Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Wayne and Paela started off the week by cutting out a pumpkin "smile face". Paela, though she's admired our neighbor's jack-o-lanterns, wasn't so sure at first about her daddy actually cutting the pumpkin. She's a sensitive soul, and doesn't like things to get hurt. :) By the time it got dark enough to appreciate the pumpkin with a glowing candle in it, she seemed appeased by the situation though. 

Wayne worked on his job application materials more extensively this week, proofreading and getting insights from people at work. So hopefully we can get those materials in tip-top shape and send more applications off.

And I am feeling the pressure at work. I'm now on three different projects (contrasted with the first month at this job in which I had none...), each of which has at least one but more often 3-4 meetings a week. Some of which are 2+ hours long. I dislike meetings. Especially when they occur so often. At some point it's just too much overhead and ends up hindering productivity. One of the projects is going to alpha soon, so hopefully things will slow down on that while I look for easy ways to transition to others during maternity leave in six weeks time. One of my coworkers joked that maybe "this would be the weekend", and I sincerely hope for my coworker's sakes that is isn't, because I haven't started leaving things in hand-off-able states by any stretch of the imagination.

Saturday was a fun day. We found a local farm, Drumlin Farm, which is a part of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Plus, we got one dollar admission by getting tickets through our library. They had goats and pigs and chickens and such, set up so we could actually pet the goats and sheep. They also had a wildlife refuge for foxes, hawks, owls, and deer. It was so much fun to see all the animals and get so close to so many of them. Paela talked about the chickens for much of the rest of the day.

Paela is also getting more and more interested in helping out in the kitchen. This, of course, makes things take longer, but Paela seems much more likely to try a new food even if all she did was stir the soup for us. She loves to sample cookie dough, of course, and thinks she likes sampling bread dough as well. It's the new cookie dough.