My Baby Is Probably Not As Advanced As Your Baby Now

I figured it was time for a Button update. Why? Because, honestly, there hasn't been ANYTHING going on this week and I really felt like I should post something instead of nothing. But I will include some cute baby pictures. That makes it all right, right?

So, Butts sort of stalled out developmentally around the five month range. In fact, she's been regressing a bit in the sleep department--moving away from the nearly convenient twice-nightly feedings back into the realm of waking up every two hours to be fed (which is probably why she's the baby equivalent of the Burj Khalifa, because she will eat a full bottle each time whether she should be hungry or not). Unfortunately, that is the ONLY way she will fall asleep right now, while eating. Unlike Gabe, who still loves his binky (a very specific style of binky--we call it a "peak-a-boo" bitty because it has a little plastic cover built in that snaps shut when the binky is closed, to keep it clean, supposedly--that we have to buy at the baby store here in town. We only have two of the damn things now and it's a daily routine of panic and relief as we scour the entire house trying to figure out where he's left one of them), and who we're a little worried might still be using said binky into his teens, Butts has had no use for them. We will give one to her, and she will chew on it dutifully for a minute or two, then she'll throw it aside. She also has nothing to do with sucking on her fingers or falling asleep while we rock or cuddle her. She'll only fall asleep with a bottle in her mouth. Obviously, this causes problems when she eats a full bottle but doesn't fall asleep like she's supposed to. She will remain awake for another 90 minutes at least before she will even consider taking another bottle. Very frustrating, indeed.

Anyway, beyond the sleeping disorder, she's also stalled out on the developmental processes that leads to walking. Despite her nearly eight months, she's still not even sitting on her own. She CAN do it, I know. I'll put her between my legs for support several times during the day then slowly back away from her, just to see if she'll keep herself upright without me there to lean on, and she will--until she realizes I'm not there, then she pushes herself back like a diver performing a back flip from the high board. If I wasn't there to catch her, she'd smack her head on the ground.

She's also shown no interest in crawling. We've tried putting things just out of reach to encourage her to scoot forward after them, but she'll just reach for them forlornly for a few moments then roll over onto her back and switch her focus to something else. This is pretty foreign territory for us. Gabe was the exact opposite. As soon as he could sit on his own (which happened by the end of January, we know, because we have pictures of it--that's one nice thing about having kids whose birthdays are three days apart, we can map their developments pretty accurately--and he was 7 weeks premature and, well, pretty neglected when we got him at three months old), he made the progressions to crawling pretty quickly because he always wanted to get at everything.

Butts, not quite rolling.

Her preferred method of movement is the roll. Over the course of five minutes, she can span the living room if she wants to. Of course, she has no particular goal in mind when she does it, so we usually have to keep a pretty close eye on her to make sure she doesn't end up cracking her head on something hard or scooting her way under our couch or chair, which have clearances just high enough for a baby to wedge herself under, should she be so inclined. But she seems perfectly content to settle on rolling her way through life.

And by "perfectly content," I mean that she will wail and cry after a few minutes of rolling because she wants to play with something more interesting or be entertained by others. Apparently, quite contrary to my own personality, I'm managing to raise two drama queens. I have no idea how it happened.

She HAS been showing marked improvement in the eating category, though. She is really very fond of feeding herself now, so we spend a goodly portion of each day handing her saltines and little baby puffs. This is her eating a teething biscuit. I'm not sure who thought these food items were a good idea. Probably someone in the laundry detergent business.

Speaking of drama, Gabe is doing some pretty amusing stuff right now. Pretty consistently, when I tell him "no" to whatever it is he has gotten into his head that he wants to do (which happens A LOT during the day), he will go over to the stairs, sit down, and start to cry. When we ask him what he's doing, he'll reply "Just crying." It's adorable and a little heart-wrenching. The kid is a magnificent manipulator. I'll give him that.

That doesn't have anything to do with anything, but I find it amusing, so I thought I would share.

This was supposed to be a video of Button rolling around, but she wasn't all that interested in participating. And Gabe, as usual, WAS interested in participating. So, not surprisingly, this has become another Gabe video with Button in the background (though Gabe wasn't exactly bringing A game material here, either).

