Joshua's Spot

A web gallery from our day at the lake, last month

Check out the photos here.

Placeholders, plans, and excuses

Well, so - here's the good news: there are a few new pictures in the photo albums. Well, not all of them "new" in the sense that they were just taken, but "new" in the sense that they're old-ish pictures that I've finally gotten off my camera and uploaded so you can see them. The one to the right is truly new, taken just yesterday - the rest go back as far as June. (Shame on me.)

The other good(ish) news is that there are nearly 1,000 (yes, you read it right) other photos waiting in the wings, either on CDs that my mom sent of photos she took while she was here, on on the CF cards from my camera. Not to mention several hours of video on three tapes from the video camera.

The bad news is that all those pictures and all that video are basically stuck where they are. My old computer is slowly dying, bit by bit, starting with (inconveniently enough) the USB ports, which are flickering in and out of usability. I can access devices plugged into the USB ports itermittently, just long enough to, say, import one photo off a card reader into Photoshop Elements - at which point the USB connection will be lost, forcing me to re-establish the connection before I can load another photo. Video works better, since it's over FireWire, but the software I have (ULead Videostudio 9) is so clunky that it's painful to try to get a movie out of it - when it doesn't crash altogether.

So basically, I'm still waiting for the new iMac to arrive before I torture myself any further trying to get this old Dell to function properly. Which means the pile of photos and video waiting to be processed just keeps growing.

Thankfully, once I do get the new machine, it'll be much less painful to clear out the backlog than it would be on the PC. I've been reading through the manual for Aperture 1.5, and am already licking my chops in anticipation, waiting, just waiting to see it do its magic on all those pics. And iMovie '08 sounds like it'll do a far better job of turning raw video footage into interesting movie clips than anything I've used to date on the PC.

Now, if I could just get my greedy hands on that iMac, I'd be all set. Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge backlog of orders that aren't being filled, for mysterious reasons - supply? Hardware issues? My reseller pissed off someone at Apple and won't get a machine out of them until the moon turns blue? Who knows.

I just hope they get that iMac here before I throw the Dell over the side of the hill...

The kids, meanwhile, have been presenting their own challenges this week. Josh has discovered the fine art of changing his mind, much to my annoyance. He'll be standing there holding, say, a plastic orange, and suddenly announce, "I don't want the orange." (To which I'll say, "Fine, then put it down.") Yesterday he changed his mind four times about what he wanted to wear to school - he wanted the white socks, then no, the red ones; the brown shoes, then, no, the red ones; to wear the froggy raincoat, then no, no froggy raincoat... until I finally got so fed up with changing him back and forth that I gave him a time out and told him he was going to school in whatever he had on his back when I was ready to leave. He's been expressing his opinion about what he wants and doesn't want a lot in general, which I suppose is a sign of important progress in developing and expressing a sense of self - but man, can it grate on the nerves at times.

Ben, meanwhile, has finally awakened from his protracted post-delivery slumber, and now wants to play. Which is great, it's wonderful to see him awakening to the world and wanting Input at long last, instead of just napping and eating and pooping and napping again, but running from one little boy to the other for 12 hours a day more or less non-stop has been exhausting the past few days. I'm beginning to see why some parents are so adamant about the need to put kids on a schedule - not for the kids' benefit, but for the parents'. Knowing that however badly they're running you ragged at the moment, there'll be a three-hour period in the middle of the day when they're all safely locked up and quiet would be a great relief. If only I could get Ben to quiet down and stop eating us out of house and boobie long enough to take a solid nap in the middle of the day, while Josh is sleeping, I'd be all set.

Night-time is a different matter - Ben is turning out to be, in addition to a champion eater (something Josh never was, and still isn't), a world-class sleeper. For several nights in a row now, he's slept solidly from about 8pm to 3:30am. That's more than seven hours, folks - and he's just two months old today. People kept bragging to me that their 6-week-old kid would/did sleep through the night, and kept asking how Josh was doing and expressing pity and urgency about the fact that he still wasn't sleeping through the night at nearly a year old - and I thought they were just making the whole thing up. Until Ben came along, that is.

