theparkerfamily.org

Month: November 2010

  • found: november

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    camera dump: november

  • found: the player

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  • the ceremonial first ornament

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    ceremonial first ornament

  • getting the christmas tree

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    getting the christmas tree, glover park, washington, dc

  • size restrictions

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    well, sparklet is officially too big to be a lap-baby.

    … not according to the airlines (they don’t really seem to care) but according to mommy’s stomach, my nose, and the eardrums of those around us, it’s about time to start getting her her own seat. sparklet careened around for the full three and a half hours out to houston, and then the full two and a half hours back.

    (while i’m just about over careening, at least it isn’t the most mortifying thing that happened during the trip.)

    for what it’s worth, it doesn’t actually seem to be a problem that isn’t limited to the airplane right now — if she’s being held, she wants on the floor. if she’s being carried, she wants to walk. don’t bother trying to put her in a stroller. and, if you turn your back for 1/4 second, she’s ready to bring on the pain.

    if these aren’t the terrible twos, i don’t want to know what’s coming.

    (really, don’t tell me.)

    ps. we leave for costa rica in exactly one week — and fortunately, we had the good forsight to get sparklet her own seat. ahhhh.

  • found: super pinky

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  • travel: last day in houston, texas

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    travel: last day in houston, texas

  • one barrel

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    today is a great day in the history of the sparkler household.

    after one thousand, one hundred and thirty three days of looking, we finally found a place in the united states that sells one barrel rum from belize (the rum we mixed with coke and drank like fish on our honeymoon).

    after about three years of trying just about every liquor store in virginia, maryland, d.c. and texas, we tried yet another store (spec’s) near the lady sparkler’s parents.

    not only did that have bottles of one barrel (they had 10!) but someone was in not 10 minutes earlier asking for a couple bottles themselves.

    now we just have to buy lots of bottles, slowly, each in a different disguise — it’ll drive up demand and make them think they need to keep it in stock to meet the popular demand.

  • found: regression

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  • guestbook: andrew and cori

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    i’ve seen my future.

    sparklet had a playdate this afternoon with a friend — one of our dedicated, arbitron-rated 3.7 blog readers — and her little boy, Andrew.

    aaaand, for some reason sparklet spent the whole time chasing Andrew around, trying to give him things (instruments he didn’t want), then trying to give him more things (kisses he didn’t want) and then try to pet his hair.

    andrew was a good sport about it all, but i have to admit i was paralyzed with fear for the whole time — which accounts for the utter lack of photos of sparklet’s early attempts at flirtation.

    nothing happened for me to be particularly embarrassed about (i guess) but something tells me that i’m not going to find the next sixteen years of my life to be particularly relaxing.

    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    guestbook: andrew and cori

  • out: trailwood playground

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    out: trailwood playground, houston, texas

  • macaroni and cheese (for adults)

    thanksgiving dinner is a really big deal for the lady sparkler’s family.

    everybody contributes a dish (or two) and each of the recipes are suitable for the pages of bon appetite or gourmet — wild rice with dried cranberries and chick peas, mexican Chayote with garlic, green beans with lemon zest and hand roasted pine nuts, a spiced pumpkin souffle.

    for the first time since “i” became “we,” i joined the thanksgiving culinary arms race this year — with macaroni and cheese.

    granted, it’s an adult version of mac and cheese — it uses gruyer and fontina instead of just cheddar, and uses both a tablespoon of mustard and a bit of red pepper to add a little kick.

    i’m pleased to say that i held my own.

    (i’ve tweaked the recipe each of the last four times i’ve made it, but it was originally based on alton brown’s baked macaroni and cheese.)

    full recipe after the jump.

    (more…)

  • found: the beginning of the end

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  • out: bear branch playground (again)

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    out: bear branch playground, houston, texas

  • thanksgiving day

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    thanksgiving day, houston, texas

  • out: bear branch playground

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    out: bear branch playground

  • travel: houston, texas

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    travel: thanksgiving in houston, texas

  • out of the frying pot …

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  • found: human space flight

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  • found: determination

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  • emergency! emergency!

