Children can be helpful! Like, seriously helpful! A few days ago was the first time I actually understood this. Jonathan was vacuuming a few hours before our weekly D&D game (nerd alert and proud), and Xander wanted to get out the "Xander-sized vacuum" to help. Voila.
And he DID help! For real. He did the entire bottom floor, the stairs, and half the top floor. I actually had to empty the Dirt Devil twice because he spent so long on it. We were seriously impressed.
Amused with his brother's vacuuming obsession.
One of my love languages is food. My husband so knows this. Those strawberries are hand-dipped!! Note the Ghirardelli. And Lois, the wine is Muscato d'Asti.
Before Ari was born, we got Xander a boy doll to talk about what it be like to care for a baby. The past week or so he's been really into it, asking me to change its diaper, rocking it, that kind of thing. Well, tonight's dinner/playdate came courtesy of the "Old McDonald's" with the indoor play structure, and he wanted to bring his "baby Ari" to McDonald's. Sure, I said. Why not? I was (not so) secretly curious as to what would be the general public's reaction. And I was pleasantly surprised... there was none! I don't think most people even noticed. Full disclosure however: we were with another home birthing liberal friend and her kids, and her son, Julian, has relatively long hair and was mistaken for a girl once by another child (I heard the child call him, "she.") I eavesdropped as Julian asked to hold Xander's doll, and was so thrilled that, as Xander proudly told me afterwards, he shared the baby with Julian and they rocked him together. :)
I have no pictures of Xander with the baby Ari doll, but here instead is a (terrible) picture of Xander at breakfast. He wanted his happy-face pancakes to be recorded for posterity. Consider me obliging.
Oh yes, and lest the title be misleading - the virtual victory part? I'm on page 117 of my thesis! I had to completely redo Chapter 4 (my advisor's constructive commentary was, unfortunately... extremely constructive). But I finished it, and then because I was too brain dead to move directly onto the intro/conclusion, I spent hours fixing up the text according to the Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style. E.g. every reference to anything in rabbinic literature has to be italicized. And abbreviated and spelled according to the SBL transliterated style. One can't write, "Babylonian Talmud, tractate Brachot," or even, "B. Brachot." It has to be, "b. Berakhot" in the text, and "b. Ber." in the footnotes. Similarly, "Tosefta Kiddushin" becomes "t. Qidd."
Did you know (I hadn't) that Biblical books don't have a period after their abbreviations? So it's not "Deuteronomy 6:2," or even "Deut. 6:2," but "Deut 6:2." And all classical literature has its own special abbreviations? So "Josephus, Antiquities," is wrong. Instead it's "Josephus, Ant." John Chrysostom's Homiliae in epistulum i ad Corinthios becomes "Chrysostom, Hom. 1 Cor." All useful information that makes the footnotes much more concise... just a pain to do when one has about 150 footnotes per chapter. But now it's DONE!
In honor of moving onward with the thesis and thus being eligible for ordination, I will end with this, which has been ubiquitous on my Facebook feed the past few days:
Honestly, any of the above pictures sound good to me. :)
3 comments:
This is such a wonderful post...Ari, Xander, parenting, love, study. You covered it all. I look forward to reading it over and over again!
Love you and miss you all bunches!
Mom/Bubby
Wait... you don't dance with a bottle on your head???? :-)
Poor Julian gets called a girl all the time. Some times he cares, but most times I don't think he even notices. I think that's really sweet that they rocked the doll together, I missed that part!
Thanks Mom!
And Nicole... I save the bottle dancing for special occasions. :) Yeah, the doll rocking was adorable, it happened when you were changing Kaya. And then we got onto something else and I forgot to tell you about it, oops!
Post a Comment