You know it's cold when...

the olive oil in the cabinet turns to a solid. That's right, apparently we keep our house so cold (and the cabinet that this is stored in apparently is closed off from getting even that heat). For the record, we keep the house at 62 during the day and a balmy 55 at night. And our heating bill was still over $500 last month.

Sticky hands

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Goodbye, Rachel

I am leaving now to take Rachel to the airport, where she will fly back to Brazil. This breaks my heart. I can't believe it has been a year already since she joined our family, and at the same time I can't believe it's only been a year since she has been part of our family. We have been so blessed to have had her as part of our lives. We love her, and will miss her so much.

She has been with us since Dexter was 7 months old, and Frances was just turning 2. What a year!

Here is a slide show of our year: warning, it's 250 pictures and videos worth of memories!

Things that go bump in the night

In the last months Frankie's night wakings have become more and more frequent. I'd estimate I'm up with her at least once in the middle of night soothing her, getting her a drink of water, or convincing her to go back to bed 4 times per week. The worst is when she falls out of bed, and is mostly asleep still, and just screams and cries for a while until she's calm enough to go back to bed. This still happens every once in a while, and we've taken to putting a rather large pile of pillows and a comforter at the bottom of her bed so she falls on those rather than the hard floor. I still stubbornly refuse to put bed rails on. I just think she's gotta learn to stay in bed.

Anyway, this is tiring, but somehow after having lived through 2 newborns, back to back, it doesn't seem so bad. Dex is a champion sleeper at night right now - not even a fire alarm would wake that kid. The other night I went to soothe Frankie, and realized Dex had a dirty diaper. He tends to get a diaper rash at the drop of a hat, so I reluctantly picked him up, changed his diaper, and put him back in bed. The kid never woke up.

Last night was different though. She woke 3 times terrified. I've never seen her so hysteric. The first time she was convinced there were monsters in the room. I opened her window shade to let some light in, and brought the nightlight in from the bathroom. I inspected the room with her supervision to show her that the monsters were not there, but Dex was (sleeping through all of this like a champ), and he would be there to help her. We prayed, she drank a glass of water, and she finally calmed down enough to go back to sleep.

An hour later she woke again, terrified of the monsters again. After she calmed down a little from the initial hysterics, she looked at me and asked if I was Maleficent (the witch from Sleeping Beauty, which she knows about from a book she has). I was so heart-broken by this. We went through the routine again, and she went back to sleep.

Around 5am she woke again, screaming. I went into the room, and she was huddled in the corner of her crib, pointing at the rice-filled "heating pad" in her bed (she often asks to sleep with it when it's cold, and I had re-heated it for her after the last round of hysterics) and screaming that there was a snake in her bed.

Frankie has been sick the last few days, probably with Croup, and while she is coughing that horrid goose-honk cough from time to time, seems in pretty good spirits. By 5 am she seemed to be spiking a fever, so I gave her some Motrin. She was able to fall back asleep, and was still not up by the time I left for work a little before 8.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I'd like to think it's fever-induced nightmares and delusion that will be temporary since she won't always have a fever. But I'm worried it's developmental. What can I do if these don't go away?

Fattening up the boy

That's a glob of peanut butter he's eating straight off the tray.

Car Talk (and car woes)

Betty, our 17-year-old Volvo 240 Station wagon, has been having transmission trouble. We would drive it for 5 minutes before it would shift out of 2nd, which meant we could only go 20 mph, max during that time period. Which means we would get honked at and passed even on roads such as Washington Street in Dorchester (which is very similar to Cambridge St in Cambridge for those more familiar with Cambridge - the double parking is similarly off the hook).

We realized this was our chance to get on Car Talk. Chris called in, and was asked to be on the show! This was very exciting for us. For me, in particular. I'm not in to the whole reality-TV, I really wanna be famous trend, but boy, do I love Car Talk. This was like winning American Idol for me.

They taped the segment with him last week, and if it gets produced, will probably be on the Jan 24th show. Or, they may never produce it. But either way, Chris had a fun time talking with Click and Clack.

Since it was the transmission, and given the car is only worth about 3K, we did some serious soul searching before deciding if we should fix her if the transmission needed to be rebuilt. We looked at other cars, text drove a few, and decided we would really just like to keep our old car moving. She only has 162,000 miles on her! That's about half what other Volvo 240s have been known to do.

We took the car into the garage (we take her to Good News Garage in Cambridgeport for major work) last Friday. This garage is about a 10-minute walk from the Ashe's apartment, so we camped out there for the day. Wow, was it fun to play dress-ups with Elizabeth:


And Dex loved playing with Brian, and the bunny-in-residence, Toulouse

Turns out we had a cracked radiator that was allowing anti-freeze to mix into the transmission fluid, for those of you who care. And I was also told that they would not let me drive home because the tie rod ends in the steering column were almost rusted out. Which meant I could have lost steering at any point and wrecked the car.

So we took the train home, which was fine, except that I realized after we got off the train at Shawmut that I had given the guys at the garage ALL my keys, expecting to drive the car home that day. It was 4:30, Frankie hadn't napped in 4 days and was a mess, Dexter only took about a 20 minute nap on the way home, it was 20 degrees and snowing, and I was locked out of my house. I called Chris, and agreed to take a cab to the McDonald's in Codman Square where I decided we would head to wait for Daddy to come (I think he could hear the tears in my voice). He showed up around 5 and we all ate and early dinner there. I'm pretty sure he's the only person in history to take a cab to the McDonald's in Codman Square.

The car has now been back to the shop, and will have to go back once more - it's still not fixed, but hopefully will be soon!

So this is how our visit to the dr is going...

While we were waiting to be called for our pedi well visit with Dr. Mitchell, the fire alarm went off. At least I have lots of snacks and books. And it's 30 degrees today. At least it's not 20 like it's been.

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