Anna's New Best Friend

Thanksgiving in Rhode Island

This year we experimented with having both of our families up for Thanksgiving and merging two well established dinner menus. Thanks to massive help from the more experienced folk, dinner turned out great.

On Friday we drove up to Boston for the day and went to Fenway Park, wandered around Quincy Market & Boston Common, and, of course, had to take a picture in front of the Cheers sign.

Anna didn't get to indulge in turkey, cranberries, and stuffing like everyone else, but she seemed perfectly happy with her mashed peas... and a couple tiny tastes of mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie.
She also faired pretty well in Boston despite some nippy weather. Thank goodness for that ridiculous hat!

From Bad To Worse

I'm pretty sure this has been the worst week ever for team Anna & Laura. The badness began brewing on Tuesday when Anna started to sound a little congested. I hoped that maybe it was allergies. After all, I had just cleaned my house for the first time since renovations on the front room commenced some six weeks ago. Perhaps I stirred up a little too much dust? Of course not. By Wednesday it was confirmed -- Anna had her first cold. It just so happens that was the same day I was scheduled to have the dermatologist slice & dice a couple spots on my body thanks to too many summers in the sun. That my mom had come to help out for a couple days was great, but by Thursday at 3 p.m. she was long gone and I was left to juggle a very unhappy baby around two equally unhappy (and inconveniently placed) incisions. I made it 24 hours post-mom-departure without incident, but Friday afternoon, I slapped the icing on Anna's miserable cake. While I was balancing the crying blob of snot on my non-dominant hip (other hip victim of slice & dice) and stirring the contents of the crock pot, Anna lurched forward and touched the ceramic rim, which, of course, was scalding hot. Thinking she had only touched it for a second, I figured she was crying scared tears, not pain tears, so I calmed her down and never even looked at the finger. (How stupid can I get?) It wasn't until the next morning -- after the burn had blistered, burst, and apparently been sucked on all night -- that I finally saw it. As though the situation couldn't get any worse, shortly after bandaging Anna's impossible little index finger, I looked in the mirror for the first time in two days and saw that I clearly had pink eye. Wonderful. So I spent a lovely part of my wild Saturday night hanging out at CVS with a bunch of hacking freaks from shady East Providence, waiting for my eye drops and Anna's over-priced antibiotic cream. When I got home, Josh and I had big fun (read: no fun) pinning Anna down so we could wrap up her entire hand as instructed by the pediatrician. Lucky us, this full hand wrap incapacitated the magic "put myself back to sleep" thumb (left thumb only, right thumb just won't do) resulting in three nighttime wakings. Will we wrap the hand again tonight? I think not. Sleep is probably in everyone's best interest at this point since Josh has to leave for yet another business trip on Monday and I'll be on my own with Anna for the entire week. Here's to hoping the bad run is over so I can survive!

So Much More Fun Than Sunday Football

SITTING UP! She's still a little wobbly, but she has the basic idea!

Dressed up for church... the black Mary Jane shoes got lost somewhere along the way.