Pico DiPaolo

Yesterday, when I picked up Elise from school, Ms. Iva said, “Elise must be tired or about to get sick because she was very crabby today.”  The substitute helper kindly chirped in, “she woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”  Indeed, their greetings at pickup were true.  Elise was crabby.  Elise is learning about an average of one word a day now.  Yesterday’s word?  Crabby.  On the way home, she said, “I crabby.” 

Joelle was actually pretty sweet yesterday.  Since she had her first Mad Science class (another story I should share), I was worried she might also be “crabby.”  She was good… until bed time.  She has this thing, which I also share, where she has to finish whatever it is she’s working on.  Joelle and I are not procrastinators.  I get that, but I was also bone tired from the work going on in the house and Elise’s crabbiness.  So, she got the short end of mom’s patience and we ended up in a fight.  This morning, she was still a little sore with me.  I said to her, “baby, it looks like you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”  There was a slight pause and then she said, “I only have one side of the bed.”  That was enough to make me laugh and then she giggled back.  The dreary mood was lifted. 

…and then there is me.  This house project needs to be done.  It’s very hard for me to continue to have strangers in my house, particularly when they continually leave huge messes, scratched walls, floor with tape stuck on it, broken furniture and dust – so much dust.  Poor Chris.  I forget what he said last night exactly, but it was something like, “women have ups and downs.”  He’s right and he has a whole house full of them.  I think our good days totally make up for the bad, but I’m sorry for the rough days, Chris.

In December, my company held its annual Christmas party at the St. Regis Hotel in Houston.  Wonderful party as always and a beautiful hotel.

On Saturday morning, employees and their dates were invited to a brunch at the hotel.  It was a buffet type setup so it was made so people could come and go as they wish.  Some people were slow getting up after shutting the place down the night before.  Others had planes to catch to go back to Dallas to be with the rest of their family for the weekend.

As I was making my second (of three!) pass at the buffet, I noticed a younger couple getting food.  Considering the company only has 40 employees I was sure they didn’t work for our company.  I asked around to make sure they weren’t kids of one of the newer employees or something.  No one knew who they were.  They were crashing the brunch.  There were plenty of open tables so they grabbed plates full of food, sat down and ate, and left within the space of about 15-20 minutes.  No one wanted to say anything and cause a scene, not to mention there is always plenty of extra food at these things.  But we had a good time coming up with different things to say to them and who would approach them.  “So, you must work in the Dallas office?” or “So, how do you do it?”

Petie said the same couple was wandering around the same level of the hotel the night before during our party.  Ours was a black tie, sit down dinner so no crashing there

After we checked out of the hotel as we were exiting the hotel driveway, we saw a Kia make a sharp turn into the hotel drive – it was the crashers coming back to the hotel from somewhere else.  Lunchtime?

A few weeks ago I received an empty text message from Petie. I asked her about it later and apparently Elise had gotten hold of the phone. Her first text message by the age of 2, not bad.

That reminded me of Joelle’s first instant message. She was 5 months old and was sitting in Petie’s lap when Petie was IMing me at work. It went like this:

petietx (9:26:43 AM): she’s trying to type
petietx (9:27:16 AM): ‘,….
petietx (9:27:37 AM): ,mmmmmmmm
petietx (9:27:47 AM): d
petietx (9:27:57 AM): gv x

Now Joelle IMs me all the time from Petie’s account. She likes to abbreviate random phrases. Like “from joelle” is “fj” …to let me know that she is the one typing, not Petie.

As was mentioned before, Elise made a quick and relatively uneventful switch from her crib to her bed.  I was surprised that, unlike Joelle when she was younger, she didn’t get out of the bed much.

Well, recently we moved a doll cabinet into her room with a shelf full of books.  Instead of settling for the few we left in her bed we heard her going back and forth to the cabinet to get more books.  This lasted almost two hours after her bedtime.  But she didn’t cry or fuss, so no big deal.  I checked on her before going to bed and she had EVERY SINGLE book in her bed with her.  She barely fit.  We now keep a much smaller selection for her nighttime reading.

Another random sleeping note: There is a trash can in her room that we actually are using now to block her from opening the cabinet door into the wall.  We had it for a long time but it was put away because she had a habit of standing in them and we were afraid she would hurt herself in the night.  Now that we leave it in the room, she almost always places it by the door or knocks on the door until we remove it.  It’s as if she’s saying “hey, you keep forgetting this thing, please remove it.”

Last night she slept fitfully, fussing once in a while.  I went in there at 3 to calm her down and she made a small fuss at 5, but she quieted down quickly.  As expected she slept in.  It was 9:30(!) and we finally said, “we have to wake her up”.  I go into the bedroom, tripping over the trashcan she had again deposited by the door, and the bed is EMPTY (except for all the books of course).

My first split second thought was “we are one of those families” where the baby is stolen and you have no clue.  But I remembered that we had stuck the trashcan in the closet so I knew she had gone in there at least once.

I quickly open the closet door (it was nearly closed) and she rises up with bleary eyes and a forced smile on her face.