In retrospect, we probably should have put Thea in daycare months ago.
If we had, I'm convinced we'd all be dead -- or would have developed a resistance to every viral strain on the planet.
As fortune would have it, she's not in daycare and we're not dead. But we all have [...]
The best thing about a baby's second Christmas is that she's more likely to enjoy it -- especially when she's as verbal as Thea has become sliding into month 20 of her time on this mortal coil.
When we pulled into Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden [...]
I like that all of these photos focus on Thea emerging out of something. I particularly like the brave adventurer feel of the second photo. Nikole took these shots (and probably most of the others I've just posted).
Another hat shot. Thea's hanging with her Omie at a craft sale, where she fell in love with a hat my mom made out of an old sweater sleeve. Because she's crafty, my mom is.
[...]Thea's Halloween costume was a labor of love, and more fascinating for everyone in the household than the candy that our allergenic tot is unable to enjoy.
Nikole has dabbled in sewing over the years, but turning Thea into Little Red Riding Hood was a labor of [...]
Nikole found these awesome bubbles at Gymboree that last forever -- and come out in a mad flurry. Thea finds herself more obsessed with the bubble blowing implements than she actually is in the physical bubbles themselves. She's also started treating our seasonal decorations on our [...]
In one of the more sallow elections in which I've actually had the sad pleasure of participating, Thea and her stuffed lion "Kaffee" joined me at the polls earlier this month. I think she also voted with Nikole, which raises all sorts of [...]
In the past few weeks, Thea and Nikole have been experimenting with crayons, sidewalk chalk and Play-Doh. I imagine it's pretty typical for small children to eat everything. Because why would you want to actually use crayons or chalk, for instance, for something [...]
It's a bit impossible to remember what life was like just over 18 months ago before Thea arrived, or imagine what life would be like today without Thea in it. We celebrated Thea's 18 months with us by letting her fall back asleep [...]
Word on the street can be trusted: Garnett's is one superb sandwich shop.
Early Friday morning, the Twitterverse alerted me to the opening of Garnett's at the corner of Park Avenue and Meadow Street. The tiny restaurant -- with fewer than a dozen tables -- is the [...]
We brought home a new filing cabinet last week. It came in a cardboard box. The cardboard box is Thea's new best friend.
Since it has rained and been freezing cold all week, I'm not sure that's a problem.
I only have [...]
We were in Charlotte last weekend for a baby shower -- Nikole's brother and his wife are expecting their second child in November; Thea and their son, Baker, are two months apart. It's going to be nice (in a few years) to have [...]
Nikole sent me this photo of Thea, who fell in love with this bouncy toy pony at Cartwheels and Coffee. I think she looks a late 70s British punker who's ready for her date with Johnny Lydon. And that scares me.
[...]
We're at the point as parents where it's really easy to let the whims of toddler life continue to pull our chains and run our lives. Knowing us, we're going to err on the chain and running side of that equation, but it was nice [...]
This might be one of my favorite recent photos of Thea, snapped on Nikole's iPhone minutes before they were slated to pull up in front of our house -- and after Thea threw an almighty, not going to take a nap tantrum. [...]
We spent a gorgeous afternoon at Maymont. When we got home, Thea and I spent time reconstructing our visit like so:
Me: What did the goats say?
Thea: Maaaaaa!
Thea: Gate! Gate! Gate!
Me: Did the goats go through the gate?
Thea: Run! Run!
Me: [...]
Thea's latest hobby is pulling the door shut behind her, and standing quietly between the door and the storm door. I'll say, "Where's Thea?" and she'll swing the door open for the big reveal. When I ask her where she's going, she replies, "Work!" And [...]
It wasn't intentional, but the best possible move we could have made as unsuspecting parents-to-be (or I could have made as an unsuspecting husband-to-be) was to have settled into our little cottage in Richmond's Northside directly across the street from a relatively new elementary [...]
Work and a host of other factors -- including our inability to schedule our lives around the sleep cycles of a baby who changes her sleep cycles more frequently than diapers -- meant that we only spent about 30 hours in Deltaville over Labor Day weekend.
But we had a great [...]
One Word. You have 60 seconds. Start writing. Today's word: knot.
A simple slip, a bit of practice, the art of looping and then dissembling until something is strung together, becoming words and some semblance of a forgotten phrase about time, and energy and the connection between things that hold [...]
We try to take Thea to my mom's house for a weekend visit, since connecting with her during the week is such a random event. It's funny to watch my mom -- who tells us constantly that she's just not "a baby person" -- hang out [...]
