2011

So the night before Christmas, my parents came over for our traditional dinner of cheese, crackers, and Chex Mix. (It's delicious, don't judge.)

Afterwards, we descended on the tree and let Zooey open her presents. What she's got here is a great drawing board with a magnetic pen.

The second gift was this little baby doll. When Nick took it out of the package he forgot to remove one of the strings on the back, so Zooey thought it was an ornament and immediately hung it on the tree.

This is an awesome floor keyboard that was given to Zooey by her Mamow and Peepaw. (Remember the one in the movie Big? It's like a home-sized version of that.) It's got different settings so the keys can sound like different instruments. Super cool.

Playing with several toys at once. And why not? It's as decadent as the late-era Roman Empire around here.

And checking herself out (with Penguin) in the Christmas photo.

Christmas! Christmas Christmas Christmas! The big day finally arrived, and with it came an insane amount of enthusiasm from a certain little girl we know. First thing in the morning the three of us had a gift exchange in our jammies. Here's Zooey opening The Snowy Day, one of my favorite books from when I was little.

Then we went over to Grandma and Papa Joe's house. Here's Zooey having a chat with Grandma and Boo Boo. (Grandma and Papa Joe are in the process of moving, so that's why there's a bit of clutter in the background.)

This is the first of two tea party sets Zooey received. She used the container for this one as a watering can and went back and forth across the living room pretending to water the furniture. Pretty cute.

And then she got this sweet Razor mini-scooter, which she proceeded to race around the house for a couple of hours. I was amazed how quickly she caught onto this! She'll have a motorcycle within the year, I just know it.

Both Daddy and daughter fascinated by the train.

And here we're having a milk party (she insisted on pouring milk instead of tea) with Grandma and Penguin.

By this point, it was becoming obvious that both Zooey and I were coming down with colds, so when we came back to Lawrence we only went over to my mom's house for a few minutes. While we were there, though, Zooey received this awesome homemade pillow from my talented Aunt Judy. Check it out! It's covered with penguins! Aunt Judy also made the adorable apron she's wearing.

Zooey was SO excited about this pillow. Here are a couple of shots of her cuddling up with the fabulous penguin pillow.

This is the first year that Zooey has really understood what was going on with the Christmas decorations, traditions, etc., and she has been extremely excited about all of it. First of all, we set up an advent calendar in the living room, which dispenses toy frogs and bouncy balls and chocolates and the like. Zooey likes to go over to it about 40 times a day, asking us if she can open another window, at which point we have to explain that the Advent Monster only visits once a day (not true) and that the other slots are empty until the day they are opened (they're actually all full now...don't tell her, please). We also introduced her to the idea of Santa, although I'm not sure she fully grasped the concept. I suspect she's thinking of him as some kind of tv character like Caillou or Cookie Monster. (And for some reason she seems to think that a visit to Santa consists of driving a fire truck.) And then, of course, there's the obligatory Christmas tree. She was SO excited about the tree. Her shrieks of delight while we set it up began at a normal pitch but ended up in a whole crazy register that Nick and I could no longer hear because we're old or possibly because we're not dogs.

She had actually calmed down a bit by the time we took these pictures, but believe me, the crazy glint is still there in her eye. Oh yes, it's still there.

Taking a break from putting up ornaments to hang out with Daddy (and the Grover puppet).

In other news: last Saturday we took Zooey to the local library to check out a book for the first time. We went to the children's section, naturally, and she rifled around in the board book bins until she found one she liked. She ended up selecting "The Foot Book: Dr. Seuss's Wacky Book of Opposites." I think it's a solid choice.

Right away she adopted the slouchy, don't-bug-me-I'm-reading posture. Doesn't she look like a moody teenager here? I'm thinking of starting her on The Hunger Games next.

We took Zooey downtown this weekend for the annual trick-or-treating extravaganza. The merchants stand outside and hand out candy, and the kids go from shop to shop until they have a veritable mountain of candy in their bags. This was the first year that Zooey was really aware of what was going on. Especially the principle of "Say slogan, receive candy."

Here she is, practically beside herself, and we haven't even gotten out of the house yet. ("Costume!! Candy!! Costume!!")

She makes for a very scary (and fabulous!) werewolf.

I love this one. By the way, Nick took all of these pictures, so if you're wondering why the quality is so much better than usual, that'd be why!

She was intensely interested in the other trick-or-treaters. Thankfully, she wasn't quite old enough to be spooked by some of the freakier costumes. (This is Lawrence, after all. Freaky is our bread and butter.)

Scoping out the candy haul.

At one point Zooey bolted from the line and made a beeline for this merry-go-round. We kept trying to lure her away with the promise of more candy, but she would not be deterred until she had ridden each one of the horses.

