a tooth!

Yesterday I was holding Julia on my lap, letting her chew on my finger as she often likes to do, and I thought I felt something. I checked her gums, but didn't see anything, so I let her chew more, and I felt it again! so I checked closer and sure enough, there is a tiny little ridge of a tooth coming up in the bottom gum! I am irrationally proud.

before she noticed the camera

after she noticed the camera

Yummmmmm

It is DARK at 8 30 am out here. 

8 30 doesn't seem all that early to be up, but it sure feels early when it is dark out. I've been working on getting Julia to bed earlier since 10 pm seems kinda late for a baby's bedtime. She'll fall asleep about 8, but wakes up about every 30 minutes for another snack until I go to bed with her. The downside is that she used to sleep until 9 30 or 10 am but now is up at 8 30, 7 30 or sometimes 6 30, just wanting to crawl around awhile while I lay on the couch and semi-monitor what she's getting in to.
Our internet has been out for 5 days now, so I'm over at the school writing this, but I can't upload photos here, so this will have to wait until our internet returns to be published. Other goings on:


Out neighbors gave us this funny star snowsuit

and Julia had her first chicken bone to gnaw on. She was a fan.

the other day I made Punkerbean Muffins, so named because I call Julia my punkerbean, and because the chocolate chips look like black beans. They were excellent.

1 3/4 cups flour
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp each ground nutmeg and  ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground allspice
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons of molasses
1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 400˚
Grease or line a 12 cup muffin tin.
Mix dry ingredients in one bowl and wet ingredients in another. Combine. Don't forget the chocolate chips. 
Fill muffin cups. 
Bake about 20 minutes, or until toothpick tests clean. 




We took a little hike this weekend to Blueberry Hill, and this was the view: 

No blueberries though, but Julia got a snack

We also took a little family outing to the dump. The dump has made me ponder some things. At first, learning that I was to chuck my bag of trash into the wilderness filled me with angst and anger, but what else is there to do? Not have trash, for one, but we all know how quickly the trash can fills itself. Recycle? Well, there is a grant that allows the village to collect recyclables, but I'm told they are flown to the nearby village of Aniak, barged around the chain of islands to Anchorage and then trucked to Seattle to be recycled. So does that carbon footprint measure smaller than chucking my bag of newspaper and tin cans into the wilderness? I'm pretty skeptical, really. If you know that answer, please let me know. 
So is there a difference, chucking my trash in the village dump myself or letting some nice garbologist pick it up for me and take it away to a city landfill? Trash is trash in the end, and it is all going to a landfill somewhere. 
We saw a beautiful fox at the dump, but he got away before I could get the camera out. 

winter approacheth

The ice is coming! Temps have dropped around here, to below freezing for most of the day, and that means that little icebergs have begun to form on the river. They slowly float downstream, making gentle little slushing noises when they collide. This photo of Dave and Julia and the ice is from two days ago, and today the river is more white than not with ice. Pretty soon it will be solid. On Saturday evening, we flew to a nearby village named Crooked Creek to have dinner with the teachers there. Angela and Taylor are both pilots and have two small planes. It took about 20 minutes to fly there. It was kinda nice to be getting out of our village for a couple hours, even if we were going to a similar small village. 

Julia and Kiley playing in Crooked Creek

Sunrise, about 8 30 am, and a light dusting of snow

And for my adventure of the day today, I'm making bread. I don't have a mixer, so I knead by hand. Here's my recipe, from the Holden cookbook

2 cups water

1 Tbsp yeast

3 Tbsp sweetener (I like brown sugar or honey)

3 Tbsp oil (canola or olive)

2 tsp salt

4-5 cups flour, half wheat half white

(this time I also added 1/2 cup powdered milk, a Tbsp of gluten and 1/2 cup wheat germ)

mix everything but the flour and the salt in an ice cream pail. Add the salt with the 2nd cup of flour so it doesn't kill the yeast. Add flour while mixing with a spoon until too thick to mix. Dump onto a floured counter and knead as long as the baby will let you. (2-10 min) Put dough back into pail and cover with lid. Let rise. Punch down. Let rise again. Shape two loaves and let rise. Bake at 350 until done, about 40 minutes. 

This is my standby recipe for bread, as it is very forgiving. I can make it slowly or quickly which is helpful with baby around. 

