Norah! Norah! Norah!

Sigh. I'm a little sad that I had to use that title already. I'd been sitting on it for, well, about as long as we've had Norah, and now I've used it. And I feel like it's wasted. I mean, how many other moderately obscure movie titles can I directly reference with one of my kids names? I could do Gabe and Norah's Infinite Play Time (or something to that effect). And there have been several movies named "Gabriel," but here's how an allusion to that title looks when it's typed out. Gabriel. Come on! Don't you get it? It's a reference to the movie! Philistine! But that's about it. So I sat on Norah! Norah! Norah! for quit some time, and now I'm using it because I don't have anything better coming to mind for a title. Double sigh.

Anyway, Libby tells me that there is a demand for more pictures of Norah. So I'm obliging. And a video of her (and Gabe) playing in the sand box a little while ago. You're welcome.

Less than a week ago, I realized that we hadn't yet taken any pictures of Norah sleeping in her bed. We had taken several pictures of Gabe doing the same by the time he was about a year old. And we felt a little guilty. Then I remembered the reason WHY we were able to take so many pictures of Gabe--once he went to sleep at night, he stayed asleep for at least four hours and nothing short of a few minutes of urgent jostling would wake him up. So we could go into his room on our way up to bed and look at him sleeping and "ooh" and "ahh" at how adorable he was while asleep.

Not so with Butts. Getting her to sleep--at night or at nap time--is becoming more and more of a chore every passing month. She still wakes up three or four times every night, same as always, but now she also won't go to sleep until about the third time we put her in bed (or if Libby rocks her or snuggles with her for an hour). I'm lucky if I can get her to sleep an hour during the day, and we're both lucky if we can get her to go to sleep by 10:00 at night. PLUS, she wakes up at the tiniest little sound most of the time. So, yeah, we've not taken many pictures of her sleeping because, as tough as it is to get her to that stated, we're not taking any chances waking her up.

But, then, these past two days, I've had two opportunities to take pictures of her while asleep. Yesterday, her nap didn't take until the fourth attempt, and by that point it was past 2:00 in the afternoon (with the first happening around noon, when Gabe is pretty much done), so she was absolutely zonked. She went down hard and actually managed to sleep for two hours (which we paid for last night when she didn't go to sleep until nearly 10:00). She might have slept longer, but I decided that I had to wake her up at 4:00 or she'd be awake until it was time for Libby to go to work the next morning. I went up to her room and turned on the light, which usually wakes her up with like a charm, but she didn't even budge. So I brushed the hair away from her eyes (don't get me started on the hair in her eyes, it has been a point of contention between Libby and her "never going to cut her hair" theory and my belief that not giving children bangs is cruel and unusual since they don't know how to keep it out of their eyes--and she DID eventually relent last week and snip some uneven bangs, but there are still hairs that hang into her eyes), and not even physical contact woke her up. So I grabbed the camera.

This is usually how she sleeps, like a wino cuddling up with a stray dog. She's even got the rosy cheeks like she's been hitting the bottle pretty hard.

Then, today, I put her down at noon again and promptly had to go back up and get her five minutes later as she started shrieking (which made Gabe decide that, if she was going to be awake, he didn't have to nap either, so he refused to take a nap, too) and brought her down. I told Gabe that he could stay up for one episode of Yo Gabba Gabba and then he had to go back to bed (he did go back, but still refused to sleep, which always makes for a long afternoon because if he doesn't get a nap, he's a mess the rest of the day). I put Norah in her activity saucer with a few graham crackers and a bottle of juice, and I excused myself to the office for a little bit to read emails and waste some time looking up movie titles that have "Norah" or "Gabe" in the titles.

Fifteen minutes later, both kids were being VERY quiet, so I went into the living room. This is what I found:

"Gabe," I said, "look at the baby. She's asleep in her gym." Gabe looked away from the TV and laughed and laughed. He thought it was hilarious. He hadn't noticed her up to that point, even though he was lying on the couch not twelve inches away from her head. Such is the power of television, people. She wasn't even resting her head on anything, she's just leaning back with absolutely no support, balancing in her sleep. Put her in a comfy bed with a bottle and Mozart playing and she screams. Put her in her baby gym for fifteen minutes with a graham cracker to smear all over her face and giant puppets singing about their love of balloons and she's out while leaning against the air. Kids are weird.

And, then, the sandbox stuff. Butts is actually progressing pretty nicely in the sandbox. She didn't even put a handful of sand in her mouth this time. That's always nice.

Not what you'd call an "action" shot, but pretty cute.

That "singing," as Libby calls it, is ambient Butts noise. Several times a day, for up to a half hour at a time, she will make this noise, pausing only for breath. To be honest, I didn't even hear it until Libby commented on it, such is my ability to completely ignore the noises around me.