Well, let's not get carried away. I'm a baby person when it comes to babies in my family.
Finding this out was something of a surprise for me; I never thought I had any kind of affinity with or towards babies, in fact I just don't have much experience with them at all. I'm the youngest person in my immediate family and haven't spent a lot of time around my friends' children. I always thought of babies as something that were utterly adorable in the abstract, but a major inconvenience in reality. I also figured I would be like Miranda in Sex and the City: I would love my own children to bits, but other people's kids would just get on my nerves.
Well, after spending a week with my nephew James I can say that sharing DNA with the kid appears to make all the difference because I became a baby-lover for sure. I wanted to hold him, feed him, read to him, play with him, basically everything except change the diaper because that's what parents are for, amiright?
Aunt Maggie and James!
And the most surprising part: he seemed to like me right back. He would coo and smile and would let me hold and feed him without a fuss. I was also shocked by how "with it" he seemed for six months. He loved to reach and grasp things and kick and try to move around. He has a huge noggin so he wasn't quite ready to hold up his own head, but it was clear he was a three year old trapped in a three month old body. I could tell that James just wanted to jump up and run and dance and color and read....but he's just not quite there yet.
'Sup world.
But don't think that I went all the way to LA and only played with the baby (thought that was the clear highlight). I'm fortunate to have a bunch of friends that ended up in the LA are so my brother moving out there was very convenient as it guaranteed I would get out there a couple times a year and be able to catch up with peeps from high school, college, and even people I met after I started working downtown.
Saturday night we all gathered at a bar in Universal City (near Universal Studios, of course) and had some drinks, food, and some impromptu dancing when Footloose came on. I mean, it's Footloose. You can't just sit there, right? And then I had the brilliant idea that we needed to get a picture of us all jumping in the air which turned into kind of a disaster.
But we FINALLY got one of us all in the air!
After chilling at the bar, we went back to my friend Patrick's place for some good old-fashioned Saturday night B-movies. You thought I was going to say something different didn't you? The SyFy channel is always there for you when it need it, and we enjoyed Swamp Volcano and Stonehenge Apocalypse. You should actually look up Stonehenge Apocalypse. It's kind of amazing.
And the fun didn't even end there! My sister-in-law Amanda's brother and his wife flew down from San Francisco for the weekend so we could go to a small club on Friday night and see Felicia Day (from Buffy and The Guild) and her improv group perform. Not to sound like too much of a nerd, but it felt like kind of a quintessential LA thing to do and the show was pretty funny. We even liked the opening act, a group called Lost Moon Radio, that had a truly epic rap about the awesomeness of Jane Austen.
Hammer Improv
Felicia Day, sadly out of practice at Improv.
Me and Katie outside Torrance High School where Buffy the Vampire Slayer was filmed. We're giving out best slayer poses.
In the end, I was sad to leave but I was reassured by the fact that I would be back in about 7 weeks when Mom and I got back to LA for her birthday in April. More family, friends, and beautiful weather...yay!