This last one's kind of blurry, but I'm including it to show what the full outfit looks like. The big red bow up by the ear? I sewed that on. Also the heart patch on the knee. Cause werewolves can be fancy, too.

Today, Zooey and I met up with my good friend Susan for a quick visit to her sister's farm (thanks, Julie!). Zooey has been to petting zoos before, but she's never been in close proximity to either cows or chickens. Here, she encountered both. These pictures can't begin to depict her excitement about this adventure, but if you imagine a two-and-a-half-year-old freebasing cocaine and watching SpongeBob, you might get somewhere near the level of enthusiasm on display here.

Here's Zooey with the eggs we collected from the coop. We even got to bring some of them home! Mmm, farm-fresh eggs.

Zooey tried her best to befriend Winston (the rooster by the fence) and his ladies, but for the most part they kept their distance. Not that she minded. Just after this photo was taken, she started flapping her arms like a chicken and jumping up and down like a crazy person. Hilarious.

And what farm is complete without a bunch of friendly dogs? Zooey really wants one of her own, but Nick has a rule that there can only be one non-potty-trained person or animal in the house at a time. Good rule, I think.

This last one is obviously not from the farm, but it IS the bench that Nick finished while Zooey and I were visiting with Susan (and the cows and chickens and dogs). Isn't it gorgeous? All he has left to do is stain/varnish it.

P.S. Please ignore the gray spot on the wall. We were just testing paint colors. As for the red marks beneath it, they are of course crayon and are courtesy of the same little lady who's sitting so demurely on the bench.

So guess what city Nick and I visited back in ... ahem ... May? Nick had a conference to attend in Leesburg, Virginia, so the two of us made a week of it. The trip was incredibly fun, although the whole experience of driving in the DC area left a great deal to be desired. It was bad, man. Really, really bad. I took the rental car to one of the outreaching metro stops while Nick was attending workshops, and it was pretty much the definition of a nightmare. First of all, it took me an hour just to get to the metro station. Apparently, in this part of the country, twenty miles away = at least an hour's drive. Next, I drove around this massive complex for another hour, going from parking area to parking area, and there was NOT A SINGLE PARKING PLACE TO BE FOUND. On my second run-through, just before giving up, I saw this man walking to his car and stalked him dangerously until he pulled out in his car and I was able to snag his space. Whew. I was very lucky. Everything went swimmingly once I was actually on the metro, but once I returned to the station at the end of the day, the fun continued. Somehow, I managed to exit out the wrong side of the station. I walked around for an hour in the baking sun, trying in vain to find my car, before realizing that there was a whole other set of lots that branched off from the other side of the station. And then....oh yes, it gets better...I sat in traffic for AN HOUR AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES just to make it those scant twenty miles back to Leesburg. Words cannot express the frustration of this. Just sitting there, bumper to bumper, moving perhaps an inch every few minutes. But there was nothing to do about it, so I just popped in the Creedence and tried to lower my blood pressure stereophonically. How do people do this commute thing every single day? I cannot even imagine the sheer hell this must be.

Fortunately, the next day Nick and I found a metered lot, made a trip by a very cooperative bank, dumped $7.00 worth of quarters into the meter, and had a very pleasant ride into DC. And since there were two of us, on the way home I just pulled out my iPhone and mapped an alternate route for us so that we could avoid the snarl. It was actually quite lovely going the backroads of Virginia. We saw palatial houses, Civil War era homes, and a few huge, lush greens where people in jodhpurs were training horses. Sometimes heading off the main roads is the best possible thing you can do while traveling.

I spent two days on my own--one in DC, one at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Annex just outside of Leesburg--and then Nick and I spent a few more days exploring the city together. Here is a not-so-brief sampling of the stuff we saw. I'll try to keep the explanations short so as not to try everyone's patience, since there are a LOT of photos here.

The first place I went to see on my own was the National Gallery of Art. It's an extremely impressive museum, filled with many of the most famous pieces of art in the world. It's also very welcoming to people who wish to come in with paints and a palette and do their own renderings of the art, as the gentleman above is doing. His portrait is quite faithful, although I have to say it looks a tad more like Bob Dylan than the original.

"Sacre bleu! An army marches on its stomach!"

This is the atrium of the beautifully designed Holocaust Museum in DC. There was very little else that was beautiful within, although it was very, very well done. Incredibly informative and presented in such an educational way that you can almost endure the soul-crushing horror of it all. Almost.

Here is the White House! On a rainy day! From a great distance but captured through a rather impressive zoom! Needless to say, we did not see the president, although it did look like there was some kind of press conference taking place right when we arrived. Impressive building.

