Had a wonderful Labor Day weekend with my family. Donald flew into NYC on Wed and hung out with friends and came up to Poughkeepsie on Thursday. I showed him the house in Millbrook and then we drove with the Rubister to Bard. Took him to the Burrito Shack, but he said he needed some meat in his burritos. Oh well, I thought they were yummy. Then he took a nap and we spent the afternoon bumming around. That night, we had a hectic dinner at the Martin’s. There were some guests there who had to catch a train and leave pretty early and we wanted to too, but we were all a little late in leaving. Ruby sat in the footwell of the car and we drove down, stopping a long time for gas in NJ, but made it home by 2 am. Vince let us sleep in until 8:30 the next morning. Hurrah! Then that evening we went to Kinkaid’s, a seafood place in DC. It was nice, Dad babysat and we really enjoyed our 5th year wedding anniversary. And the ring! I got the ring1 Beautiful :). Margaret and Andrea came into town and we really enjoyed ourselves. We had so much cake.

What a weekend. On Saturday morning, we did our errands. Basically spent our whole week’s budget by 2pm on Saturday. Hit the big stores, Walmart, Goodwill, the Chinese Market and finally A and P. Brought the Jeremy-meister shopping with me and we stocked up. That afternoon, he baked cupcakes (too much baking soda) and then another cake. We went over to Huang’s house and played and played with their three adorable kids. Vince had a blast! The next day, Vince woke up at 6 am and we were off to a rough start. That afternoon we went over to the Bonser’s baby shower which was held at Laura and Dave’s house in Pleasant Valley prepared by Esther, Mark’s wife. Vince had a great time, he had the sniffles by the time we left, so I hope we didn’t make any of the other kids sick. I puked for the first time during this pregnancy on Sunday.

I’m always exhausted. Today we had our first prenatal exam in Rhinebeck so I went to Bard at about 10 to drop off Ruby. Then we went to the thrift shop to donate some glasses and pick up some shorts for Vince. Then lunch at Bard of leftover Chinese. This afternoon during Katherine’s Chinese lesson, Ruby bit Trudy on the muzzle. Enough so that there were two red puncture wounds around her mouth. Apparently they got all tangled up together and got into some sort of argument.

Jeremy’s work network is still down. It all started last week with a worm-virus thing that disabled IBM’s servers for a little while. Then the largest blackout in North American history hit. This week the network is still down and they are doing a check of computers one by one to make sure they are all OK. According to him today is worse than yesterday. So we’ve been a bit bored and restless. Trying to think of new ideas to rev up our mundane lives. This morning we went to James Baird State park. It’s pretty far to drive for a playground, but I’m getting bored of our regular Tribute Garden Playground. Today, there were a bunch of kids on bicycles and Vince seemed really interested in them. Gotta write “tricycyle” on the Xmas list.

We checked out the YWCA which is really amazingly affordable. Fifty bucks to join and pay as you go programs. The only problem was the tiniest pool I have ever seen outside of a Motel 6. Basically a 2 lane deal. And they have the schedule printed all strangly so I can’t really make heads or tails of it. Vince got himself into some wet paint at the Y as he was going outside to check out the summer camp that was going on. It looked good. So I’m going to join a recorder group. I need to order a recorder. Also, I’m trying to figure out about this engineering test.

So on Friday, Jeremy drove to work and found fire trucks and guards standing in front of the IBM site. Apparently they had cordoned off the buildings in order to do a chemical hazard checks in all the labs. So Jeremy drove back and we had a wonderful day goofing off. Incredibly lucky as I was dreading the weekend just a little bit. So on Friday, we made cookies and went to the library and Vince took a really long nap. On Saturday, I picked up Susan at the train station in Poughkeepse and took her, Vince and Ruby to Bard while Jeremy drove Eva from her retirement home in Millbrook. Eva had fallen earlier in the week and seemed a bit out of sorts and tired. We went to a wonderful concert in Olin. I tried not to fall asleep. Then we went home (Vince, of course, was so excited to be out of my care, he didn’t take his usual nap…) and planned for our dinner party. Jeremy and I are on this new budget, so we normally, on our budget-less behaviour, we would order out. But in order to preserve our budgeting this week, we planned a home cooked meal (fajitias), which actually came out to less than $6 per person. Johannas, Dakshi, and Todd came over and it was really, really nice, especially after Vince fell asleep after 9 pm. I’m secretly delighted to know that I’m not the only on down on living in the Hudson Valley. On Sunday we went to a farm near IBM to pick some peaches, blackberrys and blueberrys with Susan who had spent the night. It was nice, Vince really liked it. We drove to Beacon to see the DIA and found a cute little sandwich place to have takeout lunch. Then we dropped her off at the Beacon station and pretty much drove home to prepare for the evening concert in the Fischer auditorium. I thought I would fall asleep, but I didn’t because it was so loud and actually very exciting. Todd, Ester and Caleb were there to switch babysitting during intermission. It was great to see the babies together.

Vince was a fussmiester today. Went to the grandparent’s house and had a little mini date. They bought Vince some toys and a swimmer thing. Dinner was a disaster with him fussing the whole time.