"Case of the Mondays" is apparently a real thing.

Some days, you just need a pick-me-up, and Anne Taintor usually does the trick. In an effort to snap out of my current funk, I pulled this up this morning over decaf coffee. Unfortunately, it reminded me that there will be no "I need a drink" days for a long time.

To be accurate, I still have plenty of those days. Just not what I imagine would be a highly satisfying cocktail at the end of them.

I'm not even anti-Monday in the way that internet memes suggest most of the working world is, and I spend a lot of time working on the practice of gratitude. It's just today.

Our last weekend at home before holiday mayhem wasn't great. Seth and I have been at each other's throats for a week or so, and Finley (and therefore, I) was up all night last night with yet another round of daycare crud. I spent the hours between 0100 and 0500 googling "croup" while she coughed herself awake repeatedly. (It's not croup.) I'm getting more and more bummed at the thought of spending five days away from my baby in just over a week, a feeling made worse by the fact that she's going through a snuggly/ Mom phase. I have yet another weekend of watching everyone else party- this time while freezing my tail off at Army-Navy in Philadelphia- coming up while I sip mineral water. Work is an absolute nightmare through the holidays, as I am forced to skip workouts and lunchbreaks (not to mention forego leave) in preparation for "getting" to start the 4-month ILE course in January (which is definitely not my choice.) I'm already getting to and leaving my windowless office in the dark every day, and am buried in work and about to have to start bringing it home to finish in time. My faith in humanity has been depressingly, seriously eroded by stupid, tasteless, offensive, ill-informed, superior, and downright inhumane social media feeds in response to recent news events. The super-fun bone-and-joint-rearrangement phase of pregnancy has started early with this baby, leaving me feeling like I have a knife buried near my tailbone most of the time and seriously hindering any spirit-lifting cardio I can squeeze in. I destroyed the blender trying to cook while holding Finley this weekend, and have yet to order the wildly expensive new vacuum cleaner we desperately need so our floors will no longer be an actual biohazard. AND it's time to dig out the ugly sweaters and shop for white elephant gifts and unearth the sugar cookie recipe while I am in the mood for exactly zero of that.

Oh, and I finally got around to making Finley's "year in photos" collage, and it did NOT come out great.

Whew. Too bad I am not somebody who thinks "oh, well, it's OK to have a  bad day/ week/ month." I am somebody who thinks you need to pull it together. Still, when laughter turns out not to be the best medicine after all and scotch is off the table, sometimes the best one can do is to hope for a mercifully short Monday and a fresh start tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, the weekend did have bright spots. One of them was the bike ride we got in last night (just under the wire for "weekend fun") and this absolutely gorgeous sunset. (Not done justice by iphone photography, as per usual.)

And I finally made it to the craft store after weeks of its residence on my to-do list, and got all the art supplies we needed for handprint reindeer courtesy of a panicked phone call to Missy. We even managed to avoid painting the entire house brown (thanks for the reminder to get washable paint, Miss, even if I'm still not sure about the glue gun), although the final product probably falls into "pinterest fail" category.

AND, although we didn't make it to see the National Christmas tree, we took Finley to see the lights at the LDS temple. They were as spectacular as we remembered, and she was way more interested (obviously) than she had been last year, pointing at everything and especially digging the purple ones.

So here's to Tuesday and Christmas lights and things looking up. The photos of the week are some other much-needed rays of sunshine:

Finley LOVES books these days, and she holds up the one she wants you to read to her and clambers into your lap. It's basically the most adorable thing ever.

She was also a hilarious (and reasonably well-behaved) dinner date Saturday night, when I took her out for date night while Seth studied.

Oh, and there was this.

And (this is from last week, but still makes me smile) she loves brussels sprouts. Grabs them and stuffs them in her mouth. I feel like this is a major parenting win.

Thanksgiving Trek to Missouri

Five years ago, I ate my Thanksgiving dinner cold, out of Ziploc bags. The view from the top of Black Balsam Knob was stunning, but I really hoped the bears couldn't smell the stuffing I had picked up at the Whole Foods in Asheville. I was backpacking the Art Loeb Trail alone, in my longstanding tradition of spending Thanksgiving in the great outdoors, eschewing the hostage situation that the holiday season represents to most people who live far from their hometowns and virtually all military families. For most of our lives, our parents hadn't been religious about holiday travel (I learned from the best that Thanksgiving "dinner" can be a turkey sandwich in the wilderness after all), and I certainly didn't intend to start.

