catching up, now with pictures

this post brought to you by my mom who took the babies so I could complete a sentence for a change

Well!

It's now exactly one month after the move, and I just had my first moving anxiety dream. It was remarkably similar to the move itself: packing the truck to its gills and looking ruefully at the pile of stuff that had yet to be packed. In the truck. That was already stuffed. Like, take-the-paper-towels-out-of-their-package-and-cram-them-into-the-few-remaining-spare-inches kind of stuffed. So, duh, subconscious mind, that one's not hard to de-code. Funny how there's always a lag-time with dreams, though. I heard a story once about a guy who was paralyzed in an accident, but had walking dreams for 11 more years.

I even managed to cram houseplants into the cab, ask Jason!

I know moving is not exactly trauma, but throw in a toddler, a baby, a stay of unknown duration at your parents' house, a future of uncertain job prospects, and the dramatic hyperbole of an underslept mother, and wheeee! It's a close second!

Auden was the age Isla is now when we first moved to Milwaukee, and like she is doing now, he elected to start crawling during that major transition. It seems fairly obvious, looking back, that a move on top of a major developmental milestone WOULD throw him off kilter for a while, further fragmenting his already-fragmented sleeping habits. So, I kind of? Knew? To expect that? Again? But still, after these four weeks of multiple night wakings and nap schedules full of holes, I'm feeling punchy.

We thought Isla was teething, what with waking up every two hours some nights, so we tried dosing her with baby tylenol and swabbing her gums with baby orajel, just in case. To no avail. I would have thought the second time around I'd feel better prepared, more magnanimous, more tolerant of what will surely be a BRIEF DISRUPTION in the big scheme of things. But no! I'm just as ornery, just as prone to 2am second-guessings and giving-in to feedings. Isla, you were supposed to be my good sleeper! Blowing raspberries in your crib at 5am is NOT OKAY.

One can only imagine what she and Auden are dreaming about.

On the bright side, though: we've been spending weekends at the lake







Grandparents are manna from heaven



We get to have date night now

We stayed out until 9:30!

And my new best friend, a hip mama I met at the Children's Museum (what? moms pick up other moms at parks the way hipsters pick up other hipsters at alt-indie-margin-outlier-rock shows) is lending me her double stroller which is VASTLY preferable to the pack-mule configuration I was assembling, righteously, before.

Gateway drug to minivans!

Also, there is much cuteness: Isla pulls herself up on everything


She loves being manually rolled and tumbled, and does a fearsome jowl-shaking strong-man impression where she threatens to bend the very bars of her confining sassy seat. Auden knows all the lyrics to "Book of Love," by the Magnetic Fields; the opposite of "opening" is "closening"; and girl is pronounced gee-yul.

Coming next -- God Does Have a Sense of Humor: Poop edition.

Hope you're doing well! Hope you're not moving! Pray for me!

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