Now, of course, we're getting all anxious in the middle of the night, getting up to check to make sure he's still breathing, because it just seems so unnatural that such a little guy could sleep that long. I guess we're just not the types to be satisfied. Go figure.

Interim post...

While you're waiting for me to get my act together again after our big trip to Florida (yeah, yeah, I'll tell ya all about it, just hold your pants on), there are some NEW PICTURES in the 2007 album.

Hopefully that'll throw enough meat to the lions to let me get my head above water again, so I can get a new post up before the natives stage a full-blown rebellion...

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of YoBaby

So, the important news first:

We survived the sailing trip.

More importantly, Da Boo didn't fall out of the boat. Nor did the Boo Elephant, which was my next-worst nightmare - imagine if Joshua had thrown his little elephant baby overboard, and then had to stand there crying and wailing watching it float away forever... NOT good, right? Well, that didn't happen either.

Nor did the grandma fall out of the boat, which isn't as far-fetched a potential disaster as you might think. And she didn't have a massive anaphalactic reaction to some random shellfish exposure and have to be helicoptered out of some remote island to make an emergency dash to the nearest hospital - also an all-too-likely bullet that we somehow dodged.

Nor did the baby get horribly seasick, or refuse to sleep on the boat the whole time we were on it (though THAT one was a close thing, for a while there), or get so terrified at the motion of the boat that we had to put in to the nearest port shortly after leaving the dock and call the whole thing off.

No one killed anyone else, and we didn't have to resort to cannibalism due to lack of food OR a simple desire to get rid of anyone in particular out of sheer annoyance.

(You can see I had a lot more anxiety about this trip than I was ever letting on... AND you can start to get an idea of how vivid my imagination can be, when it comes to dreaming up things to worry about. Aren't you glad you aren't me?)

Actually, we all had a really good time, within the limits of what can reasonably be expected of a group of people (me, Felicia, Da Boo, my parents, and my sister) with such a wide range of experience with and conceptions about and comfort levels with the whole sailing idea. Felicia would have liked it better if it had been about 30 degrees warmer so she could have broken out the bikini and gotten a nice tan; I would have liked it better if we could have done more sailing; Da Boo would have liked it better if there were more rocks to throw, and stuff. And we all would have been happier if the boat were about twice the size - not that we could have sailed it (or afforded it) if it were - so we had more elbow room and more options for sleeping arrangements, including a better, dedicated, QUIET space for His Poopiness to sleep in (as it was, he wound up in bed with his momma, which was fine for him but not so great for his momma... or me, since I wound up in a bunk bed by myself, alas and alack).

Still... the weather was gorgeous, most of the time. The places we visited (Friday Harbor, Roche Harbor, and Rosario) around the San Juans were quaint, beautiful, quiet, and full of little shops to visit and little paths to walk around on. I did my best to make sure the food was decent (you'll no doubt recall that Cohens, if not Smiths, are entirely food-motivated - and that it was no less a personage than Napoleon who noted that "an army marches on its stomach"), and since we didn't have a mutiny, I guess that part worked out okay. Mom got lots of great photos (though the shots of the one lighthouse she really, really wanted to get pictures of didn't turn out so well, due to the captain trying to head off a quickly escalating crisis with a cranky, tired baby by turning the boat around just a little too soon; sorry Mom!). Christine got away from Toledo for a while and was appropriately chaperoned on the anniversary of 9/11, which was probably a good thing, all things considered - AND she got to teach her nephew a bunch of new things, like "wow," and "uh-oh" (which is now his very most favorite thing to say ALL THE TIME, thanks, Christine), and "me me me" (which, luckily, didn't catch on), AND she got a new nickname ("TeeTee", which is apparently as close as he can come to either "Auntie" or "Christine," we're not sure which).

And I... *I* just wanted to make sure Felicia had a good enough time that she'd be willing to go again, as the first and most important step toward my ultimate nepharious plan of taking her off on a sailing trip around the world someday. (No, really.) Since she's talking about how we'll do things differently the next time - which implies that there will BE a next time - I guess that means I succeeded. (Score.)

