What a kid!

A couple of times in the last week, I've been struck by what a great kid Amy is. I mean, she drives us batty sometimes (okay, frequently), but wow. She's amazing.

Yesterday was our annual cookie day. Mom started this tradition when Aly was a baby, if I remember right. We get together, bake a bunch of stuff, order lunch and just hang out together. None of us really needs the stuff we're baking, usually, but it's a tradition.

This year, Amy helped from start to finish, only taking a break to eat lunch. Afterward, Tod asked if she was helpful...and honestly, she was every bit as helpful as anyone. She did everything we asked her to, did her best, and was geniuinely helpful. When we got home, she ran to the bathroom and on her way said "I didn't go to the bathroom all day because I didn't want to stop working!". When it's something she's interested in (like cooking), she is all in. She works so hard. It's awesome.

Another thing was a school problem that Amy solved for herself. When we had her parent-teacher conference in November, Ms. Rokus told us how Amy was sitting next to a girl named Katie, and that Amy had been really helpful in getting Katie to come out of her shell and feel more comfortable in the classroom. How great for both of them! Well, one day last week Amy told me she'd switched seats in the classroom. The first reason she gave was that Peter (who she loves wanted to sit at the table with the girls where she sits. Then she said, "Well, that's one reason, but there was another reason too." After a little prodding, she explained: "Katie wants me to tell her the answers, but she knows what the answers are, she can do it on her own. I'm afraid she won't be my friend anymore if I don't give her the answers." Wow. So Amy saw the opportunity to change seats as a chance to get out of this problem, while also making her friend Peter happy. I am really impressed that she found a way to solve her problem, and it's one that works for everyone.

Last, Amy has unfortunately gotten a case of head lice in the last week (cue the paranoid scratching). She was invited to a 'penguin pajama party' at her classmate Morgan's home, where a couple dozen little girls were going to eat popcorn and cupcakes and watch the movie "Mr. Popper's Penguins." She was SO excited about this, since she hasn't gotten a lot of invites. Well since she had head lice, we decided it wasn't a good idea for her to go, since she'd possibly be laying on the floor next to other kids, sharing pillows, etc. We were so worried how she would take the news - it's the kind of thing that would normally devastate her. Tod broke the news to her, and while she was definitely very upset, she also told him that she was kind of expecting that to happen. So she wasn't nearly as broken up about it as we feared. We had a special movie night at home where she picked the movie we rented, and we had pizza and she snuggled on the couch with Dad.

We are so lucky to be her parents. She's quite an amazing kid.

I still miss her

I was just looking through old emails, reading things my Mom had sent. Came to this one from October 7, 2006, which brings me to tears.

Thanks for the pictures, Lara. I ordered all of the short album except the giraffe pix. I will try to look at all of the rest later. I am looking for a picture for the hallway at the condo so if you remember one let me know. You do good work (of course, the subjects are adorable. I still can imagine exactly how handsome Reed is going to be when I look at the ones of him on the beach).
Love, Mom

She loved our kids so much.

This one is from December 20, 2006:

I love being able to sit here and look at [pictures of] the kids. I love them all, but the one I liked the best was the one of Amy and CJ looking out the door. How cute was that? You sure have sweet kids.
Love, Yo 'Momma

NFL dreams

Last night as I was telling Reed goodnight, he said "Mom, I really want to play football when I grow up. And I promise that if my game is on a day when our family would be having a birthday or something, I would get enough tickets so everyone could come to the game and we could all still be together."

On the subject of names...

I may have already written about this in days gone by, but I don't recall.

When we were searching for baby names while we waited for Reed's arrival, it was a daunting task. We knew we wanted to use Jennings for the middle name, since it's my middle name, and was my great-grandfather's middle name as well. As the months went by, we settled on two options for a boy name: Trevor and Reed.

The name Trevor came to mind since Trevor Linden was playing for the Washington Capitals at that time. Handsome fella, nice name. Not knowing anyone named Trevor was also a bonus - I wanted to reduce the chances of him finding another kid with the same name in his classes. A solid name.

The name Reed came to us from my Mom. She'd been on a trip to New York City and had visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. With her future grandchild in mind, she looked over the name rolls of all the people who'd come through Ellis Island as they arrived in America. She came to "Reed". When she told me the name idea, she was so excited about it, but honestly the only Reed I knew was a character on the TV show "Sisters" played by Ashley Judd - her name was Reed, which was her mother's maiden name. We quickly realized, hey, Tod's grandmother on his Mom's side was a Reed! Ada Ruby Reed Holt. So after I got over feeling like it was a girl's name (that TV character was probably the only female Reed ever), knowing it was a family name for Tod made it extra special. We figured there wouldn't be any other Reeds around, since we'd never met any ourselves.

