Aw

No, we aren't getting one, but what's cuter than a lab puppy? A yellow
haired kid with a lab puppy maybe.
This was a big event for little Tayloe - he got to skip his bath and
go out after dark with his uncle geoff and me to visit these one week
old pups. I'm always a little fearful in situations like these that
the bad side of crazy is going to turn loose, but this time it didn't.
He was just as kind and calm as he could be.
Sweetness brings out sweetness I guess. Note to self ....

Apple picking

We went apple picking this afternoon. Any idea the kind of disrespect
a baby has for his diaper after 2 green apples?

You come too, mom

Sometimes I'm so caught up in the day to day that I forget our kids
will have a life together that is beyond their father and me. Not long
from now their paths and personalities will be shaped more by each
other than by us. Maybe I'll think differently later, but mostly I'm
really happy they are so close in age.
Is it true for you - that the best parenting experiences are when
you're just tagging along on their adventure?
It seems so obvious.

A photos worth a zillion words

Take a look. I'm giving you a visual of what our week has looked like.
Nnnooo mommy. I don't want to mommy. Let me do it! You're in my space,
mommy.
That last one is my favorite. Precious right?
Oh three. You ugly beast.
But let's give a kid a break. He started preschool. No drama on the
surface, but he's bright enough to know it marked the end if one thing
and the beginning of another.
He's realized the pool, his favorite place in the whole world, is
closed.
He has the sniffles.
His dad was away for a few days and then had a busy week.
So ok. I'm willing to just write this week's bad behavior and constant
demands and inane negotiating off. God knows I've been no saint.
Cocktail hour came early more than once.
All I'm asking - and I'm asking it because I don't want to end up in
jail - is for my sense of humor to stay intact. Help me bury it deep
inside, safe from all the hen pecking.
Peck. Peck. Peck peck peck peck peck peck

Bedtime at the rock house

The boys and I are at Mt. Airy for the weekend. When we told Tayloe
where we were going he said, "ooohhh, the rock house!"
Stone, son. Stone

Welcome to the new blaby

Look!
After months of blogger laziness, i used my newfound freetime this
morning (t2 in school, thomas napping) to snitzy up this here blog.
Now I can update my blog quickly from my iPhone, which I bet I'll do
all the time. Expect to see a lot more of us on the fly and in almost
real time!I hope I can better capture some of the moments that happen
everyday because it seems that lately good bloggish stuff happens and
by the end of the day I have no head space for downloading photos and
composing sentences.
Should also be fun for you to laugh at my typos - the iPhone keyboard
has a mind of it's own. You understand.

Testing to see if I can post from my phone. Did it work?

milestones

thomas turned one last tuesday. i'm still not sure how that's possible, but ok. we had a small celebration for him at home - presents and cupcakes. no hesitation on the cupcake - food doesn't last very long in front of him. he's growing so fast - and he's so smart. he knows exactly how to get his brother's attention (pick up his favorite toys, of course). he watches people so intently i can't help but think i'm really in for it when he's really up and moving and can download all that information. and yet, i'm really excited about his next year. as challenging as it will be, i can't wait to see him come into his own. before long he'll be running right next to his brother, standing up for himself and doing things 'all by myself.' sniff.
meanwhile, we've been gearing tayloe up for preschool. it's at the episcopal church in scottsville only 1/2 a mile from our house. it wasn't my first choice, but i think it'll be just fine. he's thrilled about the toys there and seems genuinely excited to make friends. so off he trucked with his beloved baby tucked in his backpack, new shoes and all the confidence in the world.
break. my. heart.

some video

sometimes it's just good.

almost 1

w

hi from thomas. mr. serious. mr. i'm going to check you out for 20 minutes and make sure you aren't a serial killer. mr. you have to work to make me smile. unless i know you and i'm 100 percent sure you aren't a serial killer. then i'll smile for you. maybe.
i have no idea where this year went. woosh. poof. gone. thomas will be 1 on the Sept. 1. i'm a little ashamed to admit this, but in my mind he's still only about 4 months old so, you know, i'm pretty shocked by this whole approaching birthday thing. somebody has their dates mixed up. and it's not me.
today little tayloe and i were outside cutting the grass while thomas was napping. we finished up and got off the tractor and he went his way and i went mine. after a few minutes he came over and said he heard thomas crying and that we should go inside and 'ask him if he had a good nap.' charmed i said OK, knowing there was no way he heard him crying because the AC was on and all the windows were shut. plus i have super sonic mom ears making it impossible for him to hear something i didn't.
but sure enough we went inside and thomas was in fact awake & crying. kind of amazed, i asked tayloe how he'd heard thomas.
he said, 'i dunno. i just heard him.' well then. i guess that pretty much explains it.