I completely love how Thea's face changes expression and intensity at the slightest environmental change. You can practically watch her occasional meltdown's creep across her face, or in the case of Thea swinging at a high velocity you can watch her move from settling in (first photo) to a state [...]
Unlike many of our friends with toddlers, we've done a pretty poor job of creating "we" space -- going on dates and hanging out as a couple. Part of it is by choice, and part by circumstance, and part by sheer negligence on our part.
On [...]
She got the cute genes from her mom, and the allergy genes from her dad. (That's her with her cute mom being serenaded by the bluesman at the South of the James Market last weekend.)
After 16 months of ebbing and flowing, of experimenting and observing, [...]
She said it was for Rilo. We weren't sure if she meant for Rilo to gnaw on it, or if she planned to conk the pup over the head and steal all her chew toys.
[...]Nikole spent several days last week holed up in her study, cutting and sewing and doing crafty things with fabric. The outcome was a sassy little tote that Thea now slings around her head on a frequent basis, as she repeatedly says "Markt, markt, [...]
Thea, triumphant.
I suppose I need to start calling Thea posts "The Toddler Factory," but since she still is unable to refer to herself as anything other than "baby" I'm still safe.
She's always loved the playground, especially swinging with Nikole, but mobility has changed everything. She now [...]
"After the rain I'll be raging again/feet swept high in a Mormon stance" - Contoocook Line
Nikole took the above photo was taken this past Friday as a storm came sweeping down the Rappahannock River. It makes me feel like a Pilgrim.
I'm soaked!
After [...]
Until several months ago, Thea would wriggle and squirm her way through her evening book ritual. Our evening book ritual, rather.
And then, suddenly, There Are Cats In This Book changed everything. All we needed to do what pull the book out and Thea would [...]
We spent Saturday afternoon with Nikole's family in Chester, which gave Thea and her cousin an opportunity to bond -- particularly over the green, plastic cup from which Baker was drinking. Apparently, Thea had been using that same cup during a previous visit. The peculiar [...]
Thea spent most of the Fourth of July weekend hoofing it around her great-grandfather's river property -- chasing kittens, picking up rocks and dropping them in a green bucket, laughing at her Pop Pop, and keeping us from sleeping.
Nikole's dad went to [...]
One of our best reasons to visit Deltaville is to spend time with Nikole's grandfather -- Thea's great-grandfather. Almost everyone in the family calls him Pop Pop, and he's just beside himself to have two great-grandchildren with a third on the way. (That would be courtesy [...]
After spending several dozen Fourth of July holidays at one river house or another along the Rappahannock and Piankatank rivers, I think we actually experienced something close to the perfect holiday -- especially weather-wise -- this Fourth of July.
Nikole, Thea [...]
One of our other Father's Day activities was a trip across the river with Thea and Rilo to visit my mom -- Thea's Omie. It was loads of fun watching the two of them connect, and seeing how much fun my mom has when she gets [...]
We took Thea and Rilo to Nikole's grandfather's place on the Chesapeake Bay last week, and everyone had a glorious time (though I think Pop Pop wanted to kill the dog with her constant and shrill barking). I think this is a series of photos [...]
It's been a challenging year for the gardens at our house -- that would be the vegetable garden, as well as the flower beds. We're almost at the stage with Thea where we can actually do some things, but not quite at a place where [...]
This photo was taken on Father's Day, which was the morning that Nikole had planned for me to sleep late. Thea had other ideas, and since Nikole was up all night with her, I went on duty as the sun rose.
It's sort of a morning tradition [...]
The ratio is so messed up. It takes about one minute of play to generate one hour of sleep for our dog. The photo at the top is Rilo going insane on the beach in Deltaville. Hours later, back in Richmond, and we get something [...]
I know it's my job to praise her for her precocious smile and general good looks, but come on. She really is quite the cutie!
[...]Looking for a way to exhaust our inexhaustable daughter recently, we found ourselves wandering the Stony Point Fashion Park -- attracted by the idea of an outdoor water play area and the fact that we had Rilo with us and the place is dog-friendly.
Thea would [...]
Thanks to Costco's new-found ability to convince me to buy my entire life in bulk, I am rapidly working my way through a case of San Pellegrino Limonata and Aranciata.
Naturally, it brings to mind one of my favorite images from my summer in Europe (circa: [...]
It's hard to determine from this series of photos whether Thea favors Molly Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" or Mike Ness of Social Distortion.
Please notice the surprisingly clean floor in the background. This photo was taken moments before Thea proceeded to [...]
I mentioned before that my grandfather died before I was born. I spent a long month trying to imagine who he was from a collection of artifacts I inherited when my own father died -- his paintings, his letters. He was an artist, and he was a commercial sign painter, [...]