There were two important crises we had to deal with, one anticipated, one not. The first, anticipated one was coming up with a safe, comfortable, reasonably sleeping arrangement for Joshua. Our first effort didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. We tried to rig up an enclosed bunk for him in our cabin, on the lower of the two bunk beds next to our double berth, with a lee cloth (basically a nautical version of a toddler's bed rail, meant to keep adults from rolling out of the bunk while the boat is heeling under sail) to keep him in there at night in spite of his all-too-active sleeping habits. This, folks, did NOT work. The first time he sat up, he bonked his head on the upper bunk, and then woke up to find himself in a dark hole, where he could hear but not find his momma, and without room to move around or any idea where he was. You can imagine how quickly he wound up in our bed, hysterical and scared out of his wits - and from that point on he never left it, all week, including the two nights we stayed at a friend's house in Seattle after we left the boat. Neither Felicia nor I (nor Da Boo, for that matter) slept very well all week - but at least we slept, which is better than it could have turned out, given how finicky and stubborn this kid is about his sleep habits.

The other potential crisis that we *hadn't* foreseen was a wrinkle in the "how to keep the baby in the boat" worries I'd had. The boat we wound up chartering, a two-year-old, 43-foot French-built deck salon sloop, had a pass-through area leading from the cockpit onto the swim platform on the transom, which wasn't particularly well closed off even as designed. On this particular boat, the movable seat that was supposed to close this walk-through under way was broken, so not only could His Danger-Prone-Ness potentially crawl under it (and thus go right off the boat), he could just push on it and make it fall out completely, and thus go right off the boat. Needless to say, this played all too well into my Overblown Parental Anxiety Attacks, and I got on top of the problem with the charter company about, oh, 33 seconds after we first saw the boat. The solution we collectively came up with proved to be a real gem, and turned a potential problem into a huge asset. With a piece of plywood screwed over the opening, that little pass-through became a perfect Boo Spot, where he had support on three sides even while the boat was moving around, so he could stand there securely (right next to his daddy at the wheel) and look around and be part of the action... and throw rocks into the wake of the boat as we sailed or motored along.

Perrrrr-fect.

So, we all survived our first family sailing trip, more or less intact.

On the way home, while the grandparents and the auntie went off to Portland to get Christine to the airport (with a little exploration of the city along the way), Felicia and Joshua and I went to visit Felicia's college friends Larry and Dawn and their two oh-so-rambunctious boys, who are 6 and 3 (give or take), in Kirkland WA, just outside Seattle. Joshua learned a LOT about how to roughhouse with any potential siblings he might have, and we learned that in the proper context, he isn't NEARLY as peripatetic a Tasmanian Devil as he could potentially be. These kids ran on fusion reactors, I kid you not. It was weird to see Joshua in a situation where he's the youngest, quietest, least vocal, least advanced child in the group, given that to us on a day-to-day basis he's such a miracle and is learning so many things so fast. We got a pretty good reality check about just how much we have ahead of us, from potty training to the whole "why" thing to the endless series of mind-bending questions that he's eventually going to start asking about, oh, everything.

Larry took us and the whole gaggle of kids to the Puyallup State Fair, south of Seattle, that Friday - not so much for the kids' sake, really, but because Larry is kinda scarily addicted to state fairs and has hardly ever missed one since he was knee-high to a grasshopper himself. Which is kinda odd in a podiatrist, really, but it's not like I'm exactly normal myself, here, so oh well. The kids had a blast, including Joshua, who was REALLY into the whole petting zoo idea - though in his case, predictably, it was more of a kissing  zoo. Joshua, unlike Larry's two little demons, was too little for just about all the rides, and too tired for the merry-go-round... but he did find this neat drum stand thing, that someone had created out of old steel drums and bottles and jerry cans and cow bells and things, and left out with a jarful of home-made drumsticks for the kids to play on. Joshua spent a loooonnng time around that thing, both banging on everything he could find and watching the other, bigger kids to pick up pointers. (He's gotten really into watching, and absorbs everything - which means we'd better clean up our act and watch what we say around him, like, PRONTO.)