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    i got a text message from the m.o.h. last night:

    What happened to your blog?!?

    what happened is that 1,101 individual, lovingly crafted blog posts had been spontaneously replaced by a single, solitary “sorry, no blog posts matched your criteria” message.

    #$%&$%.

    i logged into the wordpress admin and the dashboard welcomed me to edit my 0 posts.

    #$%&$%, @&#$%^.

    when i logged into the super techie backed (phpmyadmin, which administers that database that powers the blog) it said that the my wp_posts table — the one with the content for all 1,101 posts — was unavailable because it was “in use”.

    #$%&$%, @&#$%^ — #%$&$%.

    suddenly, the notion of replacing the notion of sparklet’s babybook with a happy, communal blog seemed like a pretty stupid idea.

    suddenly, the notion of only backing up said blog twice in the last two years (August 2010, July 2009) seamed like a pretty bad idea.

    at some point in the week hours of the morning — after two support tickets and 45 minutes of googling/panicking — i figured out that the database had “just” become corrupted, and i “just” needed to repair the table. after another 30 minutes of googling to find out how to do such a thing, i did it.

    and it worked.

    and now i’m successfully procrastinating on a plan to backup the website — at least until after the *next* disaster.

  • out: walter pierce park playground

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    out: walter pierce park playground, washington, dc

  • hike: knob mountain / elkwallow trails, shenandoah national park, virginia

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    it’s interesting how the camera only seems to capture when the lady sparkler is wearing the backpack.i’m calling this the last hike of the season — and while i hope it’s not actually going to turn out that way, it is getting pretty late into November. and, while we *are* taking the backpack to Costa Rica, based on the events of today i’m not convinced we’re going to use it much.

    granted, sparklet had never been on a hike for longer than an hour and a half, and the lady sparkler had been on one hike since she got pregnant two years ago, but needless to say, it didn’t go especially well today.

    note to self: (1) bring more food; (2) go over the trail details with your wife beforehand especially if she pretends not to care; (3) bring earplugs just in case you happen to fail on notes #1 and/or #2.

    trail information:
    Trailhead: 38.73885, -78.308208 (Google Maps); Length: 5.7 total miles; Elevation Gain: 800 feet; Trail Type: Loop (Jeremy’s Run Trail, to Knob Mountain Trail, to Elkhollow Trail); Skill Level: Easy-to-moderate.

    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    hike: knob mountain / elkwallow trails, shenandoah national park, virginia

  • guestbook: dinner with melissa

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    guestbook: dinner with melissa

  • found: urban foliage

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  • travel: gram’s birthday, williamsburg, virginia

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    [Grant Poppa Roberts, Williamsburg, Virginia]
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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    travel: gram’s birthday, williamsburg, virginia

  • out: merrywood playground

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    out: merrywood playground, williamsburg, virginia

  • el gato

    ECPA20100827_4877 by [ecpark] ECPA20100827_4906 by [ecpark]
    ECPA20100827_4882 by [ecpark] ECPA20100827_4905 by [ecpark]
    ECPA20100827_4897 by [ecpark] ECPA20100827_4907 by [ecpark]

  • turning the other cheek

    sparklet had her first laser treatment tonight, the first of a series of four or five that should dislodge the port wine stain on her cheek.

    and while we’re most excited for people to stop asking how she got that “boo-boo” on her face, the bruising from this treatment means we’ll have a solid week of people reporting us to child protective services instead.