As it turns out, we couldn't have picked a more fitting name for Reed. He's tall and skinny, like a reed. He reads like his life depends on it. He's often asked us "How did you know that I would love to read when you picked my name?" and we tell him we had no idea, it just worked out that way. So far it hasn't worked out that he's the only Reed around (there's at least one other Reed in his school), but that's all right. We've got the best Reed in town.

Funny, I don't even recall what girl names we were thinking of!

Natural disasters and baby names

When we were awaiting Amy's arrival, of course we were thinking of what her name should be. At the top of my list were three names: Amy, Ava and Katrina for the first name, and a 'j' middle name, to match the rest of the family. Just like with Reed, we waited until we saw our new baby girl before we decided what her name would be. Amy seemed like the best choice - it is a simple, yet pretty name, it's timeless, not trendy, and it won't go out of style. I think it is a sturdy name that suits her. Amy is the youngest March sister in the book Little Women....that Amy has blond eyes, curly blond hair, and is artistic. She is rather bratty at first, but grows into a lady. None of that is to say that our Amy is named after Louisa May Alcott's Amy, or that they're anything alike (wink)....that is just the most famous Amy that I know.

And how glad was I that we didn't pick Katrina? While I still love the name, five months after Amy's birth, hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, killing so many people and leaving many more homeless. How awful if our baby girl had had that name, forever linked to this national tragedy! So I think we knew what we were doing when we chose 'Amy' as our daughter's name. And Janine went well with Amy, and could allow her to be called A.J. someday if she wanted that.

The one thing I didn't realize about the name Amy, and perhaps it's subliminally why I liked it....Amy is the generic name of about half of the bit part characters on TV shows. Got a person who's just visiting town in your show? Name her Amy. Of course I didn't notice this phenomenon until after our Amy was born, but man it is weird! Amys are everywhere on television!! I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's most probably a sign that I watch too much TV. :)

P.S. Don't forget the names that 2 year old Reed had picked out for his new baby sister: Yellow Eyes and Elmo. I get the Elmo part, but I have not a single clue where Yellow Eyes came from.

EARTHQUAKE!

Wow, who would have thought it! This afternoon, a little before 2 p.m., I was standing outside my cubicle at work on the 8th floor, hanging up some new pictures...the building started shaking. My first thought was that a transformer exploded or something along those lines. I went to the closest shelter-in-place area, but since the ground was still shaking I decided to run back, grab my purse and phone, and get to the stairs and get the he** out of there. I was truly scared - later, my co-workers said that by the look on my face, they knew they should get out. Glad I could be of service. LOL.

As it turns out, it was 5.8 on the Richter scale - not huge, but wow. The strongest earthquake in Virginia since 1897, it was centered about 90 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. As I left the building, I was able to check Twitter momentarily and saw people in other places asking if people had felt the earthquake...so then I knew that wow, yes it really was an earthquake we just went through. The quake was felt as far south as South Carolina, and all the way into NYC and up into Canada too. Again, WOW is about all I can come up with.

As it happens, Tod and the kids are in Ekalaka visiting Tod's family. I was thankful to not have them to worry about, since phones were not working, internet wasn't working - I would really have panicked not knowing if they were safe. There was hardly any damage in our area, no one was really hurt - how fortunate we all are.

That was definitely the strangest thing that I've ever experienced...and if given a choice, I'd like to never experience it again!

From behind the camera lens

If there's a camera around, I am most often the one behind it (even if it's an iPhone).

I spend a whole lot of time on pictures - taking the pictures, editing them (dumping bad ones, cropping, slight fixes), then uploading them to a photo sharing site, writing captions to tell the story, plus printing the pictures, putting them in albums, and writing captions in the albums. And all that is leaving out a new task that came along with buying a Mac: assigning keywords and peoples' names to the photos, so they can be easily searched. I spend a lot of energy on it for two reasons: first, I want our far-flung family to get an idea of what our daily life is mostly like (I don't take pictures of everything, despite complaints to the contrary), and second, I want to capture our family's activities so our kids (and us) can look back on them years from now.

Sometimes I wonder if I go overboard; by most people's standards, I probably do. I hear of other moms who don't ever print their pictures, who barely even upload them off the camera, or who upload them to share but don't bother with captions to explain what's what and who's who. Tod's Aunt Suzy said to me "You're quite a documentarian" and at first I bristled at that, but then I realized it is accurate to say what I'm doing is documenting our lives. I think I probably do fall into the "overboard" category, but I'm alright with that. I enjoy doing it, and I know all too well that time flies by and it won't be long before these kids are grown and the days of missing teeth, first days of elementary school, and first friends will all be memories. If I have the pictures, I can relive the moments.

I hope that one day Reed and Amy will look back and see this work as the treasure that I think it is. I don't have a tremendous amount of pictures of myself as a kid, and the ones I do have are so special to me. I hope the kids don't say "good grief, why did Mom take so many pictures?" or "can you believe she spent so much time on this?" or see the many photo albums as a burden. They are my gift to our kids, and I hope they'll know how much love went into every single bit of it.