You take it on faith, you take it to the heart

Aaaaaaaand we're back.

Remember how in my last post I said how happy I was that we were flying down to NJ because I couldn't do another long drive? Yeah. I jinxed it. The Philly airport was fogged in pea-soup style Thursday night, and our flight was delayed four and a half hours. So we got into my mom's at 2:30 in the morning Friday. Uch. Nolan was all wound up the whole night, he had more energy than either of us - he was running around Logan airport in his dinosaur PJs wreaking havoc. We were about ready to bag it and go home when they finally boarded the flight. I guess it could have been worse - we could have been stuck sitting on the plane for four and a half hours like the previous flight to Philly was.

But the weekend itself was good. Everyone we met at the Princeton group was awesomely normal - down-to-earth, honest folk. They're heavily involved in the community, and everyone seems to have lives outside of work, which is great. I think if KB got a job offer from either this group or the one in South Jersey, we'd be happy. We saw lots of great neighborhoods with walkable, cute little downtowns and great public schools.

I got a little spoiled, I think, because my mom watched Nolan both Saturday and Sunday while KB and I did the real estate tours and the meet-and-greets with the radiology folks. I got to have adult conversations without being interrupted seventeen times, I got to sit down and eat an entire meal that wasn't lukewarm, and I got to drink alcoholic beverages. It was pretty sweet. So the transition back to real life here was a tough one. It was like, "Oh yeah. Just me and Pint Size here all day, by ourselves. Fabulous."

He's getting very defiant, my little man. It's like someone whispered in his ear while he was sleeping "You're supposed to be a toddler now, kiddo. Enough with the sweet compliant baby attitude - you gotta start individuating, man! Let's hear some rebellion!" And he listened.

It's not just the saying, "No!" all the time (although he's excellent at that), it's more that he's willfully disobeying me, like, all the time. He'll look right at me and keep doing whatever it is I've asked him not to do, and when I go over to remove him from the forbidden item (like our Christmas tree) he laughs and squeals like it's all a big game. I think (alright, honestly? I know for a fact) I inherited a bit of a temper from my dad, and I get worried that I won't be able to control myself when Nolan's pushing my buttons like that. Not that I would ever hit him, that's not it, but that I'll yell and scream and say things I really don't mean and scar him for life.

*sigh*

I gotta check out what some of the parenting books say on discipline. I guess this is going to be my parenting M.O. - play it by ear until you run out of ideas, and then consult the oracles for help.

So now we just have to wait to hear from the radiology groups. Hopefully we'll have an offer (or maybe, hoping against hope, two offers) by the end of this week. I think KB feels good that we've done as much as we can to make a good impression on these groups, and now we just have to leave it in their hands. Yipe. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Thanks for reading.

Lottery or car crash, or you'll join a cult

Welp, we've got one more trip down to Dirty Jers, and then (hopefully, possibly, maybe) that will be the end of the job search. KB will (hopefully, possibly, maybe) get an offer from one of the groups that we liked in an locale that we liked and that liked us.

And then we'll know where the heck we're going to be moving to in six months or so. Hopefully. Possibly. Maybe.

So we're flying down tomorrow night (thank god the group is paying for our trip - I don't think I could do another six-hour drive) and coming back Sunday night, and KB will have done two second interviews and I will have done two real-estate tours and two getting-to-know-you dinners and my mom will have had some serious Nolan quality time.

Wish us luck!

Oh, and we finally took our holiday picture. Huzzah!



Thanks for reading.

Y'all are brutalizing me

The Christmas card onslaught has begun. We haven't even taken the friggin' picture yet for our cards (ack! Less than three weeks!) and we've already received six cards from those early birds who are, you know, organized and shit. (Including one from my friend in Portugal. I think she must have sent it in October or something).

The one that threw me was from one of my aunts - it was a perfectly ordinary Christmas card, written and addressed by the mom who signs all the family's names, but the stamp on the envelope says "Stop Family Violence" and has a stereotypical kids crayon-style drawing of a stick-figure house and sun, but with a sad, frowning kid in the foreground.

I'm sure my aunt bought the stamps for a good cause - probably some portion of the proceeds went to charities that fight domestic violence or something like that - but, yeesh. Nothing says Christmas like Family Violence, I guess.

Thanks for reading.

But the fire is so delightful

It finally snowed yesterday. Yay! I say "finally" only because this entire fall has been unseasonably warm, in the 50s and 60s, and while that's not entirely unpleasant, per se, it does seem a bit odd. Kind of fills me with a vague sense of unease, a certain wrong-ness, like maybe there's something to this whole global warming thing. Ya think?

Speaking of a vague sense of unease*...we spent the weekend after turkey day with a side branch of the extended family tree, and there were some major inter-family fracases (fracasses? fracasees?) happening while we were there. Major to the tune of us being woken up at one in the morning by people downstairs screaming "Don't you dare! Don't you dare!" and loud thumping noises and someone at the top of the stairs screaming, "What the fuck is going on down there?"

What the fuck indeed. To be honest, it was sort of refreshing, in a way - my own family is probably filled with just as much resentment and ill will as this particular family is, we just tighten our assholes and keep everything bottled up and seethe quietly to ourselves (or complain behind each other's backs), whereas these people just let it all fly. I was sort of taken aback that they felt no compunction whatsoever about fighting (at one in the morning! drunk!) in front of the relative strangers that we constitute to them, and that no one bothered to mention it the next day when we all convened for pancakes in the morning, preferring instead to go breezily about their day as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but I was also sort of envious that they felt free enough to just...scream at each other.

Aaaaand we were down in Dirty Jers the week after that (last week) for one more round of job interviews. KB met with four more groups, three of which he's really really jazzed about, so if any of them offer him a position, we'll probably end up taking it (and if more than one of them does, we'll have some major decision-making to do). It was an exhausting week, with rounds of "meeting the group" dinners and real-estate agent tours of towns every day, not to mention the fact that the whole family came down with the plague. Actually, Nolan was fine, it was just KB and me who were on death's door. He even was forced to cancel one of his interviews to stay home (at my mom's) on Wednesday, he felt so crappy. It was really a bummer, since we were all just sick a couple of weeks ago. But we got to see Nana (my mom) and Nolan learned how to say "Hello?" to the telephone, and we saw my grandfather and my aunt and cousins, so it wasn't all work. Nolan and I spent a LOT of time in the car with the real estate agents, plus the five hour drives down and back with KB, so we're all happy to be home again.

And now, let the usual time of holiday franticness begin! Take a family holiday picture! Soon! So we have time to order Christmas cards online! And mail them out! Hurry! I've started looking for presents in all the catalogs we got in the mail while we were gone, and I realized that, without exception, every single one of them is labelled something like, "Last-Minute Holidays 2006" or "Order by Dec. 22 for Christmas delivery!" or "It's Not Too Late!" And I think, "It better not be too late, motherfuckers, I just started!"

Thanks for reading.

*Nice blend, Fozzie - thank you, Fozzie!