Happy New Year! [Nic and Marissa] on At Home

Valentine Duell

October 31, 2021 2:31 PM

Happy New Year! [Nic and Marissa] by Valentine Duell

Valentine waited by the front door with breathless anticipation. Aunt Giselle had predicted their guests would show up in just a few minutes and had therefore locked herself into her room for the evening. She really wished her aunts got along better. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be much she could do about it. So, she was eagerly awaiting the arrival of Aunt Jhonice and her new baby cousin!

Mama had written just before the term ended with the news, and she'd been waiting very very patiently since she got home. She only asked Mama and Papa for updates once a day. Each. They'd only told her that the baby had been born on the 14th, all seemed well enough and absolutely nothing else. She suspected they knew more and wondered if Aunt Jhonice had told them not to tell her anything just because it was mean and unfair. So she waited, ready to pounce the moment they arrived at the door. They were coming by broom since they didn't want to subject the newborn to apperation or the floo yet. Val knew that traveling the floo network could by wild enough at times, and she'd heard stories about what apperation felt like.

She had learned enough to know that Aunt Jhonice had moved in with Uncle? Nic. She wasn't entirely sure if the title was right since they weren't married, but he was still the father of her cousin? She'd have to ask. Anyway, from what she'd learned, the New Year's party tonight was Aunt Jhonice's and the baby's first time out of Uncle? Nic's place since the 14th, and not many people had gone to see them either. So this was their big debut! She'd helped decorate the house and get things ready, now they just needed...

Valentine snapped back to attention and sprang for the door as the chime went off announcing visitors. She whipped the door open with an unmatched enthusiasm, and found her aunt lifting a very small cloth wrapped bundle out of some sort of floating baby-carrying thing while a man she didn't recognize at all held it steady. "Aunt Jhonice!" The girl squealed with delight, "Is that? I mean, come in, sit. Sit." Holding the door aside so that the newcomers could pass, she gestured towards the seats in the living room. "Mama! They're here!" She very helpfully called out towards the rest of the house.

The bundle in Aunt Jhonice's arms began to shift about on it's own accord and make some noises. Her aunt gave Val a possibly strained smile, "It's good to see you again to Val, and yes. Yes it is." She turned to the man as she headed for one of the comfy armchairs, "See, I told you her nap wouldn't survive arriving. Nic, this is my niece, Andrew's and Marissa's daughter, Valentine. Val, this is Nic Sawyer." Those introductions done, Aunt Jhonice sank into the chair and gave a sigh of relief and looking at her bundle again and sighing. "Nope, you're awake again. Oh well." She shifted the bundle so that a blinking baby's face was turned towards Valentine. "Ramona, this is your cousin Valentine. Valentine, this is your new cousin Ramona Sawyer Trevear."

"Awwww...." Val cooed and moved in for a closer inspection, "She's adorable! Hi Ramona!"

OOC: Since I've got a slew of characters in this scene, I'll just swap around viewpoints when my turn comes up. Marissa's letter to Val had been approved by her author

2 Valentine Duell Happy New Year! [Nic and Marissa] 1490 1 5

Marissa Duell

November 04, 2021 1:09 PM

Yes, of course. by Marissa Duell

Marissa - neatly dressed for the occasion with her hair put up and wearing a top with sequins on it - kept a smile on because that was what everyone else would want, but she had been fretting all day about the New Year's party. She had even found time, in between running between cooking and cleaning everything as though the Devil were behind her with a whip, to fret about multiple things.

1) The baby. Her mother had told her when Val was born that one ought to take a baby outside at least once a day, for a full circuit around the house unless the weather was really hideous, so that the baby would get less sick if it had to be taken outside in the cold at some future point between being born and being big enough to have a fully functioning anything-system. Somehow, thought, she didn't think her mother would have extended the order into approving of taking a baby on a broomstick in winter. In her head, Marissa knew perfectly well that wizards had many methods of making the weather less of a problem for infants than people like her late mother did. Her nerves, however, were sure the little thing was going to be sick and it was going to be her fault for...having a house? Having it where she did? Something.

