One Year

Our girl has gone from this (June 29, 2010):


...to this (yesterday):
There was ample reason to celebrate having made it one whole year together! Some days have been exciting, some have been boring, some have felt never-ending, and others unforgettable. But I feel truly blessed to have spent every single one of those days with my girl! And the fact that she has survived with us in charge of her is reason enough to celebrate!

Though we do miss having our family here to celebrate with us, we did get to open presents via Skype with them. Here's Esmé's package from Tutu's and Aunt Natalee.

On Sunday, we had dinner with our friends, the Parkers, and ate a little birthday cake.

Here is Esmé with her first boyfriend. I think that's pretty impressive to already have a boyfriend by one year old. It took until about 17 for me to get one.One more round of opening presents via Skype with Grandma and Grandpa Wright:



The night before her birthday, Roo and I were watching The Return of the King, and I couldn't help comparing how Frodo felt while climbing up Mount Doom to how I felt the night I was giving birth to our little Esmé. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. But of course it was worth the difficulty. We love our little girl so much more than we could ever have imagined a year ago! She amazes us every day!

Presents from Natalee & Grandma Tutu

Untitled from Annie Phillips on Vimeo.

Annie's Art Initiative

I've decided I need a hobby. I found that after I had cleaned everything that needed to be cleaned and put the baby in her crib to nap, I didn't know what to do with myself. This resulted in my getting way too many naps, since taking a nap was far more attractive than doing more chores during my free time. Feeling slightly guilty for spending so much time unconscious, I knew I had to find something (productive, if possible) to fill my time. Something even more seductive than an afternoon cat nap.

I spent some time brainstorming new hobby ideas. I also searched the internet. Here is what I came up with. (I blame the stupid ones on the internet):

• Breeding guinea pigs - Then I thought about what that would entail...and I realized I wouldn't even know where to start. Literally. No idea where--on the guinea pig, I mean.
  

• Participating in Viking and/or Saxon historical reenactments - Pillaging and plundering aside, I dig the sailing aspect of this potential hobby. Unfortunately after putting some feelers out in the apartment complex, there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for historical reenactments, at least not Viking or Saxon. And I couldn't manage a Knarr (that's the Norse term for a ship built for Atlantic voyage) on my own. Maybe a Karve (that's a smaller ship, similar to the Knarr), but definitely not a Knarr.

• Watching endoscopic surgeries online - I decided I don't want to know what I look like on the inside. I don't think whoever's colon that was would want me knowing how they looked in there either.

• Learning songs backwards - Then I thought, what is the point of this?

• Wittling sticks - Too hard.

• Wittling soap - Too hard.

• Wittling crayons - Too easy. Also, they break like twigs. And your options are pretty narrow as far as your end result goes. You can carve a tree branch, a person's leg (foot not included), or a straight snake. Boring.

• Scrapbooking - I'm better at wittling crayons.
  

• Taphophilia - A Taphophile is someone who takes an interest in tombstones. They look at them and do rubbings of the engravings and, I think, generally just hang around in graveyards as a hobby. So, that actually sounds pretty interesting to me. But did the term 'Taphophilia' make you a little nervous? Me too. Realizing that part of becoming a tombstone enthusiast would require me being known as a Taphophile pretty much killed (pun intended!) this hobby for me.

• Napping - Based on what I'd come up with so far, this one was looking pretty good again.

• Playing Guitar - That's really only good if you're trying to impress high school girls, which I am not.
  

• Sports - I know what you're thinking: it would be pretty unfair of me to make all my teammates and coaches and stuff look so bad at sports when compared to me. Agreed. I should probably never play sports. Ever.

So I settled on the old classic, Drawing. I love art (wittling excluded) and did some drawing in my younger years, so I pulled out my old sketchbook and now try to work on my drawings as much as I can. This is what I've done so far:

Lips

Spheres

A well-known Taphophile

To All the Fathers in my Life:

Thank you for teaching me what a good man should be.

