The Easter bunny was in town

Contrary to my lack of posting lately, we have been having lots of fun around here. It seems bizarre to talk about Easter when we are actually much closer to Mother's day, but since this is the first year that Noah is on board with all of the holiday excitements, I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to share the fun.

What with all of the job interview traveling, we hadn't had an opportunity to visit Memere & Pepere B's house since the New Year, so it was very nice to have a long weekend break to travel up there.

The Easter bunny found its way to Memere & Pepere's house and dropped off Noah's Easter basket. This time he came in the front door and left his little bunny tracks (Thanks Beth for the awesome idea!!!). Noah was VERY impressed with the bunny tracks and was talking about them all weekend!

When he came down in the morning, he wasted no time in noticing the basket that the Easter Bunny had left.

Somehow the Easter bunny knew that Noah wanted his own tractor like the one he has been obsessed with at Nannie Lou's house. This has been a big hit and has been toted around every where.

After the initial excitement of opening up and exploring the Easter basket, we sent Noah on an Easter egg hunt through the living room. He had a bit of a practice run the say before at the local grocery store. They had an hour long egg hunt set up for the short statured customers. He had a great time and was very proud of his egg stash from both hunting opportunities!

After some breakfast, we took advantage of the beautiful weather and we made beautiful chalk art on the driveway and in general ran amok for a while.

Noah also was very excited about the Easter egg decoration's on Memere's tree in front of the house. Not as though he really needed an excuse, but it provided a good target for some jumping practice.

After a bit of playtime, we headed over to Memere & Pepere L's house for an Easter lunch. Noah had some ham and green bean casserole and then played with Pepere in the driveway with his new bubble wand.

It was a beautiful weekend, we had a chance to relax and enjoy family and give the little man a bit of a change in scenery. With the upcoming move at the end of the summer, it is all the more important to make the time to hang out with all of the people that adore the wee man so much while they are still close by.

Doing the Noah

This past weekend was a whirlwind for the family. Uncle Chris got married on Saturday down in Charlotte. While a flight would have been MUCH faster and less grueling, 3 flights and a rental car on the other end was just not something that was in the financial cards right now, so we piled in the car and made the 15+ hour drive down south. It was rough with a little person in the car, but under the circumstances, we couldn't have asked for a better behaved little man! We tried the drive overnight Wednesday night, arriving at Uncle Chris' place around noon on Thursday. That will be the last time that we will be driving overnight, let's chalk it up to a learning experience and move on! :) Noah really did fine, there was a period of about 2 hours in the middle of the night around 2am when he woke up at a gas fill-up and then spent a good long period talking to me about all of the truck on the road, asking what was in each of them and narrating all of the traffic. Not that I am a huge fan of trucks per se, but at 2am, I most certainly wasn't interested in discussing anything with him. I played nice though, humored him about all of the cool things that were in the trucks and he eventually fell back asleep for another 4 hours thankfully!

The remainder of the day Thursday was a wash since none of us had slept well overnight and Noah was so excited about being in a new place and seeing people and pets that there was no nap to be had that afternoon. He spent the evening being cranky, defiant, and overall quite unpleasant! After a good 12 hour night's sleep, Friday was a MUCH better day! We had breakfast and Uncle Chris' work partner brought over the police car for Noah to check out in the morning. He was very impressed with that naturally. Thank you Uncle Chris for calling in that favor and a big thank you to Gabe for going out of his way to log a "traffic stop" in Uncle Chris' driveway and letting a little boy sit in a real police car for a few minutes! (Pardon the pacifier, he hadn't been up that long at this point)

Later that evening, we all went over for the rehearsal dinner. Noah was quite popular, getting lots of extra attention and and behaving himself quite nicely during the whole evening.

The big day was Saturday and the ceremony was a traditional Greek orthodox marriage ceremony. While beautiful and very symbolic, it was most certainly not the place for a 2 year old little dude. I know he is just 2 and he was just acting his age and nobody was faulting him for doing so as an invited guest, but I SO did not want to be the focus of attention during that period. Chris and Marian deserved their important moment and since Noah was the only small person there, I decided to remove him to outside the church doors to keep the chaos to a minimum. It wasn't pretty and if there had been a timeout chair it would have been made and stayed warm. The worst came when Noah reared back and slapped Tim across the face. He knows and we all know that this sort of behavior is completely not appropriate and as a result, we gracefully requested an escape hatch prior to the pictures so we could get him some dinner, change the scenery, and hopefully get a few minutes of privacy to readjust a short person's attitude! For the most part it worked well, there were a few minutes prior to dinner where I wondered why we had left home in the first place, but after dinner started and the lights went down and the music went up, all bets were off! Noah had a blast dancing all over the dance floor, he was a dancing fool!!! He had so much fun, and we had so much fun watching him, that it more than made up for the less than ideal behavior earlier.

