Portrait

With the artist's permission, I have an image I want to share with you all:

From 2011 June

Isn't that a wonderful portrait of Nicholas? It just captures him so well--I can see the familiar gleam in his eyes and smile.

And the artist is none other than Nicholas' great-grandma Claire:

From 2011 June

I am so in awe of her talent!

Nicholas and Alice

We had to say a lot of goodbyes before we left Maryland. But the person Nicholas will miss the most I think is Alice. Alice's parents threw us a goodbye party and Nicholas and Alice had a blast.

They played a bunch of "Ring Around the Rosie," played ball, and went outside for a little bit to play t-ball.

From 2011 June

It was tons of fun:

From 2011 June

Alice was concentrating really hard:

From 2011 June

And Nicholas kept hitting the tee, which is pretty effective at making the ball move, but not exactly proper form:

From 2011 June

And I almost got a great shot of the two of them, but the camera tends to act up exactly when the kids cooperate:

From 2011 June

But this one is pretty good:

From 2011 June

This picture is getting printed and going in Nicholas' new room. And we already have plans to go visit Joe at least once when he is in Philly in the fall after Alice and her family move there. We are all going to miss Alice and her parents.

Halfway There

We have officially moved out of the Maryland apartment and have made it as far as New York. I am too exhausted to be sentimental right now, but so far so good. If everything goes according to plan we'll get into our new apartment tomorrow and the truck will arrive Thursday morning. If I can find the camera, we'll post pictures. I really hope I find it soon because I finally got a great picture of Nicholas and Alice and I want to put it up in his room.

M-Day

The apartment is packed. Nicholas is at my parents' house, probably begging to go outside to look for Sam and Sadie (the neighbor's dogs) every 5 minutes. The movers are late. I already cried once, when I opened the bare fridge.

Midwest 2011 Ottoville

Sorry for the delay in posting about the last leg of our Midwest adventure. I have been busy packing and taking a quick trip to NY to present at a conference. In fact, I am on the train home now and the physical inability to pack has created a bubble of free time.

Anyway, we had a great time in Ottoville. Stacy and Paul's wedding was the capstone, but Nicholas enjoyed the whole trip. He made lots of fast friends with members of Stacy's extended family and formed an immediate bond with Paul's godson who is close to him in age. When you ask Nicholas about the trip, he gives a list of names, talks about playing basketball (and the too many cars that were in the way), begs to go back to "Aunt Melissa's" to ride the tractor, and gets excited about "Aunt Stacy's party."

I think the second to last of those is the only one that needs any explanation. Nicholas alternated between calling Stacy's older sister "Miss Melissa" and "Aunt Melissa," even though I was only using her first name with him. I guess all women of that age in his life have one of those titles. He and I went down to her house one morning and she let Nicholas sit in her husband's tractor since he didn't have it out in the fields that day. Andy offered later to take Nicholas out in it, but the rest of our stay was so busy that we never got a chance. Nicholas was absolutely in love with that tractor and pretending to drive it. I was in awe of how huge it was. Unfortunately, the only pictures are on my phone and I am not tech savvy enough to get them off. However, I do have a picture of Melissa pulling Nicholas around in the toy tractor in their basement.

From 2011 June

It was a little tricky to navigate helping with wedding prep and a 2-year-old and I feel like I shortchanged Stacy some on my matron of honor duties. Thankfully one of our friends volunteered to watch Nicholas during the rehearsal and Saturday morning until Joe arrived, so I was able to be fully present at the most important parts. I am so grateful for that.

By the Ottoville leg of our trip Nicholas was running on fumes. So while he had fun, he also had points where the exhaustion and over-loaded weeks of activity caught up with him. The first night he had a couple accidents due to playing while exhausted, resulting in what I'm sure is the first of many scraped knees. He did such a number on it that it is still healing. Then the second night he had the worst meltdown of his young life. He got himself so upset at the idea of going to bed that he could hardly breathe. And the screaming was so out of control that if there had been neighbors instead of cornfields all around us we might have had problems.

