Captain Kramer

Phillip is marching in the Memorial Day parade today, not just as the Deputy Mayor but as a veteran. This is the flight suit he used to wear when flying a B-52. Please take a moment today to think about all the soldiers who never made it home.

Oops

Oops! I was going to post the DD from work today, but I forgot to upload the photo. So here are two shots from my phone, taken on the way and at the wonderful Princeton pool.

You were warned

My sister, niece, Ari and I did a little shopping yesterday followed by lunch. Rachel wore Ari in a front pack and he napped for a couple of hours. Later, when he was ready for another nap I offered to take him for a walk in the same pack, so Rachel could go for a run. Wow. Forty years of swimming did not prepare my back muscles to lug around a fifteen pound sleeping baby. This is probably why you need to be young to have children!

Ari

This is 3-1/2 month old Ari, my new great-nephew, with his Nana, my sister Nancy.

No clue whatsoever

There are always goodies to be found in my iPhoto library! I have no idea what Phillip was doing here, but if I remember correctly he asked for the photo to be taken, so there you go. The boys were probably just as confused as I.

Gentleman farmer

The first thing Phillip does when he gets home from work is check his garden.

We have zucchini! In fact, we’ll soon have so much zucchini that I’ll be forced to make zucchini bread. Allrecipes.com has 94 zucchini bread recipes. I hope I won’t have to use all of them.

Somewhat related (as the garden abuts the greenhouse): the greenhouse is totally gone, not just from the back of our house but from New Jersey. Phillip and our nephew Jerome spent six hours loading it into Jerome’s truck so that it would be safe to drive back to New Hampshire. And it got there safely. While we had planned to build a real room in the sunroom’s place, the second architect we talked to asked us to list the various uses we wanted from the new room. We couldn’t think of a thing. So we’re going to put on a deck with a hot tub instead. Jerome will be back in August to help with the construction.

New Hampshire

We went to New Hampshire for the weekend, home to Phillip’s brother Wayne, his wife Roseanne, and three of their 4 children with their children, etc. Plus many dogs, as you know. They have a cookout every Memorial Day weekend using a New Zealand (where Roseanne is from) cooking method called hangi. You dig a large hole in the ground, put rocks in it, build a fire to heat the rocks, put the food in on top of the rocks, cover it with dirt, then drink beer while it cooks. Yum! That’s Phillip’s nephew Jerome in the hole with his dog Elizabeth, a retriever who likes to retrieve and likes even more to jump in the icy cold river nearby.

Hi, Moses! None of the dogs are beagles and all of the dogs are fine running free. The boys of course would have headed for Vermont, and thus they stayed at home with my cousin Marcy.

This is Levi, one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever known.

And here is baby Cole, now 7 months old!

So sorry

Christy wrote last night in the comments section of yesterday’s post that Boscoe has gone to the Bridge. I know I speak for everyone in expressing my very deep sympathy. Christy, please email me your favorite photo of your boy. In the meantime, here are the last of the vacation photos and I hope that they will evoke a sense of peace that we all need right now. The boys return tomorrow.

Baby Cole

No beagle content today, but read on. On the left, please meet Coleman, the four month old son of Phillip’s niece Gabrielle and her husband Chad. They live outside NYC and we went for a visit on Saturday. Isn’t he cute? He’s going to be a Mets fan, I can assure you of that. Oh, and that beagle in the bouncy? Gabrielle calls him Clayton!

On the right is a man who LOOKS like Phillip, but I’m not positive that it is. Because in our almost twenty years of marriage I’ve seen him hold a baby only a handful of times, but NEVER smile while doing so. If I wasn’t so old my hormones would be coursing through my body. Oops, too late!

OMG

Yesterday we joined three busloads of Rush Holt supporters and went to Washington for his swearing in to his seventh term in Congress. We were in a large room in an annex of the Library of Congress. The program was about an hour, with several speakers, the Princeton Girls Choir, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor (and poet). Nancy Pelosi was set to swear him in (I should note that it was not the “official” swearing-in, which occurred a little later on the House floor) and when she arrived in our room another speaker was droning on. Because the gentleman had mistaken us as Pennsylvanians, you could tell everyone was afraid he would drone on forever. Ms. Pelosi stood patiently about 10 feet from us. Someone asked for their picture with her and when they were done I got up my nerve and walked over to her. She didn’t see me and I wanted to tap her on the arm but you don’t tap the Speaker of the House on the arm now, do you? So there I was, almost tapping, when Phillip got her attention and said, “Madame Speaker, may I take a picture of you with my wife?” And there you have it! She was very gracious and I was completely thrilled for the rest of the day.

P.S. to my friends not in the U.S.: Nancy Pelosi was, until yesterday, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives. She was the first woman to hold that role. She was re-elected as a Representative and now is the House Minority Leader.