The ride back was uneventful, long, but at least nothing to complain about. Noah (and I) did much better traveling during the day than overnight. He talked a lot about the trucks, but he was in good spirits the whole time. I am glad that we got the chance to spend with Uncle Chris and now officially Aunt Marian. Congratulations to both of them. All the best to both of them for a long and happy life together. Enjoy your honeymoon in Mexico this week!

Cuteness overwhelms the terrible twos...I think?

Noah is in a hilarious stage right now. Yes, he's 2 and there are certainly times when I wonder who replaced my sweet, even-tempered little man with a selective-hearing prone, ill-tempered toddler, but there are moments lately that are just so entertaining that it is worth living through the less pleasurable parts of the terrible twos. His language development is exploding by the day and some of the phrases he comes out with are just too funny not to share and write down for later.

Noah is still having issue with Me, My, & I. For a while, my was the only one used, as in My helping! My get up now! Lately, Noah has been adding me to the mix as well, but some of the cutest things he says lately are the errors:

Here my coming!

Noah has also just started to get the concept of big boys and little boys. He has assigned everyone a title and categorization and some of them are just too much.

Noah is a big boy

Mommy is a big gurlllll

Daddy is a big Daddy

Uncle Tim is a big Uncle Tim

Nannie Lou is a big Nannie Lou

Baby Maggie is a little gurlll (Maggie is the newest little one at Nana Lou's, she's about 5 months old now)

My sweet little man is in the most "mommy-centric" phase we have seen so far. While it is certainly nice to feel loved and wanted, I also can't help but feel guilty for poor Tim who isn't "it" at the moment. I certainly do enjoy the extra cuddles and attention, there is also the downside of always being "it." Drop offs at Nana Lou's house have been getting progressively more dramatic and long winded, there is the extra clutching and hiding and shooing Nana Lou's attempts to say hello. Invariably he is content when I leave and has a lovely day once I am gone, but gone are the days (at least for now) when he would run into the door to her place and pile on the hugs. We've also been running into times at home where only Mommy will do, sometimes its as simple as not wanting Daddy to unbuckle him from the car seat and pitching a fit for me to do it. I've heard Come here Mommy, come here... in a pathetic whiny "please let me have my way" tone more times in the last couple of weeks than I care to count. However! The phrase Come here Mommy, come here has also been used for purposes of good and result in an extra hug or smooch from the little dude, you just never know what you are going to get.

He is also starting to pick up some of the phrases we obviously say to him frequently. Its so cute to hear him say the same things we say in the correct context. This afternoon I was getting ready to make myself a cup of tea. I told him that I was heading to the kitchen to heat up the water. About a minute later, I hear the pounding of little feet behind me. Stopping excitedly in the doorway of the kitchen, he says, "Mommy, you need help? My help you mommy! Mommy BE CAREFUL, that tea very, very hot. Be careful wif it Mommy!"

My sweet little man is a challenge everyday, but he is becoming such a little charmer and certainly provides a great deal of entertainment in between his moments of being "oh so two years old!"

Negotiating the next step

Now that everything is official, or as official as it is going to get until the signed contract arrives in the mail, I can officially announce that I have accepted a position for a tenure-track (permanent, as opposed to a temporary visiting) full-time position as an Assistant Professor in the psychology department at a teaching-focused school in upstate New York. While this is certainly not my dream job at a small liberal arts college in New England, its is an excellent opportunity for me to gain some much needed teaching experience and to prove my merit as an outstanding educator on top of being able to do quality research. I will be teaching 3 courses in the fall semester, one Research Methods course and 2 sections of an Aging class, which will both be new preparations for me. I'll be a very busy person once we arrive in the area. Obviously, this is certainly a relief to have finally landed a position for next year, but it is bittersweet as well given that we will be making a big move away from family, friends, a position that I LOVE at Boston College, an area we are familiar with, and in some ways most distressingly Nana Lou (she is a daily comfort that gives us the knowledge that Noah is safe, happy, and loved there). I am viewing this as a necessary detour that will hopefully give us the opportunity to end up in a place where we all want to be long-term. Who knows, maybe I will end up loving it there and we will settle down and stay. I may stay a few years and look again with a more competitive and well-rounded application package, time will tell. I don't promise sunshine and rainbows as we plan for and survive this transition, so please make an effort in my less optimistic periods to remind me that this is what is best for us all in the long run and bear with me as I attempt not to lose my mind!