Laughter gets us through

Needless to say things have a bit crazy around this place lately. I have been traveling almost every week since the beginning of the year, with little exaggeration. It started January 5th with an interview in New Hampshire, the next week it was North Carolina, the following week Rhode Island. I had a glorious week off and then hit Michigan, southern Florida, and then northern Pennsylvania last week. I have at least a couple of weeks off before another interview scheduled for mid-week during the second week of March. I haven't gotten real work done since the year started as I have either been traveling, getting prepped for an interview, coming down off the stress of an interview trip, or trying to convince my poor small dude that I am not heading off on a plane every time I put my coat on. And while I can most certainly say that this process is the absolute epitome of NOT FUN and HIGHLY STRESSFUL, I am trying to keep the complaining about it all at bay. I don't want to look back at these posts months or years from now and feeling the stress all over again. Suffice it to say that I am expecting word from positions any day now, I expect good news every week and repeatedly don't get it. Not necessarily because it won't ever come, but because it is just taking forever. I am getting lots of interest based on my application packet materials. I am getting a really great percentage of interviews based on the number of applications I sent in, a much higher percentage that others I have heard about. I am getting some rejection letters, mostly from schools I was less excited to apply to in the first place, sometimes from schools I interviewed at and would have liked to receive offers from, but by far, the most upsetting piece of news I received was the email I got last Friday. In that message, I was informed that I was a certain school's top choice and that I would have received an offer had their administration not pulled the position due to budgetary concerns. I had already interviewed, the search committee had already invested a great deal of time weeding through applications, meeting to agree on the short list, meeting again to conduct phone interviews, meeting again to decide on the final interview group of 3 candidates. Not to mention the huge amount of time and money invested in the 3 full day long interviews. All of this only to not end up hiring anyone because administration changed their mind on the availability of funding for the position???? Frustrating, but I digress! I am here to lighten the mood in the household for a change.

I present the hip-potamus bubble blower. It was purchased because the previously adored bubble blower decided to die randomly. No new batteries were fixing this thing sadly. Unfortunately if you hadn't noticed we are in the Boston area and it is winter, so the bubble blowing took place in the kitchen, much to the dismay of the individual left to clean the thick layer of soap solution left in the aftermath (yes, that would be me, big surprise). But does he ever love that little thing!

I put this one in just because I love this picture of him. Such a cute little face!

After figuring out that it was more fun to run through the bubbles and make Mommy do the bubble blowing, there was a lot of this going on. We had to cut the festivities eventually for safety reasons. I figured 2 wasn't a good time for him to learn how to skate and the hard tile floor wasn't the place to do so anyway. But did we ever have some fun and more importantly, we laughed. And laughter is what is getting us through the weeks right now while we wait to see what life has in store for us next.

Some fun stuff

So this semester I am taking an HTML class and finally learning some web design. It's only taken me about 10 years to get in line with it....and to think, I could have been at the start of it if I had only been more motivated! Anyways, I added a link to the left (or to the right if you don't live in opposite world) of some of the stuff that I have been working on, and obviously as the semester goes on stuff will be added to the site it takes you to. Some of the stuff may seem simple and mundane, however, it's stuff that I have actually had to create from scratch, and there is certainly more to it then I thought possible! Feel free to check in periodically to view some of the stuff I am working on!

My play museums?

We have been trying to get out on the weekends and since the weather is too cold to be outside at the park, we have been taking advantage of our children's museum membership. Easily the best entertainment money we have spent all year! Two weeks ago we dropped by the Boston Children's Museum on Sunday morning. We hadn't checked the schedule of events prior to heading over, and we found out quickly that perhaps we should have. We still had a good time, but we spent a lot of time and effort fighting the crowds with a "Japanese New Year" festival they had scheduled. I looked it up in case you're wondering, there is no such thing as a specific Japanese New Year like the Chinese New Year, Japan celebrates the New Year on January 1st, just like here, but apparently they scheduled a Japanese heritage day and called it the Japanese New Year and we ended up on a collision course with hundreds of other families, it was chaotic!

We did squeeze in some fun though in between the crowds. Noah and I played in the kitchen and he baked some bread in the "very, very hot oven."

We made the mandatory stop to play in the water. This is easily Noah's favorite activity there, he could stay for hours just pouring water from one container to the next, it just never gets old.

After a good chance to play in the water, we dragged Noah away so we could all check out the traditional Japanese drumming show. I was worried that the noise level might be a bit too much for him, but Noah was absolutely captivated. I had to check a couple of times to make sure he was still breathing!! Not a peep out of him until the drummers stopped, and even then he asked for "more drumming pease."

A second favorite stop in the museum is to play with the golf balls. They have all kinds of ramps and chutes to send the balls down, and some how watching the balls go down the same paths over and over and over again is some sort of toddler crack. Note to self...perhaps we need to set up a ball chute in our house???

This weekend, as yet another escape out of the house for the day, we took a short road trip to Providence for the day. We left just a bit before nap time, hoping the little man would take a nap on the way down. It worked out perfectly, he woke up just as we were pulling into the parking garage for lunch. Lunch, however, was an epic failure, but the blame rests on the adults this time. We forgot the critical "need to know basis" rule of parenting and mentioned the museum before we had gotten him to eat something. Noah is the type of child that will easily blow off food for the chance to play with something fun, there are days where the food quantities ingested are so small that when I wonder how he is even nourished enough to have energy to play. Suffice it to say that the grilled cheese sandwich was barely even sampled and he spent the entire of the meal on either my or Tim's lap instead of in his booster. Oh well, our bad, in the future we will be sure to be much better about informing the little dude of only what is coming up immediately next. Right after lunch we hit the bookstore to grab a couple of truck themed books to add to the bedtime reading ritual. Books were found, the mall was exited and we were off to the museum.

I have to say, the Providence Children's museum is about 1/5th the size of Boston, but their exhibits easily held Noah's interest for just as long, if not longer, than some of the ones in town here. He was a major fan of the air tubes (stick a colored handkerchief in and watch it disappear and then fly out the top of the tube and land on Mommy's head...tons of fun was had).

And as is customary, it is always necessary to stop off and play in the water tables, even out of town, there are no exceptions!

They also had an adorable little area with rubber "rocks" and a bunch of trucks and bulldozers, which was obviously a really big hit as well. We stayed for at least a couple of hours and might have stayed longer if we weren't worried about getting home in time for dinner (another meal out after the lunch fiasco was not in the cards).

Since we've been back home, we've been fielding requests to go back and play at the museum, morning, noon, and night. He obviously had a great time this weekend and now that he is a bit older, much more mobile than last year, and understands more of what is going on in the exhibits, he is really getting a whole lot more out of our time there. We already have plans to head back to the one in town in a couple weeks to check out their new Curious George exhibit, which opens this Sunday. That may just send the little dude over the edge!