GRANDMA IS IN THE HOUSE

Grandma Patty arrived in the wee hours last night for a two week visit. Yippee! She is here to attend cousin Adrienne's wedding to (beloved cousin) Anthony this coming weekend. We are so excited for the wedding and can't wait to see the whole clan again. Van is going to be the flower girl. Adrienne is the bride. Anthony is the groom. Van knows the whole drill.

Luckily, this week is a break for Daddio, so he can attend the wedding. Daddio has been very hard at work with the team and commuting to L.A. pretty much every week. He had an emotionally exhausting and ultimately amazing experience coaching the decathlon and hepthathlon at the conference meet two weeks ago.

Jack's 5th year super senior, James, won the event and his story gained national attention when it headlined the U.S. Track and Field Coaches Asssociation website.

http://www.ustfccca.org/featured/james-nunnos-improbable-comeback-highlighted-by-09-big-west-deca-title

The year incoming freshman decathlete Morrey Brown died, James had a freak accident when his pole vault pole shattered and ruptured his spleen. That was the year James was going to dedicate the conference championship to Morrey. Instead, he spent the year recovering from surgery, and Jack rejoiced he had not lost two athletes in one year. This season, James overcame many obstacles and even dominated the pole vault to win the decathlon title.

Then the next weekend, Daddio went back to L.A. for the rest of the conference meet. This year not one but six of his athletes were conference champions! A very big deal! James won in the decathlon, Julie won in the shot and in the discus, Katie won in the javelin, Conor won in the pole vault and Jenna also won in the pole vault. James, Julie, and Katie got personal best marks ("PRs") in their events and all three are seniors, so that was pretty amazing.



Things continue to move quickly around here while Daddio is traveling. I've been recovering from my breast infection and am thankful every day for Vanessa's preschool. I've told her teacher, Miss Carmen, that she was surely ordained by God to be Van's teacher. I think God cycled thousands of preschoolers through Miss Carmen's classes over the past 20 years to prepare her to teach this particular child.

Here are some of the highlights from preschool:

Miss Carmen: "Vanessa is a real trooper, going all day without a nap."

Miss Carmen: "Vanessa has great verbal skills. She's very bright."

Miss Carmen: "Vanessa doesn't mind telling everyone how to do things."

Classmate's Mom, who is pregnant: "My son asked, 'Will my baby sister look like her?' (Vanessa)"

Classmate Olivia to her Mom, upon arriving at school: "Look! There's Vanessa! There's Vanessa!"


Vanessa started naming her baby dolls something other than "Baby." She has chosen Carmen and Sandy, her teachers' names, and Olivia and Jonathan, names of two of her classmates.

Vanners is in the afternoon preschool and I think she's the only 2 year old, everyone else is 3 to 5.5. There are things she can't do very well at all, but otherwise I think she's fitting in okay. She can't trace her letters very well, but she loves the art table and of course playground time.

Miss Carmen has been amazing at establishing consequences for deviant behavior. By deviant I mean the pure sense of the word, you know, when Vanessa deviates from the pack and from expected behavior. She's not always being bad, afterall, she's often just being independent. Part of the job of being two. We promote independence in our California pioneer descendant, but we are thrilled Miss Carmen is using her classroom to teach V-Dog those indispensible skills of how to run with the pack. Ordained by God.

Auntie Anne has encouraged me to write down the funny little things that Nanners says wrong. Cousin Abby, for example, asked her mother one time, "Mommy, where did you been?" which we still laugh about. Vanessa doesn't say too many things wrong, darn it, but here is a partial list:

"What's that noises?" (she has corrected this one)

"Stunk" for skunk

"Chickmonk" for chipmonk

"Chitty Chitty Bang Dang"

"Pack pack" for backpack, which she now sports to school

She adds an "s" to a word to make it plural: womans, mans, mouses, Maribethes.

But, in general, mispronounciation is not her funniest contribution to the family. She's pretty skilled with her communication. Tonight, over dinner, she commented, "This is scrumptious, mama. This is scrumptious." Why thank you, baby daughter.

Mostly, she gets us to laugh when she is trying to entertain us. Tonight she stood on the coffee table during the closing song on American Idol and danced around in a circle, holding the hands of her new 5 inch tall baby doll. She definitely wanted the spotlight. We laughed about her dancing there, hunched over, and she kept on, keeping a straight face. Oh she works it.

She also teases us now. She teases me a lot, with a straight face. Since when do two year olds hassle their elders? That's what I want to know.

Did I mention that we have introduced the naughty time out? Yes, well, she likes it. She requests it, even.

Miss Carmen: "Today was an off day for Vanessa. She went around and got her hands into absolutely everything. She's two: it's expected."

Vanessa: "I was naughty today. I didn't feel like being nice."

Ah, me.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

Every night, this is my prayer:

"Dear God, thank you for this day together.

Thank you for baby Vanessa in our family.

Thank you for Daddy: I love being his wife.

Thank you for letting me be a Mama - I love being Mama to Vanessa.

And thank you for Milo, thank you for Max, and thank you for Chica."

That's how I start us off, then we fill in the rest.

Vanessa loves this prayer. When we ask her to pray, it is a spontaneous expression of, well, English, from our wee 2 year old. "Thank you for the doorknobs! The spiders! Mama's boob!"

