What to do with rainy days

One option is to just sleep a lot. Sadie pretty much has that down.



This is kind of her version of the see no evil speak no evil hear no evil. Not that she could, the little cherub. Especially when she's sleeping so much!

Jack prefers to spend his rainy days making trouble. Or just being a goof.



His new favorite thing to do is wear my shoes around the house. Danny has been trying for years to get me to put my shoes away instead of leaving them in random places (the bathroom, under the coffee table, etc.), but Jack may just finally break me of this annoying habit because if I don't, he wears them around and leaves them somewhere else and then I can't find them when I need them! He also likes to play kitty and mouse or, if he's feeling more exotic, penguin and sea lion. It's like an amalgamation of chase and hide-and-seek except you have to be on your hands and knees. And he's very displeased if you try to opt out of the hands and knees part. The only exception is if you're the penguin; then you just have to bounce. Except he's usually the penguin. The sea lion is much harder to pull off, although my floors sure are clean after a few passes back and forth. (Can't say the same for my pants!)

But you can only play so much penguin and sea lion before you start going a little out of your mind and would consider relocating outside even if it is raining except for the fact that you have a little 5-week-old that still hasn't been vaccinated against whooping cough in the middle of an epidemic. Not that you can catch whooping cough from rain drops. But it still seems ill-advised.

Today was our first sunny day, though the sun came and went. I took Jack and Sadie for a run to the park (my inaugural post-pregnancy run!) for a playdate with my new friend that my doula set me up with. I'm at the age now where blind dates mean two women with kids the exact same age and lots in common getting together for the first time upon the recommendation of a mutual friend and/or business associate. It's a little awkward at first, but you quickly relax into the discovery that you have so much to talk about and it's such a relief to commiserate with someone going through the exact same things as you. And our kids got along great! Which is to say, our girls slept the entire time, and our boys ran around like maniacs laughing hysterically and delighting in the sunshine.



They actually played really well together. I'm very much looking forward to getting to know this family better. She's a professor in public health at Berkeley, which makes her a great mentor in addition to a friend, someone who represents where I hope to be in ten years, when I'm her age. It's a little strange to so far behind her career-wise but in the exact same place family-wise, but that's just Berkeley, I guess. Nobody has kids at our age. We're ten years behind all our neighbors who have kids the same age as ours, too. You can more or less forget about it until somebody makes a reference to living with so-and-so back in the 80s and you think, um, I was living with my mom and dad in the 80s.

Danny spent the good weather getting started on his ambitious plans for our backyard, which involve a large fence to keep the chickens in, a gable, and several plantings of wine grapes and hops. Because, you know, we haven't done any home improvements in a while, he was starting to get bored.



And the chickens continue to lay claim to the strollers as their new nesting hutches of choice.

(They're going to be really disappointed whenever Danny gets that fence in.)