Hand-Me-Downs and Hidden Treasures

Living in the poor college town that we do, means we see a lot of hand-me-downs.  Dr. O and I have purchased exactly one piece of furniture in our seven years of marriage.  My whole three bedroom condo is filled with 2nd hand furniture, and we have a lot of furniture…for a three bedroom condo.  Yard sales are rampant, usually filled with children’s clothes dating back to the prehistoric era.  Everyone holds onto everything because even if you don’t need it, there will probably be a poor university student down the road who might.  Our local thrift store no longer accepts donations of furniture because by the time the couch makes it to the furniture store it has been used by five different families whose children have managed to break it and spoil it; then it has passed into the dorms where it has changed apartments exactly 42 times.  It becomes lower and lower to the ground as the legs give way, the upholstery becomes a muddy grayish color, it has been pieced together with duck tape, and because the springs are all entirely uncovered and there is no longer any possible spot to place ones behind…. the couch gets dragged to the thrift store.  Because this happens so often in our smallish town….no more furniture donations! 

This particular hand-me-down has a pretty good story.  My friend (who has two little girls) went to her husband’s great-aunt’s home (really), sometime this fall.  The weather was cold and the girls didn’t have jackets.  Mrs. Great Aunt happened to have two jackets in her closet, left there by some other family member.  Mrs. Great Aunt, had kept the jackets for years knowing that someday they would come in handy (which they did).  My friend passed the jackets on to me because they are made for boys.  Giovanni fell in love with this jacket almost right away.  Red happens to be his favorite color but I think he likes it because I made a grimace when I first saw it.  Understanding the history of our town I am sure this jacket is at least as old as I am.  Denim lasts forever you know. 

Anyway as we were walking home from school the other day, my four year old decided to really break in his “new” jacket by filling the pockets with acorns.  Inside the left pocket however we discovered a new treasure, some plastic pilot’s wings with a “Super N” as Gio calls it. 

Pretty cool when you are only four years old.   Now not only do we have “new” favorite jacket but we have a “new” favorite toy as well.  

Thanks a lot.               

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Six reasons we like our six year old:

1. she still likes to play dress up better than anything else

2. she has a hardcore sweet tooth, and takes her black licorice like a man

3. she always let’s her little brother win

4. she fills up her coloring books and “improves” the pictures by filling in the blanks and adding  her own doodles

5.  she loves to tell stories and share her dreams from the night before

6. she wishes she had six little sisters to tuck into bed with her, but she is content to snuggle with her two little brothers instead.

 

Happy Birthday Sweet Six!

Happy Anniversary

517 years ago, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered this big, fat continent in the middle of the ocean that got in the way of his search for a water route to India. Though he wasn't the first person to set foot on the America's (there were tons of people here already), everyone in Europe still pretended like he was, and he became an international hero! Then everyone started coming here because there was this thing called the American Dream that everyone thought was so cool compared to wherever they were living. This Dream is best characterized in the books of Steinbeck, especially The Grapes of Wrath. Ha ha!

But seriously, though...

510 years later, my wife and I got married. That was the second most important event that occurred on this continent. So, on behalf of all my many personalities, may I say a hearty happy anniversary to my lovely wife! (who probably won't see this post for another few days - which means I'll have to actually SAY something to her before the day is up...)

The Marriage of Doctor O and the Missus

1 Year of newlywed bliss

1 Year of raising a daughter, disturber of bliss

1 Year of anticipating a second child and buying a new dresser, then finding our apartment is getting smaller

1 Year of having two children, discovering postpartum bliss (and realizing it requires a little postpartum everything else), then buying our first home - thanks Christopher Columbus! (we named our second child after you!)

1 Year of not having newborns or nursing babies, finding more energy to put our kids to bed earlier and to stay up later, realizing that bliss, though fleeting, is still possible, developing our talents on the diamond and in the concert hall, because we seem to have so much time, then realizing that the more we develop our talents, the less time we have, but we still love each other, so we decide to have another baby (is that was love is?)

1 Year of having another child, this time a world-mover in more ways than one, but particularly because we thought we had so much time and suddenly realized how quickly illusions fall when babies arise (or was it just neglect), but still decide to cultivate our talents, which usually means that Wednesday nights, we hire a babysitter, then go our separate ways, only to realize later we have no money to hire a babysitter for the weekend, when we can finally be together - and this time, the kids go down later and we go down earlier - but as our baby grows, hope springs (eternal, right?) and we anxiously await the day when he will sleep for more than four hours at a time, when he'll stop pushing older kids down (that may never happen), and when I can have my wife back!

1 Year of anticipating things calming down when, really, what happens is I get close to graduating with my PhD finally, but instead get this raging illness in my lungs, right before another raging illness makes for a busy summer, from which I finally return to see that the university I HOPED to graduate from has hired me full time and expects me to finish my dissertation while I'm working as a visiting professor - well that's great, since we lived off credit cards for a whole summer, except upon receiving my first paycheck, it suddenly dawns on me how long it'll be before summer is paid off; meanwhile, the Missus weans our son, but for some reason neither one of us feels much more energy, and while I play on two softball teams (which sometimes means three or four games in one week), we're still getting babysitters for nights when we're both "cultivating" our talents, and the Missus is sitting second chair for the first UV Symphony concert, which means she practices a lot during the day and by the end, is so tired that even putting the kids to bed is a chore - and it gets later; in fact, the kids' bedtime almost corresponds to our bedtime now. Whew!

Thanks, Christopher Columbus! If it weren't for you, maybe our lives wouldn't be so complicated! I lied, by the way, we didn't name our second after you.

Happy Anniversary, anyway.