Photos, Photos, and More Photos

It wasn’t easy, but I am finally all caught up on going through the hundreds (thousands?) of kids’ photos from the past year. In addition to the new albums I announced in my November 25 post, I have just posted two even newer albums:

Melody & Julianne: July - September 2008
Melody & Julianne: October - December 2008

Since there’s still a full month left to the year, I’ll continue to add to the second album above as the month progresses. So if you check back regularly, you’ll see new pictures periodically showing up at the end of that album.

As always, you can access all my online albums via my photo album index page, which goes all the way back to 2004 and includes several theater-related albums from my pre-Daddy days.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

No, I’m not talking about Thanksgiving or the Chanukah / Christmas / Kwanza / Festivus winter holidays. I’m talking about Mallomars.

That’s right: Mallomars. The greatest commercially-produced cookie in the history of the universe.

East Coast readers will know what I’m talking about. For everyone else, let me just say that Mallomars are a seasonally produced product by Nabisco. Their composition is simple: graham crackers toped by marshmallow and all enrobed in dark chocolate. That’s pretty much all there is to it. But a great cookie is more than a collection of ingredients. It’s that certain extra undefinable something that creates cookie goodness.

I’ll always remember the time from my childhood when I visited my father at his workplace and accidentally discovered that he kept a stash of Mallomars in his desk drawer — a true life-changing event. From then on, no visit to my father’s workplace was complete without sneaking a cookie or two out of their hiding place when he stepped out of his office. Ah, memories.

Every year, Nabisco waits until the weather is cool enough to allow Mallomars to be shipped to stores — mostly in and around New York, but also to the West Coast for a particularly limited time. The chocolate melts easily, so I guess it’s important to ensure the cookies ship only when the weather is likely to stay cool. Because of this, I never know when the cookies are going to show up at any of my local markets. And when they do, they’re almost always gone as soon as they arrive. I usually start looking for them in Sepetember and if I don't see them by late October, I all but resign myself to the devastating possibility that I’ve managed to miss them for the year. Fortunately for the past few years, I’ve lucked out and managed to be at the right market at the right time.

And so it was that Lady Luck visited me again this year. This past weekend I was shopping at PW Market with Melody and Julianne, distracted in my dual task of selecting the items we need and entertaining the kiddies with Daddy-ish conversation, when the delightfully familiar and oh-so wonderful yellow of the Mallomar box caught my eye. I greedily snatched up four boxes (mustering up the self-control it takes to keep from completely emptying the shelf takes all the will power I have) and knew that the true holiday season of Mallomar goodness has begun.

For more about Mallomars and what all the fuss is about, check out this page. Extra credit to anyone who understands what I mean by saying I fall into the “dorsal method” camp.

New Photo Albums!

After countless delays, I’m finally working my way through all the kids’ photos from the past year. I'm about halfway through, having just made my way through June, and thought this would be a good time to post links to the newest albums. So without further ado, here they are:

Melody: From 24 Months to 27 Months
Melody & Julianne: December 2007 - March 2008
Julianne’s First Birthday Party (March 2008)
Melody & Julianne: April - June 2008

You'll see that I’ve gradually transitioned from creating separate albums for Melody and Julianne to simply doing combined albums. Now that Julianne is older and walking, the kids are pretty much always together now, so it didn’t make sense to do separate albums when they mostly overlapped anyway. I’m also aiming at doing these quarterly now. So the next album will cover July through September and the one after that, naturally, will cover October through December.

By the way, don’t forget to visit my photo album collection page to view all of the albums I’ve posted over the past number of years (including some pre-kids theater albums).

My goal is to be fully caught up by the end of the year (hopefully sooner). But in the interim, here are a few recent Halloween-related shots I thought pretty well represents what the kids have been up to most recently.