Summer weddings and looooooong road trips.

My brain isn't firing all of it's little fiery things...synapses? Whatever...so rather than some of those 9th grade English class paragraphs with a topic sentence, some exposition and a nice summary sentence at the end, I give you: a list.

Item 1. People like to get married in the summer. Is this because we have lots of pagan friends who don't like to sanction their love within the site of some bearded old guy who lives in a house full of stained glass windows? Who knows, but we drove 12 hours each way to attend a wedding in Tennessee last weekend and we'll be driving for 4 days (2 there, 2 back) to attend another wedding in Massachusetts this weekend.

B. Manimal and I experienced a moment of truth when we looked into the back seat and saw this: We are parents...driving a minivan with kids in the backseat. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

3). With the exception of some youtube vids of baby animals and disconnected minutes of random children's programming at friend's houses, Pete has been a TeeVee free baby until this trip when I borrowed a DVD player to bridge the many hours of boring, strapped in riding. It took him 1/2 an episode of Elmo's World before he mastered the phrase "More TV please!"

* Roadtrips are good for knitting:

This sweater was featured on the cover of Mothering Magazine a few months back and I've been obsessed with it ever since, so when we got the book in at Woven Art I knew that I was obliged to knit one...plus I haven't actually knit anything for Soon-to-be yet, and that seemed inexcusable. It's almost done...one more seam and some buttons to sew on.

Eff: HOW THE HELL DID I GET SO PREGNANT? And how am I going to survive the next two and a half months? Ragnarson was an extremely aggressive little fetus, but I swear he wasn't this big. Soon-to-be seems to favor a more deliberate pushing and stretching motion as opposed to his kick boxing brother, and I can't decide if it's better, or worse. Sometimes I won't even realize that the uncomfortable sensation in my stomach is baby related until I look down and see the distinct shape of a noggin sticking out from under my rib cage.

Six: I forget what if anything I wrote about the "sewing nights" that I used to host in the years before I joined the breeders, but on the off chance that I mentioned him, I'd like you all to give a rousing congratulations to our old Totem Male, Yammer the Onner. He finally found a good woman to take him in hand and mold him into the man we all know he can be. Awwwww.

Yellow: Ragnarson has turned into a crazy talking fool. I know that it's unreasonable, since I have watched him grow from an inert lump of newborn into a crazy walking-talking-jumping down the stairs two year old (as of two weeks ago...), but every new thing still blows me away. Intellectually I realize that my infant son will someday be an actual Man (or Manimal rather, since he does take after his Papa), but conceptually I have yet to grasp that my son will grow up. A random selection of things that shock me: sentences like this one "Water, please, water big cup, that one please water," the increasing coordination and agility that lead to things like escaping from the gated off front porch, and climbing up on the counter, selecting and peeling a banana, and the fact that his favorite place is the library, and his favorite people, the librarians.

Ragnar...only 30 hours of driving between me and a normal life.