Christmas, Christmas, Christmas

This is the part where I go through our camera and post anything interesting or amusing that we've accumulated over the past week or so.

It was a busy week or so, too. Remarkably, as busy as it was, the holiday season this year paradoxically seemed to last forever while managing to go by in a flash. If I think back, it seems like it's been at least a year since Thanksgiving. Yet, at the same time, it seems like just a few days ago when we put the Christmas tree up. Weird. From the 24th-27th, though, this can easily be explained. Those are the evenings that Uncle Jeebes was staying with us--and all of those nights (and a few of the days) he and I spent fairly inebriated. And time spent drunk does have that strange way of seeming to fly by while taking forever. As for the rest of the season, I have no explanation.

This was a special Christmas season because, for the first time, Gabe was actually able to grasp the concept of Santa. He understood the "comes in the middle of the night to leave presents" thing. Last year, Santa was just some nebulous fat man who seemed to be everywhere. Gabe still loved him, because he loves old people, but he never really understood that Santa was coming to our house with presents on Christmas morning. This year he did and he loved all the little things that went along with it (like the half eaten cookie and partially drunk glass of milk on the table--but, mostly, he LOVED all the presents).

When he woke up yesterday, he said, "Did Santa come with more presents?" Ever the optimist. "No," Libby said. "It's going to be a whole year before Santa comes again." "Ohhh," he moaned. Then he brightened up slightly. "I'll check under the tree, just to make sure." When he didn't find any presents there, he didn't even get upset. Of course that had more to do with the fact that the giant bowl of Christmas candy is still under the tree and he started to stuff his face before we could tell him no, but there you have it.

Though we'd already been to, I don't know, ten other Christmas parties--maybe more, maybe fifty, I can't even remember, but I do know that we rarely in our own house in the evenings, and if we were, other people were in our house too--this was the night when Christmas officially started, at Nana and Poppa's. This present was the clear winner for Gabe this year. It's a Toy Story . . . factory . . . thing. It has a grabber crane thingy! Gabe had a meltdown wanting it early in December, so Mom and Dad got it for him. It is his favorite toy from Christmas.

Here is a picture of my armpit. You're welcome.

Dinner that night (Ah, Blogger, you are so wonderfully awful. Now you are underlining and refuse to let me change it. Fantastic). As Gabe does, he put all his foods together--blueberry muffing, homemade applesauce, mashed potatoes, and sausage. He went on to eat some of it. Yet he won't eat pizza. Makes one wonder.

Wonderful. It switched the color to blue up there when I tried to get rid of the underline and won't change it back. Yet, now we're back to black and bold. Excellent (that had a sarcastic ring to it, in case anyone missed that). Here's the picture of all of us with our favorite Christmas presents. My favorite present is down in the front, next to Gabe's factory. Can you see it?

Here's a (oh, great, back to blue and underlined again) priceless picture that accurately displays the only reason why anyone buys a Shake Weight. Hilarious. It's an awful piece of exercise equipment, but it sure makes for funny pictures. Because we're cheap bastards, the adults on my side of the family draw names and only buy one present, roughly $20, following a theme. This year was "As Seen on TV." The Shake Weight won the prize for Best in Show.

The next night, Christmas Eve, we spent with Libby's family (I'm not even going to try and change the color on this one. Screw you, Blogger). We didn't get many pictures (but two of the videos below are from that night). You can't see them very well because of the lighting, but Norah is wearing antlers. And drooling. Still. I'm not sure it's ever going to stop. More than likely, she will be the only child in middle school who has to wear a bib every day. Poor kid.

Gabe wearing (oh, great, back to normal, this is exciting now, it's like a stupid lottery where the prize, instead of being stoned by your fellow citizens is consistent font coloring) the crown from his Christmas Cracker. The Christmas Cracker is a tradition in much of the English speaking world, sent to us by Libby's folks. We don't use them here in the states because Burger King has a monopoly on the manufacture of all paper crowns. Crackers also contain really bad jokes--like the ones on a Bazooka Joe wrapper or that might appear on a popsicle stick.

James might not be drunk yet at this point (probably around 10:00 or so in the morning), but it would happen soon enough. This was pretty typical through James' stay. Gabe rarely left his side if he could help it.

The factory was the winner with Gabe, but this dollhouse won the day with Norah. I found it at the thrift store for $3. Win! We got her some sets of people and furniture to go in there, and she's been playing with it more or less non-stop for the past few days.

Behind the couch with Uncle Jeebes. That sounds like the name of a public access TV show. Gabe has really been making use of his space behind the couch since Christmas. He's been sneaking candy from the bowl back there to eat when nobody is looking. He has definite hoarder tendencies.

The booze. This was probably around noon on Christmas Day. By this point, these boxes are already missing two bottles of champagne (consumed), a bottle of Crown Royal (have gone), two bottles of red (on the counter so they didn't get too cold--we just left all the rest of this outside since there wasn't nearly enough room in the fridge), and two bottles of wine James gave as gifts. By the time Jamie left, some of the beer was all that was left out there. Read into that whatever you want because I don't have enough brain cells left to read much of anything.

A mask, given by Aunt Molly. These masks were awesome, but I think they were designed by molemen who didn't need to use their eyes. The eye holes weren't spaced properly, weren't big enough for people eyes, and didn't have any kind of stiff backing to keep the felt from sucking straight back into one's eyeballs, making it effectively impossible to open one's eyes. We made some modifications, though, and now Gabe can be a disco superhero just like he's always wanted!

Norah on her homemade blankie (also from Aunt Molly). This blanket is awesome and clearly NOT made by molemen.

Actually, the cheap sets of Legos that Libby bought Gabe might have been more popular than the factory. Christmas day, he spent nearly six straight hours sitting at his little desk in the office working on his Legos. The look on Jamie's face her is priceless, as all three of us adults had it at one point or another while trying to put together the vehicles these sets made. I have given up entirely on putting them together now. They take a little over a half hour of close attention to put together, and Gabe invariably breaks the end product in less than five minutes. Now he has a box full of very small Lego pieces to stick together in random shapes. And we step on them a lot. Hurray for Lego!

James modeling his new clothes. By this point in the day, we were well and truly drunk. Shortly after this, I took a short nap and woke up, at 3:00 p.m., with a hangover. I went on to get drunk and sober up one more time that day. Glorious.

Just to prove that we aren't entirely negligent parents. We DID get the kids out to play at least once over the holiday weekend. Well, not "at least" once. JUST once.

