Our Fourth Anniversary

Today is our fourth wedding anniversary.  What is the traditional fourth anniversary gift anyways?  We went with paper - remember the two paper tickets to an undisclosed fabulous spot in our future?  That is our treat to one another.  Husband-wife time.  So, today is sadly uneventful.  We can't even go to dinner because Tom has been on a work marathon thanks to some inconsiderate, anti-anniversary cases.  In fact, he just got home and is probably wondering what is for dinner.  I didn't cook anything. 

But we have these lovely photos to remind of of that fantastic day (and unedited wedding video footage that we are still using to extort money from our friends who didn't use discretion at our reception :)



Princeton Unversity Chapel

Princeton Tiger. 

I won't bore everyone with a paragraph on how much Tom means to me.  Because it would take a thousand paragraphs. 

Six Boys

Wednesday my oldest sister's two boys, Lincoln (age 8) and Henry (age 6) arrived in Pittsburgh from Vermont for a few days of cousin fun.  We decided to start off the trip by taking my two, H, L, and my other sister's two boys to the zoo.  I'm not sure who was more tired at the end of that day- the kids or me.  It was a great day.

L to R: Tommy, H, L, Jack and Nathan (P in the back)

African termite hill

L & H with their Grandma from Virgina (my sister and I have different moms), and their Pap Pap (my dad).  P held my dad's hand through most of the zoo :)

Not sure this replica elephant cage would actually be able to handle these 4

Henry checking out the gorillas.

H & L with their cousin Jack

Petting the stingrays

Shark tunnel

We are obviously a family of boys!

Jack and Lincoln

Me with my sister Karen (who lives here in Pittsburgh - mom to Jack and Nathan)

Did I mention what  a fun day it was?  I think we will be returning some tired boys to their dad when he comes to get them Sunday.  Patrick did his best to keep up with his older cousins.  Lincoln was so sweet, feeding Tommy his french fries at lunch, and Nathan seems seems to be the only one (as the oldest cousin) to get P to try things outside of his comfort zone.  I couldn't believe how many new things Patrick did during this one zoo visit that he never had any interest in before. 

We were missing only two cousins during our excursion:  Chase and Kate (our lone girl) who live in Virginia and had hosted L and H at their house last week. 

God in our Backyard

We always get a lot of deer through our backyard since we back to woods, but it isn't too often we see little ones like this without their mama around.

As P would say, "Good job, God, for making deer".

Lesson Learned

As fall approaches, I always contemplate going to a darker shade hair color for a change (my natural brown is fairly dark).  So, when I couldn't get in with hairdresser to update my highlights for another 3 weeks, I decided to seize the day.  Think of the time and money I could save!  I hauled the boys to Target, grabbed two boxes of  hair color, and colored it Thursday evening after the boys went to bed.

Before

After

If only my post could end there.  If anyone has ever colored their own hair, even if it was back in high school, you may vaguely recall that you are supposed to perform a 48 hour allergy test before putting the product all over your hair.  Now I am no hair color novice- I have been having my hair colored since I was 22 and had never had a problem.

Until now.
The culprit:

 It turns out that the darker the hair color, the higher the concentration of a chemical called PPD.  Apparently a ton of people are allergic to PPD, and a lot of European countries have banned the chemical for upwards of ten years.  But not the U.S.  And apparently, I am one of the thousands of people allergic to PPD.

So Friday morning I woke up to rash all over my left, inner arm.  At first I thought it was poison ivy (which I get just by thinking of it), but my mid-day it was also on my neck.

Add caption

And by Saturday morning, it was all over my shoulders.

By Sunday, it was also on my chest, ears, right lower arm, and spreading higher on my neck.  I spent Sunday in a Benadryl stupor to no avail.

By this morning it is on my face and about a 1/4 inch from my left eye.  I have given up on the Benadryl and went to see my doctor.  With the exception of a large dose of steroids (which I had a bad experience with in the past), there wasn't much they could recommend.  So we'll wait it out another few days and see if it continues to spread, or finally subsides.  From what I could find online, this kind of reaction typically takes weeks to cycle out. 

Yippee.

