Progress report: my office

I was hoping my office would be done by the time I officially went back to work after maternity leave. Well, my official back-to-work date was April 24th, and my office is not done yet. Somehow it's even more difficult to work on the house with two little ones around instead of just one.

My mom stripped the wallpaper when she was here. Frederic finally had enough time the past few days to prime and paint the walls. We now need to decide whether one coat of paint is enough or not, and then he can lay the laminate flooring.

This is how my office looked when we moved in:

(Yes, that light fixture is like a wicker basket. It left with the previous owners although goodness only knows why you'd want to keep something that hideous. We will be looking for something more appropriate to hide my bare (but energy-saving!) lightbulb.)
And this is how it looks now:

Small as the room is (I'd guess about 8 x 12 feet), it already looks much bigger and brighter without that peach-y wallpaper and hideous border.

More first smiles

And I think this time you should be able to tell that they are smiles on the photos.

Aw, that's almost enough for him to be forgiven for his barely bearable screaming fits every evening. Almost.

We have had lovely sunny, warm weather all week, so we have been trying to enjoy it as much as possible. Frederic finished setting up Benjamin's swing set yesterday. 

Here it is.

And here is Benjamin saying, "No, no fween!" ("no, no swing").

And here I am trying to persuade him that it's really fun.

So far he remains unconvinced and prefers to stick with the slide. We're hoping that when we have friends over and their kids play on the swing set, he'll decide he wants to be in on the action, too.

Forgot to mention -

Noah's passport arrived Tuesday! It was a red-letter day - not only did he get his passport, so he's now ready for international travel, but we only turned in the application on Thursday, so it goes to show that not ALL government employees sit around doing nothing all day!

His passport is more high-tech than ours; it has "sensitive electronics" in it. His photo doesn't look much like him, because the flash was too bright so he looks blond, but in a few months it won't matter since it won't look like him anyway by then.

first smiles

are hard to capture on film. So you might just have to take my word for it, but this is one:


Not to worry, though, in a couple of years they'll be easier to spot, like this one:


Also, we've discovered that Benjamin has inherited the recessive Creole dancing genes.


Although his demonstration here looks a little more like "tectonique" than island dancing.

Benjamin is going on Day 5

of being pacifier-free! The day we went to the Embassy, we let Benjamin have his pacifier and loveys (lovies?) in the car since we made him get up so early. The rule for quite some time has been that he only gets them in his bed, and on rare occasions, like Thursday, in the car.

But we noticed that day that he had chewed his pacifier to pieces, so we had to take it away. At home that night, when he went to bed, we offered the other (brand new) one instead, but he didn't want the orange one. He kept saying, "No orange! Blue? Blue? Blue?" over and over. Since he refused the orange one and the blue one was out of commission, he got to go to bed without one. We weren't sure how that would go, but he didn't cry at all and went straight to sleep.

The next night, I offered the orange one again, but he still didn't want it. "No orange!" He asked for his pacifier a few times ("Tuh-tut" in French), and then asked for Daddy (maybe he thought I was just being mean and he'd have a better chance with Daddy!), but went to sleep pretty quickly and with no crying.

I guess by then he realized it was orange or nothing... because the next night he asked for the orange one. But he waited too long, because we already knew that he could sleep just fine without one, so we told him no, that he is a big boy and doesn't need a pacifier anymore. He didn't argue much, so we'll see how long it takes him to stop bothering to ask for it at all.

You wouldn't think a former long-time finger-sucker and a former long-time thumb-sucker could be so heartless, would you? But then, fingers and thumbs don't get chewed off and have to be replaced, either. Benjamin got to switch to real cups months and months ago for the same reason, he kept chewing up his Nuby sippy cup spouts and it's hard to find replacements here, so we just put them away.

By the way - people at church were impressed he knows his colors already. Nothing like having your own personal preschool teacher (my mom) around for a month. Good job, Mom! He is also getting better at numbers - when we were driving to church Sunday, he saw airplanes. But he didn't say "Airplane," he said "Two airplanes!"