Thanksgiving, Christmas, and two more family visits
(Boy are we behind!)

Well a lot has happened in the last several months that we've neglected to post on our blog...

Let's start with Thanksgiving. My parents came to town and cooked us Thanksgiving dinner (more accurately, my mom cooked dinner). That was our first time in 3 years not having to fly across the country for Thanksgiving and boy were we thankful not to be traveling! By that time, Nuri was more alert and social and my parents got to enjoy a mostly happy baby who was even awake for small stretches of time and had found new pleasure in playing with his first toy: the bouncy chair. Unfortunately we spent so much time enjoying ourselves that we forgot to take very many pictures. Hence the appalling lack of photos from this period. Needless to say, the food and company were good, and even though we were starting to get a handle on life again, my parents still did our dishes :-)

A few weeks later (pre-Christmas), we were visited by Ava and John. They had a good time here, despite their 10+ hour trip on "Ye smelly old bus" (Ava's nickname for the Chinatown bus) in a snowstorm. They babysat Nuri during our first night out without the kid. They babysat Nuri while I went to the dentist and came with me to work to watch him too. Unlike my parents, Ava and John went a little camera crazy, hence the appalling excess of photos and videos, some of which I will omit here (I've entitled one of Ava's videos "ceiling." I'll let you guess what it's about).

A few weeks later, we headed down to the NJ/NY area to visit friends and family. On the way, we stopped in Jamestown, RI, for a Christmas party with my mom's friend Judith and the whole Dupré clan. We spent the night nearby and continued on to NJ to stay with Sal's cousins, Farah & Amir and their 4 kids. Maria and Mustafa were also in NJ, so we got to see them too. And we also made day trips to visit Mustafa's family, my mom's good friend Mary, and my Grandma (in Brooklyn) and Aunt Jill and cousin Justin (who kindly met us in Brooklyn and brought bagels).

I will now give a stream-of-consciousness description of taking a road trip with an infant: Smooth sailing down the highway with mom and dad in front and baby in back... Uh-oh, traffic... Silence turns to whimpers and then to cries... mom reaches back to give him the pacifier... no good, crying gets louder... during a complete stop in traffic, mom catapults to the back seat and buckles up again... maybe he's hungry... next rest stop 20 miles? Is it possible to nurse him in his car seat? Let's pull over into that McDonald's... This is good, he's falling asleep nursing... wait, what is that on my hand?... oh-no, his poopy diaper exploded... dad returns to the car with a clean baby and huge pile of soiled laundry... I thought we would be able to make a 5 hour trip in less than 7 hours, but now we're going to be lucky to beat the snow warning home... etc.

Fast forward to today... Nuri is weighing 13 pounds now (as Sal says, he isn't fat, he's just not skinny like those anorexic babies in the baby magazines). If you've read this far, you deserve some pictures and videos.




Videos are here.