New Beginning

Uh, hello? Is this blog on?

My long silence here is Baby C's fault. After nearly nine months of playing fast and loose with the kid's soul, we finally had her baptized last week. Her grandmothers are much relieved. The renouncing of Satan turned out to be the least of our worries. We had to clean the house for all the family who would be in town, so we also decided to throw a big party, sort of a baby-house-warming. Which meant that we finally had to unpack those boxes from our move last August. And hang curtains. And get pictures framed. And figure out what to feed all the houseguests. And repair the hole in the deck, weed the garden, buy a grill, rent a tent, discuss our ambivalence towards organized religion in hissed whispers to avoid alerting the more devout members of our family that our views may not be exactly orthodox, and, well, you get the idea.

Greg had emailed people to say “no gifts, please", but I got one anyway. We spend a lot of time as guests in our parents’ houses in our original hometowns (his: Boston, hers: Chicago), where it sometimes feels that real life unfolds without us. Baby C’s christening brought our families together for the first time since our wedding five years ago. Most of our local friends (and even a couple of long-distance ones, too) joined us. Having everyone together in our freshly-curtained house made me feel more established, somehow. I realized for the first time that our life in DC has a weight and substance of its own.