December 31 to Jan 18

We've had an eventful two weeks! We got back from Sedona on Saturday, celebrated the New Year with party at Sunny and Paul and Arthur's (where Pete got very upset when we wouldn't let him take one of Arthur's toys home) and then I left for New York on Wednesday for a conference. The bomb cyclone hit on Thursday, which was kind of incredible--at one point I came up from the subway and was practically blown over. Birds were having trouble flying. I got to spend a lot of time with Veena, which was nice--we ate all the good food and I got to see her office. I came back on Saturday, and then school started.

Our biggest event was that Pete picked up a dead bat at preschool on Tuesday. Any contact with a bat, dead or alive, is treated as possible rabies exposure, so Tuesday was spent driving the bat to Montgomery (to the state laboratory). There was a slim chance that the bat had rabies, an even slimmer chance that Pete would have contracted it from a dead animal, but my brain doesn't handle uncertainty well, and the bat pathologist in Montgomery kept bringing up worst case scenarios. Like, what if Pete had put the bat in his mouth and chewed on it? We would have gotten the results back on Wednesday, except all of Alabama shut down because of ice and snow. We would have just gotten him the prophylactic vaccines, but the ER is the only place that gives them in Auburn, and it was crammed with flu patients, and the risk of getting the flu seemed greater than the risk of contracting rabies. Anyway, it was a fun two days! Just ask Mat. (The bat did NOT have rabies, so we are in the clear.)

I wrote an essay about removing bats from our first house in Auburn, when Pete was a newborn, and in that essay I felt very tenderly toward bats, but if you'd asked me on Tuesday, I would have gladly exterminated the entire species.

We've started going to women's basketball games! Pete likes all the action.

He was so proud. And so sad when we wiped it off.

The other eventful thing that happened on New Year's Eve day--Feenie, who is 12 1/2, is not supposed to go up or down the stairs. Pete and his babysitter were downstairs, and Feenie followed them and fell down the first flight of stairs onto the landing. We got a call from our babysitter, who calmly told us Feenie seemed fine but was bleeding. We came back to discover that Feenie's hips were fine (our main worry) but that she had somehow fallen on this unsightly growth, that has been growing for a looong time. My mom called it a silver lining. It's gone! Her unblemished profile has returned!

Mat sent me a lot of pictures while I was gone

The only picture I took in NY! This was on Friday afternoon. A very calm afternoon snack.

He really loves Mat's weight room/office.

What happens when Pete gets my phone...

At a basketball game

Eating homemade bread our neighbor brought over, before I took him to AUMC on the bat day...

Blurry, but I love his expression

It 'nowed! Pete was very excited. Mat took him out early on Wednesday morning, and then we were in and out all day. Pete loved it, and didn't seem to mind the cold.

I threw a snowball at Feenie and Pete thought it was the funniest thing to have ever happened.