Anyone Still Out There?

Considering our track record, there's really no reason you should still be frequenting at our blog, unless you're family and have to spend eternity with us anyway, or you're a really good friend who isn't deterred by long lapses in communication.

However, here we are, ready to give an update on our lives.

We survived our first semester teaching full-time, both with a 4-course, 2-prep load. To translate, we were both teaching 2 sections of 2 courses. Joe taught intro writing courses, which amounted to about 3000 pages of grading across the semester. Emily taught intro psych and cognitive psych. Our main survival technique was staying one step ahead of the students. For Emily, who had a 7:45am class MWF (who thought that was a good idea?), this meant many early mornings finishing lecture preps. Joe always seemed better at staying on top of things before classes, but he struggled to stay on top of the grading after classes.

Emily is impregnated. ETA of baby is late June. The first trimester was tiring and offered mid- to low-level nausea on a regular basis. Heartburn, aching hips, and restless legs have already made appearances. The second trimester has been more even keel and we all look forward to the gender identification ultrasound Feb. 6. Despite these minor complaints, we are super happy to see our family grow.

Joe is the editor of a book on essays about Superman. Feel free to add this to your own growing library of academic inquiries into super heroes and comic books (you all have one, right?). You can also feel good knowing you're contributing about .0000001% to our annual income, or something like that. Jokes aside, Joe has worked hard on this and there are negotiations for creating a series of essay collections on different superheroes.

Lizzie is amazing (she's a 3-year-old and does the good and bad things that come with the age, but she just brings so much happiness and fun into our lives that it makes up for the hours trying to get her to eat a decent dinner or clean up after herself or... the list could go on). We feel pretty blessed to have her as our daughter. She has quite the imagination. Given her thorough indoctrination into princesses and superheroes, she often creates fascinating ideas.  She once informed us the cardboard box she was in was a robot princess cage. She loves to play Rapunzel by attaching a scarf to her head with a headband and then perching on our bed (the tower) and calling down to Flynn Rider (dad) to come up. She enjoys books and being read to, although she is sometimes frustrated she can't read herself. While she knows the ABCs verbally, we are still working on identifying letters by sight and sound. If only she would sit still long enough to be taught!

We'll try to get some pictures up here soon so you can see what a three-year-old Lizzie looks like.