Margaret is a punk rocker

All of a sudden, Margaret has started to outgrow a lot of her clothes. As a result, the other day, she was wearing tight jeans and her Chucks along with a striped shirt. That outfit, along with her shaggy, unkempt hair (still no haircut yet) led me to say, "You know what? She looks like a Ramone." (Abby didn't really appreciate the likeness, but see here or here.) Of course, Joey, may he rest in peace, would've been wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket (and his Chucks probably wouldn't have been pink), but I think that we captured the basic gestalt of the whole thing. (Personally, I think that this would be a great Halloween costume. But not many people would get it. Then again, Mickey at Margaret's daycare was dressed up as a punk rocker complete with black fingernail polish, so who knows.)

Why, you might ask, are the above photos all funky? Were we also shooting for some avant-garde photo effect in the pictures? No. Instead, it appears that our digital camera is kaput. Which bodes ill for dedicated readers of this blog who really show up for the photos rather than my entertaining, insightful (sic) ramblings. Rest assured, however, that we'll be heading to Best Buy tomorrow to look at new digital cameras. After all, Teddy's starting to smile. A lot. Which must be documented ad infinitum.

In other news, we traveled to Ohio for Thanksgiving. We learned a number of lessons from that trip:

First, and most important, the readership of this blog is much more extensive that I ever would've imagined. I always figured that it just involved a subset of immediate relatives (e.g. grandparents, some siblings, a few aunts and uncles) along with a few other folks, but the audience is somewhat larger than that. Admittedly, it still involves extended family, but when my 18 year-old cousin comments on my blog posts, I know that I've tapped into something that is much bigger than me or this blog. Or something like that.

Our kids are pretty good travelers at this point. The trip to Ohio from DC, under ideal circumstances, would take about 6 hours. Our trip took about 9 hours each way. But 2.5 of those extra hours involved planned stops (i.e. a visit to P'burgh to visit some friends and pick up a marriage certificate - good news, we were officially married back in 2003 - on the way there, and then a stop for dinner in central PA with the Philly relatives on the way back.) In terms of fussing, we experienced about 30 minutes in each direction that involved sustained (and coordinated) fussing by the kids. They spent most of the time sleeping.

Margaret has a very strong "survival instinct" which leads her to avoid most new people. For example, everytime she was almost handed to my brother Steve, she would yell "No! No! No!" Luckily, he didn't take it personally. About the only people who she voluntarily will engage are my sister, her husband (Margaret ran to him with a big hug in parking lot of their central PA hotel - Joe said, "Wow, what a nice greeting." I pointed out that, after three hours in the car, she probably would've hugged anyone.), my Dad, and my Mom.

Speaking of my Mom, while Abby's parents are purveyors of fast food, my Mom appears to be the key source of sweets. Margaret's exposure to sweets has been pretty limited thus far, not due to any concerted effort on our part, but rather because we just don't eat many sweets. She would just as soon eat "pizza" or fruit rather than candy. However, on Thanksgiving, Margaret found out that she loves pumpkin pie, thanks to my mom. Then I caught Mom feeding her a chocolate chip cookie at my aunt and uncle's house. Now, I don't object to her eating such foods, but dangit, I should be the one who gets the adoration that accompanies sweets.