Michigan and Waterloo

Way back in October, we took M. on a big road trip: first, we visited Ann Arbor, our old haunt:

Few of our friends still remain, but we could catch up with collaborators and former mentors – and now my cousin David is there. It was a disorienting feeling, to see the ways in which everything has changed, yet are pretty much the same. College town life!

We headed further west for a stop at Hope College, where I was invited to give a talk at a World Languages conference. My best friend from high school, now also a language professor, co-organized the conference, and it was such a treat both to see him in his element and to visit with his beautiful family.

From Holland, MI, we drove east across the border to visit my family in Waterloo, Ontario. We stayed with my aunt and uncle and got to spend precious time with my Ye-ye in the nursing home where he now resides:

I feel so sad that my Grandma didn't get to spend more time with M. She would be so tickled by M.'s enjoyment of books and her constant, tuneful humming. My Ye-ye doesn't know who we are anymore, and he won't remember a thing about our visit, but that's okay. Having a baby has taught me that every day is a special gift to be cherished for what it is, and these were definitely days together to be cherished.

Trip to Ottawa

Last weekend, we gathered with my dad's side of the family to celebrate my grandfather's 90th birthday – in Ottawa, Canada! This led to a number of milestones for Madeleine: first international trip, first time to Canada, first time meeting her great-grandparents and our relatives from Waterloo and her Uncle Peter. It was quite eventful!

M. and my cousin Stephanie

Happy with Uncle Peter!

We drove up to Ottawa, family roadtrip style: Dave, Maddie, and I joined Grace, A., and M. in their minivan, and the six of us braved the journey together (Stephen traveled separately because of his work schedule). The kids were really quite good, with only one period of total meltdown on each leg of the trip!

(N.B.: my dad restraining M. by the collar so he doesn't plunge face-first into the cake! Haha)

Our actual time in Ottawa was very brief, but it felt so special to see Maddie with my grandparents! I have so many memories of their house, too, so it was precious to bring our little baby there. We went out for dim sum lunch and Chinese seafood dinner in Chinatown, and posed for family pictures to commemorate the moment.

My Ye-ye is pretty out of it these days. I'm not sure whether he recognizes me or knows that I'm his oldest son's daughter, and I'm quite certain he doesn't know whom Maddie belongs to. But when he sees Maddie, he instinctively reaches out to her and bends in close to make eye contact, smiling and chuckling and singing her little songs.

It was so moving to see those two together! Praying for more opportunities and more years to spend together!

In the Pumpkin Patch

Last weekend, we went to New Jersey for the day. First stop was lunch with Dave's parents:

It was a gorgeous fall day, so we headed out to a nearby plant nursery/farm store, called Richfield Farms. Poor Maddie is too young to protest being put in nonsensical cutout scenes:

We also visited their pumpkin patch, which turned out to be an empty field where they had placed cut pumpkins. I fear the Great Pumpkin would have found it to be a very insincere pumpkin patch!

We were joined by Julie and Shoobo on this beautiful day! Dave and I were saying how we would enjoy the memory of spending this time with them for a long time.

In our continuing Jersey adventures, we visited Julie in Edgewater, and then went to the food court at Mitsuwa for dinner! Dave enjoyed the trip down memory lane, and baby enjoyed being doted on by Auntie Julie:

We'll have to do it again soon!

Boston Babymoon!

All the cool (pregnant) kids these days seem to go on a "babymoon" to exotic locations, places where it'll be much more difficult to go to once the baby arrives. My spring break finally arrived this week – already in my third trimester! So we weren't going to be too ambitious in planning a big trip: we can't go to the Caribbean because of Zika virus; I'm sure I wouldn't tolerate a long flight very well; and mostly, I just want to sleep all day!

So we happily planned a low-key visit for a few days up to Boston. We've been saying for the past couple years that we would go up and visit our friends, and now we finally had the motivation to go. We found a place on Airbnb in Cambridge, which is apparently where all of our friends now live.

After a stroll around Harvard Square, we checked out some places along the Freedom Trail. We ate lunch at Quincy Market:

And checked out the Paul Revere House and Old North Church ("one if by land, two if by sea..."):

Must make time for North End snacks, of course!

For dinner, we drove out to Newton to see Sarah B., her husband, and her adorable toddler. Sarah B. is also expecting, due just 4 weeks after me! Here we are with matching socks and baby bumps:

The next day was rainy, cold, and fairly miserable. Perfect for a museum day! After a taco stop, we spent the afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts (my first time there!).

They had quite a nice antiquities collection (for an American museum). I hadn't realized it earlier, but one particularly important vase is in their collection:

What's special about this 6th c., black-figure Corinthian vase? Well, it depicts Heracles on the left (with the bow and arrow), Hesione in the middle, and the sea monster that threatened Troy on the right (a somewhat obscure myth that I will not go into here). It's an odd-looking "sea monster," though, no? It really looks like an animal skull protruding from a rock. And this, friends, serves as evidence for how early Greeks interpreted the fossil record they encountered in their daily lives. How else to make sense of the strange, unrecognizable animal bones preserved in stone? Why, these are the mythological monsters of the past! Anyway, I do love this line of reasoning, and if you want to know more, I suggest you read the genuinely interesting and entertaining book I learned this from, Adrienne Mayor's The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times.