Although she's a bit of a nut and skittish as a colt, our little Bernese Mountain Beagle is quite the cutie. Except when you get an extreme close-up at just the right angle of her fierce underbite. Then, she just looks sort of freakish.
If I painted all four walls vibrant orange, I would go insane within a day.
I'm in the process of relocating to a permanent office space, a suite that I'm subletting from Zeigler|Dacus Marketing at 110 East Cary Street. My new space is relatively large -- perhaps [...]
The worst thing about having a baby? The cats and dog get virtually no photographic attention.
The upside -- for one of the cats, anyway -- is that Thea's accessories provide plenty of interesting places to take a cat nap. The other morning I discovered Harvey nestled [...]
My stepmother and father moved to a farm in a small Quaker community in North Carolina when I was in my early teens -- after several years of long weekends, several a month, spent visiting her father there. It was her grandparents' farm, and it was where I learned how [...]
Since I wrote about an ending yesterday, I thought today should return us to beginnings.
I proposed to Nikole in November of 2004, and gave her a ring of red, polished sea glass that our friend Nancy had molded into a gorgeous piece of jewelry. I was also working on this [...]
"Elegy for September 10" ranks extremely high on my list of poems I find immensely satisfying to revisit, reread, reexamine.
I actually flew out of New York City on September 10, 2001. Summer broke that weekend along the East Coast, and the skies were crisp and clear and cool. I [...]
"Beach Creek" and "Dragon Run" belong together, as they paint similar pictures of two bookends that held up the summers of my youth -- one uncle with a river cottage along the Rappahanock, and two with cottages on the brackish Piankatank river. My memories of those summers are [...]
When I was four, my grandfather died in a house fire. My memory is that my grandmother and my sister pulled up the house as firefighters were trying to extinguish the blaze.
When I was 18, my grandmother died. She was deep in the throes of Alzheimer's.
A few years ago, I [...]
Although it ends with an unfinished feeling, this is another of my favorites. It started with two things -- inherited memories of my grandfather, who died before I was born, and the concept of the memory palace, a mnemonic technique. As I began working this poem, I imagined myself [...]
This would be a poem that could be workshopped a few times, and come out the better for it. While I think the images are strong and evoke equally strong emotion, there's just too much packed into this piece without a real narrative. And though I think that was exactly [...]
Qalb, an Arabic word that means "the heart at the heart of things" is one of those lovely, deep words that helps me fall in love with the most difficult of languages. Apparently, when I wrote this poem late in 1999, my subconscious was well aware that my world was [...]
Bright and early, Thea and I headed down to the office for a quick photo shoot with the team from Zeigler-Dacus marketing; we're moving into a new shared space on East Cary Street this month and they wanted to commemorate the move with a quasi-Abbey [...]
What's not so obvious in this photo is that Thea is attempting to use a fork and spoon to eat her food. Most people get fixated on her t-shirt. She has several eating shirts, since she tears bibs off and smacks us in the face [...]
In the early spring of 2002, I had two round-trip tickets to France and no one to travel with me. A bit of a planner and control freak, I discovered that there was little about my life I could control. It made total sense to me -- upon my arrival [...]
I'm not sure that I ever told my oldest friend that I'd written a poem about her, although it's ironic that she was the only person I knew who could provide me the translation I needed to anchor the poem. "The Goddess Died at Herculaneum" takes place amidst old [...]
About a decade or so ago, I spent a fair amount of time trying to write about my dad. Although we had resolved some intensely personal issues in our relationship in the last few months of his life, I found I still had more to say to him after he [...]
There are not a lot of dates in our modern history that resonate without help. Maybe only one, really. "December 31, 1999" is about going to bed on New Year's Eve at the turn of the Millenium without knowing whether or not computer networks (and the entire global electrical [...]
"This Is Not A Country Song" is a love letter to two different women who helped me hold my life together when everything called for it to be fraying apart -- totally and without much thought. I went on road trips with each of them during a particularly dry [...]
Some of my best poems were born in workshops -- my favorites were facilitated by Leslie Shiel at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and by Susan Hankla at the Virginia Museum Studio. "Chesapeake" was actually conceived in a dream, and given shape in a workshop with Leslie.
The only [...]
Word on the street was that Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden was just littered with millions of exotic butterflies. My own mother -- apparently, a connoisseur of butterfly gardens (Right? Who knew?) -- was not impressed, but Nikole and Thea and I charged ahead anyway, carving [...]
It was the traditional Lewis Family Memorial Day weekend in Deltaville last week -- a celebration of the holiday, as well as the birthdays of Nikole's brother and grandfather.