Larry, among other notable accomplishments, is a semi-professional photographer who is one of the official volunteer photographers for the Seattle Seahawks, with a collection of  high-tech gadgetry that makes my poor little Nikon D70 look like a toy - AND, more unusually, Larry has the skill to take advantage of all the capability those gadgets offer him. He took some gorgeous shots of Joshua at the Fair, including those you see here.

There are tons of other photos in the gallery, which you are more than welcome to peruse at your leisure, all three of you out there. PLUS, as a special bonus for being patient, I've finally updated the pics of the Big Dig, so you can see how our ridiculously drawn-out remodel is coming along, now that the landscaping is allllmoooosst finished, even though it sometimes seems to be moving along about as slowly as grass grows.

Enjoy.

Photos, at long last

As promised, there's a new batch of pics to wade through in Joshua's very own album.

Next, I need to wade through about two hours of raw video. Joy. (Sure, there's some great stuff in there. But still.) First, though, I think we're going to take this little Tasmanian Devil off to the County Fair, for a little petting zoo action. So don't hang around your computer waiting for a shot of movies, folks. (Ha. As if you had nothing better to do with YOUR weekend, either.)

A bone or two, thrown to the lions (or lionesses)

While I'm still up to my a... er, "neck" in springtime projects, trying to get a gazillion things done before we haul out of here for deepest, darkest Ohio on Friday morning, I've dumped a new load of pics in the photo album to stave off a revolt of the blog-masses (you know who you are, Mom, and Mom).

Hopefully, this will buy me a few more days before I discover a box full of rotten tomatoes on my front porch, or something.

New Photos

While you're waiting for an update from the home front (which has been deep in the midst of deck finishing, child care, doctor's visits, house reorganizing, and general busy-ness lately), I've thrown a few new photos into the maw of the hungry blog-beast. Look both in the Big Dig and Joshua folders for a little bit of new stuff.

Hopefully that'll keep y'all from chewing off your own left feet while you're waiting for more nourishment.

Photo Shoot, and the Imminent Demise of the Milk Fairy

First, while I've got your undivided attention, don't forget to go to the photo album - I finally got around to putting up a SMALL SAMPLING of the gazillion photos my mom took of Joshua and Bela (and, incidentally, Gimli) in her three- hour photo shoot last weekend.

No, you don't get all 170 photos. And no, I'm not posting the "baby porn" butt shots on the internet, not without doing a background check on all y'all first, to make sure you're not going to sell photos of my son's cute little tush to some nutcase named "Serge" in Bulgaria who's going to post them all over a bunch of wacko underground child porn sites hosted somewhere in deepest, darkest Micronesia. (If you want to see the "tush 'n' boots" photos - which are, admittedly, cute enough to be in a gallery - you'll have to contact my mom. If you don't know HOW to contact my mom, you probably don't have any business looking at my baby's butt anyway, so ha.)

So go take a look. And yes, before you ask, my mom is indeed pretty much a professional at this stuff. She does a fantastic job, even if she was complaining about how getting up and down chasing babies all over the floor with a camera is a good way to wreck your back.

NOW... on to the more momentous news:  the Milk Fairy is on her way out the door.

I should explain, before I get started on this story, something that may have been mystifying some of you more perceptive readers for the past few posts - namely, why we've been so stressed out about finding alternatives to breastmilk. In case you've been sitting there reading about our gyrations trying to get the picky little poop to take everything from juice to whole milk to drinkable yogurt, and asking yourself "why in the world don't they just give him formula, for Pete's sake??"...  well, that's a very good question. Unfortunately, the answer is very simple:  we have the most stubborn baby in the world when it comes to food, and he HATES formula. Always did. Never took it. Two sips, and then it's as though you were trying to feed him deadly poison in a suspension of sulphuric acid, topped off with castor oil for flavoring. (Granted, I've sniffed the stuff, and tasted it, and I can't say I entirely blame him. I mean, who do these people think they're fooling? The stuff neither looks nor tastes ANYTHING like breastmilk. But I digress.)

