Spaceman from Outer Space

This year for Halloween Graham was committed to the idea of being a Spaceman-Cheerleader so i made him a spaceman costume with paper mache helmet. He was getting upset that people kept confusing him for a robot but he really enjoyed giving out candy to trick o treaters that came to our door even though there were very few in our neighborhood. We went to a friend's house in a more trick or treat friendly neighborhood for a party and roaming candy collection. Somehow we managed to get him into bed at a reasonable hour without too much sugar consumption on his part (not on mine).

School is finally back in session after Monday and Tuesday's closure and a short day today. We are recovering from the storm up here but things in NYC are quite a mess. Liam was supposed to work in NJ this week but it looks like his whole week of work will be cancelled.

Tuesday storm update

Everything is fine here. We never lost power throughout the storm. We are very lucky. It's still windy and a bit wet out there. The Hudson has flooded in several places and parts of Beacon are out of power but we fared so much better than our neighbors down in NYC. whew!

Stormy Monday

Hatches have been battened down in preparation for Hurricane Sandy. No school, no work, no travel today but cookie baking is going on in full force! Ya know, just in case we loose power its good to have cookies. I tried to make Halloween cookies but we did not have any cutouts of bats or pumpkins so I had to make due with the pastel frosting my assistant and I made.

I can hear the wind howling outside right now. I keep seeing pictures of flooding from the Hudson River in our area. They say the storm will be peaking in our area later tonight. Keep your fingers crossed that the power outages will be minimal! 

Repose, with kitten

Graham was home sick yesterday. There was a lot of hanging out w kitties while the rain fell on the roof

Pumpkin Pickin

It's that time of year again. There's lots o pickin in the Hudson Valley. Here we are on Graham's school trip to Lawrence Farms in Newburgh.

5th Birthday

Graham turned 5 last Friday, it was a day full of celebration. At school they have a ritual called the Birthday Walk. The birthday kid holds a globe, the teacher light a yellow candle they call the sun. Birthday kid takes a walk around the sun for each year he has been alive and the teacher reads from the kid's birthday book that the family has completed. The birthday kid chooses 2 friends to help make his cake which they make at school in the morning. Then they eat the cake. Liam and I were there this year for the birthday walk and it was very cute. Perhaps I can get Liam to fork over some of the pictures he took there.

Later in the day Graham had his real birthday party which was held at the local bowling alley with 5 of his friends. As you can see he is having a great time and he behaved like a very good host, which is a relief for his parents.  Bowling, pizza, cake, games, more bowling, home to bed. We were all exhausted.

The following day it was soccer game, followed by the opening reception for a show I curated in Beacon called Bound to Printed Matter. All the artists make work from books. Still recovering from the weekend. 

Meet the latest

After weeks, maybe months, of debate we finally took the plunge by adding to our household. Our friend Nicole is always rescuing kittens that need homes so we drove up to Saugerties to pick one out to bring home with us. Graham was very excited about it all, we let him choose the kitty and name it. Somewhere between arriving at Nicole's home/temporary cat foster shelter and leaving we decided that our new kitty would need a friend to keep it company. There were about 6 or 7 kittens to choose from which made it very hard because as everyone knows they don't make 8 week old kittens ugly.

He named them Pedro and Ciriaco after his favorite Red Sox baseball player Pedro Ciriaco. The orange one is Pedro. They have currently taken up residence in my attic studio and are proving to be very entertaining little furballs. They have yet to be introduced to Lucille or our other far more cranky cat Big Fat Ramona. We will keep you posted on the details of that circus when it happens.