Gabe Tells Me a Story

Because I am a bit of a storyteller I enjoy a good yarn. But because I'm only a mediocre storyteller, I decided that I was going to do everything in my power to encourage my kids, from a very early age, to tell stories. My thinking is that, with years of practice, they'll be great at it by the time they are adults. I think this, naturally, because I wasn't much of a storyteller growing up--and really didn't decide that I wanted it to be "my thing" until after I finished my masters degree and decided that academics was kind of lame. I mean, come on. Who cares if Shakespeare was gay? His stories and characters were wonderful creations whose enjoyment is in no way, shape, or form affected by his sexual orientation. Sure it might be fun to try to get to know people who have been dead for years, since, obviously, we can't actually get to know them, but come on.

Or something like that. I actually credit my shift in interests to Frank Norris' book "McTeague." I was about halfway through my masters and decided that, because I went to a hillbilly high school where I wasn't exposed to any of the "classics" of literature, I needed to spend some time catching up. I began by reading through the small library of books that Libby had to read in high school where a severe nun that nobody liked made them read, non-stop, from the canon of classics. Over the first half a year or so, I made pretty good progress, reading through "The Pearl" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Crucible"--all pretty good books (well, maybe not so much The Pearl) that deserved reading. I followed it up with others, though I don't recall what, specifically. Then, after I'd made it through the ones whose names I recognized, I grabbed the first one that I didn't: McTeague.

McTeague is an insufferably boring slog of a book whose paper would make suitable butt wipe should we ever have a crisis that made the manufacturing of toilet paper impossible. It's the story of a dentist in early 2oth century San Francisco. Sounds exciting so far, right? Over the course of the first half of the book, I can remember McTeague discussing various aspects of dentistry, taking a long, hard look at some of the people who lived in his neighborhood (all terribly boring), and going on a picnic where he hoped to woo some woman. Half a book! It was simply put, more boring than staring at my own asshole in a mirror for three hours, but it DID manage to change my outlook on literature completely.

As I found myself sitting there, reading this book, I thought to myself, "Why am I reading this steaming pile of crap? No, it's not even crap. Crap is too vivid and alive compared to this. This is a steaming pile of warmed up, soggy cardboard." And the only answer I could come up with was, "Because I'm a book snob, and I want the bragging rights that I HAD read it." This was, after all, the only justification I had for spending nearly four years of my life (off and on, obviously) trudging through the unabridged version of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. That book was at least pretty decent, if FAR too windy, because its characters were interesting. But, really, I could have picked that much up from the version with 800 fewer pages.

Faced with this hard fact, I relented and changed my ways. I decided that reading something terrible just so I could say that I had read it was a waste of my precious reading time and, moreover, it was turning me off to the pleasures of reading. So I immediately went out and bought an Anne Rice book at the bookstore in the mall and read it just to spite my former self (though I also found this book terribly unenjoyable, so my spite actually ended up spitting right back in my face).

How does this relate to what I was saying before about storytelling?

Crap. I don't remember. But I'm sure it does!

Oh, yeah, now I remember. From that point on, I reveled in the storytelling itself and not in what any critics or intellectuals had to say about a book. I was going to read things that made me laugh or caught me up in imaginative ways and screw the academics (this, obviously, led to me more or less blowing off the last few semesters of my grad work--not REALLY blowing it off, I still got mostly A's with a few B's, but B's are a pretty serious blow-off to my way of thinking--which I found tedious, unfulfilling, and mostly a ridiculous waste of everyone's time). Then, from that point, I decided that I wanted to WRITE those kinds of stories instead.

How's that going for me? Well, I've got a blog, don't I? Hurray for the big dream!

Yeah.

It's a well-known fact that parents always project their failed dreams on their kids, so that's exactly what I plan to do as well. Sadly, I won't get a reality show out of the deal like those poor sacks who force their kids into beauty pageants at six years old, but I guess I can live with that. Instead, I'm going to encourage (but not force, because storytelling has to be enjoyed by the teller or the whole thing is a wash) my kids to tell stories. Where will it lead? Probably nowhere good as I know what the publishing field is like NOW, and I can't imagine it will get any better twenty years from now. But what can you do? Maybe they'll defiantly reject my art in favor of a lucrative career of some sort, maybe in accounting. That would sure teach me. And hopefully put me up in a swank retirement home, too.

I've been encouraging Gabe for almost a year now. As long as he has been able to talk I've asked him on occasion to "tell me a story." Or to tell Norah a story. Or, when I put him to bed with his book, to tell Amy Horsie, Two Hours Piggy (have I mentioned that new character that he named yet? Might have to get on that), and Soupie a story from that book before he goes to sleep. Before today, he never complied.