Lunch Lady, cont.

Julia is in love with boxes. This one has both our middle names on it. 

Being stinking cute and getting into the laundry

My 2nd day as Lunch lady went ok. The menu was Sloppy Joes, green beans, fruit punch and peanut butter cookies. I brought over Julia's high chair and that helped keep her happy. Still no nap in the morning, but she was content to sit and smear applesauce behind her ears for a long time. The 2nd sub lined up decided getting sober was not going to happen, so Angela's husband Taylor was it, with daughter Kiley in tow. That night I was invited over to Angela and Taylor's for supper, as it was Angela's birthday. We made ice cream in one of those soccer-ball type makers, where you roll it around instead of cranking it. The two Alaskan girls in the photo are from a village nearby called Red Devil. The school there didn't have enough kids to stay open, (10 minimum) so the girls are living with Angela and Taylor for the school year. For supper,  Taylor grilled steak, both beef and moose, and I thought it was funny that when he asked the girls if they wanted to try some, he was referring to the beef, not the moose that they were happily eating. They did not want to try any. Dave was back for my final day as Lunch Lady, so he wore Julia around for part of the morning. He thought it was probably against some rule, but I thought we were probably breaking more rules and health codes by having her in the kitchen. She seemed to do fine in the classroom. The menu was chicken nuggets, corn, fruit salad, and pilot bread, which is a thick cracker.  With that meal over, my life is back to normal, and good thing, as Julia's got a cold.

A very helpful assistant, making sure that there is total applesauce coverage 2 feet in all directions

Julia, hanging out on her crib, chewing on a dog made by Great Granny

Lunch Lady

Well, I can add another job to my list of Things In Life I've Accomplished. School Lunch Lady. Yes indeed, I got the call that said "please please please will you fill in for three days" and couldn't really say no, because who else would do it? So this morning, Julia and I get a few diapers together, I grab my food thermometer, and we truck over to the school to prepare a fabulous menu of:
Corndogs (one per elementary kid, two per high school kid)
rosy applesauce (made rosy by the addition of red jello powder and cinnamon, 1/2 cup per kid)
green beans (from a can, 1/2 cup per kid)
and pasta salad (with mayo, spices and dehydrated onions, also 1/2 cup per kid)
inspiring, eh? I was a little nervous about how it would go having Julia in tow, but she was pretty accommodating. The only problem was that she just couldn't fall asleep in the backpack for her nap, so by 1 pm, she was quickly approaching a break down. So now we are home, and she is napping. After she wakes up we'll have to go get the mail, then head back over and get prepared for tomorrow's meal of sloppy joes.
other interesting things about the day:
Dave has gone to another village for two nights to attend some meetings with his principal and other school district honchos, so he arranged for a sub, the only sub in the village, really. Dana used to be the school secretary, but was released from duties due to a problem of not showing up. Well, today she didn't show up to sub either, so Angela, the elementary teacher, brought her kids over to the high school room and took care of everyone, and Dave used a remote desktop to tune in and teach from afar in between meetings. I guess that's just how you do it out here.

Birthday

We have got ourselves a nifty little coffee maker machine. It is called the Aeropress, and it makes a wonderfully fantastic cup of coffee. You put in grounds, add water and put in the plunger. It creates a tight seal so as you gently press down air forces the water through the grounds and filter. You only add about 2 ounces of water to two scoops coffee, so what you end up with is espresso, then you add more hot water to that for normal strength coffee. The only downside to this thing is that it has made sticking to one cup a day a very difficult endeavor. They should pay me to promote this thing.

Other things we've been up to: we got invited to a birthday party for Kristyn, a young girl of three, the sister of two students in the school. I got the phone call about 6 pm, and when I inquired when, young Alfreda said "oh, about now." I guess it's pretty typical to get invited over after the party's already started. We scarfed down supper, and Alfreda came to show us which house to go to. She showed up just as we were searching the cupboards for a present. Snickers bars, a jar of applesauce or OtterPops, not yet frozen were our top three contenders.  Unfrozen OtterPops won. Alfreda showed us to the right house, and there was a full blown potluck going on. Too bad we had scarfed down dinner moments before. But we couldn't not eat and risk insulting folks. So we had dinner #2, with several tasty kinds of meat, pasta, pasta salads, green salad, orange jello with mandarin oranges, green jello with cottage cheese, frybread, hot dogs rolled in a crust, pie of several types, agutuk, which is a combination of small cranberries, crisco and fish, so I'm told. There was also both chocolate and vanilla birthday cake in the fluorescent shades of pink and blue that only come from a store. How they got that out here is beyond me. All in all, it pretty much was your standard midwest church potluck fare. Kinda funny how universal that seems to be. There was even a pinata for the kids, the kind with ribbons hanging, and one is supposed to make it fall. none of them did though, so dad came to the rescue and shook out the candy. 

