Note David's hand gripping the back of her onesie. Now that she can crawl, she refuses to sit still.
Well, folks, we're 30 for 30. I can't believe we did it. Thirty awesome things in 30 days. Today David said, "Let's just keep doing awesome things. But...without the pressure of blogging about it every day." 30 Things started as something like a joke that I brought up to David while we were in the car, and he jumped on the idea and said we must do it. And I have to admit it has been something of a life-changer for me. Life-adjuster at the very least. It is not a bad way to live a life: to wake up and ask yourself what awesome thing you are going to accomplish with your family that day. Even if it is just a quiet evening at home.
In any case, today Hollie took a turn for choosing awesomeness. She crawled.
We love our Little Bean so much it hurts. We are so in love with her. I'm proud of her for choosing today—the 30th of 30 days—to reach her biggest milestone yet. (Don't you think her eyes look green?)
She's crawled earlier this week—one or two crawls this way, one or two that way. But never more than a couple of feet at a time. But today, she was on the move. She crawled from one end of the living room to the other, finding Mom's books, Dad's records, and the basket where we hide the rest of her toys next to the couch. She crawled down the hallway; she crawled into her room. She pulled out the drawer that we keep her nighttime diapers in, and she played with one of these diapers for about twenty minutes, without ever even putting it in her mouth. She is so happy.
She still wants David or me to help her stand up and walk around whenever we are sitting (or lying down—crawling babies make you sleepy!) anywhere near her, but she is much more content to play by herself now that she knows that she's mobile. We found out today that we can no longer leave bags of groceries on the ground, and we really need to figure out what to do with every bottom shelf in the house. David is leaving to grade AP English tests in Kentucky for a week and a half this Friday, so I will likely spend the week following Little Miss Busy around and making a list of all the places we need to baby-proof.
Anyway, here is video evidence of Hollie's crawling. It is two minutes long plus change—viewer beware. I thought about trimming it, but I like how the full video documents Hollie's persistence. I think my mom in particular will want to see this baby not giving up. I'm so proud of my little scamp. (Now if I could just figure out how to keep her from tearing apart all of our books until I know where to move them all!)
A quick note on that yellow ball: it was a new toy today, and I think she understands how special it is to actually be able to hold it without it slipping away (think Harry Potter and golden snitches, maybe). She was so pleased at finally grabbing it, that she refused to let go of it, even after she got ready for bed. She fell asleep with it in her fist. I about cried, it was so cute.
P.S. The other awesome thing we did was have David open his birthday present: a SuperNintendo (our SNES was lost over Christmas break in some boxes that never reached our house). The question blocks were filled with cheap game cartridges I won on eBay. Although we are always trying to make better use of our time in general, it sure was fun to play old video games with David today (and Hollie is really, really, really interested in touching the controllers, too. Fortunately, I gave them all a good wash down with some Clorox wipes before wrapping them up).
It was a little ridiculous to spend so much time on just wrapping presents, and I thought David would make fun of me. Instead, he took it as a challenge to wrap future presents even more creatively. I'm just glad I didn't pull down the light fixture by hanging tissue boxes full of game cartridges from them.
David gives a question-box present a good Mario "sproing! sproing!"
Today our friend Joleen helped us make freezer jam. It was pretty awesome. We had never done such a thing before. Here are some pictures. Today's blogging is brief because Dave and I are trying to put most of our energy into the two remaining days. Also, it is raining in West Texas tonight, and that requires curling up with some good old 18th-century gothic literature, eating snacks.
Blackberries and skinned peaches and nectarines to add flavor to our strawberry jams.
A fruity brew. I sort of wished I were making soup that I could just bowl up and eat. I kept being sloppy with all the steps so that I would have excuses to lick my fingers.
Baby Hollie wore her strawberry outfit in support.
We named the flavors Stoneberry Jam (Dave's name) and Summer Blush (my name. I know that sounds more like a name for make-up than one for delicious jam. I don't have an explanation for that. I don't even wear make-up all that often. I don't need to. My summer blush is all-natural, baby. However, if I don't wear mascara, David always points out that his and Hollie's lashes are much fuller and longer than mine. He says I have "action lashes," but I'm pretty sure they are just runty lashes after all).
Meanwhile, David and Hollie sat on the floor and dreamed of freshly baked bread.
Thanks, Joleen, for letting us use your kitchen and your jammin' know-how! Jo is also my morning exercise "buddy" (Gillian Michaels refers to the beautiful women in her videos as "buddies," and this always drives us crazy). Hopefully by the end of the summer, that double-chin you see on my face will be less prominent. Also, this is what my hair looks like when I immediately pull it back into a ponytail after showering so that I can get on with my day. Blow dryers shmo shmyers! And why, yes, that IS a maternity top! (It ends up that wearing maternity tops when you aren't pregnant really makes you feel thin. And my torso is so unfortunately long, they are about the only shirts that will cover me up. Why am I making excuses? I made a ton of jam today and it was awesome!)
My work station we set up so that I could work on my denim quilt while we watched movies. It was fabulous.