Video from Kent and Kathy's house (Libby's aunt and uncle). The kids were already wound for sound. The videos are pretty self-explanatory, just Gabe and Norah being dorks.

Apparently the "spinning until you fall down like a drunk" thing wasn't just Gabe. It must be a universal toddler thing. I would have thought for sure Norah would be more sensible. Guess not. Definitely still pretty funny.

And, finally, further proof that we got the kids some exercise. Or, at least, that they were chased around our yard for twenty minutes or so.

The Fourteen Year Itch

Fourteen years ago today, at this very time (9:30 a.m.) I was already starting to get drunk for the first time. Mid-afternoon, I would get married to my first wife (who is determined to be my last wife by driving me to an early grave), and then I would get drunk a second time that night.

I would not get drunk twice in one day again until last Saturday (Christmas Day), when Uncle James and I spent much of the sacred day bombed off our asses. Around 3:00, I laid down for an hour long nap and woke up with a hangover--the first time I've ever had one in the middle of the afternoon. But I soon drank it away and everything was better. It was a truly blessed day (and I will put up a big long Christmas post filled with several days of pictures and videos at some point in the next few days--whenever I get more than a few minutes to sit at the computer).

But back to my 14th anniversary today.

As I'm sure everyone already knows, the 14th anniversary is the "ivory anniversary." To celebrate, I have a special treat in store for Libby when she gets home from work tonight. It's taken a little doing, but I've managed to set up a two-shall-enter-one-shall-leave style Mad Max Thunderdome in our backyard. Only, this time, three shall enter and I shall leave as I use a walrus as a club and beat an elephant to death with it. Then I will take all of their tusks and build Libby a series of fourteen stylishly scrimshawed bird cages that she can hang around our yard (probably in the non-Thunderdomed parts). Then, every time a songbird takes a shit in one of these birdhouses, Libby can think of me. Very poetic and appropriate, I think.

And that, I think, does a pretty good job of summing up how great the last fourteen years have been. Thanks, Libby! You're a peach and WELL worth the effort of beating an elephant to death with a walrus!

The Day I Dropped the Bomb

A little while ago, I noticed that our Christmas tree was out of place. For the past few years, we've been using a little four foot "porch tree" as our only Christmas tree. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) it can be placed up on a table away from our children, and 2) we are lazy and a small tree takes far less time to decorate. This year, we have it up on a cabinet in our dining room. It's high enough that Norah can't reach it, and we didn't figure we would have as much trouble with Gabe this year. Last year, we had the tree behind the couch in the living room and, by the end of the season, he wasn't messing with it anymore. We figured he had moved beyond that stage where he had to mess with the ornaments all the time.

Not so.

A couple times this week I've noticed the tree pulled out to the edge of the cabinet, and it's been turned a few times. Gabe has obviously been doing an inventory of the ornaments and pulled the tree out so he could reach more of them. A few times, I've found little, unimportant ones (the ones we purposely put close to the bottom of the tree) lying on the floor, and each time I've picked them up, chewed Gabe out, and hung them back up. After the first few times, I threatened to put the Christmas tree away if he didn't stop.

And it sort of seemed like he had. Until today. When I went over to push the tree back against the wall, I noticed that it seemed kind of thinly decorated. Closer inspection showed that, indeed, more than a dozen ornaments were missing.

I immediately went to the first place that I now look for ANYTHING when it's gone missing in our house, behind the couch to Gabe's little hoard. He is keeping everything back there now. Food, drink cups, trash, toys, books, more trash, vermin, you name it. After pulling out all the blankets and pillows, I quickly spotted a couple of the ornaments. I called him over and told him to find them all for me.

For ten minutes, he found ornaments. Lots of them. Some not in the best of shape anymore, and all of them missing their hooks, which I'm sure will end up in my foot at some point in the not too distant future. He had, apparently, been stockpiling them every time I wasn't paying close enough attention and I just hadn't noticed since not TOO many of them were missing.

The end result. It was quite a collection, and I'm pretty sure there are still several back there.

As he kept pulling them out, I made the ultimate threat. The child threat equivalent of the nuclear option. I built on my previous threat of taking down the tree thusly:

"That's it!" I said. "I'm putting away the Christmas tree, and if we don't have a Christmas tree, then Santa won't know to come to our house. No more Santa! No more Christmas!"

Not surprisingly, Gabe started to cry. He sobbed and bellowed and made some excuse about needing more light to see the ornaments and that was why he took them back there. The kid is improving slightly on his lying skills, but he really needs to work on his concept of plausibility. I let him cry for a little bit and then he promised that he wouldn't take down any more ornaments. I agreed that I wouldn't take the tree down and end Christmas, but if he touched even one more ornament, Christmas was over and all of his presents were going to Finn (in retrospect, that was probably not a good threat as it might make him start to hate Finn--but I know from experience that he doesn't understand the concept of "the less fortunate" so I had to go with something I knew he'd get).

So now we see how well the nuclear option really works. It's been clearly placed on the table, and now I just have to hope that he doesn't force my hand, because I have several presents in here that I really want to open up.

Dad-Type Man Strength to the Rescue

There are advantages to having a stay-at-home dad around the house as opposed to a stay-at-home mom. Probably many advantages--though I can't really think of any others, and even this one is an incredible stretch.

Today, we had our first real emergency in quite some time. We've had many minor emergencies. Like when Norah discovered that she could climb over the back of the couch on the short ends and ended up toppling head first over the back. She landed without harm thanks to the pile of blankets and pillows, but she also landed with her head buried in the pillows so she couldn't move and had a proper freak out because of it. Valuable lessons about gravity and chubby, not entirely dexterous body parts learned. And there have been plenty of slammed fingers or pushings or pokings or what-have-yous. But no proper emergencies of the get-the-blood-flowing variety.

Until today. I left the kids upstairs to play for a little bit while I came down to sort some laundry. Norah's been enjoying the time up there for the past few weeks and Gabe loves it when I leave them alone up there because he can get up to no good without me noticing right away. And that's what he was doing. He decided that he needed to get into the drawers in the armoire. Yeah, the same armoire he broke the door off a few weeks back. The thing is proving to be quite a lot of trouble lately.

Anyway, he had no reason to get in the drawers because they just have some baby clothes we haven't gotten rid of yet and some extra sheets and stuff in them, but he likes to do things he's not supposed to for no other reason than to do them. And, of course, Norah joined in on the fun because she just loves to do whatever Gabe is doing.

"Daddy!" I hear from upstairs. "The door is stuck and Norah is trapped."