2) Giselle and Jhonice. Marissa knew why her sister-in-law shut herself up in her room, of course, and knew, too, that Giselle was still to some extent adjusting to even having family and therefore could get overwhelmed, but she still felt awful about the whole situation, and unsure how, beyond making her favorite cookies and taking her a generous plate of them, what to do to ensure that Giselle wasn't brooding about Marissa and Andrew choosing Jhonice over her or anything like that. At the same time, though, she didn't want Jhonice to feel like an inconvenience, or like she wasn't welcome - they were practically sisters-in-law, too, and Jhon had just had a baby and had a man living with her for the first time and needed a lot of support. It was just a mess, and Marissa had never, she supposed, been all that good at handling things she couldn't figure out a way to make better.

3) Valentine. She was so excited that Marissa was worried about her being entirely too much for Jhon, who was most likely exhausted and frazzled to some degree just by virtue of being awake, or Nic, who Marissa wasn't sure she would have even remembered from school if he hadn't also been a Crotalus and who didn't seem to have grown much more talkative since, or even Ramona, who she was pretty sure hadn't dealt with anything on par with her cousin yet. There could be upsets. Val might end up feeling terrible or disappointed. This would not be good.

Luckily, she'd been through this all before. Fundamentally, outside of the situation with Giselle and Jhonice, she was pretty sure it was really all just something to do with Nic still being pretty new to her acquaintance. She had been just as anxious the first time she'd ever hosted her family at the house, and just as bad when she'd done the same with Andrew's, and so on. Her nerves just insisted, despite the accumulation of past evidence to the contrary, that a new person was sure to spot any speck of dust she'd missed or turn out horribly allergic to everything she'd cooked or...something embarrassing like that, but her head told them to shut up and get on with things.

"Hello, everyone," she said warmly, smiling sympathetically at Jhonice as Val enthusiastically greeted everyone. "Can I take your coats? Please, come in, sit down...."

And then came the moment of truth: Val seeing the baby. And it went well. The baby was quiet and looking as well as she ever did. Marissa knew this was in no way conscious, but smiled at Ramona appreciatively anyway. "Yes, she is," she said. "And she's a pretty baby, aren't you?" She looked up at the adults. "Did you have a good trip?" she asked.

16 Marissa Duell Yes, of course. 147 0 5

Nic Sawyer

November 05, 2021 11:34 AM

Is it a year already? by Nic Sawyer

Nic was grateful for this visit to Jhonice's family. There were a number of reasons for that, few of them related to being around more people. It did, however, give him an excuse to go out to the workshop during the first couple of weeks after the birth. He'd said he would take a break from his hoverboard designing after the birth and he had, but . . . floo, apparation, portkey? None of those seemed like responsible ways to bring an infant from point A to point B, so he put his magical conveyance design skills to good use and designed a prototype HoverPram (patent pending).

It had actually been a very interesting project and gave his brain something to do even when he was washing the millions of bottles they had somehow not only acquired but also used. Ramona ate more than he did (by frequency, not volume), and she definitely pooped more (same measure). He had a chart that logged her input and output, so he could prove that. The vast majority of Ramona's life was spent either inputting, outputting, cleaning the output (from either end), or sleeping. When she wasn't doing any of those, she was usually screaming her head off for Merlin only knew what reason. And sometimes, sometimes, when stars aligned and magical prophesies were fulfilled, she was just cute and adorable and entirely happy to grasp Nic's finger, or gnaw on his knuckle, or just stare into his face.

She liked the HoverPram (he'd have to see about getting that trademarked) though, and Nic had enjoyed making it. It had been a long time since he got to design something from the ground up instead of just making minor improvements to an existing design, and it had been kind of exciting. He was definitely going to expand his professional line to more than hoverboards after this. HoverPrams were clearly an untapped market. They were great for just taking walks, for going on broom rides, and just for pushing back and forth between the parents in the living room. He already thought he could modify it just slightly to help with learning to walk, later.

He was still working out some aesthetics - the prototype was kind of futuristic (because he had looked up Grogu on the internet and The Child's pod was actually what inspired the whole HoverPram idea in the first place), which he wasn't sure would sell well to the wizarding community - but he was very pleased by its success so far. He could now confirm even long distance broom rides were not too difficult with a HoverPram attached to the back of the broom. At least, for skilled fliers. He wasn't sure he was confident enough in its safety features to try attaching it to Jhonice's yet.

When they first met up again, brooms, hoverboards, and Quidditch were just about the only topics Nic would talk about at length, so he knew she claimed she had improved as a flier since he'd seen her fly as a second year, and while he thought 'improved' was undoubtedly accurate, that was not saying a lot. She might have risen from 'catastrophic' to merely 'terrible'.