Five years later found Seth and I spending the wee hours of the holiday at the mercy of crowded airports, early morning flights, long security lines, oversized suitcases, and a sick and cranky baby. The business of having babies shifts the paradigm more than a little, and we were making the holiday rounds this year. Not without protest. Finley and I feel roughly the same way about holiday travel:

Although one of us did get to sleep on the plane. Thank God for Seth, who is willing (and able) to wrestle a thrashing baby into cherubic, sleepy submission. When I fly with her alone, it's looks a lot like this.

Finley, who had been sick with a high fever, causing an eleventh-hour race to the doctor's office to find out whether we should cancel our trip, turned out to be a real trooper. She was under the weather for most of the trip, but charmed her way across the state of Missouri with minimal fuss and only a few temper tantrums. 
We at least partially credited this genius invention ("best $14 ever spent," as we affectionately refer to it) on the long drive to and from the Lake of the Ozarks.

We also benefited from the reinforcements provided by Ana & Ata, with whom Finley had a joyous reunion (reminding us just how much we missed having them down the road). They took her beer shopping

 and to the famous Versailles Christmas lights.

and she watched her share of football with Ata in the townhouse we had VRBO'ed on the lake. (Best. Plan. Ever.)

She did, however, sleep through the epic drive-thru Christmas lights in Laurie, as well as her walk to see the completely random exotic animal farm.

Missouri sure delivered on the weather: it was in the upper 30s and raining for virtually the entire trip. (After a beautiful, sunny Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday at Katie's, that is. Which Finley spent most of outside with Ana & Ata, trying to eat the landscaping rocks.) Poor Seth sat in a rainy ground blind for days without seeing a single deer, while I bundled up for balmy walks with Mom. This picture made me laugh.

But as with probably all of the families for whom I had felt sorry from my perch atop the Pisgah Ledge, we ended up feeling like the odyssey had been worth it. It was nostalgic and funny to see Finley crawl around with her second cousins, as we had done with the Walters cousins decades ago. It was indescribably special to see her point at the painting of the old man that's been above the Grans' fireplace for as long as I can remember, and show the Robinson side of the family her comes-by-it-honestly red-tinged hair. And of course it was wonderful to introduce Seth around, and spend time with aunts and uncles and cousins we hadn't seen in ages, and catch up on new babies and life changes and do a bit of reminiscing over pie.

That doesn't mean I won't insist that my own kids (I finally look and feel pregnant enough to think of that in the plural!) spend their fair share of Thanksgiving holidays eating turkey sandwiches around a campfire. But it does mean that we now understand why those security lines at the airport are so long this time of year, and we were definitely glad we had made the trek (and grateful to everyone who accommodated our whirlwind tour of the Ozarks!)

And, because we're on the topic of gratitude, we celebrated Seth's third "alive day" on Friday. It was very low key this year, but it's never far from our minds this time of year. Grateful, as always, doesn't begin to describe it, and we feel more so with each passing of November 27th.

We didn't take as many photos as we had intended, but snapped these photo of the week doozies. Finley's exuberant discovery of luggage carts,

and the devouring of one of Mom's famous cinnamon rolls.

 We hope everyone had a beautiful long weekend giving thanks, however celebrated.

Pre-holidays fun at National Harbor.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas... by which I mean our tree has been up for weeks, insanely complicated holiday travel plans have been made, and I've watched "White Christmas." It doesn’t hurt that it's finally started to get cold here (not that any of the Niemans have complained about the unseasonably warm November.) This also means that the planes, trains and automobiles fiasco kicks off next weekend, so we were determined to enjoy this last one at home. Or at least get a whole bunch of things ticked off our pre-holiday to-do list.

Unfortunately for my plans to clean out the attic, it's "that time of the year" for grad students again, so Seth had to study rather than sort through TA-50. Or so he claimed. This meant the little early bird and I had lots of time on our hands, so we spent our weekend mornings finishing our Christmas shopping at her current favorite place, Barnes & Noble. (She also tore Dad away from his statistics homework long enough to go to the park Saturday, where he let her do this.)

By Sunday afternoon I had done load upon load of laundry, navigated Target with a cranky Finley, fought with a broken vacuum cleaner for hours, and was beginning to develop a Cinderella complex. So Seth took pity on me and caved to my demand for a family afternoon at National Harbor. I had been dying to go see the earliest-lit Christmas tree in the NCR, and take Finley to the winter wonderland at the Gaylord complex.

National Harbor didn't disappoint. It never does, honestly- an anomaly of a place around here with plenty of parking, no crowds, and restaurants that seat you with no reservations. Finley rode the carousel

and had the playground all to herself (probably due to suddenly winter-like winds Sunday).