Since my last post, we have had my sister's daughter, Abby, come visit. Nanners took a backseat whilst we rolled out the red carpet for Abs because it was her very first visit to our house in all of her seventeen years. Well, unless you count when she was a 3 month old fetus in her Mama's belly when we got married.



Abby arrived in San Francisco on her seventeenth birthday, so we - Van, Daddio and Granny Ernestine and I - met her at baggage claim, blended frozen coffee drink in hand, singing "Happy Birthday to you!" at the top of our lungs. Abby came off the escalator, glanced our way, turned, and launched off in the opposite direction. She later said she thought, "Wow, someone has the same birthday as me." Silly girl. She did not expect a grand entrance? She'll learn.

For her birthday meal, she selected the weirdest food possible at the San Francisco wharf, octopus. Many photos of said food were taken.

After carrying around the mass of tentacles for an hour, we made Abs ditch her leftovers so we could introduce her to Ghirardelli hot fudge sundaes.

We had a quick walk over the Golden Gate Bridge in a 90 degree heatwave, and a driving tour of the city, and then we felt Abby had done San Fran adequately for the afternoon.

When Auntie Anne is within a mile of Vanessa, she is laser focused on her. That's how I felt about Abby. Where ever we went, people assumed she was my daughter. (Ahem.) I loved that. Instead of being the haggard-looking, out of shape young mother of a toddler, I looked like the youthful, slightly with-it middle-aged woman that I more truthfully am. Hey, I'm closer to 60 than I am to 21.

Abby, you might gather from the pictures, is a bit of a hottie. She fit right in to the surf climate and culture. You would never guess she hails from rural Connecticut. Bless her heart.

Let's just say that this amateur and occasionally bossy photographer and this underphotographed teenager could have spent days on location together. She willingly did all I asked, in terms of posing, and she made every shot look great. So much easier than photographing a toddler.

When we weren't snapping pics, we spent our days getting our nails done, shopping, and sampling the local fare. We girled out, Big Time.

Daddio took her surfing. He surfed over her face her first day out. Doh! or Woot! as Abby would say.

Death-defying surfing lessons work up one's appetite... for ribs, apparently.

When it was time to go home, we drove up the coast through Big Sur on Route 1 - Abby drove, actually, all 225 miles and 6 hours of it. We stopped briefly to see the elephant seals and again to try to say hello to Steven the Beetle, but we couldn't find him. That's a lot of driving for a new driver, and it was an expert trail, no less. Abs was thrilled.

We sent Abigail MacGoo home with a French manicure, a new haircut, a fabulous tan, and a suitcase full of new surf-inspired duds, five new pairs of shoes, and a Pokeman comforter and sheet set (thrift store find) that was her catch of the week. She also had a hearty dose of western air in her lungs. Heck, she even got a new job and a boyfriend the week she was visiting - both back in Connecticut.

As soon as Abby departed, Jack, Van and I all got a virus I affectionately call the swine flu, which morphed into a sinus infection for both me and Jack. V-dog missed her second full week of preschool thanks to that. Even so, the weekend after Abby left, we drove to Santa Barbara on Saturday and Los Angeles on Sunday, for track meets. We got to see Rob, Manuela and Sophia in Santa Barbara, and "Auntie" Shea-Shea's parents Eugene and Yolanda in Los Angeles.

While in Santa Barbara, we got an unexpected call from our adoption agency that another birthmom is interested in us. After talking for an hour on Saturday, and discovering that she happens to live in L.A., we agreed to meet up on Sunday at a McDonald's. We all got along very well. This birthmom is adopted herself and is raising a 4 year old girl, so she is pretty clear about what she is looking for in parents for her child, due July 30th. Jack and I both felt an immediate connection with this mom. We're waiting to hear if she chooses us, so this past week has been full of anticipation for me.

In other news, Vanessa's Uncle Mike needs surgery to remove a world record sized kidney stone, Auntie Anne put her baby boy Andy on a plane to head back to the Navy base before he ships off to Afghanistan next week, and Auntie Judi's boy Daniel, an Iraqi War veteran, fell and broke his leg and perhaps his femur. Even our dear Maxy cat is in the hospital today, after a bad fight and an abscess on his ear bud that the doctor hopes isn't new cancer. So much to pray for.

As far as my mysterious breast lump goes, I have good news to report. It disappeared! Even so, I kept my biopsy appointment with the surgeon, who actually participated on my c-section when a loop of bowel was adhered to my abdominal wall, making it hard to make the incision. He was very nice. I had to disrobe and lie back on the examination table. While the doctor palpitated my right breast, Van seized the opportunity to man-handle my left breast, then tried to get her mouth on it for a quick snack. ("God bless Mama's boob!")

As an elderly stay-at-home mom with little left to prove in the way of ambition, organization, housekeeping or self grooming, I can spend luxurious amounts of time bonding with Vanessa, time my sister didn't have with her baby girl. I hope to someday be the slightly with-it mom of a seventeen year old VanNannerkins, but until that happens, I was delighted to capitalize on my opportunity to lavishly spend time with Abby.

"Thank you for letting me be a Mama - I love to be Mama to Vanessa."