In the whole history of our attempts to get this little snot to take formula - at least as a backup to breastmilk, if not as a replacement for it - we've managed to get a total of maaaayyyybe four bottles into him. We've tried every kind - every brand, soy-based, milk-based, organic, those with DTE and PCB and ABCDEFG, those claiming to be "our closest formula to breastmilk" and those claiming to be better than breastmilk... we even tried flavoring the stuff with hazelnut syrup at one point, on the theory that it'd be like a flavored latte (hey, it works with his mom). Nu-uh. No way, no how, poke my eyes out with a pitchfork, Dad, I'm NOT drinking the stuff.

We've been trying this since he was about, oh, I forget, maybe six or seven weeks old, and the results never changed. You'd think he'd get thirsty eventually - but no. You'd think his taste buds wouldn't be quite that sophisticated at such a young age - but no. So when it came to finding a reasonable alternative to breastmilk, one that could take over not only the nutritional component but also the hydrating function, we were kind of up poop creek. Between that and the fact that he still thinks sippy cups are throw toys, we've had a hard time of it.

Well, we finally managed to find not one, but two silver bullets, now that he's almost a year old. Silver bullet number one:  drinkable Yo-Baby (whole milk organic yogurt), the kind that comes in a bottle (rather than a tub) and is designed for drinking like a smoothie. He loves the regular Yo-Baby, so the drinkable stuff seemed like a good bet, and sure enough, it works. And then there's silver bullet number two:  chocolate milk. (Predictable - he is his mother's son, after all.) Now that he's within shouting distance of being "legal" for drinking milk, we decided to push ahead with it even though he's not technically a year yet - desperation will do that to ya, folks. He had little to no interest in the unflavored whole milk - he's no dumb baby, and his momma's milk didn't come from no cow, thankyouverymuch - but the CHOCOLATE stuff, now... THAT got his attention.

So between the two, and adding in the discovery that for whatever reason, sippy cups with a straw (rather than a nub) work pretty well as long as you don't let him hold it, we've suddenly found alternatives that work.

Now, much as Felicia loves breastfeeding her baby, and as depressed as she gets at th e thought of giving it up (prompting crises along the lines of "my baby doesn't need me anymore"), she wants ANOTHER baby almost as much. So now that Joshua's eating solid food pretty well, and has things that can somewhat replace the breastmilk that he'll take more or less willingly, we've finally run out of ready excuses to start the weaning process.

Which means that starting this past Wednesday, the Boo has been getting off the Booby.

It's going better than we would've expected, actually - at least as far as the Boo is concerned. He looks startled when you put him into bed straight after his Bookie, without the Booby that normally follows, and he definitely knows something's missing - but he does go to sleep. The 5am feeding is harder, since he yells like mad when he sees me (rather than his momma) coming through the door, bearing a sippy cup full of yogurt instead of two big full boobies, but desperation is a powerful incentive, and he'll eventually drink himself back into satiety and go back to sleep, with only about a minute or two of very vocal rebellion. And he still yells and pleads and tries to manipulate himself into booby every time he sees his momma - and at this point, he knows every string to pull, every button to push, every weak spot in his momma's soft heart, so this can be Very Trying Indeed. But so far, Momma's held out, for two whole days and counting, and Joshua's doing surprisingly well, in spite of the bumps and potholes in the road.

Momma, now... Momma's a whole different story.

First of all, her boobs are a safety hazard - anyone coming into a room with her should be warned to don a hard hat and a hazardous materials suit, because those suckers could blow any minute. She looks like a heroine out of a Japanese cartoon - you know, the ones with the tiny waists and size 64EEEE boobs that defy gravity and point every which way. You could actually map out the milk ducts with a felt-tip pen, if you were so inclined, she's that engorged.

Which means, secondly, that she's very, very sore. Last night, she was wearing three (count 'em, three) sports bras, and took 800mg of Advil, and was still not having a good time. And she's sure not sleeping on her stomach anytime soon.

But thirdly, and most importantly, she's deep into the grieving process for her lost breastfeeding, which was something hugely important that she shared with her son. This is a big deal, and I really grieve with her - they both just loved the intimacy of it, and the peacefulness, and the quiet time with each other. It's hard to WATCH her give that up, so I can only imagine how it feels for her. I keep telling her that she shares so many other wonderful things with him, and that she still makes him laugh and be happy better than anyone else by far, and that she's a great mom for so many other reasons than Ms. Left and Ms. Right - but I have a feeling it's going to be hard to get through with that message for a little while. So let's all just do our best to be very, very supportive right now, shall we? The Boo-Momma's having a hard time of it, and she needs all the love and comfort she can get.

