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January was exhausting.  Greg set up a series of photo shoots to create new work for his book – five shoots in ten days. While we were preparing for them, I started waking up covered in itchy red welts. Bedbugs.

The internet said it could turn into an infestation if not controlled immediately. As in, right at this very moment, while we were producing a photo shoot and hosting Greg's art director as a houseguest and expecting my mother to arrive in another day.  Oh, and also, I was coordinating the first ever order for the brand new Savannah Food Co-op. It’s hard to describe how I reacted, but Greg says the only time he’s seen me worse was the night a few months after Oliver was born when I thought I’d found a lump.

We’re not really pesticide people, so my parents stayed at a hotel and we moved into the guestroom.  I then covered every surface in our bedroom with a layer of diatomaceous earth, working the powder into the mattress and box spring, into corners, into our carpets, and laying down a circle of death at the base of the bed and a Maginot Line by the door. We bought special covers for the mattresses and gave the dog a flea bath and washed everything everything in superheated water. Our uber-helpful cleaning person, Karen, vacuumed every crevice.  Then we waited. For a month. And it worked.  And I haven’t been bitten since.  But oh did that suck.

As for the photo shoot – it went great!  And I don’t use exclamation points lightly (and I hate people who do.) My favorite part was meeting our neighbor Cuffy and her kids.  We pass their house every morning on our daily dog walk, and Greg had often mentioned how much he would love to photograph their perfect, beautiful porch, which had the most tasteful Christmas lights in all Savannah.  So finally, this being the South, we just rang their bell and introduced ourselves. And they invited us in, and Oliver loved their Christmas tree and playing with the girls, and the girls modeled for the photo shoot, and that’s their porch swing at left.  Try doing that in NYC.

Our hazmat shoot was also great fun.  Big shout-out to Tavia for hooking us up with scary looking gear.  There’s nothing like acquiring professional chemical protection suits at an affordable price to make you feel like a competent producer.  And the too-perfect food was prepared by Libbie, food stylist to Paula Deen her-very-self. OK, it’s a small town and it only has one food stylist, but at least she’s great.

Sadly, Oliver did not actually get to pet or even approach the wallaby – that pic is all about the miracle of Photoshop.  Wallabies are actually not all that friendly when confined in small unfamiliar spaces and surrounded by a big crew of people with flashing lights.  That particular specimen tried to escape through the closed window - luckily neither keeper nor wallaby were seriously injured.

In more Oliver-centric news, he and I went on a series of pre-school investigatory field trips this month, and we found one that we liked. Maggie’s is play-based and the teachers seem really loving and enthusiastic and we just get a really good vibe there. As opposed to the other Montessori school we looked at, that we had to disqualify out-of-hand due to a racist comment made by the director…

Oliver’s big developmental thing this month was learning lots of new words, though I can’t remember what they were. His favorite food was olives. Here’s how I described him in a reassuring email I sent to another mother concerned that her “very active toddler’ might have ADD.

No snapshots of Oliver from this month - we were otherwise occupied.

-M