quick catch up

thomas started crawling (finally)
tayloe turned 3. he got a new swingset and wants to have a birthday party just about every week. last friday he said, 'mom, i have a birthday coming up, right?'
thomas is 11 months and uses words on a regular basis. uh-oh, pee-boo, nigh-nigh, broda (brother) and bye-bye among them. this totally amazes me.
tayloe hasn't had an accident during the day or at night in i don't know how long.
thomas has 4 upper teeth coming in and hasn't slept through the night in at least two weeks, maybe longer. it's really very unfun.
tayloe is still on the waiting list for the preschool we prefer and although they keep telling me to have faith, it's making me very nervous. crazy nervous.
my camera just became unbroke so maybe someday soon i'll post some pictures again. and video.
tayloe asks 4 million questions a day and his most favorite thing to do is to tell me when there's a red light, when there's a green light and when a big hill is coming up.
our puppy june was lost all last week after a fence door was left open. turns out she was right down the street making friends with a new family.
johnny, our male puppy, probably weighs close to 60 lbs. he's 5 months old.
tayloe calls his umbrella his 'rainbrella.'
thomas eats more food than seems humanly possible.
big tayloe turned 40 caught a ginormous 6.5 pound bass in the mill pond the day after his birthday. it was so exciting i cried.
we have more tomatoes than we could ever possibly eat. ever.

oldie but goodie

i meant to post this months ago. cracks me up.

merry christmas from the tayloe emerys!

if i were the kind of person who wrote those my family is better than your family christmas letters, this would be my section on little tayloe for 2009:
not only is he very handsome and charming, a gifted singer and athlete, he's also the most independent child in charlottesville! he barely needed any toilet training at all - just one day of soggy pants and that was it, he was ready to be a big kid!!! and big kid he is - each day at summer camp he said goodbye to us with a huge smile and greeted us when we picked him up with an inventive craft worthy of art gallery walls (image left). we're so proud of our 'little man' and tell everyone we know how outstanding and remarkable he is. we've already alerted Harvard to make room in the class of 2025 because the next Emery is on his way!!! kidding, of course! (not really)
barf. hiccup.
the truth of course is that t's eaten enough gummy life savers to send rocket fueled only by sugar into space, had one memorable (embarrassing) accident on the preschool director's office floor and i'm about to have to make good on purchasing a garage for his thomas trains. and he is independent and doesn't have trouble being left places or with other people, but he doesn't really have a choice. preschool also has about a zillion toys he's never seen before, so there's that.
of course i'm proud. there have been plenty of times in his young life when i most certainly haven't been. a recent meltdown in the 20 people deep Bodo's line where he yanked and pulled on me so much my skirt came down comes to mind.
so i'll spare you the christmas letter and just take this moment to gloat. my kid has been easy to toilet train and is happy to go by himself to preschool camp alone for 3 hours. no poop issues, no tears, no long goodbyes. just a happy confident kid who can pee in a pot.