He'd told her they were putting the pram on his broom because he had designed and tested the pram's attachment clasps using his own and hadn't had time yet to make it compatible with other brooms, but that was not the reason. She might be a screaming poop machine, but he was weirdly attached to Ramona now and he didn't want her suffering because his cushioning charms weren't up to compensating for Jhonice's flying style.

Nic himself had flown slower than he normally would, not wanting to test them too hard with his own flying either, which had led to a longer flight than the distance would normally take, but he had accounted for that, as well as the two breaks they'd had to take to feed and change Ramona on the way, so they arrived just about on time.

They landed and Nic detached the HoverPram, pushing it after Jhon as she led the way to the front door. She rang the the bell as he opened up the protective shield that had enclosed the pram to protect it from the wind and air moisture and colder temperatures of flight. Nic held it steady as Jhon tried to lift Ramona out without waking her (Jhon was better at that than Nic was) but the door burst open and a Sonora aged girl - presumably the cousin Valentine - shouted and undid Jhon's hard work. Nic grimaced visibly as Ramona stirred.

Surprisingly, she didn't seem cranky, though he guessed that was because there were new things and faces to look at. That was another thing that made Nic glad for this visit. He normally spent months without leaving his home, but it was somehow different when he wasn't leaving because he wanted to be there instead of because there was too much effort involved in going out. Also, there were two more people in there than he was really used to, and one of them was a screaming poop machine who objected to full nights of sleep at a deep guttural level.

So a change of scenery was welcome.

And while he didn't generally like people as a rule, and he was definitely concerned about the reported bubbliness of Jhonice's niece, he had met far worse people than Andrew and Marissa, and he almost welcomed the addition of a couple of faces who were not prone to irrational bouts of irritability (by which he meant himself and Jhonice, not Ramona - Ramona was the only one of them who wasn't sleep deprived). Nic planned to leach some emotional stability from the people who still had some left.

Nic followed his . . . co-parent and daughter into the Duells' house, maintaining distance between himself and the teenager, and hoping both that Ramona would continue to hold the girl's attention and that Ramona wouldn't be upset by it. So far so good. She must have been near the end of her nap cycle anyway when she'd gotten woken up, or she'd be much more unhappy than this. The last bottle break hadn't been very long ago, so maybe she even had a few minutes of magical prophesy fulfillment in her before the screaming started.

He pushed the HoverPram to an out-of-the-way spot against the wall and deactivated it, letting it settle on the floor, then gave his coat to Marissa with a polite, "Thank you," that was intended to cover both the taking of his coat and the welcome into her home. He was pretty sure the proper etiquette at this point was to say something complimentary about the house, but his brain was not firing on all cylinders between the sleep deprivation and the long trip, and he just couldn't manage it. 'Your floors are clean,' was the first thing he could come up with but his brain was working enough to realize that would sound like he was verbalizing internal monologues rather than being friendly.

He'd never been very good at being friendly anyway.

He could manage an answer to a direct question though, so when asked about the trip, he nodded. "It was long but as uneventful as flying with a baby can be. We had to make a couple quick stops when she cried. Fortunately she sleeps really well in the HoverPram," he imagined the soft music, warm temperature, comfortable blankets, and muted lights he had installed specifically for that purpose helped with that, "so she slept most of the way."

1 Nic Sawyer Is it a year already? 165 0 5

Jhonice Trevear

November 06, 2021 9:11 AM

It has been a year. by Jhonice Trevear

Ugh. Jhonice wished someone had warned her how exhausting and horrifying motherhood would be. Well, some had she supposed, but she hadn't really taken it seriously. At this point it just felt good to collapse on Marissa's couch while Ramona was being a perfect little baby. She wondered how long that would last. Jhon hadn't slept properly for at least a month and was wondering if she would ever do so again. In the meantime her body was… well, she didn't really want to think about that.

The flight over had taken so long. Nic had flew infuriatingly slow, logically she knew why and agreed. It was his HoverPram's first long distance test run and it had been carrying super precious cargo. That meant she had spent the entire long, slow trip flitting about his broom and the pram, making sure everything was still okay, and ready to act if something did go wrong. Riding on the broom to start with hadn't been great to start with, even with the extra cushioning charms, that had made it less pleasant. Still it was all worth it, she wouldn't miss this for anything in the world.