Then, out of the blue, he started flying a little helicopter around and schpealing off a narrative about where this helicopter was flying--even delving slightly into its motivation (it wanted to go home). Then he started throwing the helicopter into the air to simulate flying (which, I think, was the entire point of the considerable lead up of his story, to give him the impetus, and perhaps permission, to throw a toy, something I am pretty strict about him not doing most of the time). And it worked! Because he told me a story first, I didn't mind when he tossed the helicopter up in the air. I like where this is going. Stories to get out of trouble? Good idea!

Then, I got the camera and asked him to tell the story again. As with most sequels, much of the magic was lost, but I think he did an OK job, with my egging him on, of getting his story across (and he even added an element--the part about living in "winter time").

Abominable Snow Baby

Just a quick video this time. This is Button in her new sleeper that she got for Christmas. It looks a bit like old timey long johns, only it's missing the drop flap in the back. They are just fuzzy enough to make her look like an abominable snow person--though not as much as the fluffy yellow full-body suit that we used for Gabe (and still have but haven't gotten out for Norah because we learned the lesson of taking babies into weather cold enough to warrant such an outfit when we tried it with Gabe at 6 months old and he had a terrible cold that stuck around for almost a month afterwards). So this version will have to do.

I didn't really have anything new or interesting to post, so I figured this would be a good filler video--plus, it features Butts, and she doesn't get nearly the face time on this site as Gabe does. Yet. I already explained to her that, in order to draw our attention away from Gabe, she's going to have to start coming up with new material and really polishing her act. We'll see how that plays out.

Monkey Trouble

First, let me apologize for naming this post after a terrible mid-90s monkey movie starring Harvey Keitel in a role that must surely have been leveled against him as punishment for showing off his crank in "The Piano" a year earlier. The only other monkey movie I could think of was "Dunston Checks In," and that name doesn't really apply. I think what's his name--Joey from Friends--might have made a monkey movie too during the high point of his career (that statement is sad, but true), but I didn't have enough interest to try and find out what the name of it is in the off chance that it would apply.

But we do have a bit of an issue building with Dag Masters, P.I., the big gorilla doll, and Gabe, so a monkey title of some sort was in order.

For the past week, I've been leaving the gate upstairs open so that Gabe can come and go as he pleases. He's gotten to the point where he can navigate the stairs without much trouble. The only worry now, really, is that he likes to use the stairs as a toy--throwing things up and down them, hauling things upstairs then back down, that sort of thing--and I'm afraid that he'll begin to take for granted the effects that gravity and hardwood stairs can have on a young noggin. We've been imprinting on him the absolute necessity of holding onto the stair rail, and he usually does a pretty good job, but it only takes one time. Nonetheless, I decided it was time he had a few more rooms of the house at his disposal. Also, since, as I pointed out last week, almost all of my best stories begin "I wasn't paying close enough attention to Gabe when . . . ." So, I figured this would give me ample new material to work with.

But it really hasn't, for the most part. He's enjoyed being able to go up and down as he pleases, but he really has been very responsible with his time alone upstairs. He makes some messes (and at some point in the last few weeks he shoved a half dozen very thin books into the VCR we have up there, rendering even the DVD portion of it unusable until I dug all the books out this morning), but nothing too interesting has occurred.

Except for this running . . . I don't know what to call it. I think of it as a running gag, but I just don't know how to read it. He MIGHT be doing it on purpose, just to be a turd, but I'm not sure if he's reached the developmental stage necessary for practical joking.

Four out of the last seven days, when he's gone upstairs, he's left a surprise for me in my room. The first night, it caught me off guard. He knows he's not supposed to play in our bedroom, and he usually doesn't. A few months back, he took to closing our bedroom door--maybe as a reminder that he's not supposed to go in there, but maybe because he just likes to open and close doors. So, when I came up that night for bed and found my door closed, I didn't really think anything of it. I opened the door and saw this:

Now, tell me that wouldn't put the wind up you a little bit. Not to mention the fact that most of the lights were off, so all I could see was a lifeless, good-sized lump on the floor right inside my door. My first instinct, actually, was that our giant cat Tsunami had gotten locked in there and chosen that time and place to die (or sleep, there really isn't much difference between the two for most practical purposes, but my mind went immediately to her being dead--so read into that whatever you like). But I quickly recovered and figured out that it was Dag.