The two rays of sunshine in this mess are that it is not nearly as itchy as poison ivy, and the bumps are so fine that it is barely visible to someone else. That means I am not quite a carnival show yet.
Oh, and Tom is thrilled at the prospect that I may never be able to color my hair dark again. 

Stay tuned for more news of the strange and grotesque.
And you are welcome for the extra large image of my rash.

Update Tuesday Morning:  I woke up with both functioning eyes and no more spreading.  I am not convinced that the worse is over yet, but just maybe...

Conquering the "Divide & Conquer"

We are no different from every other family we know with kids.  There are more things on our to-do list than there are hours in the day.  We get one crossed off and add three.

Which brings me to the divide and conquer approach.  Saturday morning Tom and I generally start our negotiations:

Me:
         I need to run to the grocery store and I have some gardening to do.  The shelf we bought P for his birthday in May still needs hung, and the window in our guest room needs the storm window down before the stink bugs decided to hibernate there.  I would like to get the basement wall prepped so we can finish painting (then paint the floor, then finally finish the basement).

Tom:
         I have 3 legal briefs to finish and need to mow the grass.  Then I will tackle the 20 million repairs or projects required by our house.  If you watch  the kids until lunch, I'll get the grass and legal work done, then I'll take P while Tommy naps and you get the weeding done and run to the grocery store. 

So we divide up the kid watching duty into shifts and have what we feel is a pretty productive weekend.  Except for the fact that we end up spending nearly no time together with the exception of church and dinner. And until we get some more house projects wrapped up, I don't see a way around our current approach. 

Sometimes I do worry that we are developing a routine that we won't be able to break away from down the road, but in the meantime, we have promised to be better about squeezing in date nights and time together.  In fact, Tom and I are now in possession of two (yes, only two- sorry kids!) plane tickets to a fantastic destination.  Sorry, you won't find out the where or when until after we return.  I'll leave you in suspense when I am absent from my blogs for several days.  Am in knee deep in laundry and sick kids, or sipping a glass of wine in a kid free zone?

Classic Inspiration

For the longest time, I had been thinking about getting the kids' silhouettes done once they got a little older.  Then my fabulous neighbor came back from a trip to Disney with two silhouettes of her girls.  She framed them and put them in her dining room where they look so good, I decided I had to have some too.  And as luck would have it, Idlewild had a silhouette portrait artist, who promised me my kids had to sit still for just one, teensie-weensie minute.  I was sold.



Tommy

Patrick

 In the end, I don't think Tommy's is a very good likeness (although to be fair, the the tiny minute proved more than he could tolerate) , but P's is spot-on.  I already have them hung in my stairwell gallery in my favorite Target round frames:

3rd Annual Idlewild Outing

We continued our yearly tradition of taking the kids to Idlewild Park, despite Tommy (who has been healthy as a horse all summer) coming down with a cold the day before.  This year we were missing the company of our friends, the Browns, who could not come after recently moving to Georgia, but we did not miss the 93 degree weather last year dealt us.  We bounced around the park in perfectly lovely 76 degree bliss on Sunday.

Poor Tommy.  He cried on the carousel.  And these cars.  He was just miserable and refused to fall asleep. 

We didn't know until the ride was already in full swing that the gearshift in the plane actually made the plane go up and down.  Notice everyone elses' kids were in full flight while our man never made it off the runway. 

I think this was Patrick's favorite ride - he was concentrating so hard on his steering around the whole course.

Patrick Tees Off

Well, I knew it was coming. Patrick is addicted.

To playing golf.  At 3 1/4 years old. 

This afternoon, Tom took P (along with his teeny tiny clubs) to a little 9-hole course, just to give him a taste of the game.  I am surprised he didn't pee his pants on the way, solely out of excitement.

Here they are about to head off ( I was dying to stalk them on the course with my camera, but Tom promised he would take plenty of pictures to satisfy even me): 

 Did I ever mention that Patrick is a lefty?  Tom says he will learn to play golf right-handed.

 As soon as Patrick got home, he gave me all the highlights:

*Daddy let him steer the golf cart, but it went crooked.
*He peed in the woods on the course.
*There was a ball washing machine.

Oh, how happy he was.