As we walked home, there was a lovely sliver of sunset going on. 

Bath Time

Thursday October 7th
Our nice little bathroom does not come equipped with a tub. This made me sad, as Julia has loved taking baths starting with the 2nd one in her life. (not so much the after-birth-hospital-standard scrub down.) After perusing the internet countless portable and inflatable bathtub options, we (Dave, really) hit upon the brilliant idea of using a Rubbermaid tote. It works very well. better, possibly than a real bathtub as the high walls help contain her vigorous splashing. I take the vigorous splashing as a sign that she's happy with the situation.

I finished another hat today. I'm working on creating my own hat designs so that I'm one step closer to having a store on Etsy. The problem with this one is that I don't know what kind of yarn it is. It was  leftover yarn someone didn't want, and that means I'll have to modify the pattern for another yarn or find a very similar yarn to use. I like this mystery yarn though. it feels soft, and not at all wooly-itchy. Perhaps it is a newfangled bamboo or microfiber yarn.

I also made carrot bread today. It turned out rather well. I decided to make this recipe since we have an enormous bag of carrots in the fridge that are starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges. But since I was feeling uninspired about grating 3.5 cups of carrots, I supplemented with a bag of grated zucchini that i had in the freezer. And instead of using raisins, i put in Craisins instead, as we have THREE enormous bags of them!

The original recipe is credited to Rose Levy Beranbaum's cookbook The Bread Bible.

Preheat oven to 350
combine in a bowl:
1 3/4 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
in another bowl combine:
3 large eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
3 1/2 cups of some combination of grated carrots and grated zucchini
1 cup Craisins or raisins
combine the two bowls with a bare minimum of mixing, pour into a greased loaf pan and bake 1 hour until a toothpick tests clean.

Buster

Yesterday: Dave tells me about a stray dog, lame in one leg, that a woman in the village wants caught because she found someone who wants to adopt it. 

Today: I’m out walking with Julia and lo, behold, I see three dogs, two that I recognize and one that I do not recognize. The unknown dog is also limping. “That must be the stray” I think to myself, and endeavor to catch it using my jogging stroller wrist strap for a leash. After several comical tries, I do indeed manage to catch the dog, and secure it with the stroller strap. Now I have a baby, a stroller, a dog that is none to pleased at being on a leash, and ankle deep mud. I slog over to the nearest person, standing outside the store, and ask if he knows if the dog belongs to someone. He shakes his head. I see another woman, and slog over to ask her. She also shakes her head. I head to the house of the woman who wanted the dog caught. I am only guessing that it is her house, as I’ve never met her. I can’t navigate the stairs, so I tap on the window a couple times. Nobody is home. “Well what the #$@ to do now?” I think. At least I am out of the ankle deep mud at this point, though the dog has kindly seen to it to give me a good pawful on each leg. I head towards the school and am contemplating banging on Dave’s classroom window and asking him “what the #$@ to do now,” when I run into two more people. I ask them if they know if the dog is a stray. More head shakes and shrugs. Instead of banging on Dave’s classroom window, I go and bang on neighbor Taylor’s window. He comes out and eyes me and the situation. I blab on about finding and catching the stray and the woman isn’t home and what to do, and he kindly informs me that this is Buster, and he belongs to Chelsea’s brother. I promptly release poor Buster who takes off as fast as his gimpy paw allows and contemplate my gratitude that I did not run into Chelsea’s brother while hauling his dog around on a leash, and also contemplated how 4 people had no idea who’s dog this is. I mean really, there’s only 100 or so people in this village. In retrospect, perhaps they simply had no wish to get involved with the lunatic white woman who was hauling her baby and Buster through the mud and pounding on windows.