The ever-indulgent Seth also took us on the Capital Wheel at sunset, something that had been on my DC bucket list for awhile. It was every bit as spectacular as promised, with views like this one. (Photos don't do it justice, as with most terrific views.)

Finley's favorite part seemed to be the emergency button inside the gondola, and Seth's was the big screens showing the Vikings-Packers game all over the harbor complex.

He did get to watch a good chunk of the game at the sports bar next to the winter wonderland. After the obligatory blurry family photo. All in all, a nice pre-holiday weekend was had by all. Except for the Vikings loss, of course.

Speaking of obligatory family photos, we did get a very understanding stranger to try to take a decent one for our Christmas card. No dice, but these hilarious outtakes made us laugh.

And the other photo of the week is this one, of Finley in her new courtesy-of-Grandma Hello Kitty PJs, sweet talking Dad into another bedtime story.

Waffles & Wednesdays

Sunday mornings have finally become a thing in the Nieman household.

When we're home, anyway, and we've had a nice long stretch of travel-free weekends lately.

 I don't even remember what we did before Finley, except for vague recollections of long runs followed by pitchers of mimosas. (The nostalgia pangs are real.) When Finley was tiny, at-home weekend mornings revolved around early morning feedings followed by a desperate attempt to grab a few more hours of sleep (and repeat). And then she was bigger and still up insanely early, but it was summer so I packed her up in the jogging stroller or dragged her to the farmer's market just after dawn. Now that she reliably sleeps 11 hours or so and then likes to putter around the house all morning, we have PJ-and-cartoon mornings and eat waffles. We're starting to really enjoy our lazy Sunday mornings.

I just got a Belgian waffle maker that flips like the ones in hotels, and I love it.

I am also kind of in love with that rare and surprisingly wonderful thing, a Wednesday federal holiday. Thanks to Army leave regulations, there is no way to turn a Wednesday into a long weekend- so I simply had Veterans' Day off in the middle of the week. At work, we complained that it cost us a long weekend, but in reality it was like a gift: we didn't feel obligated to plan anything, like you do when you have a stretch of downtime, but we still got to play hooky. At least I did, and Finley's daycare was closed. Seth still had class, but he took the morning off and we went for a beautiful family bike ride on the Capital Crescent Trail, where we managed to avoid the famously aggressive owl and found a new playground for Finley. Of course she preferred the leaf piles.

The weekend felt like a bonus after a seemingly two day work week, and we spent as much of it as we could outside enjoying our Indian summer. Seth spent some Seth Time in a tree stand. I had a mini-meltdown about how back-to-back pregnancies means I haven't gotten to have Amy Time (read: long runs or rock climbs or more than one beer) in literally years (brought on by the unfortunately-timed comment that this was "only" his second time deer hunting this season.) Bless his heart. Seth tried to understand, and made me feel slightly better by making me a fresh-squeezed mimosa and acquiescing to a family hike. (During which he fished, Finley ate dirt, and very little actual hiking occurred.)

Still, outside time is outside time, and I'm trying hard not to look gift horses in the mouth these days.

I also snuck out Sunday night for a much-needed girls' dinner and a yoga benefit (for the Yellow Ribbon Fund) by candlelight. I ate spicy food, did downward dog without little hands grabbing my ponytail, and centered my chi. I also found myself thinking that Finley would love the Christmas lights on Bethesda Ave.

Seth and Finley watched the Vikings game and celebrated the big win (and current status as NFC North champs) over the pork chops and cabbage I had left in the crockpot. Finley apparently loves sauerkraut. The house smelled like Warsaw in winter when I got home, but the world's easiest dinner prep was a hit- and went well with a Vikings victory, I'm told. (I've been dicing vegetables and mincing fresh herbs and grinding my own spices all these years, why again?)

Finley's also been busy with Christmas prep, which she loves. By which I mean, perusing the ads

and shopping "for her cousins." (Thank you, Lisa and Sara, for failing to warm me about the uber-creepy beanie boos.)

The photo of the week is from Thursday night bed check. I found Finley sleeping in this incredibly relaxing position.

Oh, and this rare family shot, from our hiking/ fishing/ dirt-eating excursion.

Birthday Week & Christmas Lights

There was frost on the ground this morning, and I was halfway to work before it finally warmed up inside the hybrid. I was actually grateful. It made me feel a little less ridiculous for doing this: on a weekend we also did yardwork in shorts.

According to Walters Family Tradition, I was late with the tree. We always used to put ours up the day after Halloween. Now, Mom & Dad's- and I think maybe Sara's- have become year-round fixtures. What can I say? Christmas lights are cheerful. Ours had me feeling a little nostalgic too, since it was Finley's birthday week and I couldn't help but remember all the Christmas tree-lit night feedings (only!) a year ago.