For the next two nights I found the same thing when I went upstairs. Then, while Libby was gone last week, he stopped doing it and a few days passed. But he did it again this morning.

Now, my question is: what does this mean? Should I be putting some sort of Freudian spin on this? I'm not sure HOW I could do that, as I never paid that much attention in my Psychology classes, but it seems like it should make some sense if analyzed under the lens of Freud. Or is it just saying something about him and that monkey? I know he doesn't hate the toy. He set it up on a chair at the little table in his room two weeks ago and served it some pretend soup, which I don't think he would have done if he was scared of it. But what else could be encouraging him, on a daily basis, to pick up the monkey, throw it into our bedroom, and shut the door on it? Anyone? I just wonder if I should be worried.

Vicks Baby Rub Is Still Oil Based

Just in case anyone was wondering, I'll offer up this tidbit of research that Gabe produced this morning. For those of you who feel the eucalyptus smell of Vicks Vap-o products "soothing" (as my wife does), this won't be news because you probably use the stuff with some regularity. For those who find the smell of Vicks "more offputting that the prospects of drooling snot out my nose and onto my pillow in the middle of the night" (as I do), however, this bit of information might come in useful some day. If, say, you want to know what products you should keep out of easy reach of your two years olds if easy cleanup is a concern.

This story begins, as most of mine seem to, with my back turned for a short while on my son. For over a year now, Gabe has been obsessed with brushing his teeth. Several times a day he will come up to me and say "Brush teeth!" and then proceed to cry if I don't immediately open the gate that allows him access into the bathroom and follow him in there to turn on the water and hand him his toothbrush.

Now, this doesn't mean that Gabe actually brushes his teeth. He doesn't. Once or twice a day I will put on a dab of his training toothpaste and brush his teeth for him. Then I hand him the brush and say, "Now, brush them again, really good." And he'll stick the brush in his mouth and suck off the last of the toothpaste. Then he'll put the toothbrush under the running water, get it wet, then suck the water off. For some reason, this game has not gotten old to him yet. In fact, it seems to be growing in popularity again.

The last two weeks, he will bug me to let him brush his teeth a dozen times or more a day. Now, however, the tooth brushing is hardly even a formality. I'll hand him his brush, he'll dunk it in the water once, suck it off, and then he'll start dinking around in the dripping water. He likes to fill a plastic cup that we use to rinse the kids' hair in the tub and then dump it out in the sink. Or he'll put the little sponge cars and trucks he got for Christmas in the water and play with them some.

Usually, because he throws a fit if I try to steer him out of the bathroom before he's spent a good five minutes playing in the faucet, I leave him be and go about my business for a few minutes then come back and tell him that he's done brushing his teeth. Sometimes there will be small spills on the floor or the bathroom sinktop, but nothing too serious. Again, anything that keeps him entertained for a few minutes is great in my books.

Today, however, he discovered that he could reach some of the things on the bathroom countertop, among them, a small container of Vicks Baby Rub. The Rub has been out for the past three or four weeks because the kids have been trading colds back and forth and Libby believes that the nasty, tingly, foul smelling goop actually helps. Well, it didn't help me today.

Not five minutes after I left the bathroom, I returned to let him know that he was done, and the sink, everything in and around it, and Gabe were smeared with nearly an entire container's worth of Baby Rub. Had I been thinking, I would have taken a picture at that point. Instead, I didn't think about it until I had already begun the cleaning process.

You can only sort of see the smears of jelly on things in this picture, partly because it's clear and doesn't show up very well and partly because I had already used a half dozen paper towels to get as much of the excess off as I could.

And because I have not had much experience with cleaning up petroleum spills, it took me a little trial and error to find something that would work to clean it all up. I started with soap, thinking, dumbly, that soap and water might clean it up. It IS a common household item and one would think that the manufacturers would keep easy clean up in mind. But they don't. Soap and water only served to make the stinky mess damp on the surface. So I worked with the paper towels for a few minutes, but that just ended up smearing most of it around.

Then I remembered my basic commercial fundamentals--"Dawn cuts through tough grease." Yes! Dawn can remove grease from pans and such, so it must work against oily things. And it did. I squirted a healthy dose into the sink and half filled it with warm water to set about cleaning. I started with Gabe's hands, and that was when I remembered the camera. I took the picture above then went back into the office to return the camera. When I came back, this was what was waiting for me:

Yes. That's Gabe eating soap bubbles. And he did it long enough for me to go back into the office, reclaim the camera, and come back to take the picture. He might still be doing it if I hadn't stopped him.

