A Weekend at Home, and Five Years (?!?!)

Facebook reminded me this week that this was exactly five years ago:

This was our second real date, a Saturday morning half marathon in beautiful Keystone, Colorado. It actually boggles the mind to look at that picture and think about everything that's happened in the last five years.

These days, our Saturday mornings look like this. If we're lucky. Sometimes there's bloodshed before breakfast. This Saturday, Finley woke up and was having her "coffee" (milk in the sturdiest coffee cup I can find) when she said "I want Ford-y (her new nickname for him which has unfortunately caught on) to sit on my lap." I lunged for the camera to capture this unicorn of a moment.

She may have been feeling magnanimous because we all needed a quiet weekend at home. We've been on the go a ton and the weeks really just wear us out. (As I type this, I'm thinking, "how is it only Tuesday???")

Not that there's a whole lot of sleeping in with these little monsters running around. And I had to work Saturday afternoon. And there was a whole lot of laundry to fold. But we found time to grill out with friends (the kids baked an apple pie with Dad and learned how to core a pineapple- thought of you, Ata!),

and work out (Finley's new favorite thing),

and take Ford for a hundred thousand laps around the living room on Finley's scooter.





Sunday we had a blast taking turns squeezing in a bike ride while the kids played at Round Pond.

The Tommy Ryan made an appearance, patriotic sweat bands and all. Finley was over the moon.

Seth and I even sat on the couch for a few uninterrupted minutes and watched TV Sunday night. Our relaxing weekend at home was just what the doctor ordered.

So naturally, by Tuesday we're both already wondering how on earth we're going to make it to Friday.

Luckily we have adorable weekend photos to get us through. This one, of the kids rocking their new shades, is my favorite. Ford's face is priceless.



Summer fabulousness, and a box of ice cream bars.

The Army Football Club golf tournament is one of my least favorite annual events. Right up there with cleaning out the garage. It looks respectable here:

But winds up being an entire weekend of intolerable debauchery. This year, I took the excellent advice of a friend and likely saved either my marriage or my husband's life by fleeing the state- having hired the neighbor's 17 year old to do Seth's driving and left money on the counter for bail. (Just kidding about the latter.) (Or am I?)

The kids and I headed to Rhode Island, where my twin/former roommate Rebecca and her new husband and his five year old just scored a terrific assignment at the Naval War Colleg, just miles from her parents' two beach houses.

It's a perfect place for a weekend away, and we had a great time, the exhaustion of wrangling two on one's own in proximity of water notwithstanding.

Finley and Ashlynn hit it off, and had a killer time playing dress up

and hitting both the beach

 and the sprinklers.

Sometimes they even let Ford play with them

We spent a stunning (if highly stressful for yours truly) afternoon in a boat on Narragansett Bay, and went swimming and chased seagulls on Rose Island. And Finley and Ashlynn got to drive the boat.

We visited Bonnet Shores Beach Club (in our new sunglasses),

and Ford discovered New Haven style pizza

 and ate a remarkable amount of sand.

We'll be back in two weeks for Bex and Jeremy's vow renewal/ party, and we already can't wait. (Even if I have PTSD from a loonnngggg drive home across Connecticut with a dead iPad and wailing children.)



It was a fabulous, funny "summatime" weekend, and so good to get in time with friends who are family.



Of course, I came home to work emails, laundry, last minute takeout dinner from Highland Falls, and "groceries" from Rite Aid.

I am not kidding. This is Seth's version of groceries.


It's going to be a long week. But hey, we have ice cream.

A Whole New World...

The title, of course, is a reference to Finley's current favorite Disney princess, the scantily clad but acceptably feminist Jasmine, of "Aladdin" fame.

It's also a metaphor for our current life, as we get our bearings post-vacation and grapple with the nutty world that is two big-time jobs on the installation, with not nearly the flexibility we've enjoyed the last few years; and two tiny terrorists who do things like pull hair, get up at 3am, and contract every contagious disease known to man at CDC. To which we remain staunchly committed because they love so much and it's so good for them... but every day when we stage high level 1630 negotiations about who can pick up the kids, we wonder if we've made the right choice.

There's no telling. Life comes in phases, and this one is characterized- for both of us, I think- by feeling like a failure at work because you're racing out on important issues to beat the daycare closing time; and feeling like a failure as a parent because you're invariably among the last parents trickling in. And spending all the moments in between wondering who's going to be able to sneak away to take kids to the doctor or take time off when one of them is sick.

