18 Months of a Man

 

Parley Pants is 18 months old, and we all know what that means!  NURSERY!  My word, we're exhausted from chasing this one around!

 Parley is one completely impossible toddler.  He is a child like no other in his devious endeavors.  He will push chairs over to the table so that he can climb on top and throw picture frames off the walls.  If you turn your back for a moment at church, he has already ran down the hall, and disappeared to another floor via the elevator.  Yesterday he broke skin after biting Jason on the shoulder.  Sometimes I just have to exclaim, "Oh, he was such a good infant!" and hope that one day he will go back to his easy going ways :)

 But crazy can be fun too.  I was running around in a frantic frenzy trying to snap pictures of absolutely anything for this photoshoot.  He make look stationary, but he was really darting in every direction, and as soon as I lifted my eyes from my camera, he was already in the street.

 He is SO FAST!  Legs like a cheetah.

 

And the face of an angel!

We love you so much, little man!  You crazy crazy little man!

Shake Shack

Have you been?  

 Diana here is giving us all sorts of reasons to try new places, eat delicious things, and stay up later than usual.  We finally had a free Sat. afternoon to visit where she works (Boston Children's Hospital) and taste some Shake Shack goodness.

Carving Pumps

 Our new friends, the Marsh's, invited us over for pumpkin carving! 

 

Too much candy, Lincoln?

 Kristi, do you recognize this place?!

Together Again

Seeing couples reunited is so heartwarming :) Marc came to visit Diana here for a week.  We all enjoyed having a 4th player to join us in our practically nightly tradition of playing Clue, and we always love an excuse to eat at Giacomo's. 

Chalkboard

Its official.  Halloween is my favorite holiday.  After Christmas, of course, because honestly, Christmas is in a league all its own, and its practically everyone's favorite.  Look at our new chalkboard panel!

I love it all.  The costumes, the candy, the decorating, and most of all, getting to talk about it literally every few hours around here.  These kids are so excited!  Halloween halloween halloween!

And that deserves a photoshoot.

 

What a handsome little man!

My baby is THREE!

 Oh where has the time gone?  Lincoln has gone from my chunky little baby, to my cheeky little toddler, to my sweet spunky boy!

 We're all in agreement that Link is well over the terrible two's, and is becoming quite a charming little police helper around the house.  He makes sure that little brother stays in line and knows his place :)

 I was SOOOO excited to give this boy a fun birthday!  I almost couldn't sleep the night before with all the anticipation of making his day magical.  I gave him a whole day of one-on-one attention and after making cupcakes together, we went all over town to get balloons, library movies, and frozen pizzas.

 Then it was party time at (Early Intervention) Playgroup!

 I loved seeing how far he's come in the last year of IE.  When he started this a year ago, he knew 2-3 words and rarely said anything, and now he is King of the Classroom.  He tells everyone else just what is going on, what songs to sing, what books to read, when it is snack time...

(Now that he's three, IE ends and he'll still get a little classroom help in the public schools, but only for 30 min./week) 

The biggest hit was this old-school 3-D Viewmaster filled with family pictures!  We couldn't get his eyes out of it all evening!

And THANK YOU grandmas for the wonderful gifts!

Family Picture Practice

So I know that I am not really a photographer--I am really what Brett calls a mom with a DSLR who thinks she is a photographer!  Regardless, I was excited to get more experience taking some family pictures yesterday!

This is my dear friend Lindsey and her family.  We are the Relief President and 1st counselor in our ward, and watching the way she has calmed storms and loved without boundaries will always be an example to me!

 

We've kind of banded together as the only two wives with husbands working in finance and excluded from the Harvard or MIT crowd.  We've been able to empathize about our husbands' unpredictable hours and the state of limbo that we call pre-business school.

 Cuties.

If I Only Had a Brain

Turns out I do!

Occasionally, I've been volunteering to do these studies at MIT that have all been pretty fascinating.  Last night, I got paid $60 to get an MRI!  This is what Diana does every day--working with children and young adults getting MRIs in the Radiology Dept. at Boston Childrens, so I was so excited to get the inside experience and tell her all about it! 

 I had to sit completely still for 1 hour while I watched Pixar movies and answered questions about whether the character was happy or sad.  For anyone out there who knows what a healthy brain looks like, how does mine measure up?  Super cool, and knowing that a typical MRI costs thousands of dollars (and somewhere around 10k with sedation), what a cool thing to get paid to do!

A Harvard Project

Well, I'm afraid this project might look terribly ordinary and unimpressive, but this is actually one of the coolest things I've ever done!

This is a garment from the Harvard Archives, dated to around 1836 and worn by a student of Harvard.  This could be called a Mens 'robe' or a 'dressing gown', and naturally, was sewn entirely by hand.  Prof. Laurel Ulrich, who happens to be in our ward, teaches a general course this semester on Harvard Collections (and also won a Pulitzer for writing A Midwife's Tale), and commissioned me to replicate it in its exact measurements.  We ventured deep into the Harvard archives, past security checkpoints, where I got to handle the original and get measurements and pictures.  Here is the TA, dressed in the gown for the lecture where I got to attend and chime in!  I was even introduced as an "1800s Historical Clothing Construction Specialist", haha!

The lecture revolved around what we can learn from this garment as a picture, and what we can learn from it by handling an exact (and new) replica.  Though it looks like a women's nightdress above, these were the ritzy sweats of the young wealthy radicals of Harvard.  Its crazy how simple and underwhelming this looks, but it actually took forever!  Most of those hours consisted of drafting up a pattern in tissue, three attempts to get the sleeves in just right (it was a totally bazaar technique I've never seen before) and hand-tying each of these tiny tassles on the 7 yards of trim.

It was a huge honor and quite fun.  Prof. Ulrich says the dept. wants to do a workshop/forum more about the construction where I will get to talk more about how this came together.  What a funny thing to have brought me to a Harvard lecture!  I may not have the smarts, but my skills can still get me into the Ivy League, ha!