My mother-in-law...

This sums my mother-in-law Nancy up just perfectly. Full of energy, enthusiasm, and fun. On thanksgiving day we went to the field across from our house. First she just wanted to play with Hux. Then she wanted to play frisbee and football. To round things out - she just wanted to see if she could still do a cartwheel. She did three. Anders almost had a panic attack. No bones were broken in the making of this film!

Bad blogger

Bad, bad, bad, bad blogger.

I have been MIA and I am so sorry. I wont test your patience with posting about what I have been doing. I will simply summarize that things have been very good. Life has been fun, even wedding planning has been really fun! I know there will be plenty of stress still to come, but I am feeling great right now. I am just so excited to be marrying Anders. We literally look at each other everyday (generally multiple times a day) and talk about how happy/lucky/thankful/in love we are. There is really nothing better then that.

On top of it all - spring is finally here. I bought a pot of daffodils at Trader Joe's yesterday. I picked my pot specifically because all of the flowers were still tight little buds. I was confident that it would just keep growing this weekend and maybe I would see blooms at the beginning of next week. This morning my jaw dropped. One bloom was cracked half open when I came into my office. Its all the way open now and two of the others are getting close to being open too. I really think the plant has grown 2 inches since last night and another inch this morning. How amazing is that? Just thinking about all of that growth and new life brings a huge smile to my face. I simply adore the spring.

Daffodils always remind me of my family - particularly my mother. For years of my childhood she recruited us to plant what felt like hundreds of daffodil buds in our propriety. It was always sort of torturous as a teenager. However the spring was always filled with all of those hundreds of daffodils blooming up the driveway or in vases around the house. Daffodils are now my favorite sign of spring and always reminds me of home. I had intended to plant bulbs first thing when we moved into the new house. However things got very busy and I never had the chance. Though lucky for me - someone else did! There are shoots springing up all over our backyard. I am so excited to see what blooms. I'm sure there are daffodils in the mix, but also something much shorter. Perhaps a crocus? We will see! It has certainly been fun to see the seasons change during our first year together in the new house. The winter was intense and the spring is shaping up beautifully!

Tonight we are having a handful of close friends over for the first cookout of the season. I haven't been able to focus all day just thinking about grilling out and lighting the fire pit tonight! Sitting around a fire with a cool drink and good friends seems like a perfect start to the weekend.

I will leave you with a quick picture of me, Huxley and our house in the winter. I believe this was early into blizzard #1 in DC. I can tell because the snow isn't up to our waist already! Lucky for me the temperature outside right now is a beautiful 72 degrees!

Drewlyn

With Lyndsey out of the country in South Africa I feel a lot of pressure to keep the blog going! It's only the second week and I don't want to slack on our goal of one post per week. Work is amping up here and that is the typical pattern of university counseling center work: a few weeks of quiet that pick up as midterms arrive, chaos between midterms and finals, and then being able to hear a pin drop during finals week. At Stanford they have a culture-based syndrome called "The Stanford Duck Syndrome" where students like to present as collected, calm, and capable on the surface, but their little duck legs are working double time under the water to keep the duck afloat. It's been interesting to watch.

I also wanted to give some background on the origin of the name "Drewlyn." It may seem obvious to a modern reader, but it actually was a bit of a mistake. First, you should know, growing up, until the very end of high school, I went by "Andrew" rather than "Drew." In high school, a few friends started calling me Drew and I felt like it fit, so in college I began introducing myself as Drew and asked my family and friends to try to transition. I still answer to Andrew, but it takes me a second to remember to answer to that name. (As a sidenote, Lyndsey used to call me "And," which I always liked, but it was also confusing because of how frequently the word "and" is used in everyday conversation).

When we were small and our mom had to address the children as a unit she would often call us 'Lyndrew.' This name makes sense because both names share the n-d combination and it follows our birth order. I can't recall the times it was commonly used, but I feel like written communication was often shortened to Lyndrew. How endearing, you might think, as you envision these Children-of-the-Corn blond siblings answering to a single name.

Well, along comes the advent of the internet with dial-up modems and when everyone had America Online to connect to the world wide web. And one day Scott tells us we are getting the internet and he will set it up for us. And, oh the thrill of the internet! Who knew the untold joy that might come from being able to connect with information and people from around the world. (Who knew how dependent on the internet we would become -- I've already checked my several key email accounts several times since starting to write this blog...). So, I remember how proud Scott was to have set up the account and have us on the internet and we run to the computer to see our very first screen name:

DREWLYN.

"Drewlyn...?? Dreeewling?! Droolin'?!! That's not our nickname! Our screenname means we have drooling problems!" No appreciation for the hard work involved, just shock that we would have to email everyone from a capitalized name that reminds everyone of salivation! Oh, the dismay I'm sure we displayed. (Sorry, Scott, we were brats.)


But somehow, we forged ahead and we able to develop our own screennames, but DREWLYN remained the "master account" and somehow stuck with us. And it was the only name that seemed to fit when we were looking to name the sibling + dog blog.