Rudy - early works

I'm not sure when this happened exactly, but at some point over the past few months Rudy has gone from a random scribbler to a drawer of recognizable figures. Who knew? Clearly, you have to be  paying closer attention than I am around here or you will miss major developmental leaps. Rudy is undoubtedly influenced by his big sister's drawing style. Scarlett is a rule follower of Germanic proportions, and she makes it very clear that all drawings must include at least 3 different colors and NO STICKS for limbs. Rudy seems happy to comply.

I asked him to tell me about the above drawing. According to the artist, the orange guy is Daddy, and the red figure with blue hair is me. The blue one on top is Grandma, and the blue squiggle in the bottom right corner is a snake.

Love it!

This blog needs a little Pepper

New years resolution! Stop letting the fact that I have less time/energy/stamina/will... to write long rambling thought provoking blog posts be reason to not post at all. I love my little blog and I know that future me will be pissed when she looks back at this time and there is a big void. Who cares if I have chores to catch up on, a meeting to prepare for, a school fundraiser to coordinate, books to read for the TWO book clubs I belong to but never actually read the book (can someone please invite me to join their "Let's just get together for a glass of wine club"?)! Dear Lord! If ever there was a list of whiney First World problems that had to be it. I'm going to stop now and just - here's a big idea - post some photos and be done with it.

Pepper is over SEVEN months old now! Gulp. This is what she's up to.

Pepper has been kicking ass at sitting for quite some weeks now. Look at her go!

She also loves to shove things in her mouth.

 

She's working on her waiving/so-big arm motions. Its a little random right now but I'd say coming together nicely.

This one's a bit more subtle, but here she appears to be working on perfecting an Elivis style lip curl expression.

These are just all Pepper. All cute.

Happy New Year! Best of 2011 Photo Review

I just finished putting together my annual "best of" slide show, 2011 edition, and wow, another big year - gone. Time to let go of '11 and forge ahead into '12. After I finished up with this year's project I took a look back at the slideshows I did for 2008, 2009, and 2010, just to indulge myself a bit further in family nostalgia. I could not help but notice a running theme from year to year. I seem to KEEP HAVING BABIES. That will be enough, thankyouverymuch. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the 2011 slideshow will be the last year to feature photographs of: a positive pregnancy test, a bulging pregnant belly, a gratuitous birthing shot, or a freshly born babe. So enjoy it while it lasts. 

Happy New Year! 

Best of 2011 from Rebecca Bythe on Vimeo.

Soundtrack: Tanktop by Caroline Smith and the Goodnight Sleeps

The most wonderful time...

It is the most wonderful time of the year to get the mail. I am loving all the cards, friends! Thanks so much for thinking of us. You should know that I tape each and every one to the wall around the door between my foyer and kitchen. The overall effect is of a garland of photos and holiday greetings welcoming me to my favorite part of the house. 

I love getting your cards and letters and seeing how the kids have changed since last year. I love sending out my own cards too, despite the obvious challenges involved in capturing a photo of three squirmy, unpredicatble, not always bribeable children. Of ourse I do not make the task easy on myself. I get hung up on wanting the photo to meet certain specifications. I want the photo to be recent, because a baby changes so much in the course of a few months. I want everyone to have a reasonably clean and ideally snot-free face because it would reflect poorly on my parenting if they did not. I want everyone to be looking at the camera because the eyes are the window to their tiny little souls. And I want to take the photo myself because I am too cheap and controlling to have it any other way. 

As a result of these exacting standards it took multiple largely unsuccessful photo sessions to put together this year's card. The good news is I have got plenty of photos for my 2nd annual holiday card bloopers reel. Let's begin:

The first attempt: I dressed everyone up in their holiday finest a few days after Thanksgiving for an outdoor photo shoot in the freezing cold. It was a cloudy, blustery day, and while the light was good for taking photos, it was bright enough to trigger Scarlett's transitions lenses and I don't like that her eyes are obscured. Plus Pepper was not having it. I think even she knew it was a bad idea to put her sister in charge of holding her at the top of several concrete stairs.

We decided to move along to a new, slightly less precarious location.

...aaand that's not going to work either. Poor Pepper.

Next try: Another outdoor opportunity! This time with snow AND I think to get Scarlett in her non-transitions lenses so she does not look like one of the three blind mice. The only problem this time is of all the bjillion photos I took during this session, only 1 or 2 feature everyone looking. Scarlett manages to maintain a consistently adorable expression in 95% of the pictures, but the other two...all over the place.

No Pepper

Pepper's up Rudy's out.

Rudy is back Pepper looks wierd.

Scarlett is still hangin' in there, Pepper is cute, Rudy is...close but not gonna make it. Gah!

Moving on: The final attempt. By the time this one came around no one and no thing was in the mood to cooperate with me. Dark clouds moved in a stayed for days, so it was hard to get much natural light going indoors. And the kids were shockingly just not that excited about having their pictures taken. Curious. I know. I had to resort to candy bribes, and even that barely worked.