Dog adventures aside, we had a really encouraging nap time development. I put Julia in her crib this morning, after she nursed and wasn't falling asleep. she fussed halfheartedly for 8 minutes while I rubbed her back, then she went to sleep! The next nap, she fell asleep while nursing and stayed asleep when I moved her to the crib. The third nap, she nursed and wasn't falling asleep, so in the crib she went and she fussed mildly for 2 minutes while I rubbed her back and then she went to sleep! And just minutes ago, I did the bedtime routine, nursed her, she wasn't going to sleep, so in the crib, and again, about 2 minutes of mild fussing with some back rubbing and singing of the bedtime song, and there we go! This seems encouraging!

Kuspuk

10/7 No crying last night. For some reason she was fine under a blanket again. The eternal mystery of a baby. Today I’m tidying the house. Or would be if I weren’t writing this. My neighbor, Taylor has helped get our internet up and running, so I can begin to post in a real-time manner instead of each post several days later. We watched his daughter Kiley this afternoon for a while. She and Julia really like each other, but there’s definitely some accidental violence that happens between them! Kiley is 17 months now, but when I pick her up and then pick Julia up, I must conclude that Kiley is made of packing peanuts and Julia is made of concrete. This photo show both girls in Kuspuks, a native style of shirt-dress.

October 4th

Monday today. Julia had quite a night last night. She was in bed with me, but kept waking up wailing! I couldn’t figure out what was going on, I tried to change her in case she was wet and she peed mid-change, necessitating a entire outfit change, and after she went back to sleep, she woke again, wailing! It wasn’t until 5 am that Dave told me that every time he pulled the blanket up, over her legs, she would start wailing and thrashing around to get it off! How crazy! So we’re a bit tired today, but doing fine. Julia spent the morning climbing on the giant pack of toilet paper, then methodically destroying some magazine inserts and envelopes.

Rosehips, on the rose bush

Yesterday we went for a long walk and collected rose hips and high bush cranberries. I’m drying them to make tea. They don’t taste like much of anything, but they have tons of vitamin c, so I’m mixing them with other tea things for taste. It was pretty wet and muddy out. We had snow on September 29^th, but just a coating that soon disappeared. 

taking Julia to get the mail

sleep

10/3

I’m cooking the green tomato jam right now. Kind of an interesting recipe, calling for green tomatoes, lemons, salt, sugar, black pepper and cinnamon. I hope we like it, since I’m not full of ideas for what to do with the rest of the green tomatoes. I’ve heard of green tomato pie that is supposed to be similar to apple pie. Perhaps I will try that if this jam turns out to be less than wonderful.

Julia’s been waking a lot at night. I read about it in my baby book, and they suggest that periods of intense development can lead to a lot of night waking, as can a new home setting, teething, or about 20 other causes, several of which seem to directly apply to our situation. I was working on getting her to sleep in her crib, but the pattern has been Julia falls asleep with me in bed, then I move her over to her crib where she sleeps for about 2 hours, then I feed her and put her back when she’s asleep again, and an hour or so later she wakes up again, and I bring her back into bed for the rest of the night. It used to be that in bed with us she’d sleep almost all night long. Now she’s waking every couple hours no matter where she's sleeping. Let’s hope it is a phase that passes soon. I tried the cry-to-sleep thing a couple times when she was too keyed up to nurse to sleep. It worked, eventually. I’d rub her back, and she’d quiet, then I’d stop and she’d cry again. And repeat, and repeat and eventually she’d sleep, but man, what a emotional drain. I’ve given it up for now. It’d be nice to have a kid that went to sleep on her own, but I’m not ready to pay the emotional price right now.

It’s hard to know what is going to be the best sleep method for us. My mom nursed all 7 of us to sleep every night for a major portion of her life. My friends have kids that put themselves to sleep, freeing them to have a life beyond 8 pm. I want both worlds. Emotionally secure children that say to me, “you are an incredibly good mother. I’m going to go to sleep on my own now and not wake up until 9 am tomorrow and I won’t suck my thumb either, to save you on the orthodontia bills!”

It could happen. 

