A splurge in time saves...three?

We have been wanting to go to the holiday train exhibit at the Bronx Botanical Garden. So we went. This morning. It was great. The first tickets to the train exhibit were for 12:45, so we went to a gingerbread house exhibit before that.Naomi, Alex, and Hannah. Alex and Hannah live in our building, and Alex is also in Naomi's class. This is not the best picture of the three, but honestly I have great difficulty just keeping three 2 year-olds in the same vicinity as each other, let alone all looking at the camera and smiling simultaneously.One of the gingerbread houses on display. The houses made me want to try something a little more elaborate next year...Getting ready to decorate gingerbread cookies.The statue of liberty...at the very, very beginning of the train exhibit, before it really started actually. Then my camera died. I did get some video footage, though, but I want to try to combine some of it before putting it up here. After finals. I am kind of in denial about my finals. This exhibit was really sooooo amazing. They had replicas of many, many, many historical buildings from all over NYC, all made out of plant parts, with a number of trains winding in and out of the buildings. The coolest part about it was recognizing so many of the buildings--I don't think it would have been as fun if we were not familiar with this city. Of course for the kids, the coolest parts were the trains. That and each other.After the train exhibit, we went to a little train puppet show, because it appears Naomi is really into that kind of thing right now (our friends went to eat lunch instead). We didn't get home until almost 4. It is a good 50 minute commute by subway to the Botanical Garden, and honestly way too exhausting to do it alone with a kid, but with more than one adult it is fun. Then at 5:15 we went to a ward Christmas party. This was maybe the best ward Christmas party I have been to, just relatively simple (everyone brought a blanket and dressed in biblical garb to eat a meal we "bought" at the market...then watched a nativity scene with singing). I really liked it. And then we came home. And Matt went to babysit for a friend.

So it was a good day. Maybe I should have studied all day instead. But I didn't. The one blip in my plan is that I really do actually need more sleep lately because I am pregnant (15 weeks, for anyone we haven't told yet). So the whole approach of the past--overdose on caffeine and junk food for five days, sleep less and recover later--isn't going to work this week. I mean these three days. I mean....YES IT IS TIME FOR ME TO STOP WRITING AND GET TO WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PS--I will write more about the baby later. We are happy. A little tired just anticipating it. But happy. :)

Finals

I apologize to anyone I have not emailed back/called back/etc this past week. I am trying to get my finals done by Tuesday, and still do some fun things this weekend. We will see how well that works out. Naomi has not been a very good sleeper lately, which hasn't helped (it's not her fault, she just has a really crappy bug that has resulted in nonstop coughing). AT LEAST IT HAS FINALLY STOPPED RAINING!!! (Seriously, I know rain is important, but when you spend 50-60 minutes a day walking, and this is your only real viable form of transportation, pouring rain is really not fun anymore. It is just plain depressing). Here is a picture of Naomi with my Edwards grandparents, who were in town for a football hall of fame thing this week. We went to Eli's after church.Naomi and I also went to a caroling and tree lighting at Carl Schurz this weekend. It was really cold, but I really liked it. They had a children's choir sing some songs, and then everyone sang Christmas carols together. It was nice. We did take a cab home though. I think that is the shortest distance I have ever taken a cab. :)
Naomi painting a Santa:I found a bunch of old pictures from last Christmas which I somehow lost track of. Here is one of Naomi with my mom. What's amazing is they look even *more* alike in pictures of my mom when she was Naomi's age.
Back to studying. If anyone wants to ask me a question about drug side effects, ask me now! Because I am very, very doubtful I will remember any of this oh, say, a week from now. :)

One man's coil....

...is another woman's wedding ring. The ring is found! Our amazing, wonderful custodian and handyman wouldn't let me look through the garbage this morning because of liability issues (someone has been throwing away syringes in the trash, apparently?), but they agreed to look themselves. I stayed for a while with them, then eventually went to drop Naomi off at daycare, and go to school. When I got home, Matt said they didn't find the ring. He went down to talk to them again, and they mentioned that they had found other small things, including a small silver coil of some sort, but no wedding ring. It turns out, the coil was my ring! I described it, but they were still expecting something big with diamonds and so on, so when they saw it, they threw it back into the trash thinking it was nothing. Then they and Matt both went through some of the trash bags to find it again.