We love being dual military... it works for us. But we are very definitely beginning to understand why the number of couples still making it work at this point in the rank structure is very small.

If we survive with our sanity intact, one of our favorite memories will likely be from this week, of us taking turns tearing down the historic walkway between our offices with a mildly sick Ford, attempting to salute passing cadet formations and look dignified while carrying baby + diaper bag, passing the baby off on shouted promises to retrieve him after some high level meeting or other.

At one point, I found him sitting on Seth's boss's lap, watching Sheriff Callie on one monitor while she sent emails on the other.


At another, I shoved him under my desk and fed him lollipop after lollipop to try to keep him quiet while I had an officeful on speaker phone with a Congressional delegation. And this was after, I believe, Seth actually just gave up and took him to class.

Finally, Ford became exhausted from terrorizing the academy at large, and fell asleep in one of the CEP's famous egg chairs.

We eventually had to hire a nanny, since Ford's bout with the daycare bug was significantly impacting our ability to be taken seriously at work, ever, and somehow are limping toward the finish line this week.

The kids are still jetlagged, but luckily when they wind up in our bed in the middle of the night, they look like tiny angels.

And our evenings have been filled with dance parties,

crutch fights (on top of everything else, Seth has a bad socket and had a rough few days of needing to borrow the kids' "swords" to get around)

and Finley's "fabulous" swimming pool, an unwieldy monster that the kids and I adore (you can leave it filled since it requires chlorine and a pump, so the water gets warm and perfect for lounging in while drinking wine on late summer nights while meat grills and the kids water slide into the pool.)

 Also, the trying on of Mom's shoes

and "date nights" at the only Italian restaurant in the state of New York that will let our kids manhandle the garden gnomes while awaiting pizza. (Big shoutout to Prima in Cornwall.)

 Photo of the week is from Wednesday, right after I yelled "bathtime!!" Obviously made a big impact.

Here's to making it work... somehow.

Home.

The fourth of July is my favorite holiday, and we landed at JFK in time to race home, change out of our bonfire-worthy travel clothes, and race to the Ryans' to celebrate properly. By which I mean barbecue, beer, swimming in pool water of dubious cleanliness, and waving around illicit sparklers. 

Since then, I've been saving up all my best stories and memories from our almost-two idyllic weeks in Europe to share here. Like the fact that Finley was over the moon about her "chateau," still thanks everyone with "merci," and told her teacher at school that her trip was "magical." No kidding.

Or that Belgian beer is even better in Belgium. (And, as pictured here, in France.)

Or that F+F carried on the family tradition. ("We like hiking, Ford. Now give me your hand.")

And are really incredible travelers (the return flight forever seared in our memories as a glaring exception) and consummate tourists. (Here, listening intently to their audio "version enfant" at the Bayeux tapestry museum.)

Or that the legend of "Seth Nieman, who never met a tourist trap he didn't like" continues (at the beach in Calais.)

Or that Finley picked up on French fashion and began demanding to wear scarves. (I can't get over how grown-up she looked, pulling her own suitcase down the Rue Notre Dame.)

Or how we discovered that European playgrounds are better (here, in Dover);

gondola rides are not as kitschy as they sound (in Brugge);

Belgian waffles are best consumed on plastic plates while sitting on church steps and listening to accordion music;

nowhere is too scenic for a good temper tantrum (Port-en-Bessin and Brugge, respectively);

Belgian frites are fried not once but twice, and taste even better with a view of the carriage horses in the square (smell notwithstanding, to Finley anyway);

the Nieman men will, in fact, go all the way to jolly ol' England to find somewhere to gamble (here, at a casino in Dover);

and baguettes are meant to be enjoyed fresh. While still in the bag. Literally, just outside the bakery.

But after an entire day spent doing piles of vacation laundry and frantic grocery shopping and trying to get everybody un-jetlagged and back into some semblance of a routine, followed by a half-week of playing catch up at work that brought us to our knees, it's all I can do to guzzle cold medicine (thank you, airplane air) and halfheartedly sift through mail and daycare notifications while everybody else sleeps. So instead I offer: more than 300 photos. The uncut, unedited version (because who are we kidding? my days of captioning photos are over.)

We had a "magical" time in Europe, but are happy to be back on U.S. soil in time to say: "happy birthday, 'murica!" With sparklers, of course.