Jhonice was not one for sitting still for long, after all of this she absolutely had to get out of Nic's place. She had to see other people than just Nic, Ramona and the occasional visits from her or Nic's parents. The only real downside this trip had was the fact that Giselle was here, but it looked like that cousin wasn't feeling social. Good. Her other one followed his wife into the room and picked up her coat where she'd dropped it. "Sounds like it could have been worse," he responded to Nic while eyeing up the HoverPram, "This looks familiar." He gave Nic a smile. Jhon figured Nic and Andrew may wind up talking shop for the rest of the night.

Her attention was pulled back to Ramona and Valentine. Ramona was starting to get squirmy and the older girl was eyeing up the newborn eagerly. "Can... can I hold her?" Jhon smiled at the girl, "Maybe when your turn comes. I think your Mama gets first dibs if she wants to." She gave Marissa a smile and offered the baby to her.

2 Jhonice Trevear It has been a year. 209 0 5

Marissa Duell

November 11, 2021 7:18 PM

And now here goes another one. by Marissa Duell

Marissa looked politely at the contraption - HoverPram? That sounded like a brand name of something, but she'd never heard of it, it must have come around after Val had been well past that stage - which the baby had been transported in, and had to admit it was impressive. "It looks a little like a spaceship," she said, and smiled indulgently when her husband also took notice of it. It would be good if he could be friend's with Jhon's...friend, she thought - good for Andrew personally, and good for the family on the whole. Maybe Nic could also befriend Giselle somehow, though that was probably too much good luck to ask....

Most of her attention stayed on Valentine, ready to step in if Val got too enthusiastic or started crowding Jhonice and the baby. Jhonice looked...frazzled and exhausted, which was to be expected to some extent, and also like she had her own concerns about Val's irrepressibility. Jhonice sidestepped Val with surprising tact, though, by offering the baby to Marissa first.

"Watch me close, Val," she said. "You have to be extremely careful with babies this bitty." On the whole, if Val was entrusted with her cousin at all, Marissa was more inclined to have her sit extremely still and then have Ramona put down on her instead of passing Ramona to her, but best to cover all eventualities.

It had been a long while since Marissa had had much to do with babies on a regular basis, either, but muscle memory apparently came to the rescue. Ramona frowned slightly, but Marissa thought that might be the effort needed to focus on a different face. Marissa smiled at the little thing. "Hello," she said, her voice pitching up in the way one did when talking to babies. "How are you today, Miss Ramona? Are you happy it's your first New Year? First a birthday, then a Christmas, and now a New Year - you're going to be confused when everything quiets down, aren't you? But then it'll be Easter, and you can have your picture taken in a pretty dress!"

She turned as if to show Ramona the framed portrait of Val's first Easter. At two months old, Val had started looking more focused, somehow, than as a newborn, and in that particular image she looked distinctly skeptical. Considering how close to lost she was in the mountain of blue and white frills Marissa's mother had bought her for the occasion, Marissa couldn't have blamed her if she'd felt that way. A tiny straw hat bedecked in blue ribbons lay by the miniature Val's side; she'd been in a mood that day, Marissa remembered fondly, and had refused to keep it on. There were a great number of stuffy bunnies and chicks in the setting, too.

Marissa carefully sat down with the baby, who made a small, irritable noise at the movement. "I'll have to look up people, see if anyone who took Val's pictures is still in business," she said, this mostly to Jhonice. Until they'd left for Greece, Val's life had been steadily documented in photo sessions - Easter, Christmas, birthday, summer, autumn - just as Marissa's and her sister Paige's had been. "Have y'all taken many pictures of her yet yourselves?"

Marissa then glanced back at Ramona. "Sorry for talking over your head, little one, but you can't answer questions in any way I can understand yet. No. No you can't. I'm sorry, but you just can't," she cooed at the infant. Ramona most likely hadn't yet guessed that the sounds people made with their faces carried any meaning whatsoever, but it was good for babies to be talked to and looked at a lot, and Marissa thought it was generally a good idea to remind oneself that they were technically people who were entitled to some basic courtesy now and then, though she rarely actually told anyone that opinion. There was admitting that her own mother's ideas about being polite at all costs ran deep, and then there was sounding a bit absurd about it.

16 Marissa Duell And now here goes another one. 147 0 5