"Huh," I think. "That's not one I hear every day." So I run up the stairs figuring he's just closed a door tight and can't turn the knob for some reason or other.

Not so. What he had done, in fact, was close the door to Norah's bedroom. And, while the door was closed, Norah pulled the big bottom drawer in the armoire out behind it, effectively locking the door shut.

Now, as a stay-at-home DAD, I was able to perform a feat of strength that, I think, most women would not have been able to perform. Sure, sure. You hear the story about the adrenaline fueled mother lifting a car off her infant, but this was a different situation entirely. There was no real and immediate danger. Norah was trapped, and she would have gotten very unhappy about it before too long, but she wasn't in any danger (at least not until I started performing my feat of strength, then there might have been the potential for danger), so there wasn't an adrenaline surge to work with.

Because this armoire backs up to the headboard of the bed in the room, and that headboard has a slightly recessed area into which the armoire was backed into, I had to effectively push both the armoire and the bed back by sticking my arm through a three inch gap in the door. And I did. It took much grunting and Gabe probably picked up a few new curse words in the process, but, by god, I saved my child from a boring death in her own room! Hurray for brute man strength saving the day!

Now, this, of course, ignores the fact that my options for opening the door went as such.

First, upon seeing what was keeping the door from opening, I tried to push it in--resorting to man strength immediately to fix the problem. It did not budge easily. It didn't, in fact, budge at all (this was because it wasn't just the armoire but the bed--both of which are pretty hefty and I was completely lacking for leverage). So light exertion man strength wasn't going to solve the problem.

Second, I tried to push the drawer back into the armoire, thus allowing the door to freely swing open. This MIGHT have worked, except that my strengthy man arm was too wide to get in but a very short distance and I couldn't touch the drawer without pushing the door firmly against it. Thus, I couldn't close it because my own brute man strength was exacerbating the situation (at this point I actually thought to myself, "I wonder if I could call Libby and get her home before Norah completed freaked herself out since Libby has such nice, skinny, girly arms that could probably squeak past the door and move the drawer out of the way," but that is beside the point of all this entirely, I believe).

Third, I briefly considered finding something that I could slide in the crack in the door to latch onto the drawer and close it. This would have been physically impossible to do, however. And not even a woman could have done it. There was just no way to maneuver something around that tight of a corner, latch the drawer, and pull it closed. Directions and mass and propulsion and inertia all probably would have played a part and only a stay-at-home inventor could have figured out a way around it. So I put the plastic hanger down that I grabbed to try to do the job.

So, finally, with my options effectively being to call the fire department, call Libby and hope she could get home quickly, or give man strength another go, I went with man strength, hoping that I didn't hyper-extend myself or dislocate my brain pan and have to rely on my three year old to find the phone and dial 911 to save us all.

And I won! Take that stay-at-home moms who could not have done this thing I did!

Why Teachers Should Make Doctor Money

As the days pass, I am becoming increasingly convinced that, once he's in school, Gabe is going to be "that kid." You know the kid I'm talking about. The one who, at the school program, is dancing in place or pulling someone's hair instead of singing the song he's supposed to be singing. The one who never sits still and, several times a day, gets in trouble for disrupting class. The one that teachers have to plan their days around.

He's got all the marks of being "that kid." He's pretty smart. He's high energy and doesn't care for sitting still. And he's got a short attention span and gets bored easily. He's going to be a handful for all of the teachers he has, probably until high school.

Now, to my reasoning for the title of this post. I have to find ways to keep Gabe at least passably entertained every day. It's not an easy task--and I have to admit that I spend a great deal of my energy trying to steer him towards activities that will keep him in one place and get him used to the twelve years of school he's going to spend sitting in small desks--but I only have ONE other child in the house that I have to keep occupied at the same time. Imagine trying to juggle a classroom full of children, all with different needs, AND having to contain/entertain/contend with one or more of "those children." These people should be living sumptuous lives of luxury when they aren't working, and that's all there is too it.

Anyway, I had all these thoughts after watching Gabe at his pre-school program yesterday. It was short, about ten minutes. They prepared a few songs that they sang along with their teacher--which they'd obviously been working on for a little while at least--and it was, of course, adorable. Libby got some video of Gabe's "participation" throughout. Watch the videos and tell me that I'm wrong in my assessment of his future school life and how much his teachers should be making for dealing with him and the other kids that are like him.

Kids Say the Creepiest Things

Very brief post.

Libby got home from work a little while ago and had to pee. Gabe ran into the bathroom to pee first then was standing around waiting for Libby to go.

"Leave the room please, while I go to the bathroom," Libby said.

"I want to smell you," Gabe replied.

No further elaboration needed.

Down at Fraggle Rock

In an attempt to make Norah look more like Boo from "Monsters Inc.," Libby pulled back her first pigtails yesterday. Pigtails on little girls are, of course, an adorable staple. There is, however, one minor consideration that must first be addressed--is the hair actually long enough to pull it off.


In this case, I'm going to have to go with "no."

This picture is the one that prompted the title of this post. After getting the pigtails up, Libby decided that Norah looked like a Fraggle. This made me laugh. Maybe her name could be Buttser.

Yesterday (and today, and probably tomorrow, if I get right down to it) was Baking Day. I have not done a major Christmas baking day since the year before Gabe was born. Small children have a way to distract away from any desire to spend a few days cooking (though, I have to admit, that they are a GREAT reason to want to stay isolated in a kitchen for an entire day--seriously, I totally understand why earlier generations spent so much time cooking from scratch. I mean, besides not having fast food and prepackaged meals to buy at the store. It was the best way a mother could distance herself from her children and not be frowned upon by judgmental neighbors. I get that now. I really, really do.). But, this year, I decided it was time to revive the tradition.

And, because Gabe loves to help, I tasked Libby with the job of assisting Gabe in all of the cookie cuttering that needed to be done. Not surprisingly, since he's probably clocked about 1000 hours of Play-Doh cutting, he did a very good job of cutting out the Christmas shapes. The two of them worked on the dining room table.

None of this is particularly interesting, I know, but I needed to lead in to the picture I took.

After they finished the first few dozen cookies, Libby got tired of messing with it and moved on to other things. But she left the flour on the table, figuring she would come back to do more cookies later. In the interim, Gabe decided to play with it. About ten minutes after they were done cutting cookies, this is what I found.

The baby is obviously the creepiest part of this little tableau, with its head turned all the way around, resting in a pile of scattered "flour." It's like a scene out of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" or "Trainspotting."

Urine Is Sterile, Right?