Crawling like she's got somewhere to go

10/2

Julia crawled on all 4 limbs today for the first time. She was very nonchalant about it, not super proud like she is when she pulls herself up on something. I wanted to go picking rose hips today, but it is drizzly and grey out and just feels nasty. So we’ve wasted the Saturday away puttering around inside. Dave is working on his masters in Principalness, and I’m starting to study for the GRE. What a pain. I now have to learn the true definition of a lot of words that I vaguely understand by context, not to mention all the math that I’ve avoided doing my whole life. 

October 1st

Two days ago, on sept 29^th, Julia pulled herself up to a stand for the first time. I was across the room in the kitchen, and saw her pulling up to her knees, and warned her that she was going to bonk her head again if she wasn’t careful. Next thing she pulls up, stands for a second, and then wham, down on her back, bonked the head, and wailing bloody murder. She hasn’t attempted it too much since. She’s got toys and books stored on low shelves in the living room, and often crawls in to get one and gets stuck, not able to back out.

She’s got a holler of annoyance, as if to say “mom, I’m stuck AGAIN!” she’s also a pretty big fan of mealtime. I’m trying not to push food on her, knowing that giving her mostly breastmilk is best for the first year, but she is super interested in food! She likes to gum finger foods, like dry bread crusts, thick pretzels, slices of bell peppers, and also likes pureed food fed by spoon. I bought two jars of baby fruit puree thinking it might be a good plane distraction, but quickly realized that was a terrible idea due to the potential huge mess. She’s enjoying them now though, and we have a huge supply of applesauce and a baby food grinder to make our own pureed food. Right now she’s napping, despite the fact that our landlord set up a sawmill 20 feet from her crib yesterday and is sawing away at huge logs today.

The school took down the greenhouse the other day, so we have a huge pile of green tomatoes and small peppers in the kitchen. I’ve spent the morning cutting up the peppers into a salsa, and I’ve got a recipe for green tomato jam, but it calls for two lemons and I’ve only got three….These are my only lemons, until January, probably. Do I use them up now? I suppose so…

Taking Julia north

We have been here one week and one day. We are Mary, (me) a 27 year old housewife and mother to Julia, 6 months. My husband Dave (32 years old) is here too. Here is Sleetmute, Alaska. A native Yupik village of about 100 people. 200 miles west of Anchorage accessible only by plane. We are here because Dave is the high school teacher in the public school. 

To begin with our travels, we were summering in Stockholm, Wisconsin. Dave left us on August 11^th to begin teacher inservice and shortly after, to begin school. Julia and I stayed in Stockholm until September 5^th, at which point we drove to Oregon with my brother. It took us 3 nights and 4 days, and Julia was most accommodating. She took multiple 1-4 hour naps and I was able to eek more car seat compliance out of her by performing the dangle breastfeeding move that I perfected on the drive to Wisconsin at the beginning of the summer. Most uncomfortable for me, but anything for peace and quiet. Anyway, we got to Klamath Falls, Oregon where my folks live and stayed there 5 nights. During those 5 nights, Julia perfected her ability to army crawl and also sat up on her own for the first time. We left kf for Seattle, staying one night with my sister Caroline, and one night with my friend Erin. After that we headed to Dave’s dad’s house for two nights and then to Dave’s mom’s house for two nights. On the18th, Julia got her 6 month vaccines and weighed in at 20 lb 11 oz and 27.5 inches. There’s good reason I call her my punker chunker bean. 

The morning of the 20^th, David sr. drove us to the airport and we navigated security. They make you feel guilty for being there. I didn’t know that in addition to removing my coat and shoes, I had to remove julia’s coat and booties too, so I got barked at for that, and then barked at since I was supposed to take my stroller to the other side of the security line. (like I would venture back there on my own!) they did let us skip standing in line and sent us on the fast track to the front with the VIP people. That was nice. So we made it through security in about 20 minutes, then got to sit around for two hours until the flight left. 