The photo above is special for Nikole's family -- the two boys [...]
Nikole caught this action shot of Thea a few weeks ago. She's been pulling herself up and walking with assistance (a finger, a hand, a chair) for several months now, but refuses to take those first independent steps. Apparently, being the daughter of two compulsively [...]
Last year's garden was a shambles because we had a newborn in the house. This year's garden is only slightly more organized now that Thea is a full-fledged toddler -- but still too young to sit in the dirt while I plant and weed. That [...]
Earlier in May, my mom competed in the swimming competition for the Virginia Senior Games (formerly the Senior Olympics). As impressed as I was with her silver and gold medals in the 70-75 age group, I was blown away by a 94-year-old woman who competed [...]
My neice Morgankara playing with Thea earlier in May during the Virginia Senior Games. We were hanging out at the pool watching my mom sweep her events.
[...]"Cairo Fragment" is about as concise a snapshot of our first morning in Cairo as I could ever capture.
We woke in the bedroom of our friend's apartment in a middle class suburb on the west side of the city. It was a chilly January morning, and we heard loud [...]
"The Birth of Loss " was meant to be a poem about nuns in France, and it somehow transformed itself into a poem about miscarriage. Odder still, it was a poem about the miscarriage of someone I knew -- several years before Nikole and I experienced our own series [...]
In the midst of significant emotional events, words tend to bubble forth. Trips overseas are a strong catalyst for my pen, as were the deaths of my father and stepmother, and my separation and divorce from my first wife. "Above Franklin" was written in the midst of that last [...]
My first published poem, Al Tahrir was written following a six-week excursion to Cairo, Egypt, early in 1999.
I spent far too many hours during that trip sitting in a cafe in the heart of old Cairo sipping shay bi na na (tea with mint) trying to teach myself [...]
Thea's biggest challenge since showing up on our doorstep just over a year ago has been dietary. She has a list of food allergies as long as an aisle at Wal-Mart, which has made eating a bit of a challenge.
Dairy -- milk and cheese [...]
Thea turned a year old last Saturday, so we gathered together with family at my mom's house to celebrate.
We finished the spring vegetable planting this weekend. The garden now boasts broccoli, brussels sprouts, peas, scarlet runner beans, bush beans, carrots, radishes, beets, chard, spinach, lettuce, melons, cucumbers and eight different heirloom tomatoes.
All we have to do [...]
You wouldn't know it from the heat, but it is still April and our beds of flowers are just starting to pull themselves out of the dirt with the color and vigor we love to see.
We took Thea and Rilo to Bryan Park last week to check out the Azalea Gardens, which used to be magnificent and are now just reasonably impressive. They've actually been really cleaned up and pulled together in recent years by the Friends of [...]
This image is a visual shout out to my Twitter friend Tristana, who does not find the song "Wildfire" strange in the least. But she's from the Badlands, which means she gets to decide what's strange in her life without my assistance.
Thea may [...]
Imagine my disappointment when I realized that while I could put a bottle of beer in the beverage holder in Thea's brand new red wagon, she would simply grab it and either angrily dash it to the sidewalk or guzzle it.
But enough about [...]
Thea engaged in her first Easter egg hunt today, which essentially involved her Aunt Anne carrying her around and filling a bag with plastic eggs while Thea drooled all over them. Since she was the center of attention (the other cousins are nine to [...]
The early garden is going strong with carrots, radishes, beets, lettuces, peas, broccoli, brussels sprouts, chard and spinach out of the ground. The rest of the yard could use some major weeding and edging and other basic maintenance, but fortunately most of our perennials [...]
A hastily thrown-together Easter basket won't pass the muster once she becomes more cognizant that holidays in her home country equal loot.
We celebrated Easter this morning with a short walk in the brisk morning air and the unveiling [...]
You really couldn't tell she was mine if you just went by the smile. (I inherited my father's inability to offer much more than a quick, tight grin.) Thea will smile at just about anything. Including slamming her forehead into the door. (The [...]
I happened to be at a meeting in the Short Pump area, so I swung by Whole Foods on Thursday to pick up some produce for dinner and to check out their organic baby edibles. I couldn't resist a bunch of deep purple tulips [...]
Like most people in Richmond, we believed the lying weather forecasters who told us it would be sunny and warming by early afternoon on Saturday. And we also completely forgot about Easter -- in the sense of actually having an Easter basket for our [...]
One of our new rituals -- and a great way to distract Thea for long stretches of time -- involves sitting on the couch and looking out the window. Squirrels, birds, passing cars and anyone out walking are fair game for her periodic [...]
