Cousins

We live only 2 hours away from Caleb's sister and her husband who have 2 children around Reed's age, so he gets to see them often. He especially loves Carrick who is only a few months older. Reed says that Carrick is "the best friend of Reed." He says everything that way. For example, I'm the "mommy of Reed." That gives me some interesting things to think about concerning grammar and linguistics, and how in America, we all think that our Subject+Verb+Object sentence structure is just the way it should be, but that's not even how we necessarily learn to construct language in the beginning.


But I digress.

So anyway, Reed gets to see his cousins all of the time, and this is great, because he will likely be an only child, and I want him to know how to share and have all of those great qualities that come with having siblings. This is not to say that "only" children don't turn out great, because I have some wonderful friends who are only children, but I don't want him to grow up feeling lonely or as though he's missed something.

I was lucky to have a great older brother who let me bully him into playing with me, but I rarely saw my own cousins. We lived in Idaho, and my cousins lived in Texas and Arizona. Every summer, for a while during my youth, my cousins from Arizona would come to visit, and I just remember those times as being crazy fun--even though now, as an adult, I can imagine that having 6 kids and 4 adults was pretty stressful for my parents considering that we lived in a 3 bedroom ranch house. But for me, those are some of my favorite memories, and I'm glad that I can provide similar memories for Reed.

Here Reed is with Carrick. See how his face just glows.

In this picture, Carrick, Reed, and Alivia were playing under our dining room table (which is unusually high). Reed was yelling at his train set "Go Thomas, Go Thomas, Go," and everytime that Thomas would go over the bridge, they would all cheer. Even little Livie cheered, although it was obvious that she was just cheering for cheerings sake.

And here is Reed bonding with his other friends: George the Monkey (as he says it) and Pig.

Kids are really fun. I highly recommend them.

Birthday's over.

Reed turned 3 on Friday, November 14. Caleb and I took cupcakes to his preschool on Friday. The kids were really cute.

Then on Saturday, we had a party with family. I made a this lovely Thomas the Train cake. Maybe I actually have a domestic side.

Reed only liked the frosting.

His grandpa and grammie Winters gave him a Home Depot Employee outfit. It's pretty funny, but we were all bummed they couldn't find a Lowes outfit. Caleb's Dad is a union organizer, so we care about stuff like supporting businesses that use union employees. This is, in no way an advertisement for Home Depot. However, the outfit is really cute, and I spend lots of time at the hardware store trying to keep Reed from playing with the display model glass doors while the employees look on in horror, so he's familiar with the uniform.

He'ss now old enough to understand what "birthday" means, and all week, he kept shouting "birthday coming up!" Of course, on Sunday, I had to explain to him that his birthday was over. On Monday, he looked at me sadly and said "birthday's over."

Caleb Breaks Family Record!

Yesterday, Caleb, Reed, and I made our monthly pilgrimage to Pittsburgh to go to Costco; not too exciting I know--I would rather be going to the Andy Warhol museum, but duty and Cabot Vermont white cheddar dictate that we must go to Costco. The roads were really bad with a combination of a snow storm and about 40,000 college students headed home to New York and New Jersey, so we were stuck in traffic for 3.5 hours. To put this into perspective, the drive to Pittsburgh is usually an hour. In order to alleviate our boredom, we started playing 20 questions.

This is where the record breaking comes in; Caleb guessed the answer with 0 questions! It's a miracle. 0 questions. It's like we're psychically linked.

Or maybe I'm just really transparent. I was hemming and hawing over what to pick, when all of a sudden, I said "Okay, I'm ready." Caleb immediately said "Is it milk?" I guess picking milk may have been an obvious choice when we were stopped in traffic next to a milk truck.

I did beat him with Princess Diana though, and he beat me with Werner Herzog, so maybe we're not psychically linked after all.