Last night, when I took Gabe up to bed, he crawled in and did his standard inventory of friends and sleeping accessories, finding his binky and blankie and flashlight and the old cell phone that he calls Poppa or Fireman Sam on and his half a dozen books and the dozen or so friends that he's decided he simply MUST have in bed at all times. After that, he looked at me and asked, "Can you empty the pee pee out of my potty?"

"Why?" I replied. "I just emptied it out before your nap today. Did you fill it up already?"

"No," he said, trying to sound innocent. "Can you empty my pee pee?" he repeated.

So I opened up the potty and peered in. "Oh, Gabe," I said as I inspected the inventory within.

I spied one of his binkies and a pepperoni from a Melissa and Doug play pizza set of his. And two white, porcelain balls that I couldn't immediately identify. They looked like handles from a dresser or small doorknobs or something.

"What is this stuff?" I queried. "And why are they in your potty?"

"That binky is broken," he answered by way of explanation. Clearly, when a binky has reached the end of its line, a heavy soaking of piss is what it needs before its send off to the landfill.

"What is this other stuff?" I continued. "Where did these white balls come from?"

"The curtains," he said, and I realized what they were. We installed curtain tieback bracket thingies (whatever they're called, I'm too lazy to look it up) on the walls so we could pull the curtains over and hold them there. Each of them had a little decorative ball screwed into them. He had unscrewed them, during his nap yesterday afternoon when I THOUGHT he was quietly sleeping. Then, for reasons that he was unable to elaborate on, he'd put them in his potty.

Needless to say, we had a discussion of the inappropriateness of storing household items in a potty full of pee. How he managed to nearly fill it in one nap time is another matter for consideration later on.

Sadly, when I brought the potty tray downstairs, I was a bit irate, so I didn't think to take a picture. It would have been a quite interesting tableau, perhaps even delving into the realm of art. Too bad I wasn't thinking more clearly.

I did, however, snap a picture of him this morning that was a bit amusing.

He wore this basket on his head for about fifteen minutes. When I asked him why, he said, "It's my fireman helmet." This is especially odd because the ACTUAL fireman helmet, the one from his Halloween costume, was lying on the floor in the dining room the entire time. He might have kept it on longer but he realized, after that fifteen minutes, that he wasn't wearing it so much as it was stuck on his head. A short, panicked (for him) scene followed this picture a few minutes later when he realized this fact and I had to pry it loose from his head.

Is This Goth?

Over the past few months, Gabe has somewhat gotten out of the habit of joining Libby in the bathroom for "makeover" in the morning. Once upon a time, he would stand at the gate into my office and call out to Libby, about every minute, if she was ready for him to come in and join her. Every morning. For the hour that it takes Libby to get ready.

Maybe he got bored with the waiting or maybe he's just got better things to do now, but he has decided that makeovers are just a sometimes obsession now. Today was one of those days.

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed this about Gabe, but he lacks a certain . . . subtlety. Everything he does, he does full bore, all or nothing, balls to the wall, or any of the other dozen or so cliches that I could throw out here.

What does "balls to the wall" mean, anyway? In what circumstance would one's balls be against a wall and how would that in any way encourage overt action? I guess, if I found myself in that awkward position, I might work as quickly and efficiently as possible to NOT have my balls against the wall, but, really, that would only require one step away from the wall-hardly something I would consider an overly active option. Our language is weird.

Anyway, when Gabe puts makeup on, he makes sure its noticeable. Here's his application from this morning.

Our first picture. He wasn't looking at the camera, so we tried another one.

But then I took this picture, which is hardly better. He looks like a bare knuckle boxer. I went with the "goth" angle in the title, even though I haven't said anything else about it (because I don't in any way, shape, or form relate to goth, so I'm really not interested in discussing it in any depth), because I didn't think it was appropriate to relate his makeup application to a pair of black eyes, which is what it really looks like. Maybe he's got a future in special effects (or cosmetology).

I had also hoped to get an adorable video of Norah doing her new thing. I'm sure she picked it up from me because I have a nasty habit of doing it myself. Sometimes now, when I ask her a question, she'll cock her cute little head to one side and say "Huh?" Then she'll walk around for a bit with her head tilted and keep saying it. Really, it's one of the cutest things ever, and I'd really love to get it on video. Sadly, that didn't work out. Instead, you get a video of Norah sitting at the table doing moderately cute things.

Semantic Satiation

Semantic Satiation is an interesting phenomenon that I learned about way back in college in a linguistics class I took.

The premise is simple, even if the words used to name it aren't. If you say a word enough times, generally in quick succession, they will start to lose their meaning for the person saying it and (and usually for the person hearing it, too) until, eventually, it is nothing more than a repeated sound (and, before too long, it will become difficult to even say that sound coherently). We used to do it with the word "cup"--and, every once in awhile, just to remind myself what it's like, I will sit in one place and say that word over and over again for a few minutes. It might SEEM crazy . . . . Well, probably it is. We also used the word "fish" once to the same effect, but I imagine just about any word would work. Longer words work more quickly as the added syllables quickly becoming confused and nonsense ensues.

This all is relevant to something besides me being able to whip out an esoteric terminology that I learned over a decade ago.

I think my children are suffering from semantic satiation. It started off simple enough. I was saying the word "no" so often that it began to lose meaning to them. When a soft tone no longer elicited the response I wanted, volume increased. Eventually, that didn't make any difference either (actually, Norah seems to do things BECAUSE I tell her "no" now). That's not TOO surprising as I have to tell them both "no" about an infinity number of times a day. It practically is a constant, repeated stream of the word.

But, lately, it seems as though ALL words I say have been repeated so many times that they are losing their meaning to my children. "Eat your dinner." "Don't throw food on the floor." "Don't color on the windows." "Stop pushing each other." "Don't wipe your hands on the furniture." You name it, and I've chastised for it. It's a never ending stream of redirecting and admonishing comments coming from me.

Before, they would occasionally try to appease me by moving to another part of the room and doing something else they weren't supposed to be doing, but, now, it seems as though they just sit there quietly long enough for me to shift my attention and then they go right back to doing what they were doing.

Well, not Norah. As I said before, she seems to derive great pleasure out of being contrary and doing exactly what I just told her not to. She'll smile at me and slowly move her hand back to whatever she was doing. If she's coloring on the window (which, I swear to god, I've stopped her doing AT LEAST a hundred times now) and tell her "no," she just smiles at me and lets her hand make a few reactive streaks with the crayon across the window. So I take the crayon away and she bawls and shrieks and throws herself onto the ground for ten minutes.