But, in typical Nicholas fashion, he pulled himself together for the wedding.

From 2011 June

Aided by a long nap between the ceremony and reception, he partied hard, having a blast dancing with the other kids.

From 2011 June

From 2011 June

From 2011 June

Joe and I didn't get to dance much, though, because apparently a week alone with me made Nicholas a little jealous. Every time Joe and I tried to sneak in a dance during a slow song, Nicholas would abruptly stop whatever he was doing, demand to be picked up, and then push Joe away, saying, "no, Daddy!" It was hurtful to Joe, I'm sure, but I do understand where the little guy was coming from. The whole week the two of us had been a team, taking on all sorts of crazy adventures together. And here was someone trying to butt in. Joe and I did get 2 swing dances, I think mostly because Nicholas was too busy trying to figure out what we were doing to interfere.

But, really, how handsome is this little guy?

From 2011 June

Because we were so anxious about getting the packing done, we pushed and made the drive home in one day. By the end Nicholas was going a little stir crazy. Joe took this video of him playing rock, paper, scissors with himself:

From 2011 June

This is a little boy who is very sick of long car trips.

Nicholas is still trying to recoup from the last few weeks. He has been taking 3-hour long naps, something he hasn't done in probably close to a year. I am so grateful that he has been spending most of his days in the calm normalcy of my parents' house. This gives him a brief respite before we head out on our next adventure next week. But as much fun as we have all had this month, I think we will all be happy come July 11th, when Nicholas starts his new school and we can establish a routine and begin to develop a new normal.

Owning the Move

Though Nicholas is a very bright two-year-old, he is not anywhere near ready to grasp the full implications of moving yet.  However, he's very observant, which means he's started to notice that something is not right (and not just the obvious, such as the high and deep stack of boxes in our living room and his bedroom).

Given all of that, we're trying to do at least some preparation to get him ready for the idea of living somewhere else.  Oddly for us—and a sign of how busy and stressed out both Sarah and I are—we have not consulted any writings on the topic from child psychologists, experts in travel, etc. Basically, we've tried to do what we always do with Nicholas: we explain things so that he can exert ownership over a situation.  It's proven to be the only way that he really calms down and accepts newness.

So today Nicholas and I had a little conversation on our way to Home Depot for more boxes about our new house (NB: it's really an apartment, but saying "house" seems more natural).  That he would get to have his same toys, and the same furniture, etc.  All of them are coming with us!  It also helps that he finds Boston a very cool place, since last time we went on an airplane.  Though we have had to explain that we're driving this time.  I'm not entirely sure it's the "right" thing to do with a two-year-old to emphasize that we're leaving and that we'll be someplace new, but my gut tells me it's right for this two-year-old.

And just in case he gets a little nervous about being in a new space, Sarah and I are already scheming for a few gimmicks to make him feel more comfortable and/or to distract him until he's had time to settle in.  First, Sarah's parents are making the trip with us [ed.: THANK YOU!], which will help at least functionally so he doesn't get run over by furniture and its movers. Second, we tried to pack in accessible places some of the things he uses as safety cues, such as the wall quilt that hangs in his room, some of his favorite toys, etc. And if those fail, there's always distraction: we'll live across the street from a small airfield, where we may make a few visits early in July, and getting a library card is very high on our to-do list.

We'll see how it all works, and of course as we have time will blog about it in order to share and/or bore the living daylights out of you. [ed.: also pictures!]  Whatever happens, it will be interesting, and since Nicholas is pretty resilient, I'm confident he'll be fine.

Home

We're home. After 1800 miles of driving, most of it just me and the little guy, we are definitely glad to be out of the car. Nicholas was a little disturbed that his room was mostly dismantled and kept walking around the house saying "too many mess," but when I put him in bed he stretched out (the pack n' play is getting really tight), smiled, and closed his eyes.

Hopefully I'll write about the last leg of the trip later. But for now, time to make a plan for tomorrow and get some sleep. I missed my own bed too. And not sharing a room with a 2-year-old.