Fortney Christmas/solstice/etc. letter 2011

Hello blog readers! If you want a normal Christmas letter, you can go read this first. All that is true of us.
Okay, now that that's out of the way, here are some Fortney family vital stats for those of you who've been out of the loop: Graham is 2, Finn is 4. Katie's a librarian and Jonathan's an astronomy professor. Now we'll do some fun facts. If anyone reading this knew all of these before reading this, come claim your raffle prize. We'll let Finn pick it out.

• Graham insists on wearing sweatpants nearly every day. Or, as he calls them, "sofpants."
• Jonathan got to go golfing this month. He shot a 40 on a par 30. It's been so long since he's golfed at home with his own clubs that we cannot figure out how long it's been (and we tried very hard for multiple minutes).
  
• Finn's favorite stuffed animal is teal and electric yellow shark he won at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, "beating" Jonathan in that game where you squirt in the clown's mouth. He calls it "Fishie." He will tell you (repeatedly) that it is not a shark.
  
• Katie tried to grow rhubarb this year, and failed. But the herb garden was fabulous. We still have parsley, sage, chives, and mint. So, so much mint. (Do you need any mint?)
  
• Mona the cat is NINE. She's gotten less picky about many things in her old age. For instance, she's not above Cheerios now.
• Finn knows his right from his left, and could probably navigate you from our house to his preschool on a good day. Of course, you might also end up in the ocean.
• Graham can say just about whatever pops into his head these days. Today, for instance, before 9 am we'd heard "I pooped at the movie," and "I found a knife for Finn."
• Despite having a chest freezer in the garage for most of the year, Katie has failed to follow through with her threats/promises to "buy half pigs with impunity."
• The Father's Day present Jonathan picked out for himself was a German-engineered 5" diameter hot pink high bounce ball. It's still living a happy cage-free life in the backyard.
  
• Speaking of the backyard, we have a tire swing.
• Our current family project is moving crap (books, staples, batteries, exacto knives, wrapping paper) out of our office/nap room/storage area to make it a better guest room. (Hint, hint).
  
• The boys' favorite books right now include Tiddler, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, The Shy Little Kitten, and anything based on Cars 2.
• Katie recommends NurtureShock (Po Bronson), Dr. Thorne (Trollope), and Kelley Armstrong's YA novels (Darkest Powers trilogy). Jonathan recommends Bossypants (Tina Fey) and An Introduction to the Theory of Stellar Structure and Evolution (Dina Prialnik).
  
• We did our first whole-family movie outing in 2011, to The Muppets. The boys liked it, and ate most of the popcorn, but the grown-ups laughed more.
• The only movies J&K saw in the theaters without the kids in 2011 were Bridesmaids and Harry Potter 7.5. Bridesmaids FTW!
• 6 days after we write this, the four of us will be getting on a plane bound for MSP, and spending 6 days each in Minnesota and Iowa. We're dreaming of a white Christmas (that link is an oh-so-subtle plug for Katie's December project).
  

We hope to see many of you there, or back here after we get back, or somewhere else that 2012 deems fit if that's what works out. We're both fortunate and unfortunate in having so many amazing friends and family so many places. We wish we could see you more often and catch up on your daily trivia the way we've just caught you up on ours.

With love and silliness,
the Fortneys


P.S. No, we didn't order prints of that. We got the other one.

Happy 4th Birthday, Finn!

Four years into this adventure, Finn continues to surprise us.
We started out the day with some breakfast, hugs, and present opening, colored by excitement for this afternoon's party. The kid's been talking about this thing for months. ("My birthday party... is going to be SO. CRAZY.")
We finally had a party where we invited all of Finn's school friends, instead of his parents' friends, and we had it at a Place That Does Parties. A gymnastics place where Finn had been before, so he shouldn't be too crazy-fied by the new environment, but should also be free to run around like the little turbo-charged guy that he is. We were prepared for yelling, and running, and not following directions, and maybe having to insist on some quiet time to keep him from knocking over other kids. We were completely unprepared for sudden inexplicable leg injuries and shyness, which led to him spending most of the party off in a separate room or out in the car with his mom. Crying. Complaining that he didn't want anyone to look at him.
I tried everything in my very large bag of Finn-managing tricks, and the best we managed was bribing him with some early cake and getting him to sit *near* the action while the other kids did their last activity of the afternoon, the zip line.
He had an absolute blast during cake time.

Then he was sad and pained and panicked again, and wanted only to go straight home.
Where we opened presents, and he was mostly fine again. Until bath - again a mess. Apparently we have discovered "too much excitement for Finn" for the first time in at least 3 years. Or maybe this was one of the rare days he would have actually taken a nap. Who knows? Not me, I'm just his mom.
Oh, and this kid?
Had a blast. Was the star of the show. But wouldn't do the zip line.

Graham, growing up

Yes yes, Graham is two! He can't hold up two fingers to show you how old he is, but he can hold up his entire hand, with his pointer and middle fingers purposefully touching each other, and then use his other hand to point to those two fingers, to indicate that yes, he is two.

He can do a lot of stuff. You want to see him climb up the ladder at the back of our swing set? [The camera work isn't great because I kept almost deciding to grab him.]


You want to see him run around the house with his shirt off, while squeezing his nipples? We see that every single night, but here he is:

We will *CERTAINLY* use that for our own purposes when he is in high school and college.