Our original plans for tonight were to go see Men In Black 3 at the drive-in and let Hollie sleep in the car while we stayed up late. After a day filled of doing this and that, the evening rolled around and Hollie got nice and cozy in her pjs and we finally decided that the only thing more awesome than a drive-in movie would be a nice, quiet evening at home.
So we did it. We stayed home.
I immediately changed into my pajamas, and David left to pick up our take-out Italian. Meanwhile, I pulled the dining room table into the living room and set up a work station for cutting out patches for my denim blanket that I am working on (the work station was Dave's idea). After tonight, I have somewhere around 100 7x7-inch squares—not nearly enough! (The denim blanket is a huge labor of love for me. The jeans are all from my high school and college days, and I can tell you specific adventures I had in each pair. Almost all of them have holes in the knees or safety-pins holding the cuffs together. Even after getting cut up into squares, I can still tell for the most part which pair of pants each square came from. I have an almost unhealthy obsession with my past blue jeans, in the same way that I get weirdly attached to good pairs of sneakers. I mostly hate my jeans now, mostly because they aren't nearly flared enough for my taste, and I'm in that terrible halfway point between jean sizes that always results in a saggy bottom or a fly that won't stay up. Terrible, terrible. But the jeans in this blanket............oh my. What stories they tell. I hope I can make a blanket worthy of their memories. Anyone out there with advice on denim-blanket making or patterning, your words of wisdom are welcome here!)
Anyway, we put Hollie to bed, ate our grub, and watched Sleepless in Seattle on Netflix, a film that only just recently came up in a conversation between me and Dave a week or so ago. The entire time we watched it, I couldn't help but realize how differently I watch this movie as a married woman than I ever did as a single gal.
It is still a good movie, a great movie even. Not perfect, but really great. Really enjoyable. It's strange, though, to remember watching this movie at countless sleepovers as a girl, sighing over Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, waiting for them to meet up on the Empire State Building just in the nick of time. I saw myself as Meg Ryan, secretly impatient to grow older so that fate could line me up with an adorable widower with a clever young son. The part about Hanks's wife dying was sad, but necessary for the story, an unfortunate happenstance that paved the way for the real love story between Meg and Tom. I was uncomfortable with all the scenes that focused on the dead wife, because the more interesting story for me was the one about all the crazy coincidences between Meg and Tom that proved they were meant to be.
Of course, I, too, believe in something like meant to be. Though I would never put it in those words. But there is something quite odd about the way David and I got together. So many random moments of chance—it's really quite horrific when I sit down to think about it, about how many dominoes had to fall into other dominoes in order for us to have met at all (and, even after meeting, how many chance encounters occurred, how many brave and even seemingly stupid-at-the-time emails had to be sent in order for true love to begin to stir in our hearts that night at the Chicago Hilton.....). The really wild part is how well Dave and I really do fit together. We had both dated many people before finding each other—I think it is safe to say that we both began to question our ability to really find what it was we thought we were looking for. It's easy to empathize with Meg Ryan trying to make things work with poor old Bill Pullman. And, now that I've met David, it's easy to empathize with the unaccountable interest you can have with someone you barely know, but who just seems like he is meant for you. When Ryan hires a detective to spy on Hanks, I couldn't help but recall my own secret blog-stalking of David when I was suddenly terrified that he was meant for me (terrified because of my own nearly-serious boyfriend at the time, as well as my own gap of a dozen or so states between me and Dave). I do think that there is something to sparks and epic loves and heavenly orchestrations of people meeting people (though I don't believe in one-true-loves or soulmates. Well, I think Dave is a soulmate, but I'm sure both of us have other potential soulmates out there. I prefer the term kindred spirits. Bosom buddies. You know, blood brothers.)
My point is, I don't watch the film for Meg Ryan anymore. I watch the film now for Tom Hanks.
From my perspective now, the movie is less about finding true love and more about bereavement and the frightening possibility of ever having to move on from past true loves. I admit that I carried my heart in my throat the entire film, biting my lip so as not to cry so that David wouldn't feel bad about me watching this movie (I have terrible fears at night that something will happen to rupture our lifelong vows to each other prematurely. Even though I have a strong religious faith that our family will remain united even after death, I also know that mortality is still a long time to have mourn even a brief separation from loved ones).
Still, the film isn't dark; to the contrary, this movie is comforting and cathartic. And though it is about moving on, it isn't about losing the past love. The way I see it, the film is about how human hearts are large enough to be capable of loving more people without mitigating the love you carry for people already. And I believe that myself.
Now, if you'll excuse me, all of this blogging is getting in the way of my quiet evening at home.
Oh, and for Mom Gilliland and Mom Grover, here is a bonus picture and video of Babalooboo. She kind of crawled today. She crawled, but not predictably, and only a few feet at a time. She mostly just tries to stand up over and over and over again (to no avail). The video was us trying to capture the crawling, but she won't do it on demand. Still, it is a good minute or so of a cute baby doing cute baby things.
Trying to stand. It's hard in footie-pajamas on a wood floor, it ends up.
