Oh yes, well, let's just count them: twelve days since my last post. There are some technical changes in the works here—a switch to a new host and software—but I haven't finished those yet. Stay tuned. You will find an updated and expanded list of links. Look to the right-hand column for an array of wonderful parent bloggers and restaurant resources. Meanwhile, stopping at chain restaurants hasn't been a big part of our summer. There's probably meaning in that, but I'll leave that exploration for another post.
So here's what we have done, lately.
We went to my family's lake house on Lake Murray in South Carolina, a lovely place I've visited my whole life. I re-introduced Baby A to the culinary wonder of warm boiled peanuts. At three, she's able to open the shell and work out those salty, earthy treasures—and work it she did. (That's a peanut she's showing you in the picture above.) She bogarted almost the whole bag.
And we swam and skiied and floated and got ridiculously tan. No restaurant tie-ins here. We had local tomatoes, butter beans, barbecue, all consumed as quickly as possible so mom could get back into the lakewater I love so much. We did have one big Sunday dinner during which Baby A tore into a dinner roll like a Viking, as if she had never seen spherical bread before.
Which, dinner rolls? She really hadn't seen them much, so I hadn't had a chance to teach her the tear-butter-bite routine. I have a feeling adults would eat dinner rolls in a Viking way, too, given the chance. It would be a lot more fun.
We also spent a week with friends in a large house on the intracoastal waterway. Only-child Baby A swam and played happily with their four children, and we parents put them to bed early and pounded a night's worth of wine and poker into the two hours we could manage to stay awake ourselves.
We then followed The Wonderful Husband down to Greenville, South Carolina (yes, there's a theme here), where he was consulting on quality assurance for a manufacturer. ("Daddy helps make engines, only better!," Baby A will tell you.) What a great little city, Greenville, full of parks and fountains and a zoo and a river running down a rocky waterfall right there in the middle of it. Again, no chain restaurant tie-ins here. Main Street in Greenville is lined with little eateries, all with cafe-style streetside dining. Baby A and I had homemade Mexican one day for lunch. After forgoing it for more than a year, A. ate a whole bowl of salsa ("SHALSHAAAAA!" was actually one of her earliest words, she loved it that much early on) and made her own guacamole burrito. The next day, we shared red-curry beef in a lovely little Thai place. Simply awesome. Both of those days, I felt like I was hanging out with the Future A, getting glimpses into what it'll be like when she's five and eight and ten. She wasn't my little baby.
Until, of course, I looked over and saw she was pulling her underwear out from under her dress, right there in the street-facing picture window of the Port City Java we'd ducked into when a thunderstorm rolled up. "BUT I HAVE A WEDGIE!," she protested. Note to self: Wait until child has develped a sense of propriety before introducing words like "wedgie."
I'll have more posts soon, plus more good technical changes and podcasts and some really good reads—interviews, book reviews, that kind of stuff. But for today? I'll throw in another picture or two and call it a summer day.
In the one and a half years I've been doing this blog, I've grown numb to the offers of the hundreds of spam comments I get each day.
So I check the webstats on this site more times each day than I brush my teeth or tell my husband I love him. In fact, my stat checks number about the same as my espresso drinks, which is to say, three, or four on a bad day.
You know when your kid says something so funny or cute that you decide maybe—just maybe—you'll let them live in your house a while longer? This in spite of their, say, horrid two-year-old tantrums and waking three times a night?
We got hacked! Hooray!