And now, back to vacation photos. We got to visit with one of my former roommates from Michigan, Christa, who now is on the faculty at Harvard and has two beautiful little kids! She also still has the two dogs Nien and Mika (plus their daughter) who first introduced me to puppy love. I don't know whether they remembered me, but I was sure happy to see them!

Before departing, we visited Townsman, a restaurant my brother Peter is invested in. I think it was a good choice, because the food was delicious, the location excellent (near the Chinatown T-stop and a close walk to Boston Common), the service accommodating, and there was a bustling lunchtime crowd. Everyone, go eat there!

 

And thus concluded our babymoon. Thanks to all our friends and family who made the time to see us! We hope to see you soon in Long Island, where you will be welcomed by all three of us!

San Francisco

The weeks are flying by, especially now that the semester has started. We're in deep freeze this weekend in NY, but I don't want to forget the lovely and mild weekend Dave and I spent together in San Francisco last month. I was out there for a conference, and Dave flew out to join me afterwards. It seems like a pretty great city! But I don't think I'd be tempted to move there from New York. I felt very hip and tech-y, though – we booked our first Airbnb stay and took Uber cabs everywhere! The future is here.

Dave's cousin and his wife took us on a tour that included a walk in beautiful Muir Woods.

So majestic! I always feel short, but I felt especially diminutive here.

Then we went for a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge:

It was too long, so we only went across part of it! Haha. It's the return journey that always gets ya!

The next day, we took the ferry to Alcatraz. Funny how things change...the most notorious criminals for their time tended to have committed crimes like bank robbery, organized crime, post-Prohibition-type stuff, less violent crime than I would have expected. I find it hard to believe that there was a time when the most fearsome lawbreaker was a bank robber. Now you can rob a bank with a hoodie and a toy gun! Not that you'll get very far...

We ate some delicious dim sum:

And on our final morning, went for a peaceful walk around Golden Gate Park.

Next time, we want to stay longer in California so that we can visit other nearby places, too. 'Til then!

Ontario Weekend #1

It's October – why not spend a lot of time in Canada? This past weekend, I traveled to attend the wedding of two friends from graduate school. The husband is from Saint Catharines, so they got married in a nature preserve near Niagara Falls (Canada side). Too bad Dave had to be at a conference in Chicago this weekend...

My visit kicked off with a stop at the University of Waterloo, to see my old friend Matt. We've been friends since freshman year of college, and we also overlapped at Michigan, where he was a post-doc when I was a grad student. Now he's a math professor! We got tea and caught up, and it sounds like everything is going really well.

I got to spend the night in Waterloo with my uncle John, aunt Virginia, and cousin Stephanie. It had been 8 years since I last visited them at their home, and it was fun to reunite with such objects as the FRIDGE:

We had the same exact one growing up, and it has the most amazing feature: a special drinks compartment, with a tray that flips down, where you can put your glass and pour your drink. Since "getting drinks" was one of my setting-the-table chores, I used this feature very often. I still wish I had a refrigerator like this.

We also ate Auntie Virginia's delicious homemade apple pie:

The next day, it was off to the wedding at Niagara Falls! My friends Evelyn and Mark are both classicists/archaeologists and met in Athens. They are a wonderful couple and perfectly suited for one another.

Post-ceremony joy

I liked their idea for table assignments: each table was associated with a place they've visited during their extensive travels, with a cute picture of them in each location.

Evelyn is a belly dancer on the side, so of course there was a performance by her former troupe...

...in which she also joined in!

Before I left, I stopped by the Falls themselves. That's a lot of water. It was too cold to ride the boat into the mist – while I was there, it began to SNOW.

Overall, it was almost a perfect weekend! But a final note on air travel: I arrived in Toronto on a Brazilian airline I had never heard of before, TAM. It was absurdly cheap, and I felt a little worried about entrusting my safety to this obscure company. However, flying with TAM was instead a throwback to the previous glories of late '90s air travel. I got to check a bag FOR FREE. We boarded according to ROW NUMBER, rather than customer status. They even gave us each THIS MUFFIN:

On the way home, I was flying Air Canada. Air Canada canceled my flight back to New York without explanation, and after rebooking me, refused to comp a hotel room for the evening. <shakes fist> I supposed I could have shelled out for the room, but I had to be back at the airport so early the next morning that I wouldn't have gotten a good night's rest anyway. So I spent the evening in these luxurious accommodations:

Yes, it's a slightly padded bench at the foot of a wifi-related statue, with a strange woman on the other side removing her shoes. Actually, I could've slept fairly well – I changed into pajamas and brushed my teeth, placed my head on my backpack, and had my coat covering me and my purse. It's just that there was construction, seemingly jackhammer-based, going on in the terminal all night. I am seriously disgruntled and will never fly Air Canada again! I urge you all to consider the same action.