I love you!



It was Esmé's bedtime one evening, and Roo had volunteered to put her down. I happened to pass by her bedroom door and I saw the two of them there. Roo was holding her, her tiny fist was grasping his shoulder, and he was holding each of her stuffed animals up to her face, having them tell her goodnight. He picked up her little kangaroo and her little Aunt Beru action figure and Esmé touched them. I just watched the two of them together and I thought, this might be one of the best moments of the day, or the week, or really, of my life.

Thank you, Roo, for being such an exceptional 'dada'!

What I Need Today

Either a tiny sloth or a hug. You can interpret it however you'd like.

From Sara's blog

11 Months

Today Esmé is 11 months old and as cute (or cuter) than ever!

Lately, we've been experimenting on new hair-do's. Here we have the curly pompadour:
And this is what happens when Daddy does Esmé's hair:

She's just recently starting sporting the top-of-the head ponytail.

She is an adventurous girl, and with that comes a few bumps and bruises. This particular injury on the forehead looks like she had a recent run-in with Voldemort.
Disorganizing things is one of her favorite pastimes.
She usually eats with one foot on the tray.
She's such a sweet, silly girl! We can't believe she's almost one!

A Case of Mistaken Identity?

There have been three strange occurrences of mistaken identity in my life lately.

First, about six months ago, I received an email that went something like this:

Dear Allison,
Thank you for your interest in (some kind of job opening...I forget what it was). We will contact you once we review your resume.

I thought, hmm that was weird. Someone must've mixed up my email address with this Allison person. Oh well. Delete. Then periodically over the next six months, I would receive email alerts for various job openings and automatic 'thank you for applying' response-type emails from some employment website that were meant for this Allison person. It was annoying, so I'd just delete them.

Then about two months ago, I got an email that went something like this:

Dear Windycitygirl,

Thank you for registering on Match.com. You're gonna love using our website (or something like that) Click this link to update your profile and view your matches. (Followed by a bunch of login and profile information.)

I thought, uhh, that's weird. I didn't register for Match.com, and if I did I certainly wouldn't have chosen the username 'Windycitygirl'. Wanting the issue to just go away, I deleted the email. However, almost everyday for the following months, I would receive email updates from Match.com telling me that 47 men had viewed my profile today. Or that SexyAbs2000 wants to flirt with me. I had no idea why I was getting these emails. There must have been some kind of mistake. Having been winked at by one too many Match.com males (or so my daily emails would inform me) I decided to see if I could log in to this profile and see why I was getting these emails. It seemed someone (Windycitygirl) had mistakenly entered my email address when creating the profile. She probably just had to create a new profile when she couldn't get in using her own email address, and here I was, the recipient of her Match.com flirtations from her first failed profile attempt. Realizing that I had full access to this person's profile and account and, had I wished, could have masqueraded as her on the website, I got overburdened by the invasion of privacy and unsubscribed to the emails. Weird.

Finally, last Saturday while we were watching a movie at home, I received the following text message from a strange number I've never seen before in my life:

'I like u back then. Corey didn't deserve u. And when he wasn't making u happy I wanted to.'

Whoa. I'm flattered and all, but who the heck is Corey?

Then an hour later from the same number (a Tennessee area code, we found out):

'K have fun'

It took a lot of self discipline to not text back something like, 'I want u to make me happy. Can u come over tonite?' But while I was laughing about it, I began to wonder if something strange is going on.

You know how some medications make people do things they can't remember, like driving forklifts at night. Then they wake up and have no idea why they have a forklift on their patio. Or how some people live secret double lives. What if I am not only living a double life, but a quadruple life?! During the day I am Annie the housewife, but at night I am alternately Allison the unemployed; Windycitygirl the lonely; and someone who should have known better than to let Corey mistreat them so.

That might be the only explanation for these strange events.

Yikes.