Tuesday, August 21, 2007

So much!

I wrote a wonderful long post the other day, and blogger conveniently let it slip through the tubes of the Internet.

But, inspired by Nicholas' gargantuan catch-up effort on his blog, and some wonderful happenings yesterday, and my flight to DC in an hour, here goes.

We're having a girl!! A little princess!

Not to compete with my chief princess, who has made it very clear she will share the spotlight, but never step out of the middle of it.

My darling bride is weepy-ecstatic. She was prancing around the house yesterday, flipping her dress up over her belly and saying "it's a girl!!!". This continued when we walked the dogs all through town.

Wasn't until we were folding laundry on the couch, watching Scrubs and packing, that I noticed she had written "kiss me" on her belly. I certainly complied.

So that's our news.
I'm swamped with the building, still trying to get the engineer to complete his work. Tried prying up the 5k square feet of three layered vinyl tile on the first floor, got less than 1/4 of the room done in 10 hours, so I'm looking for some day laborers.

In DC all week for a conference, back to MS for 2 days, then up to PA for a family event at Blooming Grove, then down the NC for John and Sara's wedding, then back to MS. Weee.

Love to all.
A girl!

Thursday, August 9, 2007

My wonderful big and little sisters (and brother in law)

Feeling all mushy towards my sisters right now.
Caitlin and Jim went to the Simpson's premiere in Springfield, VT. She sent me a wonderful note in the mail today, along with a cd of all the pictures she took there.
I went through every picture, scanning the crowd for people I might recognize. Not one. In a town of < 10,000 people, that I spent most of the first 18 years of my life in. Slightly upsetting.
But thank you so much Caitlin. And there was a really sweet picture of C&J, which I am going to post here, just because I think they're so cute.



And just to prove the Simpson's thing, here's Groening.
oh, and here're some Simpson suits.


And anything but a small note: Natalie, at 20, paid off the student loans she took out for her first year of college. The youngest of us, and the only one with no college debt. Very proud of her.

Friday, August 3, 2007

New post

The trouble with delaying these updates is that the news and random thoughts just pile up, and it gets more daunting the longer you wait. However, since there are several folks who have not updated their blogs yet, and I need a high-horse from which to scold, here we go. (I refer here to a certain big sister, and best friend, who have mastered their guilt and continue through life with stale blog postings for months at a time.)

So much. Alexe is now 19 weeks pregnant. The 20th of this month we are going to find out if we have a boy or girl. We have no idea, and our preference seems to shift from week to week. I'm looking forward to the transition from "my sweetie has a little pooch belly and is acting funny" to "oh my Lord, we're having a child". Should be a hoot.

I've been away from my building project for two weeks while making a trip to Vegas for work, and then a working vacation to the NC coast with Alexe's family.

Vegas is loud and bright, and working a conference is super-draining. The kind of days when you fall into bed with a sore face from on the talking and smiling, laughing, and generally using up vast reserves of "pleasant Kagan". Nicholas came out for a short visit (in a cute little rented Prius, we had fun watching the batteries charge as we drove along), and we had a wonderful time first catching up, a necessity for a best friend I see once or twice a year if I'm lucky, and then we went out to Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam. We swam in the lake, beautiful fresh water, and then went and took a peak at the dam. Amazing. Can't say much more about it without pictures, which are trapped in my cell phone.
Oh, and it was 112 degrees in the desert.

A pleasant red eye flight back to Memphis, a 5 am arrival I will never repeat, had me back at work for two days before Alexe and I piled into the car with Dido and Shadow and headed East for 1010 miles to Join Alexe's extended maternal side of the family for a week at the beach. (I worked while there to preserve vacation for paternity leave, not the most moral building location for that sort of thing.) The rented house the 9 of us stayed in was 3.5 miles down a beach of very soft and shifting sand, a novelty that wears off surprisingly quickly and becomes stressful as all get out. Local tow trucks have a field day charging $250 to get folks going again. The mother in law and her sisters went three days before combusting, and then it was a waiting game until Sat morning when we started our 1010 mile trek home.

2 things:
1)Alexe is so much fun in a bikini at the beach. Strutting and dancing with her belly pushed out, and playing in the waves with me without moving her legs too much because she's convinced they will look like baby seals to the sharks.
2)We miss Trader Joe's. Stopped at the nearest one to our house on the way back home, in Atlanta, and packed the car so full that Shadow was surrounded in the back seat by cascading piles of Pirate's Booty, and Dido was "stuck" on my lap.

The new stairs in our building are almost done, which is very exciting. This week is the Watermelon Carnival in Water Valley, and we're looking forward to the street dance tonight.

I'm sure there's more, but I've officially posted so slackers beware.