growing up boys

tayloe took little t on his first ever fishing trip today. i thought the child was going to jump out of his skin he was so excited. he couldn't even sleep during his nap time. he helped his dad pack up the cooler with snacks and get his rod ready. he went and got his shoes, his hat and put on sunscreen so quickly and with so much joy i almost wondered if he was my child. off they went. tayloe didn't even take his rod so intent he was on showing little tayloe the ropes. it made me so happy and proud. even more so when he came home and told me he'd caught 2 bluegill. i asked t2 how big his was and he held his arms out as wide as he could. 'THIS BIG, MAMA!' for a kid that's been imaginary fishing for the last 8 months with anything that could remotely pass for a fishing pole, it was a total triumph.
thomas and i stayed home and had a rare afternoon just the two of us. we hung some things up in his room (9 months old and the only thing i ever got around to hanging was his mobile) then we read and sang and took pictures. since thomas didn't make regular practice of rolling over and hasn't even begun to show interest in crawling, there hasn't been much documentation of his major milestones. he's been sitting up now for about 2 months and while forward movement still seems a ways off, the kid can reach and stretch with the best of them. if he wants something beyond his grasp, he hurls himself toward it. if he misses, he takes a breath and bends, bends, bends as far as he can on the exhale. he gets lots of A+'s for effort.
looking at these pictures of tayloe makes me realize it's time to kiss the diapers goodbye. potty training hasn't really been on my radar since i bought one of those kiddie toilets last summer. it's probably because my pediatrician put it this way : you can potty train a boy at 2 1/2 and he'll be potty trained by 3. or you can just wait until he's 3. so i just put it out of my mind, knowing it'd get around to it eventually.
eventually starts on monday. everyone's home. we don't have any major plans to go anywhere.it gives me enough time to get to the bookstore and get some instructions on this type of thing. it's warm outside so a few pantsless days in the yard won't do any harm. plus he starts summer camp at his preschool in two weeks and they said they'd be more than happy to help.
perked ears. help did you say? was there ever a better motivational word?

for comparison sake

i just realized every picture i have to tayloe at this age (around 9 months) he's smiling huge. and every picture i've taken of thomas lately he has this 'whatchoo lookin at lady' look on his face. i'm wondering if that's because i took no less than 2 million pictures of tayloe a month and just saved all the smiley ones. my photos of thomas are mostly on my iphone.
the thing about telling the older brother that his job is to protect the younger brother is that the older brother takes the task pretty seriously. today thomas was on the floor and the puppies came tromping inside. before i could even think about it, tayloe ran screaming past me yelling 'NO NO NO PUPPIES' arms straight out in front of him, heading straight for thomas. 'I SAVE YOU' he yells as he plows into thomas, - lays him out flat. he's full-on smothering his brother yelling 'I SAVE YOU THOMAS. I SAVE YOU! SHOO PUPPIES, SHOO'
of course how could he have known he was hurting him? thomas's screams were so muffled he didn't even hear him. when i scolded him for being too rough he looked at me like i had 1,000 heads.
i know, kiddo. it's confusing.

kids and dogs

there isn't much difference really. both cute. both curious. both poop a lot.
so far so good with the puppies. they sleep outside, play outside, nap outside and mostly entertain each other. i'm a little afraid of how big johnny, the male, is going to be. he's such a lug right now he's nearly double the size of june. let's just hope he stays gentle and dumb.

tayloe cal ripkin emery

mad skills. this is the same kid who was blocking soccer balls at 5 months. at the time that didn't seem weird, but now that i have thomas - our child who never rolled over and is perfectly content to sit and watch the world go by without moving a single limb (thus his nickname, 'love lump') - it seems prodigal.

why

it's so weird how one day your kid is the way he has been for the last 6 months and the next day it's like your child was abducted and whoever did it left this complete stranger with a whole new rule book. the last 4 days or so, tayloe's had a burst of new words and along with it the inclination to ask why. at everything.
why do you put the milk in the fridge?
why do pretzels go here? why is the oven hot? why are you brushing my hair? why do you do this? why do you do that? what you doing now? why are you doing that?
i enjoy the curiosity, sure. and i'm happy to explain a thing or two when i know the answer. but ya gotta know i'm not a particularly chatty person. quiet doesn't make me uncomfortable. so this afternoon when i realized i'd been talking nonstop to a two year old for what felt like 100 years i felt an enormous amount of anxiety about how long this is going to last. especially because he's relentless. thomas is screaming and the phone is ringing and i'm clearly about to lose my #$it, but there he is - right at my heels looking for answers to life's larger questions. and not quietly or patiently, i might add.
i'll say that this new found chatter and the discovered ability to communicate beats the tantrums of the preverbal early twos, but only by a little bit.
thomas, meanwhile, is going through some kind of 8 month attachment thing. i can hardly put him down without him dissolving into a puddle of tears. it's the saddest thing you've ever seen.
so if you need me i'll be here. under a huge pile of laundry and dust with dishes piled up in the sink braving the t2 inquisition and with a little cherub clung to me like a staticky dark sock.

