Hell has not actually frozen over.

However, all four of us have been captured on film in the same shot:

While the photo captures some of the polliwog's slack-jawed yokelness and the bug's best smarmy make-me-smile qualities, at least we are all dressed and not leaking any bodily fluids. 

This is good even for the adults, but the polliwog has been more like a slug in the past month as he's both learning to crawl and gaining four upper teeth at once.  Thus, our family room hardwood floors are covered in little slime trails as he progresses across the floor between Matt's magazines (which he's not supposed to suck on) and the stereo cords (ditto) with many age-appropriate distractions in between (by which he is neither absorbed nor distracted). We were outdoors at the playground by White Fence Farms in Lakewood after a lovely big fried chicken lunch when the photo was taken.  Perhaps in future photos Matt and I may be in body positions which indicate we know and like each other, but hey, you can see our faces! Thanks to Liesl for sharing the photo for bloggy consumption.

It's May, it's May, the merry month of May...

Updates since my last post:

Two shows I worked on, one opera and one romance, have opened and closed.  Both were sell-out hits and did very well with the critics, which should hopefully improve funding on all fronts in the year ahead.

My parents came to visit and got to see one of the shows, the world premiere of Morisot Reclining, and to meet some of the theatre friends I've been working with for the past three years.  It was a treat to have them here to see our work.  

Matt went to the shuttle launch in Florida to watch COS go up in style.  He has promised pictures to me for future blog posts.  We'll see who returns images first, Matt or the newly repaired Hubble.

Mother's day was the day both my parents and Matt left town, so it was truly a mother's day as I spent that day and the next two with the kids, except for work.  We've made lots of trips to lots of parks and playgrounds in an effort to exhaust the bug and air out the polliwog.  He, by the way, appears to have "man of the house" syndrome.  While Matt was away, he was unusually hard to get down to sleep, and wouldn't stay asleep unless I stayed upstairs in my bedroom.  Literally the moment his dad's plane touched down, he took a 2.5 hour nap at daycare (VERY unusual, he's usually an hour-or-less guy) and another mid-evening nap tonight while we went for a walk.  Yup, he's been taking care of the women and it's been exhausting. :)

Perhaps most relevantly, I started Facebooking which has sucked my recreational computer time away from blogging.  I will attempt to be better about maintaining the longer blog post format more than once a month, especially since I have family members who rely on my blog for photos.  (Ah, faithful readers!)  This is why I haven't gone near Twitter--I've already gone from blog posting to 250-character updates and the lure of brevity is way too attractive for me to consider seriously.

Seven years.

Today is our seventh anniversary. For those of you who may remember our wedding day, it was a pretty darn fabulous party. We are so blessed to have so many family and friends who could be with us that day who are still a meaningful part of our lives.

Matt and I went out to lunch to celebrate at Ras Kassa's today, as I have to work at the Opera stage-managing auditions tonight.  We were talking it over and we realized that we are basically still the same people we were when we got married, except for parenthood.  That's a pretty big "except," I realize, but we both agree that parenthood changed us more than marriage did.  I suspect this is especially true for me, since motherhood has been approximately like having two additional internal organs that are now capable of existing a considerable distance from my body and acting independently without permission.

Still, I married a pretty amazing guy.  He makes the best coffee I can imagine drinking in my home, short of morning delivery directly from the Blue Bottle Cafe in San Francisco.  He lets me put my cold toes on his warm legs when I come to bed later than he does. He does a whole lot of housework and probably more of the cooking than I do, which make him an excellent roommate as well as husband. . . the amount of mush I could put into this post would be frankly shocking if I got around to it, but rather than displaying tons of overt sentiment to my reading public I'll simply wish him a happy anniversary--we have had so much happiness already that the years ahead are sure to hold even more than we can imagine.

Word of the day: graupeling.

So, hail starts with a raindrop freezing.

Graupel begins with a snowflake instead, creating a sort of weird styrofoamy pellet-like snow that melts quickly on ground contact.  

It's been graupeling on and off here since yesterday.  Sometimes snow, sometimes rain, sometimes (this new lovely word) graupel.   The bug had teacher in-service today so it's been very mellow: late wake-up, waffles with berries for breakfast, cookie-making and CD-listening, and probably at least one kids' movie in the works after quiet time.

A lovely not-quite-snow day, to say the least.

i would add a photo...

but it would make me sad. 

The polliwog took a header off the chair in his room yesterday, and we ended up at the doctor's office in the late afternoon. No stitches needed, thankfully, but some major band-aidage and a tense 12 hours on concussion watch.   He is just fine today, in good spirits, and things look like they were relatively superficial and will heal well.  Still an important brief list of lessons (re)learned:

1) Head wounds bleed like hell.

2) Four-year-olds cannot move to the car fast enough for a mom carrying an injured infant, even if they are completely cooperative and sprinting at top speed. That said, the bug was AWESOME in terms of taking direction and moving fast without asking too many questions until we actually got to the doctor's office.  (Then she kept asking whose fault it was. Mine, child. I took my hand off him and reached for the diaper wipes when he shouldn't have been up on the chair alone. Now shush.)

3) Blood doesn't come out of carpets. Or car seats. Or running shoes.  Or indeed most things it comes into contact with.

4) My boy is amazingly precious, cheery, and sweet, and has rebounded from his injury very quickly.  I'm the one who wants to cuddle him 24 hours a day and keeps having nightmares with the injury repeated in slow-mo.