And speaking of impressive, this is the World War II memorial.

I felt compelled to take this photo since my grandfather on my mom's side fought in Okinawa. It was one of the deadliest battle zones in the war.

The Korean War Memorial. Isn't the design of this gorgeous? I love how it incorporates the greenery to give a sense of the soldiers' environment.

Lincoln!!! Much, much bigger in person. I can see why those people were so impressed with it at the end of Logan's Run.

And this is the famous reflecting pool, undergoing some seriously unattractive renovation. Sigh. No re-enacting the Jenny scene from Forrest Gump for us.

This is in the Air and Space Museum. It's the actual Spirit of St. Louis.

One of Amelia Earhart's jackets! How cool is that?

Here's the exterior of the Air & Space Museum annex, just outside of Leesburg.

The Enola Gay. Like Lincoln's statue, this was much, much larger than I would have imagined.

Here's a German Messerschmitt, which looks as if it's seen a bit of battle.

And this is the type of plane flown by the kamikaze pilots.

There was a whole wall of engines in this museum, and some of them were downright gorgeous. This one looks kind of organic, like a deep sea creature or something.

This was the model alien craft used in the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

And here you will notice that the creators of the model embellished the surface with some recognizable characters (since they were too small to show up in the finished film). See R2-D2 right in the center there?

Ford's Theater. See the old-fashioned lampposts still in use?

Here's our lovely hotel in Leesburg. Would you ever guess it was a Holiday Inn? By the way, the hotel restaurant served primarily Indian food, and the rogan josh was so unbelievably delicious it nearly made me cry. For reals. Probably the best Indian food I've ever had.

Oh! And last, but not least, here's the famous Dulles airport, where large parts of the immortal Die Hard 2 were filmed. Yippee kai-yay....uh....melon farmer?

Here are some belated pictures from Zooey's first real Easter celebration. We bought some of those individually wrapped candy eggs, tossed them haphazardly around the yard (we didn't really HIDE any of them, per se), and then handed her a basket with which to retrieve them. She was thrilled about the whole thing, and that was before she figured out there was candy inside. Mmmm...sweet sweet candy. Truth be told, we let her have a few too many of those eggs, and before long she was zipping around the house so fast all we could see was a purple blur and the flick of flying ponytails. It was at least dinner time before she crashed. We were driving to the restaurant, and we turned around to see Zooey sitting in her car seat, staring at her hands like she'd never seen them before, like she was saying, "DUDE, have you seen these things? They're huge!!" Very, very funny.

So this past Sunday we had a fabulous dinosaur party in honor of Zooey's 2nd birthday. (Two years, already! How did that happen?) We had cake and presents and yummy Wheat State Pizza, and Zooey was just absolutely thrilled with all the attention. Here are some choice shots from the occasion.

This is a dinosaur hoodie I sewed for our little Zooeysaurus.

Part of the birthday display. Notice the phalanx of tiny dinosaurs arranged along the ledge.

Zooey has totally figured out how this present thing works. Here she is opening a Sit 'N Spin that Grandma Janelle and Papa Joe got for her. (I know! SIt 'N Spins! Cue the collective nostalgia flashback!)

Zooey playing blocks with Grandma Jan and Grandma Janelle.

Zooey prowling the earth in the Land Before Time. Watch out for that comet!

Zooeysaurus enjoying the Sit 'N Spin.

Part 2.

Here's the cake I made for the party. It took FOREVER to decorate (my pinky finger developed a spectacular blister), but it was worth it to see her face when she saw it. Also, it was yummy.

Taking some time to color with Grandma Janelle. Notice that very few of the crayons are in one piece?

Lastly, here's a picture I shot tonight, on Zooey's birthday proper.

Happy Birthday, Zooeysaurus! We love you.

Christmas season photos! Yay!!!

Here's Zooey wearing Mommy's blazer, looking very hip and telling everyone all about how she liked Arcade Fire's early stuff better. Pass the PBR, please.

And here she is in a fabulous scarf, classing up the joint.

We always open presents with my folks on Christmas Eve, then spend Christmas morning with Nick's family. Here's a super-cool cat keyboard that Mamo and Papo (Grandma and Grandpa) Vaughn got for her. She loves to mash the keys and chatter into the microphone.

Next up was the obligatory Cozy Coupe, which Zooey insisted on sitting in while it was being assembled. Not terribly patient, this one.

Too. Much. Sugar.

This is Christmas morning at Mamo Janelle and Papa Joe's house. It was amazing how quickly she worked out the whole gift-opening process.

A baby MP3 player thingie.

And lastly, it's the awesome Chicken Dance Elmo. As you might guess, he does the chicken dance.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!