Category: triplets
2020, don’t let the door hit you on the way out

This is going to be a weird year-end recap. Let’s see.
January
I got to go to Lisbon! Thank god we planned our meetup for January, or my only trip (outside of Louisiana, anyway) in 2020 never would have happened. Also I turned 45 there. (My third birthday meetup since I started at Automattic.)





The boys finished up their season playing soccer for the school team, which ended in winning the championship! I adore this picture of Linus.

February
Kiki came to visit! Thank god. I’m so glad I got to see her this year at least once. We ate a lot and took a road trip to Alexandria and Natchitoches for Linus’s archery tournament.





Later in the month was Mardi Gras! Where we were probably all spreading COVID like crazy! I made a fun Mardi Gras dress. Maybe I’ll get to wear it again in 2022.






Also I got a new wardrobe from IKEA. I love it.


March
Well it started out okay. I had raised over $2000 for St. Baldrick’s and I was so ready for my hair chop scheduled for the end of the month. Yeah, that still hasn’t happened. I did get a haircut, but nothing too drastic. (You can still donate, you know!)

I took two days off to spend with Linus and Miles, just like I’d done the year before. We ate lunch and escaped from rooms.


Two days before Oliver and I were supposed to have our day off, I was sitting at soccer practice waiting for the boys when I got a message from the school. It was going to be closed for the next two days because there was a possible connection to a COVID case. You know what happened next.
The rest of March was a lot of sewing, cooking, and watching movies.
Click here for the fun part of 2020Five years of Ziggy!

Five years ago, a coworker dropped off this dog at our house and our family became complete.
Some pics from just the last few months of our sweet Zig Zig, who is loving quarantine.

















































Teenagers.


They were very excited to get their gifts this morning. I promised not to post the whole video, but what we did (this was my friend Stephanie’s suggestion) was fill a box with boring things like socks and underwear and Axe deodorant (I couldn’t bring myself to get the body spray) and call it their “Teenager Survival Kit” or something, but hidden at the bottom was an iPhone.

Here’s a gif of Oliver’s reaction (LOM):

Obviously I’m sad we can’t celebrate like we normally would, but let’s face it, they just want to be on their new phones anyway.
The back half of November
My sweet boys at the bus stop.
An exquisite loaf of sourdough bread that I made for Thanksgiving. Recipe here.
Grandee and Larry came for Thanksgiving. We had zero vegetables.
Ziggy has been cute, as usual. We got our Christmas tree up!
Random leftover photos. Finally got the fabric for my cape! I was going to make it over Thanksgiving break, but I didn’t have the pattern yet. But it’s coming soon! Also the delicious beet salad I made. I like making things that are yummy.
Now it’s December 2 and the boys will be 13 in two days and I cannot believe it.
12 years, 10 months

Presenting the 154th monthly photo. Kudos to Photoshop.
Seventh grade is the worst
I wrote a sincere, non-sarcastic, non-jokey post for the New Orleans Mom. Uh, enjoy?
(Bonus hilariously bad picture of me from 1987 if you click through!)
12 years, 9 months

First day of 7th grade!

I don’t need to tell you, it sure looked different from years past!

And their classrooms:
They’re all in the same class this year to make life a bit easier and safer, if they do end up back in a real classroom. I guess we’ll see.
And for reference, here they are on the first day at their school, 9 years ago.

Random Tuesday post

I took part in a blogging workshop at work today, and now I am feeling inspired to post.
So let’s see, what have we been up to?
Haircuts!
The boys finally got real haircuts (first time since February or so) and now I feel okay about getting one. We went to a salon owned by the mom of one of their classmates, and everyone was masked and spread out, and it felt fine.
But even more exciting is that I am getting a haircut tomorrow! Mine hasn’t been cut since last September. Of course it was supposed to be cut in March for St. Baldrick’s but that didn’t happen, and it’s been rescheduled twice but as of now it won’t happen until next year and I canNOT wait that long.
I wanted to take a picture of my hair looking as long as possible for a Facebook post so I could get feedback on how much to get cut off tomorrow, and well, that backfired. I had to blowdry it and use a hot brush and a flat iron and a curling iron just to get it looking decent enough to share, and the feedback was largely “just a trim!”
I mean, first of all, thanks for the compliments but you know I never wear my hair down, it’s too much work and it’s too hot. And it’s a nightmare to wash. And it’s so heavy it gives me tension headaches. So I will probably go shoulder length.
My hair after making it look nice:
If I just let it airdry:
So yeah. Not great. Also I had to wear sunglasses because I forgot I put mascara on yesterday for a school meet and greet and taking it off is more trouble than it’s worth. But also I’m v glam.
In other news, remember how I mentioned that I was making a sourdough starter? Well, it worked! I’m kind of intimidated by it but I used this recipe sorta* to make a loaf of bread yesterday and by golly it worked**!
*This recipe had like forty gajillion steps and I was required to do something like every half hour for an ENTIRE day and I’m sorry, no bread is worth that, so I just like, let my mixer knead it for a while and called that a win. Also I took it out about 20 minutes sooner than the recipe said because it was about to scorch.
**I mean, it was tasty, but it was a very wet dough, maybe because I skipped the half-hourly folding or whattheheckever but it resulted in having to use a lot of flour at the shaping phase so there was a line of flour in the middle.
School starts on Thursday (at home) and I have three desks all set up for the boys. I just got a box of uniforms in the mail that I ordered when there was a sale over the summer in a fit of optimism, so I will definitely make them wear them for a picture. We joked about walking over to the bus stop at 7am but that would just make us all cry.
I took next week off work. Not for any reason except if I don’t do it now, it might be a while before I can. So I’m going to tackle a big sewing project. My motivation to sew has been pretty low lately, but maybe this will help! I’m making a Cashmerette Chilton trench in this plum herringbone flannel with a dark teal satin lining. It’ll definitely keep me busy!
Do I want to make the short or long version? Who knows?
And to close the post, Linus’s snowball before it turned into brown minty-fruity sludge.
12 and 2/3
What are they up to right now? Enjoying their new room, even still keeping it neat! Playing Football Manager and Fortnite. Not doing enough summer reading. About to start reminding themselves what math is to prep for a placement test. Though surely keeping track of football team standings and scores and all that stuff is keeping their brains sharp? Mmhmm. School starts virtually in a couple of weeks, so I’m frantically trying to get three desks set up around the house.
It’s pa-jammy, you know
Today I did my 200th Peloton ride, and I got a shout out! It was very exciting, except the instructor said “pee-why-jammy” and after posting about it on Facebook, I now realize everyone thinks it’s either pee-why-jammy or pie-jammy and it’s neither, it’s pa-jammy. Like pajamas! That’s the whole point! I guess spelling it the British way was the problem. Except the instructor who gave me the shout out is British! So who knows.
I registered my domain in March 2002 and only now am realizing no one knows how to pronounce it. But it’s okay. It’s not meant to be spoken aloud, right? It’s fine.
So what else? I started a sourdough erm starter. It’s only day 2. I’m fairly sure this is not going to go well. That reminds me, I should water my plants.
I hung up the boys’ soccer medals, and Ziggy got a dog bed for their room, which he has been sleeping in! Very very very very very very very very cute.
The LED lights make everything look funky.
One night for dinner I made these zucchini fritters that the boys didn’t like. I was adorably optimistic. Alas.
This beer can is ridiculously pretty.
The end!