  • found: foliage

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  • hike: limberlost trail, shenadoah national park, virginia

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    photo of the week // thirteen months
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    trail information:
    Trailhead: 38.579997,-78.381389 (Google Maps); Length: 1.3 total miles; Elevation Gain: 100 feet; Trail Type: Loop; Skill Level: Easy.
    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    hike: limberlost, shenandoah national park, virginia

  • found: jack-o-lanterns

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  • daylight savings

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    it looks like everything is back to normal in the sparkler household — well, healthy, if not normal.

    this weekend we opted out of yet another social event — our fourth missed halloween party / birthday party / playdate in 10 days — out of an over-abundance of caution that viruses (viri?) aren’t a heck of a lot of fun and probably shouldn’t be shared with friends and neighbors.

    so, we did what we could to keep sparklet’s mind busy while her body adapts to the time change — even if it meant carving month old pumpkins a week after the passage of Halloween rendered them seasonally inappropriate.

    p.s. i absolutely love the picture, above — there is something special in the annual slide towards winter, and in eeking out every last drop of sunlight with your friends before running inside for dinner.

  • pumpkin carving

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    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    firsts: pumpkin carving

  • spreading like a virus

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    yesterday was a day of worshiping the porcelain bowl goddess for the sparkler family.

    it started with the nanny shortly before noon, followed by myself around 12:30pm, emily the cat was next at 2pm, sparklet later around 9pm, and finally the lady sparkler at 10:30pm.

    and, it turns out that our nanny share family had a similar vision — they just got a two day jump on us.

    it’s looking like it’s just a 24-hour bug — the first three hours you think you’re going to die, the next three hours you wish you would, closely followed by 18 hours on your back.

    sparklet’s actually been a trooper through it all — not only last night during all the madness, but today with no nanny and two utterly debilitated parents.

    she even took an hour and a half nap on the couch with me early this morning once it was pretty obvious that i wasn’t going to be able to do much else.

    that’s my girl.

    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    spreading like a virus

  • found: braids

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  • fraggled

    after a week of saying it was just your average adverse (non-contageous) reactions to some recent vaccinations, our pediatrician announced today that sparklet could (?!?) have a virus.

    … which would have been really useful to know a week ago before we played typhoid mary with a half dozen of our friends kids.

    (fwiw, i’m still not convinced it’s anything other than the vaccines — this is completely unlike anything she’s ever had before, and she’s done the virus “thing” a couple times already.)

    she has been feeling pretty crappy since Friday, so we preemptively canceled all non-essential activities this past weekend — including jon stewart’s rally to restore sanity, unfortunately — to give sparklet the max chance of enjoying halloween Sunday night.

    so, the traditional role of a sick kid’s parent distracting the patient — especially if doing so will get them eating and drinking. but, after a couple of days worth of efforts that yielded no distraction, the lady sparkler and i finally pulled out the big guns:

    fraggle rock.

    and for a few brief minutes sparklet has found happiness, boucing up and down, moving her head like she was a heavy-metal headbanger. (i’m still working getting video, but she stops whenever she sees the camera.)

    it wasn’t much — twice, each time barely enough to get a couple of ounces of bottle in her — but it’s enough.

  • i’m pretty sure …

    … that i’m the only prog in D.C. who’s jumping for joy on his couch right now.

    and that’s because instead of watching the Democratic Party getting swept from the U.S. House of Representatives, i’m watching Tottenham Hotspur beat the crap out of reigning european champions Inter Milan in the champions league.

    nancy pelosi? tottenham hotspur? i’ll take the younger one, with the fewer surgeries — zing!

  • vote

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    i was thiiiiiiiis close to skipping voting this year — it’s the off year for the presidentials, all of the local contests were decided back in the September primaries (which d.c. conveniently screwed up my ballot for) and our representative in Congress can’t vote anyway.

    however, someone at work suggested it was sparklet’s civic duty to vote today, and who was i to get in the way a toddler executing her civic duty.

    so we voted.

    her picks were pretty reasonably across the board, until we had a bit of a disagreement over her choice for D.C.’s Shadow Representative.

    Sparklet was drooling towards Republican Nelson Rimensynder and i was going to object — but he’s never going to actually win (with 75% of D.C. voters registered as Democrats) and the position has no power anyway (technically, he would be seated if the District ever got the right to vote in Congress but that’s never going to happen).

    with that in mind, who am i to object?

    besides, as a resident of D.C., sparklet needs to get used the the idea of throwing her vote away.

  • video: fighting for control

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VjZG94fzn8