It's all very frustrating, but it has led to some interesting moments with Gabe, who has heard me say the same things over and over enough that they are ingrained into his brain. Just last night he said, "Oh my god," when he saw the candy that he got from the Christmas parade. His context was confused, as it usually comes out something like "Oh my god, Gabe, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" when I say it, but there's no denying where he got the phrase from.

But there is something good that's come from it. My mom used to say "I should just make a recording and play it back for you boys." And now I understand what she meant. I SHOULD make a recording and just play it back for them. Maybe then I wouldn't run as much risk of the words losing meaning to me as well.

Rockin' the Belly Shirt

It's been awhile since I've taken any embarrassing pictures of Norah. Oh, wait, she's been about the only one I've taken embarrassing pictures of for the past week. Oh well. I have another.


On the one hand, I'm a little disappointed at her lack of shame. But, on the other, I suppose I should be proud that she's happy with who she is and isn't afraid to let the world know.

This, by the way, is a 3T shirt she's wearing. It's not that the shirt is too small, really. It goes down well below her waist when pulled down. The problem is that girls' clothing is all too tight. She doesn't have this problem when she's sporting one of Gabe's 3T hand-me-downs, it's just with the stuff that we buy for her. What does this say about society? Are we training our girls by the age of two or three to expect to wear form fitting clothes instead of loose, comfortable clothing that doesn't ride up over your formidable gut when you move around? I'm not sure it's right or proper.

But it is pretty amusing to take pictures of.

At least she had her finger MOSTLY out of her belly button. It's one of her favorite places to explore right now. That and her nose.

Oh, and please note that I didn't make this a post about wet t-shirt contests, which I could very easily have done considering how drenched she's made herself in the HOUR that she's had that shirt on. I feel as thought I took the high road on this one.

The Gangsta Life Ain't Easy

Ah, they grow up so fast. Just the other day I was posting about Norah's fat rolls, and by tonight I expect she'll be rolling a forty full of homies onto her grill. Or whatever it is the younguns say these days.

"But why?" you ask. "And HOW? She's only eighteen months old for god's sake!"

Good questions. I'm a little dumbfounded myself, but it is what it is. I can't deny the proof before me--and you won't be able to either once I've gotten around to presenting it. The only explanation that I can come up with is that kids really do grow up faster these days than ever before. MUCH faster. I guess I should have suspected something was going on when ALL of her shirts started gradually creeping up to show her "midriff" (I use the quotes because it's more like a midrough right now--ZING!), but I naively blamed that on her stomach being too big to fit into clothes that weren't a full size bigger than what she should be wearing. Foolish, foolish me.

But today she took things to a new level, all by herself. Right before my very eyes, she did this to her head.

Worse still, I'm pretty sure these are gang colors. I'm not sure WHICH gang--possibly one made up of train conductors or hobos--but one of them.

But, as my title suggests, thugging ain't easy. Or should that be chugging? Bugging? No, "buggin" is something else. And what's a "krunk"? Wasn't he a superhero on "Dexter's Laboratory"? Slang I'm not "down" with is stupid.

Anyway, she's paying the price for her crazy ways. Look at this!

Clearly she's doing whatever it is kids do with goofballs. Or however they get high listening to Devo's "Whip It." And she's doing it in our home! Insulting.

I mean, look at this last one!


She's lost control of her lips and face! She's drooling all over herself! And, trust me, she hasn't been to a dentist yet, so she can't claim that she's numb from Novocaine or something. There is something else going on. Something sinister and youth related!

But, seriously, she's teething again--or still--AND she has a head cold so she's mouth breathing and drooling like she hasn't done for six months or so. These pictures were about as close as I've been able to get her to smiling for most of the morning.

At this point I should make some sort of witty ACCURATE use of current slang terms to show that everything above was just me being silly, but I am honestly that out of touch with slang from the past five years that I'm pretty sure I'd misuse it. So I'll just end by using one bit of slang that will NEVER go out of style: Word.

Norah's Rolls

Just snapped a quick picture that I thought I should share--especially as it is relevant to my last post about how big Norah is.

I took a picture of her rolls of back fat.

When she first started growing them out, the first image that came to my mind was of the character Zoidberg from "Futurama." Here's what his look like:


And here's my baby:


Some day, she's going to hate me for these pictures. But today is not that day. Also, she usually has a matching set on the other side, but she kept twisting around in Libby's arms so I couldn't get a good picture. Still, you get the idea.

So Maybe My Baby IS More Advanced Than Yours After All

This afternoon, Libby took Gabe outside for about an hour. Norah won't keep a hat on, and it was a bit too chilly and windy for her without one, and I don't much care for "outside," so we stayed in. Without Gabe around for her to push and kick, though, Norah quickly became bored with only me to entertain her. Fortunately, instead of just tossing tantrums and herself around the room, she remembered her favorite activity--drawing.

Actually, prior to putting her in her booster seat at the table, she DID have a tantrum and threw herself around the room. It was pretty hilarious. I was putting Gabe's Play-Doh away in the dining room and she came in to her booster seat and started grunting. She's regressed pretty noticeably on her language skills over the past two weeks--reverting to sub-human grunts and moans to get what she wants instead of saying the simple words like "up" and "hat" that she'd been using so well for the past month or two.

"Up?" I asked her, trying to encourage her to use her words. "Mmmmmmooooooooohhhhhhh" she groaned, and she lifted her arms up for me to lift her.

So I walked into the living room, pretending not to understand what she wanted. "Waaahhhh!" she wailed in frustration as she looked directly at me. Then she spun around in place, hit her hand down hard on her little music table, noticed that she wasn't THAT close to where I was sitting, so I might not see what she was up to, and came into the living room. Once there, she walked over to the window, pushed herself off it, spun around a couple times, kicked at a pillow on the floor, fell down, hit the pillow, stood back up, and came over to me with blood in her eyes.

I picked her up and said, "Can you show me what you want?" I set her back down and she walked over to the booster seat and said, "Up." Problem solved.

If only it was this easy to teach ALL women just to show you what they want instead of having to interpret crazed signals and supposedly communicative dances.

Huh. That was a pretty good summation/punch line there. Too bad this isn't the end of the post.

She stayed up in her booster seat for pretty much the entire hour that Gabe and Libby were outside. Because she was staying content--making her little groaning "thinking" noise the entire time--I didn't really check on what she was doing except to pick her washable markers up when she dropped them on the floor.

When Libby and Gabe came back in, I finally stopped to look at what she was doing. And I was mightily impressed.

Norah Art.

