All About the Animals

Ah, what a wonderful Labor Day weekend we've had to wrap up summer and kick off the fall! 

This weekend was so much fun, and we have pictures to prove it. Isaiah is all about animals -- mostly anything he can equate with marginal similarity to a dog or a cow, the two sounds he knows how to make. 

Dog: urf, urf, urf, urf. This would sound more like a grunt to the untrained ear.

Cow: Uooooooooo. To anyone else, this would sound like a ghost sound.

So we headed off to the National Zoo on Saturday afternoon to see real lions and tigers and bears, oh my! And cows.

See tiger just to the left of Isaiah. He put on quite a show!

It’s an Earthquake! It’s a Hurricane!

Nope. It’s just something to talk about in August.

Some places August is the peak of summer. Some places it’s the end of summer, when kids go back to school. Some places it’s time to retreat to the air conditioning. Here, it’s recess.

This is the first time since I started back to work fulltime that both the House and Senate have been in recess at the same time for more than a day. That means everyone wears jeans to work, catches up on emails from three months ago, has lunch at new restaurants outside our general sphere and either gets off a little early or drops in to work a few minutes late. Ah, recess.

But we don’t have anything to talk about during recess. You know? Paul Ryan hasn’t come out with a new budget number in months. Coburn hasn’t resigned from a Gang of 6 or 5 in eons. The president’s T-time is thoroughly uninteresting. And we are political nerd buckets up here in D.C.

So we got an earthquake.

Rain

You know how back home in the south people say "we have a good chance of rain" on a cloudy day?

I was walking to a great little deli/bakery called Firehook for a hot date at noon today, and I thought I'd better grab an umbrella because "we had a good chance of rain." It occurred to me, in a city where we walk everywhere we go, yards are 10'x10' on average, trees grow every year and rain is just a messy nuisance that makes the traffic move slower, do people say "today we have a bad chance of rain?"

6 Weeks, 10 Photos

If I had taken a new full time job and therefore find myself with lots less time to blog, it's also possible that I might have missed six weeks worth of "extremely" newsworthy events. Catch up with a few photos...

A sunny day in Washington, DC

The WWII Memorial with Mammy

Our "Date"

When we moved out here, we knew we were giving up some things we loved. For example, Mexican food that tastes like Mexican food, hanging out with a bunch of crazy college kids on Tuesday nights, and great babysitters.

There were other things we didn’t realize we were giving up, like fresh jalapenos at the ready in every grocery store, drive through everything (like cleaners, Starbucks and pharmacies) and sleep.

We have an 11-month old, so the occasional sleepless night and sacrificed date night is expected. We are aware of that and don’t complain. We never took for granted that we had scores of willing grandmothers, neighbors, coworkers, friends and college kids who really wanted to hang out with our little buddy for a few hours so we could have dinner and a movie when we got well and ready. However, we didn’t anticipate that moving to Virginia would launch poor little Isaiah into a series of viruses that have kept all of us from sleeping for two months. That’s ok….he’s going to be fine. But it’s time for a date.

We Hold these Truths to be Self Evident

What a good day to get out of the city! With a car full of Texas Tech interns and a handful of good friends, we pulled out of D.C. yesterday morning, headed south to Monticello. Our friend Matt planned the perfect day: lunch at Mitchie Tavern, guided tour of the house, and a whole afternoon to explore the grounds. We finished up with dinner at Pig ‘n Steak Virginia barbeque.

We have to beg friends to travel with us because with as much gear as it takes to keep this kid happy, we'd never get any sightseeing done. Don't we look like tourists? By "we" I mean them.

Thomas Jefferson was a farmer and a gardener. He did intense horticultural testing in these gardens, which were maintained by slaves who lived in shacks located where I am standing. His garden not only fed the estate, but in it he experimented with new varieties and crop rotations.

There She Is...Miss America!

I don't know if little girls still get giddy about meeting Miss America, but they did when I was little. When I was about six years old we had an old TV where you used the rotary dial to change the channel. Actually, it was probably new at the time. My mom told me we were going to fudge bed time and watch Miss America. She spun that rotary dial through all the snowy channels (my child will never know about snowy channels since everything is digital now) until we heard the theme song. I don't know who won, but there's something magical about little girls and crowns. I ran to my dress up chest and fished out a white stretchy headband that Santa had brought adorned with pearls and sparkly pink and purple flowers. I'm sure I wore it proudly long after I fell asleep that night, which was probably about the time the talent competition started.

Two years ago as a full-fledged, income earning, adult I was invited to a Miss America party with other full-fledged, income earning adults. It was impeccably planned and themed by state. Every girl was supposed to choose a state candidate to root for and wear something symbolizing that state. Did I go? You better believe I did!

Then, three weeks ago I got a Monday afternoon invitation to have dinner with royalty! Miss American 2011, Theresa Scanlan, was in town to meet with stakeholders in an agriculture movement.

Transplanted

I’m a transplant.

I thought our family was settled, at least for awhile. We’d bought a house in the country, added a baby to our family of two, settled into careers we loved.

Then over a normal lunch on a normal day, a friend casually suggested we turn our life upside down.

I laughed. Then I told my husband, my dad and my boss, as a joke. Then my husband started looking at houses, my dad started talking about finding your purpose in life, and my boss said I could take my job with me.

That’s where it got serious. Two weeks later my husband had an interview. Five weeks later we both had jobs. A week after that we had a rental home, and three weeks after that my baby and I were on a flight across the country to meet up with my hubby and start a new life.

So now we live here. Well, not here, but you get the idea.

I’m not just any transplant, though. I grew up on a ranch in the middle of Texas nowhere. Most of my childhood was spent on eight miles of dirt road. The first time I lived in the city limits was when I went across the state for college. I know about preg checking cows, windstorms and burning trash to keep the critters away, but I do not know about traffic circles, recycling pickup on Tuesdays or community green spaces.

Because every day I laugh at myself over some new revelation about city living, my work in agriculture and politics, my life with a 10 month old, my marriage to Mr. Wonderful, and the absurdity of how life has changed in just one year, here’s my blog…