on said chair, get onto the table, pull the bag down, get down herself...

Yes, we really dodged a bullet. She could have done anything! Thank goodness(???) she covered half of her face in lipstick.

Once her face was on she got a little hungry and tried for my Honey Nut Cheerios. She couldn't get them open. This was also on the kitchen table, though we found it on the floor-- next to a couple of packs of English muffins, both packages with torn plastic and smeared lipstick all over them.

The Cheerios:


At some point during or after the lipstick application she came in to pat our bedsheets, no doubt an homage to the art found in Chauvet Cave.


Which is done by a toddler covered in lipstick and which is done by our Paleolithic cousin?


Just to erase the image of the the wild child drinking her own bathwater-- hopeless-- I've included a photo from just a few days prior, when her face was clear and all seemed right with the world...


In case you're wondering, it all came off fine. It even came out of her hair!

Briana: She's Gone! :(

Folks, that's my first-ever emoticon right there in that title. Something about the occassion calls for a... symbol that expresses the profound sadness we're feeling today, so I had to bust it out. To reiterate, :(

I took Briana to the airport this morning at five-ish. Got a call later in the day saying she made it back to Akron where I'm sure they gave her a welcome-home parade and her parents will lavish her with attention before she heads off for her sophomore year at Toledo U. Some life.

Despite the fact that our apartment is so small, and Briana's nocturnal schedule was sometimes... tricky, I already miss her and the apartment seems a little sad without her. Sure, there's a decided lack of bad music coming from laptop speakers, but... we miss her.

At dinner I mentioned her name in conversation with Rachel, and Zora began to look very concerned. She went to what was Briana's room, checked it out. Looked out the kitchen window. Asked to look out of the bathroom window. Pointed off into the distance. It made me kind of sad to think that her memories of Briana's visit will probably be occluded by words when she gets them, and the pile of memories she's bound to put on top of this summer, but I suppose that's the way it goes. I remember blurred images from what must have been my first couple of years, so maybe she'll remember Briana picking her up, or blinking into the late-morning light, or quietly eating a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, or falling asleep next to her car-seat on rides from the beach. Who knows? I'll remember them, at least.

Briana was always very sweet with Zora; very patient and sharing. Here she is helping Zora with her hair. You'll notice you can see the floor in this photo, so I think that might date this image back to the first couple of days of Briana's visit, before she unleashed her shoe collection.



And here she is with Zora at SoundSession, wherein Providence introduced its funky self to Briana. We hope she makes it back for next year's parade!

Sorry for such a long delay, folks. A broken camera (many good years, several bad drops) and a busy life have kept us from posting for a loooooong time.

Luckily, our neighbor Ben has a fancy camera on his phone and shot some pictures of Z down at the corner store. She was hanging out with Megan (our awesome upstairs neighbor-- the best and perhaps only good thing to come out of Pennsylvania, really) while R and I were at a class.

ANYWAY, the photos. Thanks, Ben, and thanks, Megan.

This one is a little creepy because she looks like a teenager. Sort of. She's holding a Wiggles doll (property of the store, really) that has been modified for S&M. He had a gingerbread gal as a top, but I don't think Zora's found her yet.


She is... perplexed by this guy, but asks to see him every time we go to the store (hourly, some days).


And here's the cutest picture I've seen in a minute (slang minute)-- Megan and Zora in the park. They took a walk with Ben and reportedly Zora was a huge hit with the wandering Christian missionaries who set up next to the playground occasionally and sing evangelical hymns in Spanish. For some reason they always steer clear of me when I'm out there with Z, but apparently Megan looks like she could be saved.

Finally, here's a link to a little video of Zora dancing with some other kids in the park. She's got the same dress on, but it's a different day. What can I say? We get a lot of use out of this dress-- it's awesome. Her auntie Stef got it for her!

TTFN, friends, family and neighbors.

PS. I just looked at that video, and damn if she hasn't grown a foot since then! She looks like a baby, whereas now she looks like a little kid.

Memorial Day Visit to Brooklyn...

... where we visited Auntie Stef and Onkel Manny. And Zeke (Zeek?) and Zelda (not pictured).



We did a lot of traveling.

Walking and eating a scone.




Fort Greene Park

Prospect Park, Memorial Day

Discarded (dud) water balloon. I sincerely hope it was a water balloon.

Enough with the photos.

Happy Mother's Day Picnic

Okay, I didn't get any of the actual picnic, but it was very nice. We had it out at Breton Point, where it was blustery and sunny. Look how happy and full this kid is! She ate her weight in olives. Look how little hair she has at 16 months! Ridiculous.

Flying a kite with Mary (Grandmom).

Holy Smokes!

I guess there's no way to make up for lost time, but here goes.

Sorry for the delay. We're all doing fine. The baby (not so much a baby anymore) is doing really, really well, though she's not talking much. I mean, she makes tons of noises and busts out the occasional "Mama" and "Dada" and "ball," but really, I expected more, and her sentence structure is horrible. She is experimenting with her eyebrow and forehead expressions, and the other day looked at R and I, scrunched up her face in mock soulful pain, and sang, "Ooooooh." I have no idea where she got that.

We got a bike seat for her and she seems to enjoy it a great deal. It sits on the front of my bike rather than the back and she makes for a terrific windbreak.

Okay, some photos. I hope someone is still looking at this blog!


Howard and Mary come every week so Rachel and I can slip out to the gym and get some exercise sans baby. Zora and Mary are the best of buddies.


Zora's Aunt Mary (of the Freed Clan in Virginia) sent Zora some egg-shaped shakers she LOVES. She's shaking them here. She appreciated the packaging almost as much-- a cardboard tube and a silk handkerchief.

I've been working on some clothing design. I call this one "Dress I."


Bike helmet!
R has been baking bread lately-- amazing bread. Zora is a fan of all food, really, but fresh bread with a little butter and a pinch of kosher salt? It makes her very happy.

It's a shame our neighborhood has no proper hills.
"Dress II"

Uncle Joshua wrestling Zora away from the computer.

Sunday Styles.
Bored baby.
Asleep with Zeppo, our 20-pound cat.