Now, I'm not sure I can say that this is genius level drawing for an eighteen month old. I don't have MUCH of a frame of reference to draw from. Gabe has never had the patience to do much more than scribble on paper. He's always been perfectly happy just to see the colors appear with no particular shape or form. And then he moves on to something else after five or ten minutes. To give an idea of where he's at, just to see what he would do when I showed him what Norah had been doing, I asked him to draw a circle of his own on the page. His is the blue "poorly torn in half pizza" shape in the bottom left corner (he then added the other squiggles on the page that aren't green--Norah was going through her green phase today and only used that marker).

So there we are--a three year old that can't really draw a circle and an eighteen month old that created, without even knowing what she was drawing, nearly complete circles. The evidence is pretty clear that she's a prodigy to my way of thinking.

However, besides being a budding artist, we also had Norah's eighteen month checkup this week and we discovered that she is advanced beyond her age physically as well--especially in the weight department. Here's a hint. We've decided to only buy her 3T clothes for the time being because she can't keep even 2Ts from riding up her belly and we can't pull the pants up around her thighs. Yeah. She's 95th percentile on height, around 90th in head size, and off the chart on weight. We're not sure how she could be "off the chart," exactly. The chart, presumably, includes ALL children--at least that is the way that I figured something like "percentile" works, basing it on percentages which go up to 100%, at which point everyone is included. So, either their system is broken and stupid, or Norah is the heaviest baby in the history of recorded medicine. Since I've seen fatter babies in Weekly World News at the rate of about every time I've picked up an issue, I'm leaning towards a broken system.

Still, the evidence clearly points to her being a big, beefy baby. Really, I think the combination of artist and linebacker is one that she'll be able to bank on in the future. After all, whose art are you going to appreciate more, the frail, waifish, strap of a girl who is meekly pointing you in the direction of her art, or the burly, hulking brute of a woman who is shoving your face into the canvas? Well, who knows which you would prefer, art being very subjective and all, but you're SURE going to tell the lady who's shoving your face into her art that you like her style best of all. And probably you will buy the painting to make sure she doesn't follow you to your car and break your throat.

And here you can repeat that closing punchline I included in the middle of the post, even though it no longer accurately sums anything up. I just hate to waste it is all, and I'm too lazy to come up with another one.

Gallagher 2: The Resmashening

Back in July, I posted an observation on the possible career choices that Gabe might have available to him based on his then current aptitudes and preferences. Usually, parents have a funny way of projecting typically optimistic predictions onto their children's futures based on their block stacking abilities or some such indicator--I, being the curmudgeon that I am, tried to "keep it real" a bit more and declared that, in all likelihood, Gabe was best suited to be a stunt man or daredevil.

And nothing about his personality has changed that would lead me to think otherwise. However, based on what I saw yesterday, I'm not willing to add one more possible career path that Gabe might follow: Gallagher.

Yes, yes. I know that Gallagher is a person and not a career path. But considering what Gabe was doing, there is really only one thing this skill would qualify him to do--be the next generation's Gallagher.

As I'm sure all of you remember, Gallagher was a prop comic who was popular in the 80s and early 90s. He was famous for the bit that he ended all of his routines with, a faux sales pitch for his wonderful "new" product, the Sledge-o-Matic. He would then bring out a big wooden mallet and proceed to smash everything, covering the first few rows in the crowd with smooshy bits of this and that--most famously, watermelons.

Not surprisingly, Gallagher was my favorite comedian when I was about 12 years old. What wasn't to love? He smashed things! Equally unsurprising is how poorly his routines held up to scrutiny as I grew older. In college, someone gave me a video of one of his stand-ups. I watched it and was not nearly as amused as I was eight or so years earlier.

Anyway, Gallagher more or less disappeared into the ether of irrelevant comics about two decades ago. He still occasionally makes the rounds, appearing at low-end venues (I think he came to our area a couple years back, appearing at a local comedy "shack" where has-beens and probably-never-will-bes come to mildly amuse smallish audiences), but, for the most part, his career is over.

Leaving the field wide open for his comedic successor to step in! I look forward to investing in tarps and large sheets of polyurethane (Holy crap! To make sure I was spelling that right, I did a search for "polyurethane sheets" and the first company that came up is called Gallaghercorp. I didn't see him anywhere on the site, but I hope that he is somehow involved. That would make me feel better about him disappearing into obscurity--knowing that he was still making a living somehow).

Here's the video of Gabe Gallaghering:

Plumber's Crack: It's Not Age/Gender/Profession Restricted

Not really much to say about this. Libby snapped a picture of Norah yesterday sporting some rockin' awesome plumber's crack. And, because it's cute when it's an 18 month old wearing it, I'm sharing.

Does it add insult to injury that she's also wearing pink camo? I think yes.

What Parents of Girls Probably Miss Out On

Having one child of each gender, I am in an excellent position to, time and again, enumerate the differences between the attitudes, personalities, and actions of boys and girls. That isn't to suggest that my word is law, of course. Different children will act and develop differently. There are simply too many variables to take into account, and any or all of them might or might not affect how a child grows up.

For instance, being a stay-at-home DAD, as opposed to a stay-at-home MOM, my just being here all the time might lean our kids in one direction or another in terms of gender identification and gender roles. But even beyond that, my own personality might play a role in how both Gabe and Norah view the masculine and feminine. I am decidedly NOT an alpha male. I am a subtly manipulative, passive-aggressive beta male. Also, I am very sensitive (not in the "in touch with my feminine/inner child" sense but in the "I will cry like a girl if you poke, pinch, or prod me--ESPECIALLY if you prod me" sense). Will this decrease Gabe's chance of developing into an alpha male himself, or will it simply illustrate to his way of thinking that their are alternatives in life?

Libby, on the other hand, is an obvious alpha female (with mildly crazy tendencies--but I suppose that is to be expected from an alpha female). She is the breadwinner and, ultimately--though it pains me to admit--she wears the pants in our family. But, then, she convinced me to wear a dress in our wedding, so this lower-half-clothing generalization based on our family roles doesn't surprise me one bit. Does this mean that Norah will grow up to be an alpha female or will she take her cues from me and grow up as . . . well, whatever I am.

Only time will tell, I suppose, and they are both too young to even have a clear picture of which direction they are heading. Norah, after all, is only now STARTING to show some signs of her own personality. And, while Gabe shows definite signs of leaning towards alpha male predilections, many of his personality traits might also be attributed to him simply being three years old and full of energy.