A Halloween Retrospective

I know I'm a little late posting on Halloween, but I still wanted to post some pictures of Reed in his costume. Then, when I was looking at pictures, I found these old pictures, so I thought I would do a little Halloween Retrospective. Reed was a dog this year. This was probably the last time he would let me dress him up in any kind of stuffed animal garb. Next year, I'm sure he'll want to be a punk rocker or something.23 month old pumpkin--Yes, I like the cuddly costumes. I'm sure he'll hate me for it someday.

This is an 11 month old Tigger.

And finally, a 3 week old pumpkin. This picture wasn't taken on Halloween. He wasn't born yet on Halloween, but Jenny gave him this cute costume with the hope that he would come early, so we dressed him up in November.

I know I'm biased, but I think he's pretty adorable.

More pictures of Mo'town.

I have to confess that we're pretty lax about downloading photos from the camera to the computer, which is why I'm posting multiple blogs in one day, and then I probably won't post again for weeks.

Caleb has his own office at WVU with his name on the door. This is a huge improvement over the cubicle in a hallway that he shared with two other people at BSU.

This is a picture of our street. We live in one of those real neighborhoods where people walk their dogs and say hello and all of that. Our neighbors in Boise were mean to us. They were DINKS (Double Income No Kids), and I think they thought we were trashy because we had a child and dog. When we would drive by their house, they would look at us with disgust. One time, the husband left an "anonymous" note on our door because Hank had barked at him on Sunday morning while he was trying to sit in his hot tub. We were gone for less than an hour, so I didn't feel too bad for him, as it was 11am or something like that. His note, among other things, said "please leave and return our neighborhood to the peaceful place it used to be." We were so quiet. We were great neighbors. I can't help it that the last person who lived there was a serious cat lady. Also, when I went to the door with his "anonymous" note and graciously apologized, he got embarrassed and tried to blame it on his wife who wasn't even there at the time. Our neighbors here love both Reed AND Hank. When Hank barks at walkers through the fence, they stop and pet him and say stuff like "Oh what a nice dog!"

We have to climb lots and lots of stair at campus. That's the problem with a campus built on "mountains."

So that's the crash course on Morgantown. All of that said, we both really miss the West and would love to move back someday.

Getting to know Morgantown Cont....

Here are some pictures of campus.

This is Colson Hall where all of the magic happens. This is the English Department building; it's beautiful with a marble staircase and fancy bathrooms--very different from the shabby Liberal Arts building at BSU. I'm totally tooting my own horn here, but I was recently named the number one Creative Writing student at WVU, so I really like the English Department here, and they like me too.

This is Eisland Hall where all of the fancy faculty have their offices. By the way, Caleb's office is not in Eisland Hall.

Umm, I don't even remember what this building is called, but you can see Caleb and Reed are in the picture.

Woodburn Hall is the first building built at WVU. We missed watching Bill Clinton speak here last semester, because we were having our house appraised. That was a bummer, but we do have a great house now thanks to my wonderful in-laws, so that's not a bummer.

This is the legendary Personal Rapid Transit system. I don't even know how to explain it except to say that it connects the two different campuses at WVU, which are located across town from each other. It's robotic or something, and you might find a PRT in England, but probably nowhere else.

Getting to Know Morgantown

Having most of our family and friends scattered across the country has made Caleb and I eager to share some pictures of our new home. We're always bugging people to visit us, and we wanted to give people an idea of where we live.

This is a picture of Morgantown taken from a road just below our house. Morgantown is a very hilly city with lots of trees. People here call the hills "mountains," but of course, I know better.

This is our favorite bakery in town. They make really good bread, and they also make brick-oven fired pizza. It's pretty much the best pizza I've ever had. I like "Sonoma" that has sun-dried tomato pesto, carmelized onions, goat cheese, and fresh basil--and the prices are really good. Still, we had to stop getting pizza every week when we realized we were eating ourselves into the poor house.

The "Cow House" is one of the 7 wonders of Morgantown. No one knows what the other 6 wonders are.

When we make our millions, we're going to buy this house.

Mario's Fish Bowl is the local watering hole just down the street from our house. They have good cheeseburgers and wings. And "fish bowls" of beer. Perhaps that's obvious from the sign.