easter

we went to greensboro last weekend for easter and had a spectacular time. it's so much fun to get kids really really excited about holidays.
we went to an egg hunt on saturday morning, dyed eggs saturday afternoon and tayloe, mom, dad and i spent most of saturday night pretending to call the easter bunny to tell him various things - like where to find the eggs and what to leave for us (jack daniels!). little tayloe would stand there watching us with huge eyes, nearly wiggling out of his skin with excitement. he'd grab the phone, kiss it and say, 'i wub ewe feaster bunny' and we'd all fall apart with laughter.
the hide and seek game of sunday morning was right up t2s alley and we spent most of the day hiding then looking for eggs.
on the way home today, i decided it was time to start the search for a new puppy. maybe it seems a little hasty, but thomas will be crawling soon (that's ambitious since he doesn't really even roll over ... let's just say eventually) and i'd really love to house train a puppy before that happens. i don't need a baby sloshing through pee puddles and well, other stuff.
plus i can't stand not having a dog around and it breaks my heart to see t2 outside throwing tennis balls to himself (and fetching them. i wish i was kidding.)
a quick scan of the classifieds and i found an ad for chocolate lab puppies, what we've been talking about getting, ready on mother's day. i called and the family that has them lives 3 minutes from our house. 11 chocolates! 3 minutes away! how's that for serendipity?
so we went by - you know, just to look. 10 minutes later we had picked the one we wanted - the biggest male in the lot (just what a i need, right? another dude) - and were handing over the duckets.
and that was that.

wolly by golly

wolly died on sunday and i haven't been able to put it out of my mind. i feel really weird about seeing him dead, stroking his velvet soft ears, which were still warm, and then curling him up, putting him in the ground and shoveling dirt on him.
we put him behind our vegetable garden so when i'm out there he'll always be near. only every time i've gone out there this week i've had that image in my head - him curled up under all that red dirt clay. it isn't nightmarish. it's just weird.
i found this picture on my camera today. it was just a month ago, the beginning of march. that's w - staring at a tennis ball, so intense, waiting, waiting, waiting ...
wolls was my dog first - a hopelessly devoted nut job who could out fetch and outlast any other breathing being on the planet. if there wasn't a ball, he'd find a stick. if there wasn't a stick he'd find a twig. if there wasn't a twig, he'd find a piece of bark. if there wasn't bark he'd damn near try to get you to throw dirt for him. in a crowd of people he'd sniff out the biggest sucker, corner them with a ball and never ever leave them alone. he made sure that everyone noticed him and that no one ever forgot him.
then he was our dog - tayloe's and mine. we carted him all over the damn place - gave him a river to live by, tortured him with two more puppies, then kept him with us in our 500 sq foot apt in dc and then hauled him out to california and back again. he was never a 'go with the flow' kind of guy - in fact i always sensed that he hated change and in that way he was a kind of ying to our yang. but he was a gentleman, so he did the best he could.
our family grew and wolly - well, he adjusted.
most recently, he'd become little tayloe's dog. tayloe fed him. tayloe gave him a gazillion dog bones at my parents house. tayloe threw the ball for him. in return, wolly tolerated being locked in the bathroom, being drug around the yard by his collar, getting crashed with dump trucks or having buckets of stuff dumped on his head. most times when we went somewhere tayloe would ask if wolly could come too and he always included him in his prayers and list of people in our family (mommy, daddy, tayloe, thomas, wawe).
i'll tell you the truth. i was looking forward to wolly getting older. i knew that was when i'd get him back, when he'd either be too stubborn or too deaf to comply with tayloe's demands and instead be content to lay by my feet.
i always said in his previous life wolly was an accountant - some dude with a desk job whose zest for living had been zapped by florescent lights and microwave lunches.
in his dog life, he made up for all he'd missed. he had space and air, lakes and oceans and rivers. he had grass to roll in, dirt to dig in and tons and tons of balls to fetch. he had four strong, beautiful legs so he could run.
he had a family.
more than anything, he had love.