But, again, as I've pointed out before, our kids definitely show some gender preferences that are "typical" or "expected" for their respective genders. They both gravitate to the typical toys--Gabe has his things that "go" and Norah loves her baby dolls. They are developing physically and cognitively just as one would expect--Gabe developed gross motor skills at an advanced rate and Norah has displayed fine motor control skills that Gabe is only just now addressing, especially where coloring and drawing are concerned.

So, because our kids, no matter how they perceive their parents' roles in the world, are STILL showing typical patterns of boy/girl development, I think it is pretty safe to say that parents of girls will likely miss out on some of the crazy stuff that boys do--and by "miss out," I obviously don't mean to suggest that they are actually MISSING OUT on anything, they simply will not see the same things that parents of boys do.

For instance, without any apparent influence from me or the television (because I keep a pretty close eye on what the kids watch, and Gabe hasn't figured out how to work the remote control yet), Gabe has figured out how to make laser gun noises, line up and "fight" with army men, and create imaginative situations in which a man is eaten by a dinosaur. The last one came complete with his own oddly humorous sound effects. And that was exactly what he was doing this morning. When I got the camera out--as is usually the case--he stopped what he was doing and I had to prompt him to do it again, so his storytelling lost some of its original zeal. But I think you should still get the point.

The Student Becomes the Teacher

Over the weekend, Gabe managed to do something that his predecessors failed to do, and I thought it was worth mentioning on here.

When Libby's entire family moved hither and yon, we inherited much of their furniture, including several pieces of bedroom furniture that had somehow managed to survive five children. Please keep in mind that one of these children was James, whom everyone compares Gabe to in terms of energy and raw destructive power.

Among these pieces of furniture was an armoire. Like many armoires, this one consisted of a large cabinet and a series of drawers (actually, that's probably the description of ALL armoires, not just "many," since, without those parts, it would be something else). Libby recalled often using the cabinet, as a child, as a hiding place whenever they played hide and seek--so this was a piece of furniture that saw some action. And I know it existed through much of the kids' childhoods because, inside the door, there is a giant E.T. sticker still plastered to it.

Saturday night, Gabe broke the door off that armoire. He managed to do what five children could not accomplish in two decades. And he's just three years old.

The door. Well, ex-door. Now it is a piece of flat lumber with a door nob in it. And an E.T. sticker on the back.

Now, I wanted everyone to be clear here. He didn't just break the hinges off or pull them from their moorings. Nor did he simply detach the piece of wood that made up the frame of the door on that side from the top and bottom frame pieces. He actually splintered the hinge side frame board, making it all but impossible to fix. Undoubtedly, I will still TRY to fix it, because otherwise we have an armoire without a door, which is a bit unsightly. But I'm not optimistic about my chances.

How we found out that it was broken was actually a pretty amusing story, and is evidence that Gabe still needs to work on his lying skills if he ever expects to actually get away with anything.

See, we didn't hear anything. There was no loud crash or bang. There was no sound of splintering wood that filtered down from the bedroom. What he was doing, exactly, we have no idea, and he wouldn't fill us in on any of the details. This is how it went down.

Libby and I were sitting downstairs. We hear a few slowly descending steps from the staircase as Gabe made very deliberate progress down the stairs. But we didn't think anything of this. He will often play with his cars on the top stairs, so we often hear him coming down just one or two stairs and then pausing for long periods of time. This time, apparently, he was coming down slowly because he was reluctant to share with us the breaking news.

Then he said, "Daddy, I didn't break the door."

At first I didn't realize this was a cover-up lie and not just some random statement. He often will say things out of the blue that don't seem to make sense--possibly just to remind us that he HASN'T done some destructive act that he COULD have done, or, possibly, we just haven't found all the things he's broken yet.

"That's good, bub," I said. "We don't need any broken doors."

A few moments of silence followed during which we didn't hear him come down anymore stairs or go back up them. Apparently, whatever was on his mind was still unresolved. "Daddy," he eventually said. "You don't get mad because I didn't break the door."

And then I knew something was up. He wouldn't have brought it up a second time if it wasn't relevant. So I went upstairs and I found the door standing up along the wall and the splintered remains still attached and ajar on the armoire.

I sighed, as I often do, and asked, "How did you not break this door?"

"I DIDN'T break the door," he insisted. And I grilled him for another minute or two but couldn't get anymore information out of him than that. I have to assume that he climbed inside the cabinet and started hanging on the door or something. Though, how he managed to break it like that without crashing to the ground--which we would have clearly heard downstairs--is beyond me. Maybe, the fact that we never heard a crash is proof that, in fact, he DIDN'T break the door. Maybe he just opened it and it spontaneous splintered. Maybe the hinge-side frame board had finally had enough of the rest of the door and broke off ties, and Gabe had just been there to catch the door as it came down.

I don't know, but we still have to be moderately impressed with the fact that he has exceeded the previous generation in terms of his destructive capabilities. Because, honestly, there isn't much else that we can be impressed about with this whole affair, and sometimes you just have to cling to what you've got.

That Time of Year Again

Cold season has officially begun. Hurray. Last week we took the annual preventative measure of getting flu shots for everyone--figuring, at the very least, it MIGHT keep everyone in the house from puking ourselves dry at the same time. Sadly, there is no shot available to keep the kids (and us) from picking up pretty much everything else that's floating around. And with Gabe and Libby in contact with lots of other kids and people, we're pretty much guaranteed to get whatever is going around.

About two years ago, I lamented a fact that is often lost on everyone who hasn't raised small children: in essence, it's about as easy to figure out what is wrong with a sick child as it is to discern the ailment a sick pet is suffering from.

Once, when our cat Tsunami was just two years old, we discovered that she loved pumpkin seeds. I'm not sure HOW, exactly, we stumbled onto that knowledge--probably it involved someone in our house (I was living with my brother and two other friends at the time in a rental) being a bit drunk and figuring it sounded like a good idea to offer the cat what we were eating. Anyway, she loved them. For the next day or so, until the seeds ran out, we would drop a few on the floor for her to eat along with us. She snarfed them up happily.

About two days later--after we'd forgotten that we even gave her the seeds--she became quite lethargic (this is saying something, as Tsu is notoriously fat and lazy, so for her to be noticeably moreso was an accomplishment). She spent most of the days lying on my bed. And she was drooling ALL the time, to the point where she completely soaked the foot of my bed. Since I was a mostly unemployed graduate student living off student loans at the time, I opted to wait and see what was going on for a little while.

