to the sound of rain on pavement

It's been a busy week.

First, my good buddy who moved away came back for a visit. Yay!

Then, it seems that I must traverse all over the city and its environs this week.
On Wednesday I had a quick visit with the midwife (follow up on some birth control options, if you must know). I bother to even mention this little visit, because I met a new midwife at the birth center and she was so awesome that it made me want to have another baby just so I could see her again. In the afternoon, I went to my friend's house for playgroup. I've felt weird about going without Ellis who is in school. But Marlowe deserves to play with other babies, too. On Wednesday evening I went to CHOP for a presentation about bilateral cochlear implants (two implants--one for each ear). We're not interested in getting a second one, but the CI team had just been through a time of study, and i wanted to hear what they had to say. (So I've gone from Bryn Mawr to NW Philly to home to University City.)

On Thursday I went to a signing class at the school. The teacher was our first deaf mentor and is a really terrific ASL teacher. The material itself I already knew, but it is so helpful to actually practice conversation, because that is where I have trouble. I struggle with my ASL receptive skills. After class I tromped through the rain to the fabric store. Then there was speech therapy in the afternoon. After which my brother met us and we went to Target. (So I've gone from Germantown to University City to Jenkintown to home.)

Then on Friday, I kept Ellis home, so that we could go to Lancaster. We made a stop off to visit my grandma who is feeling very blah. The kids cheered her up a little, but it was kind of a difficult visit. I had a hard time thinking of what to say. We spent the rest of the day at my parents' house. My brother came over for a little bit and took Ellis to his house for a couple of hours. Ellis was over the moon with joy about driving away with Uncle Nick.

Today we had deep clean day. I wanted to have a huge deep clean, declutter day before the holidays. It's still not where I want it, but significant progress was made. I even got the kids clothing situation squared away, which is big when you have a baby who grows out of his clothes every few months. I really wanted to get ahold of the toy situation before Christmas and to reorganize stuff now that Marlowe is mobile.

Oh yea, did I mention Marlowe will be crawling any day now. He scooches very deftly and quickly wherever he wants to go, and then gets up on his hands and knees and rocks, with a determined look on his face that says "I WILL crawl!" Very comical on his tiny 5 mo face. Thankfully, he's still easy to pick up and redirect, because he can pretty much get into anything in his reach that he wants.

Speaking of Marlowe, the magical baby who can get by with very short increments of sleep is saying "mommy! mommy!" in that special baby kind of way, "waaah!". Sorry this is kind of a boring post. My blog mojo is kind of off these days.