In the meantime, though, I'd suggest you provide your support from a safe distance, just in case. I mean it, those things could really blow.

Aqua-Boo

If you'll check out the latest additions to the photo album, you'll see how our first taste of baby swim class turned out.

It made a big splash with Da Boo. (Heh heh, I'm such a comic.)

I'm doing my best to catch up with the tidal wave of photos that has been coming out of the Grandma's camera lately - bear with me. She did a photo session with Joshua and Bela over the weekend, while the Grandpa and I were out building our shed (the latest time-gobbling boondoggle, more on that in some later post) - and she took something like 250 photos. She then wittled the pile down to 170-odd "keepers," and put them on a CD-ROM, which I'm now expected to wade through.

If y'all think you're going to get 170 new photos on the blog, you're ALL heading for a nice padded room, real soon. You get ten, MAYbe. Possibly 15, if you're really super-dooper nice to me, and send me ice cream or something.

Meanwhile, our little baby has suddenly, all at once, just in the past few minutes, figured out how to make his walker actually, well, walk. AND he's getting his very first taste of chocolate milk, which his Momma figures is the magic bullet that will finally replace breast milk and allow her to stop breastfeeding him - or, at least, stop feeling guilty about it. Personally, I think it'll probably work like a charm, because he somehow mysteriously has exACTly the same food tastes as his Momma, and chocolate milk is one of her favorites. (Chocolate anything, really.)

Changes coming along daily, around here. It's hard to keep up.

A Post on Steroids

Those (few) of you who are particularly detail-minded and who follow every last teensy-weensy change to this here blog may have noticed that I've been sloooowwwwly adding new photos to the albums over the past 24 hours or so, as time has allowed, in between a gazillion other things that I've been doing in the meantime (tree planting, cooking for last night's little dinner party with Lisa and Matt, meeting with the insurance agent to update our home owner's policy to accommodate all these additions, running errands, going to the gym, etc., etc. - not to mention hanging out with His Booness).

If you didn't notice, don't worry about it. It's not like I expect all of the Boo's adoring fans out there to be hanging on my every word, or anything. (sniffle)

In any case, there are a whole gaggle of new pics in Joshua's album and the Big Dig, both. Check 'em out - and be sure to go back a little bit into January for a few photos of Fireman Boo in action, which I found hidden on my Nikon's memory card from a little fashion shoot that the Boo-Momma and the Boo-Grandma apparently held when I wasn't paying attention. (Either of them individually is capable of taking a truly ridiculous number of photos as it is - the two of them together are a combination that should be, well, illegal. You may THINK I posted a silly number of very similar pictures of our son with his fire truck, but trust me, you should see how many I left on my hard disk...)

Not to make excuses or anything, but it's become something of a daunting task to sit down and update the photo albums on this here blog, in large part because, well, Grandma's in the house. If that doesn't seem to follow logically, consider:  my mother is a pretty serious photographer, this is her only grandson we're talking about, and more often than not, while I'm out and about doing all the things that the grandparents' presence allows me to do, she's left all alone and unsupervised, with lots of time on her hands and a fresh, cute, not-camera-shy-at-all little baby just sitting there WAITING to be photographed. Worse, she was trained in the school of photography that, back in the bad old days of actual film (if you can remember that far back, before God invented the digital camera), theorized that you should take as many pictures as possible, bracketed all over the place in terms of speed and aperature and who knows what else, so that you couldn't possibly miss the shot or lose the moment because if nothing else you've taken 150 nearly identical photos of the same instant in time, and one or two of them pretty much HAVE to come out well, just as a mathematical probability. So wading through the memory cards that my mom occasionally hands me from her latest bout of photographing the baby is somewhat akin to sitting down and finally trying to fulfill that New Year's resolution to read War and Peace all the way through, really, you're going to do it this time.