You want to see him sleeping with his new tiger that is even bigger than him? We got that too:


Graham is getting bigger and is making his opinions known at every opportunity. His number of go-to phrases is growing at a fast rate. Some of the new classics are:

"Oh Pete Sake!" (he says this all the time)
"Too Much Meat" (when really, really full)
"I need it" (when he wants/needs something)
"Hello Daddy" (only when I unbuckle him at home after school)
"MY DO IT!" (when you try to help him. Always a bad idea)
"My turn!" (when it is actually someone else's turn)

Here he is kind of singing. We'll try to get a better movie of this before he gets too old:


And lastly, here are the Fortney boys at the beach at sunset, from just last Friday. It was a nice time.

Graham turned two!

Our "baby" is two today!
We had a party on Sunday, with a high density of two year olds. There was also cake, wet sand, bikes, bubbles, and chalk. Oh, and singing!

I love how delighted he looks that everyone is singing to him. It was enough to temporarily win him over to agreeing that he was, in fact, turning two. Since then he's gone back to correcting us with "No. One... half."

This morning he opened birthday presents, and then brought muffins to day care for his school buddies.

He is getting a little more "two" these days, with bouts of stubbornness, temper tantrums, possessiveness, and all that good stuff. But most of the time he's the same sweet old Graham. We love you, buddy! Seriously, how great is this kid?

Minnesota Cousins

Katie and I got back from England and France late on Sunday. More on that nice trip later. This is about our trip to Iowa and Minnesota from a few weeks back. How the time flies! I was going to post about the whole trip, but that was impossible, so I'm focusing on Justin and Becky's kids, cousins Jamie, Wyatt, and Heidi. What, you didn't know about Heidi? She is new and small. See here:

Whereas Jamie and Wyatt looked like little clones of Justin when they were born, Heidi only looks 75% like Justin, so maybe Becky's genes are finally starting to exert themselves. My brother and sister and I look 90% like my Dad (tall and fair), and 10% like my Mom (small and dark), so the Fortney genes are tough to overcome.

It was great to see my parents again, and we managed to see a few of the high school friends, who have their own kids. But mostly the boys ran around with their cousins. We spent some time over at Justin and Becky's "acreage" in Wisconsin. The boys drove around Power Wheels and then we went on Justin's boat, too. Finn did most of the boat steering. I think Finn would have preferred to stay there for the next 15 years. We lack a boat and any Power Wheels, sadly.

I thought that this one, above, was a great one of Finn and Wyatt. Wyatt is only a month older.

Of course, I took some movies of them driving round. Graham got a kick out of riding around with Jamie (the oldest!) but wouldn't hop in with anyone else. Smart boy!

Car Driving 1 from Jonathan Fortney on Vimeo.

Next summer we may try for an even longer trip than 10 days. If we're going to spend the money on 4 plane tickets, we should get out money's worth! And the state fair will have to be on the list.

Dispatch from Grandma Week

Yesterday:
Finn: Why are the brakes making noise?
Gma: They must be wet.
Finn: How did they get wet? It's not wet out.
Gma: Must be the fog.
Finn: Fog doesn't get in brakes.
Gma: Yes, I believe it does.
[Graham taking my side and echoing "fog. Fog."]
Finn: Last time when you drove in Iowa the brakes made noise too.
Gma: Yes, they did! You have a good memory.
Finn: So maybe you're not such a good driver.

This morning, unsolicited, he volunteered that his mom and dad were both better drivers than me, especially his dad, who is always learning more about driving.


******
Jonathan and I are currently in St. Ives, not far from Cambridge, vising Jeanna and Craig (Jonathan's sister and her husband). Today he gave a short talk at Cambridge, and tomorrow we take a train to London, and from there to Paris! Besides catching up on our sleeping, reading, TV watching, and eating of English foodstuffs (Wensleydale! Scones! Pasties!), we've also done some sightseeing and shopping. We're having a great time, more so thanks to updates like these from my mom. It's also neat that our rented Italian smart phone can use Google Voice to send text messages to my mom in California while I'm in England.
I'm sure we'll have plenty of pictures to bore you with soon. Until then...

Sit on it

Introducing the newest piece of bargain basement awesomeness to join our backyard escape: creekside bench!

Beach train

This week we realized summer was nearly over and we hadn't ridden the beach train yet this year, so today we fixed that. Bought hats, rode train, did the Boardwalk's helicopter ride, ate ice cream, ran on the beach, another round on the helicopter, back to the train.
Whew! We pack a lot of summer into 3 hours around here.

Conversations: Speed

F: Graham, are you the fastest baby in the world?
G: Yep.*
F: Graham, are you the fastest baby in the whole school?
G: Yep.*

Please, someone arrange the tournament to determine the world's fastest under-twos. I would pay to watch that.

*Somehwere during vacation, all of Graham's "Ya"s and "No"s turned into "Yep"s and "Nope"s.

Parents were in town

So right now I'm sitting in Waterloo, IA, at Katie's Mom's place. Before that we were at my parents' place. But before that we were in Sonoma, CA, with my parents, who flew in for the wedding of Dave Rolnitzky and Brittany Glidden. It was a B. R. Cohn winery, and it went off without a hitch! Special thanks to Alex and Laura for babysitting.

When we were in Sonoma we visited Train Town, which is the "most developed scale model train in the Americas" or something. At any rate, it was a good ride--I'd recommend the place to anyone with little kids. The rest of the rides are skippable. Here are my parents on the train.

Here is Finn in the Sonoma jail after a late night of carousing.

The boys had a fun time at the party that Dave and Brittany threw the night before the wedding. Finn did a lot of running around with some other kids. This gives you kind of a flavor. There was also a pinata. And croquet. And much food- and drink-stuffs.

On the last day of the CA trip, we took my parents to the San Francisco Zoo, and this was just awesome:

King Hippo from Jonathan Fortney on Vimeo.