Finley reveled in the rest of her birthday week. She played with her new toys every night, partially overcame her fear of the walker, and tried to read all of her books at the same time. Thursday I had to speak at an insanely boring conference on force structure (my briefing threatened to put me to sleep!) but at least I managed to sneak out early enough to pick her up and take her to the park before it got dark. 

She managed to convince us she needed another cupcake too, and I thought I had her outsmarted by going with minis this time- until Seth (obviously on Finley's team) put one of each flavor in front of her "so she can pick which one she wants," and she grabbed them both and stuffed them in her mouth before either of us could react. Winning.

We also got a very cool "double birthday" call from the Misawa Walters- since Ben & Lisa are 14 hours ahead of us, it was Tyler's birthday too! 

Friday night we fought traffic to make it down for a final birthday celebration, and one I had been super excited about. Because I'm an honorary Carron ("0% Korean!" as Grace always gloats, reminding me that she's "a quarter Korean"), Finley got to don Grace's old hanbok for the fortune telling ritual. It was hilarious and awesome. She picked the pencil, which supposedly means she will be smart- although the way she was jabbing it about, she was more likely selecting a weapon.

We had a quiet weekend at home after the festivities. I was battling a cold along with the "poor me"s, since being sick while pregnant (read: unable to take any decent cold meds) just seems like adding insult to injury. We took Finley on a hilarious Christmas decoration shopping trip to Target, and an ill-fated late afternoon trip to the zoo (most of the animals had retired for the night, so we bailed and went out for BBQ. Although she did really dig the elephants.) And we had a nice long fall walk and watched Army lose to Air Force purely out of loyalty while longsuffering Dad deer hunted (having buttered up sick and cranky Mom by helping out with tons of chores and some seriously thorough yardwork first.)

The photo of the week was probably Finley's favorite part of the weekend. I call it "that look on your face when you're the first kid at the park on Saturday morning." 

A Banner Weekend for the Niemans

It's a rare occasion that I'm at a loss for words, but there aren't many that would do this last week justice. It was a week of banner events for the Nieman family, and we were lucky enough to get to share them in person with lots of people who mean the world to us (as well as bask in the well wishes of the many more who were there in spirit.) We spent an absolutely insane couple of days ordering cupcakes and preparing scripts and getting the house semi-company ready and making sure there were batteries in the camera and frontloading homework assignments and rearranging work obligations... but things worked out and the maze of logistics fell away- as these things have a way of doing- by Thursday, when an assorted crew of friends and family and former teammates and West Point classmates and old bosses and even a decorated football coach descended on the Fort Belvoir Golf Course for Seth's promotion to Major.   

It was a terrific way to celebrate. LTG Thomas did the honors, and gave a speech that was personal and inclusive, funny and touching, interesting and inspired. Plus he let Finley crawl around while he talked and generally steal the show. Seth had to give part of his speech holding her, but still managed to thank his family, make everyone feel included, shift the focus to his teammates and supporters, choke up a little bit, and avoid dropping the f-bomb. Big win. And after the ceremony everyone hung out and drank beer and avoided traffic while Finley charmed the kitchen staff into making her some chicken tenders and I attacked the cupcakes. We were thrilled that so many people- especially Seth's parents- could be there to share his hard-earned moment.

And our celebrating was just getting started! Tony and Jayne were in town for the whole fortuitously-timed weekend, so we also managed to do Halloween (Finley loved her costume once she realized that people thought it was cute, and spent two parades and a 5k literally preening in it), squeeze in a date lunch sans baby (I only felt a little guilty for having chicken and waffles without her), and stage an early one-year birthday party, cake smash and all. It was such a big weekend for the little beast, I'm a little worried about how she's handling a post-daylight-savings-time Monday with no cupcakes, no presents, and no grandparents in sight. I always hate leaving for work in the dark, with Seth and Finley still snoozing peacefully- but in light of the above, I feel a little like I dodged a bullet today.

 I AM encouraged by the fact that, even after a morning spent opening presents and playing with new toys, her favorite game Sunday afternoon was still stealing forks out of the dishwasher. And that her own personal slide in the living room was still trumped in the "utter glee" department by the rusty swings at the park.

There are too many terrific photos from the weekend to pick just a few, although I loved this father-son moment from Halloween night, which Seth spent hanging streamers for Finley's birthday party and ignoring Tony's baby slide-building advice.

The rest of the photos from the weekend are an unedited, unsorted mess here. Although there are some gems.