The flight was completely full, but we had an aisle seat which turned out to be a great help. Julia immediately fell asleep when we got to our seat which meant that I had to get up twice with a sleeping baby to let the other people in my aisle, but she stayed asleep through taking off, so no wailing. Soon after she woke though, chipper and ready to explore! I couldn’t fit the tray down in front of us, so I had to juggle her and the barf bag she was destroying with the bag of peanuts and the beverages the stewardesses were handing out. Soon she was no longer enthralled with the barf bag, and spent awhile leaning over my shoulder smiling at people behind us, and then demanded down! So I put her down in the aisle and picked her up again every two minutes or so to let another person walk by or to let the beverage carts go by again. This and a trip to the restroom for a diaper change kept her relatively happy until time to descend, when she took another little nap. All in all it was a very smooth little bit of travel. In Anchorage, some family friends met us and took us to Costco and Fred Meyer and to Safeway to do all our last minute shopping. This consisted of buying a cooler and Rubbermaid tote, and all the meat, dairy and produce I could stuff in them. This was necessary because while the village does have a store, it is a tiny one and an expensive one. Our dry good shopping is done in anchorage and mailed to the village, or done online via Fred Meyer’s bush Alaska portion of the website. Walmart will package and ship dry goods to you, as will SpanAlaska. But if you want produce in the bush, you are going to have to cough up some money. So what did I buy? Chicken thighs, pork loin, ground beef, a half gallon of half and half, two bags of green beans, a carton of blueberries, frozen berries, frozen corn, frozen peas, 9 red and orange bell peppers, two avocados, 10 bananas, two turnips, three parsnips, one sweet potato, and three big blocks of cheese. (Dave had purchased eggs, shelf-stable milk, more cheese, butter and carrots along with the dry goods, so I didn’t need to get those) Shopping done, we spent the night with our friends, and the next day we got ready to get on our bush flight into the village. The flight time wasn’t set until that morning, in true Alaska fashion, and we showed up on time only to be told that there’s some folks wanting a scenic tour, so would we mind coming back in a hour and a half. Nobody seemed to throw a fuss over that, so we didn’t either. We went to a quivut wool store to check things out. (from the muskox, the warmest and lightest wool anywhere, but probably the most expensive too) and got something to eat before heading back again. 

This time we loaded up properly and got underway. Julia got to wear her ear mufflers, a last minute purchase that I’m glad I made. It was really loud in the airplane. There were headphone for the adults that let us talk among ourselves, and our pilot pointed out the various glaciers, mountains, passes and crashed planes while freely giving his opinions on global warming, religion and politics. We made it to Sleetmute without crashing ourselves, and finally got to be reunited with Dave after 5 weeks of separation. No more single motherhood for me, thank you. 

I also got to meet the elementary teacher Angela, her husband Taylor, and their 17 month old daughter, Keily. As I was meeting the principal, Susan, there was a commotion on the other side of the plane. A fight had started between my landlord, Henry and one of the villagers on the plane. accusations over stolen goods were thrown and denied, and it probably would have come to a fist fight if a third villager and her baby hadn’t stepped in and yelled at them about fighting in front of her child. After it was over, and we were all kind of reeling from it, people kept telling me that it was a really unusual event, and Sleetmute isn’t normally like that. We loaded the bags and coolers into a 4 wheeler and drove about 30 seconds to our house.

 It’s small, a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen/living room, but it’s clean, no bugs, no mold and no rodents, so I’m content. I spent the first 4 or so days here re-arranging dave’s bachelor pad set up to suit me, and now we’ve started to get a routine:

Wake up between 715 and 830, change and dress Julia, and then she plays while I get dressed, tidy the bedroom and get myself breakfast. After all that, she nurses, and takes a morning nap. Then we go for a walk using the backpack or stroller. She often takes another nap in the mornings, and I eat lunch with or without her joining me in her high chair. We go over to see Dave at the school at 1215, when his kids have lunch, then come home and if she didn’t take a 2^nd morning nap, then she gets one now. At 2 30 we bundle back up and go check the mail at the post office. We come home, and unpack whatever box came (there appears to be no rhyme or reason for when boxes come. Things I mailed two weeks before arrive intermingled with things I mailed later. Boxes I mailed together come one at a time over two weeks or more. Regular mail seems to come at the regular fast pace. For the first 5 days here we had 6 cloth diapers. I was pretty happy when the rest finally came) and then Julia plays until she needs yet another nap in the later afternoon. Dave comes home about 4, and one of us makes supper. I go over to the school to check my e-mail (haven’t got it set up in the house yet) and then the evening is filled with showers for everyone, or socializing, or watching a show on tv. That’s how our first week has played out, at any rate.