Lala

We spent the weekend frolicking in DC at Anthony’s wedding. It was a total blast! We saw the monuments; biked around them for 4 hours, actually. We actually went out to a bar at night, amazing! We went to the rehearsal dinner high atop a hotel overlooking the Pentagon and stayed out late enough to see the lights on the monuments. Read: we stayed out after 8pm. Did you know that the Washington Monument has 2 red lights at the top that come on at dark that make it look like it has eyes? We danced the night away at the reception to “Starry-Eyed Surprise,” the theme song of the wedding. You’ve probably gathered an important fact from these details…we left the girls at home!!! It was fabulous to get to be foot-loose and fancy-free for a weekend–I actually felt guilty about how much fun it was.
While we were gone, Peapod learned lots of new tricks: 1. How to crawl on all fours instead of doing the army crawl, 2. how to wave w/ both hands at the same time, 3. how to say “ni ni,” as in “Night, Night,” and 4. For once, after 2 or 3 months of repetition, she might have finally learned to sign “All Done” when she’s finished eating.
Those of you who know me know that I’m not totally sold on the whole recent fad of teaching 6 month olds how to do simple sign-language. There is certainly nothing morally wrong with it, I just never thought that I’d want to join the fad. However, this is another instance in which you end up doing things as a parent that you never thought you’d do.
As a result of Peapod’s incessant screaming at meal times, her continued lack of communication skills (very few 9 month olds can tell you exactly what they want you to do for them), and my intense aversion to being screamed at, we decided to try to teach her to tell us that she was done eating. Maybe it has finally paid off because, last night at supper, I gave her a bite at the end of the meal, and she immediately threw her hands up in the air and waved them around, which was the signal. Of couse we made a huge deal out of it and got her out right away, hoping that it would sink in. Has she done it again since? Nope….wishful thinking. Too bad for us. We’ll have to keep trying.
Yes, it’s amazing how much more darling and cute my children seem when I’ve been away from them for a while. The weather here has been truly beautiful for a week or two now. Highs around 80, lows in the upper 50s, and low humidity. So we were driving around today, and out of the blue Small Bean says, “Mama, there’s a car without a top.” It was a convertible. Not that this revelation will be nearly as cute to anybody else besides me, but it was precious at the time. This will be the end of this part of the post, which has definitely gone from chronicling our awesome weekend to raving about our children. It might get even more sappy if I don’t change topics.
It was fun to get to hang around all of Anthony and Bethany’s friends. They are just normal people like we are, but I was struck with how unpretentious they were. They weren’t out to impress anybody; they really didn’t seem to care too much what other people thought about them or their lives. Not that they thumbed their noses at society’s norms or anything like that, it just seemed that they were “comfortable in their skin,” and if someone didn’t like the way they were, that was okay with them. There was definitely something intriguing about them. Maybe it was because they live in a big city, and the pressures of small town life are not present there. Some of them were concerned with things like poverty in Africa (something that people in Lynchburg don’t talk about in a social setting generally), and considering moving to a really poor part of town just to minster to people around them. It was definitely interesting to hear the things that they talked about and to contrast them to the things that I talk about…..