I decided to loosen them up with some silly shots.

Once again it proved really hard to get Pepper to look up. Why will she not respond to my candy bribes???

Then when Pepper does look up, I lose the other 2. FerGODssakes!

Then, Rudy takes matters into his own hands. And by "matters" I mean his baby sister's face

...and ear.

And so now you know that my final card was indeed a Christmas miracle.

Holiday Cheers to you and yours!

A Tale of Two Turkeys (and some napkin rings)

Ed. This post was originally written the day after Thanksgiving, but due to a minor blog crisis it is not hitting the internet until now. Forgive.

Hey! Happy day after, several days after, one month after Thanksgiving! I could not let my favorite holiday come and go without giving it some blog attention. I made my perennial vow to "keep it simple" this year, and in many ways I think I succeeded in ratcheting things down a little. I made one pie instead of my usual 2 or 3, I axed my beloved platter of 27 totally redundant root vegetables side dish. I handed over sweet potato responsibility entirely to Grandma. Appetizers involved nothing more than openeing a jar of my mom's pickles and filling a bowl with salted almonds. Plus my mom, despite having had surgery on her right hand one week prior to the big day, did easily half of all the cooking and prep work. Thankfully, my mom can do more in the kitchen with her dominant hand tied behind her back than most people could do with 4 hands, so it all worked out.

Of course, when things get too simple I start getting twitchy.  I seem to need to have some dramatic crescendo of cooking and crafting in order for Thanksgiving to feel like Thanksgiving. I was experiencing a decided lack of enthusiasm for my tamed down Thanksgiving plans until I came up with the perfect solution. We should cook TWO turkeys, one on the grill and one in the oven and have a blind turkey taste test. Fun, right?! Rolph took some convincing, but I made a case that it would not be that much extra work, plus think of all the leftovers! FOUR turkey legs! I'm not sure that Rolph ever agreed that it sounded "fun", but he was willing to go along with it. I also rallied my crafty side and with Scarlett's help, put together some rather over the top (possibly very un-PC) napkin rings.

I seemed to have had a hard time this year being both the lead cook and the lead photographer at Thanksgiving, so the pictures are slim. I'm not sure what happened to my photo impulse this year. I usually manage to take about 342 photos of my pies and at least that many of my children. Oh well. This is what I've got.

My mom a.k.a. "pit master Cindy" took care of the griller. For this one we bought a "brined" turkey from Trader Joes and did nothing more in the way of preparation than seasoning it generously with salt and pepper before plopping it on the grill. It was done in 2 hours.

Everyone looks so aprehensive in this photo, like they think they might discover a severed head under the Weber lid instead of that gorgeous mahogany turkey.

We lucked out in the weather department for grilling the bird. It was a gorgeous day (almost 60 degrees) so it ended up being nice to hang outside and chat around the grill.

 

I took care of the oven bird. Which I dry brined and stuffed with onions, oranges, and herbs, and did not photograph. Lets pretend it looked like this

photo via NY Times

Scarlett helped make these napking rings with pipe cleaners and feathers.

She was really into it until she passed out from boredom. Must work on building her crafting stamina. 

 This is the only photo of my pretty apple pie. See it waaaay over there on the side board? It was really pretty.

Ya know who else escaped my photo attention? Pepper! I feel so bad that I did not take any photos of her on her very first Thanksgiving. I dressed her in the exact same outfit that Scarlett wore on her first Thanksgiving,

Seen here on Thanksgiving 2006:

Sarlett and Pepper look so much alike, I guess I could just try to pass off Scarlett photos if it ever becomes an issue, but still I feel negligent. Perhaps Pepper will take comfort in the fact that I at least got plenty of photos of the napkin rings. Priorities!

I did a kids table for the first time this year. It was really cute and all 3 kids "sat" at it simultaneously for exactly 5 seconds.  Dear Uncle Teke managed to capture the action around the kids table on his iphone (forgive the tiny thumbnail size - technical difficulties). If you have microscopic vision you'll be able to see in this photo that Rudy had the forsight to strip down to his undies before the meal even began. I like the way that boy thinks. AND Pepper is in this one so there, proof that she was in attendance.

The empty kids table.

So, back to the turkey! Which turkey won? You are surely (one month after the fact) dying to know. Of course by the time we ate, everyone was starving and declared both birds to be supremely tasty. The 2 turkeys had noticeably different flavor; the griller picked up a hint of hickory from the wood chips, and the oven bird was enhanced by the herbs and orange zest. While both were good and tasted like Thanksgiving should, I think the griller had a slight edge, winning by a nose, or a beak, as the case may be. Not sure if it was the novelty factor of grilling on an unseasonably warm late November day or what, but I am inclinded to go grill from now on.