As it turned out, that was just as well. I'm reasonably sure that, if I'd taken her to the vet for an examination, they would have charged me a couple hundred dollars, given me some antibiotics, and informed me that she was suffering from some sort of virus or other (or they would have run a whole slew of tests, charged me a thousand dollars, and then made up some ailment that I could treat her for--as there would have been zero chance that they would have ACTUALLY figured out what was wrong with her unless they pumped her stomach). It turns out, cats don't digest pumpkin seeds. They just sat in her stomach for three or four days, causing her discomfort and creating drool. I figured this out, after working through three sets of saliva saturated bedding, when she ralphed up ALL of the pumpkin seeds onto the comforter that I had just cleaned. And there they were, ten or twelve undigested pumpkin seeds. She was perfectly fine after that.

That's the thing with pets. They can't TELL you what's wrong, so you have to create a diagnosis based on the symptoms they are displaying. And kids are pretty much the same way.

When Norah, inexplicably, started exploding pooh all over herself and her diaper around her first birthday, after we figured out that it wasn't some virus or other, all we could do was carefully watch her and her diet and try to see if there was some connection (because she wasn't displaying any symptoms of illness besides disgusting and traumatic--for us--splattercraps). After about a week and a half, we established that she has some sort of apple allergy. Since then, we've periodically tried to give her apple products, just to see if she's over it (our friend's child was violently allergic to oats for about a year but then, weirdly, just got over it). So far--as her diapers from these last few days will attest (I gave her an apple fruit bar on Monday)--she hasn't.

Anyway, about two years ago, I thought to myself, "I can't wait until Gabe can talk so he can tell us what's wrong with him and we can fix it more quickly and effectively." As it turns out, this was wishful thinking on my part.

See, despite the fact that Gabe can communicate rather effectively now, he simply lacks the proper frame of reference to be able to self-diagnose. A stomach ache from being sick is different from a stomach ache from being hungry, but he doesn't really know that (that doesn't stop him from using the "upset tummy" excuse whenever he can--usually making the "logical" leap that filling it with candy would make it stop). Stuffed sinuses from a cold might cause a head or jaw ache, but he doesn't know that.

So that's where we are right now. Yesterday, out of the blue, he started crying and saying he was hot and sweaty and that his mouth hurt. He wasn't running a fever and he wasn't sweaty, but who knows what might have been going on in his mouth. Was his filling from last week hurting? Was it sinus pressure? Did he bite his tongue (this one he SHOULD be able to tell us about, but that would also require some kind of longer term memory for self-inflicted trauma, which he really hasn't developed yet)?

Who knows? So, like I did with Tsunami all those years ago, all I can do is watch and wait and hope. And, just as I was doing two years ago, I will continue to long for the day when he can actually tell me what's wrong so that I can make it better. At least I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that pumpkin seeds aren't the problem this time.

A Busy Week

For the record, I firmly believe that involving children in ANY adult activity is a bad idea. At least until they are six or seven years old, at least. Anything. But, most specifically--and because it was relevant to our activities over this last weekend--I don't think kids should be involved in weddings.

Yesterday, Gabe had the honor of being ring bearer in Libby's cousin's wedding. All things considered, he did a pretty decent job. He didn't explode, he sort of did what he was told, and he didn't bite, punch, or tackle anyone in the wedding party. Moreover, since he wasn't actually given the ring, he didn't lose that. Really, he did as well as could be expected.

Also, Uncle James (sadly, he's no longer Uncle Jeebes--though, for some strange reason, Gabe spent about half the weekend calling him Jason, or Uncle Jason) was here for the weekend. So that's been fun. We always love the opportunity to share our children (i.e. abandon them) with some friend or family member so we can get a few uninterrupted breaths of non-child air. This kind of inflicting our kids on other people I DO support, if for no other reason than we are offering a vital service to our friends/family who don't have kids yet--we are giving them the opportunity to test the waters a bit, to soak in the good AND the bad.

Oddly, none of our non-parent friends/family have ended up having kids after spending a significant period of time around ours. I wonder why that is.

Anyway, I have a MESS of pictures and videos from the last week to put up. So I might as well get started.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Gabe got his first filling on Thursday, too? His mouth is a mess and is going to require several more fillings--a few rather major ones--here in the next year. He did VERY well, though--and we found out that, when he's stoned on nitrous, he's very laid back and cooperative.

Norah doing what she does best: being adorable.

The kids playing in the leaves. Norah had been far more entertaining just before I started recording, of course, plopping down purposefully in the leaves and rolling around in them and stuff. After she was done, we had to clean a handful of dried leave mush that had creeped into her diaper out of her butt crack. Fun!

Norah figuring out the slide. She's still a terrible climber--something we're trying to adapt to since Gabe was climbing up on our dining room chairs by this stage in his development. I think, perhaps, her girth keeps her from being a very successful climber. She just doesn't have the muscle mass to lug her form up onto things yet. But she did love the slide. She spent about a half hour going down it and crunching down into the pile of leaves below (where most of the butt mulch came from, I think).

Norah in her ride. She hasn't figured out how to make it move yet, but she likes to honk the horn.

Uncle James giving Norah a ride.


Gabe officially entered the Army Men phase this weekend. He received a bag of them for his participation in the wedding--which, thankfully, kept him busy during most of the rehearsal. They didn't do QUITE as good a job distracting him before and during the wedding, but one day of entertainment is about what we expect out of a new toy these days.

Uncle James and Gabe.

Gabe and the wedding party. I didn't get to see the wedding. Since I was dealing with Norah, our options were to either let her run around, pestering everyone at the wedding and making terrible noise or sequestering ourselves off in one of the little side rooms where I could shut the door and keep her contained. That's what I did--and I don't think Norah minded missing the wedding all that much.

And, finally, a video of the kids running around at the wedding reception. Well, Gabe was running around and throwing army men. Norah was waddling.

Mystery Solved

Since school started in September, Gabe's teachers have sent out regular blog updates on the various activities and events that are going on in his school. Gabe has been in almost none of the pictures that are included of the teachers and the students as they participate in the activities, and we've always wondered why. After watching the posts for awhile now, I was pretty sure the reason was that they were mostly using pictures from the Mon/Wed/Fri classes (Gabe is Tue/Thur), but now I'm not so sure.

Instead, I think Gabe isn't in any of the pictures because, more than likely, he's off doing something he's not supposed to be doing. And I base this off the evidence of this picture that came with today's update.




In and of itself, it's a kind of hilarious picture. But, man, do I feel sorry for his teachers--from now until forever (and, of course, for Libby and I, as we're the ones who will have to keep harassing him to focus from now until forever).