And they did! From now on the ring is going on my right hand only, where it fits a little more snugly and doesn't have the same tendency of slipping off unprovoked. I don't know why my fingers are so much skinnier now than three and a half years ago, since the rest of me is NOT, but maybe this just means that the ring will still fit me when I'm 70 and have arthritis. Then I will return it to my left hand. In the meantime, right hand it is!

One more reason not to look forward to Monday morning....

My wedding ring fell off of my finger into the garbage chute at 7:30pm tonight as I was throwing away a couple of diapers. The key to the compacting room where it now lies will not be in until 8am tomorrow. In the meantime, 17 floors of 12 apartments each will have the opportunity to throw more trash away, which will subsequently be compacted by the machine into a giant cube. Somewhere in the middle, I will eventually find my ring. Hopefully *before* searching inside all the many diapers and trash bags to see if it got crammed in somewhere under all the pressure of the compacter.

Looks like I will be having a rather....aromatic....start to my day.

For Matt (in London for the weekend)

Classic Naomi (outside of Macy's this morning):Our tree. Again. I think this camera mode (and having the lights off) does a better job of capturing it. I am really a little obsessed. I want to keep it up all year long (or at least all winter?), but I'm pretty sure it will die after three weeks without water.Naomi with the Macy's teddy bears. These guys were a way bigger hit than Santa (there was no actual lap-sitting this year). :-) They came out after the puppet show of Miracle on 34th St. I didn't know if Naomi would like the show, since it was fairly long this year and a little more geared at older kids, but she was completely enthralled. Even though I highly doubt she got anything out of it other than some fun music and dancing. Go figure.Santa was not a big hit....but Santaland was.
Outside looking at the windows:In Santaland again:And now on to another topic, unrelated (kind of) to Naomi. I had a conversation with someone yesterday in which I stupidly asked how much they pay their nanny. This was a bad conversation in which I came across (accurately) as being completely judgmental. So fine, maybe that was bad. It's debatable. I just have one point to make here. Everyone makes the argument that nannies earn so much more than it seems because they are being paid off the books. But in reality, if (as in this particular case) you earn less than minimum wage, and you are the sole income-earner in your household, If you WERE on the books, you would ONLY pay social security taxes (6%), PLUS if you were a US citizen, you would be eligible for all kinds of governmental assistance (welfare, Medicaid, etc) that is not available to an illegal immigrant paid in cash only. So no, they are not really so amazingly well off--certainly not better off than a legal citizen being paid the identical amount on the books. Especially since you CAN'T PAY the identical amount on the books, because it is ILLEGAL. On the other hand, if you pay a more reasonable wage, and the person is in a dual-income family...chances are they might end up paying more in taxes, and that they do actually benefit *financially* from being paid off-the-books. Also, since most of the nannies in Manhattan commute from the boroughs anyway, living in a borough doesn't make it considerably easier for a low-paid nanny to pay her bills. After the boroughs come the burbs, which are not cheaper but more expensive to live in. *Everywhere* in NYC is expensive to live.

Bottom line: paying off the books does virtually nothing to solve the financial woes of someone earning well below the poverty level. It only "helps" someone who is already earning a more middle-class income. For what it's worth. I don't know what the appropriate amount is to pay a babysitter, and I know these issues are exceedingly complicated; I just want people to be honest about the reality of the situations they are involved in.

We have a Christmas tree + ornaments....

We had a little confusion in the beginning on the location of our ornaments (we actually found the box, but the first thing in the box wasn't an ornament, so we didn't realize they were there, underneath). Here is our tree, now with more of our ornaments. I have been a little obsessed with this tree (yeah, we're leaving in less than two weeks now...but the tree will have been up for almost three weeks, and it is really making me happy.Matt and Naomi decorating posterboard ornaments (before we found our regular ones...still, we will be keeping at least some of these):Cowgirl:Katie and her cute boyfriend (who is clearly in love with her!) were also in NY for Thanksgiving, so we had the chance to visit for a while.