Not that I'm complaining. She's gotten some really, truly amazing shots of our Boo - in fact, most of what you've been seeing on the site lately has been taken by her. It's just kind of, well, intimidating. So I tend to put it off, until Grandma Jo gives me a gentle (or not so gentle) little nudge to say in her oh-so-subtle way, WHERE THE #@&! ARE MY PICTURES?!?

Sigh.

So, with that little bit of whining out of the way, here's what else has been going on, while you've been patiently waiting for me to lasso myself to the computer long enough to post an update...

His Booness has absolutely, emphatically, utterly become enthralled with this whole "standing up" thing - to the point where he's taken to doing so when he wakes up in the middle of the night, so that Felicia walks in to find him standing up in his crib, holding onto the bars with one hand and the Boo-Elephant (his favorite and much-chewed-on stuffed comfort toy) with the other, wailing his baby head off for his momma. He's learned how to sit down again, after many painful experiments - you basically just let go and go "boom!" on your little baby behind, not so bad, really, as long as you don't land on something hard and unexpected with your little tooshie - but in the middle of the night, he chooses not to, because he'd really much rather yell until he gets his momma-time. (Yes, this is still going on, almost 11 months into this whole shindig. Both Momma and Baby COULD give this up any time they chose to do so, with just a few days of crying and complaining - on both parts - during the transition... but both choose not to, because they both kinda like their middle-of-the-night time together. Me, I've gotten to the point where I mostly sleep through it, kind of.)

He's become incredibly curious, exploring every single object he can get his hands on to see what it will do when banged, bitten, thrown, dropped, rolled, struck with another object, stuck inside a box, or otherwise manipulated in any way he can think of. He especially likes experimenting with gravity, dropping (or just throwing down) any object you give him - so much so that we've taken to calling him "Sir Isaac Booton." I'm sure it'll make him brilliant someday, but man, is it annoying in the meantime. More often than not, I'll come back from running errands in town, and discover that Joshua and the Grandparents (those three juvenile-and-semi-senile delinquents) between them have managed to empty every drawer in the kitchen and every toy bin in the house ALL OVER THE FLOOR, leaving a 3000-square-foot obstacle course for me to navigate as I haul in the day's groceries and mail. (Anyone who chooses to walk around the house barefoot these days, does so at their own peril.)

I've come to the conclusion, after much experimenting and considerable expense, that the experts (including my own dad) who claim that the simplest toys are the best toys are probably right. Number one, because His Droppishness tends to gravitate most avidly toward the dumbest-looking, most-boring-appearing toys over those that light up or make noise or otherwise make too much obvious effort to entertain him (and that cost a lot of money). And number two, because given that he's most likely going to go for the spatula over the Fisher Price Wonder-Dingy-That-Does-Everything-But-Cook-Him-Breakfast anyway, why waste the money? His favorite toy at the moment seems to be a little cookie-dough scoop that has a clicker-thingy that is meant to coax the dough out of the scoop - he just loves that clicking noise. But he's also very fond of a clear plastic cup, and it's great fun to take his sippy-cup and throw it on the floor, where it will leak out all over everything in a truly fascinating way.

He has imposed two rules on our household, which he enforces quite strictly:  1) no two blocks shall ever be left standing atop one another for any longer than babily possible, and 2) no object shall be left on any horizontal surface that he is capable of reaching, but instead said object shall be swept as quickly as possible onto the floor, where it can be more readily chewed, thrown, banged, bitten, and otherwise experimented with. This is just the way it is, and there's no use fighting it. And if you happen to have left your coffee mug or soda can on the coffee table, it's your own damn fault, thankyouverymuch.

Oh - and let's not forget Rule #3:  given a choice between baby toys and dog toys, go for the dog toys, every time. (Which raises the question of why we're still bothering to sterilize his bottles...) Gimli is wearing a very long-suffering expression these days.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this baby-inspired chaos and exploration, the exterior chaos that we've been living through with the remodel is drawing to a foreseeable close, at last. The deck is basically done - it just needs to be sealed, and a few remaining screw holes still need to be plugged - the outdoor room is ready for plaster and tile and countertops to be installed, the roof is finished, and the new office is just waiting for the floor to acclimate enough that the flooring guy can come back and sand and finish it (it takes a month or so, otherwise it'll just expand and/or contract later on and develop cracks in the finish, which is exactly what's happened in the nursery). Most importantly... the hot tub is up and running, and has power and water in it and everything! So Felicia and I were in it more often than is really decent over this past weekend, when the grandparents were off in Jacksonville spending a few days seeing some part of Oregon other than the inside of our house. We discovered that a spa is a truly wonderful thing, and is indeed very relaxing and romantic and all that... but also that there's only so much time you can spend in it before you start going kind of, well, comatose, and become fried like a lobster. So our first "Spa Date" proved to be considerably shorter than expected.

Ah well.

The grandparents' minivan - which, you may recall, they had shipped out here via Canada Rail, ages ago - finally arrived, after a mere five or six weeks in transit, most of which was apparently spent sitting in a rail yard in Vancouver, collecting dirt and grime while waiting to go through US Customs. It still works, and was no worse for wear other than being very dirty and kind of reluctant to start up after so long sitting on its butt doing nothing... so the grandparents promptly (last Friday) took off for a little weekend getaway to Jacksonville, which proved to be a very relaxing concept for all involved. They got to do some wine tasting and country driving and hanging out together, and we... well, we did a lot of napping, and visited with David and Patrick in the park in Ashland with the baby, and took a couple long walks, and hung out in the hot tub. I think we all felt much refreshed.

Grandma Kay, meanwhile, has been getting pumped. Apparently Jan (our housekeeper/babysitter/adoptive grandma) took note of the fact that my mom seemed to have little to do but sit around the house watching the baby and playing Mah Jong on her computer ad nauseum, and took pity on her - and in typical Jan fashion, decided to kick her into action with a little tough love, by inviting her to go to Curves with her and get some exercise. After much hesitation and some little battling with the forces of inertia, Mom took her up on the offer, and ever since she's been going to pump iron with the girls at Curves several times a week. It's made a huge difference - not so much in that she's suddenly started to bear a strong resemblance to Governor Ahhnold, but more in the level of energy that she has, and that she's just seeming to have a lot more spark and verve and liveliness. (Go Mom!)

And finally, I've been basically racing around like a madman, trying to do a gazillion things in these last few weeks while I have ready access to grandparently help. I shanghai'd my dad into helping me build a shed on top of King Tut's tomb, at long last - we made good progress for a few days, and got three of the four walls framed and installed, before they took off on their weekend away and we got rained out from then on. I've been doing little jobs on the remodel to save a few bucks here and there and put in some "sweat equity" - so, for instance, I've been running around plugging the screw holes with little purpleheart and ipe plugs, sticking them in the holes with glue and then coming back later on and using a chisel to shave them off at deck level. (Sure, you can tell which ones I did and which the regular crew did, because mine look like they were chewed on by a rabid beaver - but it's a learning experience, so who's counting?) I've continued my Johnnie Appleseed tendencies as the baby trees I ordered last fall have dribbled in - just yesterday, I planted three quaking aspens, two saucer magnolias, two Japanese maples, and one red maple, none of them longer than my forearm. (They might be as tall as Joshua by the time his grandchildren inherit the house, but again, it's a learning experience, so who's counting?) And I keep dragging myself to the gym, trying to get my knee - and the leg to which it belongs - back into action, still from that major surgery I had more than a year ago now.

Speaking of which, I got clearance from the orthopedic surgeon to do just about anything with my knee that I feel like doing - well, as long as it's not soccer, or skiing, or basketball, or football, or... you get the idea. But I can play "light racquetball" (whatever that means) and "light tennis" (ditto) and go hiking and go snowshoeing and ride my bike and do a bunch of other stuff that was off-limits until now - which feels something like being released from the county jail, or at least being let off house arrest. Not that I have much time to do any of that stuff, but hey, I appreciate the thought.

So, folks, there's your update. And right on schedule, His Booness is waking up and calling for his poppa - no doubt standing up in his crib to do so. So with that as my cue, I shall exit, stage left.