It took a bit of doing, but everything cleaned up rather nicely. Actually, I think the oil based nature of the Rub put a pretty nice shine on the wooden cabinet top and on the faucet (and probably will help to seal the wood for a time). So, if you can stand the smell, you might consider it an option for your surface shining needs.

I Now Firmly Oppose Socialized Medicine

This morning, the kids and I went to the health department so they could get flu shots. H1N1, to be precise. Libby and I got ours back in December, and Gabe got the first batch of his (kids under 3, I think, need two doses, a month apart). Button couldn't get a dose at the same time because, at six months, she was just old enough to get the regular flu shot, and she couldn't get both at the same time. So Gabe was getting his second dose and she was getting her first (which means a repeat trip next month, hurray!).

When we went last month, they had a special clinic set up and we were able to move through there within a half hour of getting there.

This time, however, it was different, and my experience led me to oppose socialized medicine, and I am doing it based largely on two assumptions.

And you know what they say about assuming--it makes an ass out of you. At least that's how I remember the saying that I seem to hear ad nauseum these days.

Anyway, the assumptions that I make about what socialized medicine is like are based entirely on two points of reference: what the talking heads tell me I should think about socialized medicine, and what happened, as I recall it, in the movie "Jesus of Montreal."

I'll start with the second one (which I should have made the first one, in retrospect, but it's too late now). For those who have not seen the move "Jesus of Montreal," it goes something like this: an actor plays Jesus, has problems that reflect the Bible's story of Jesus, then dies at the end while sitting in a waiting room in a Canadian hospital--a SOCIALIZED hospital. That may or may not be how the movie actually goes, but it is how I remember it. I also remember being pretty bored while I watched the movie way back in college (at a time when I was pretty tolerant of boring movies because they expanded my horizons, something I've since come to recognize as balderdash), and because I remember being bored, I wasn't going to go out of my way to look the movie up on the internet to make sure my facts were straight. As far as my brain is concerned, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE KILLED JESUS. That alone is a pretty strong case against it.

But, then, I've also got the influence of the sources that the media have deemed fit for me to hear from to consider. Everyone they show on my TV is against socialized medicine for various reasons. For instance, there are long waits. Also . . . hmm. I

'm not actually sure why else I should hate socialized medicine now that I think about it. Competition, maybe? Capitalism, perhaps? Quality of care, could be? I don't think I understand how, exactly, it will really hurt anyone but, possibly, doctors because they might make a little less money and insurance companies because they would be obsolete--oh, and drug companies because they couldn't price gouge here to make up for "shortfalls" they suffer in places with socialized medicine where they refuse to pay top dollar if they can still get something else that does basically the same thing for cheaper. I guess I missed those part of the arguments against it. That's understandable, really, as there wasn't much time spent on WHY I should hate it, it's mostly just been a bunch of shouting that I SHOULD hate it. And because I like to believe people who shout at me, I will in this case also.

But I DO know that patients have to wait ungodly amounts of time to receive care. I've seen it in the motion pictures and I've had it shouted at me. That's more than enough proof for me (I did, after all, come to believe that dinosaurs could be cloned on tropical islands after only seeing one movie--Jurrasic Park--and having nobody shout at me for proof, so I'm not that much of a stickler for multiple sources, really).

Which brings me back to my experience today. We waited in the waiting room at the health department, surrounded by about two dozen different people, many of whom probably suffered from exactly the kinds of illnesses that I was supposedly trying to protect my children from, for almost an hour and a half. When we finally did get our turn, the procedure took all of two minutes and we were quickly out the door. Only four people went before us with the lady giving the flu shots, and it took them only about five minutes each to get through.

According to my basic maths, four people at five minutes each should equal twenty minutes of wait time. But, somehow, it equalled nearly ninety minutes of wait time. In short, it was a display of EXTRAORDINARY inefficiency--and this was in a capitalized medical facility! Imagine if I'd been in Canada or England. I might have had to wait two or three days in that waiting room! And believe me, 90 minutes was WAAAAAAAYYYYY too long to have to sit in a waiting room with a fussy seven month old and a quite possibly hyperactive two year old.

Gabe was, literally (and I mean that, I don't use this word lightly, as many do), bouncing off the wall (specifically off the row of wooden letters they have mounted to one wall, he was bouncing and spinning along them while he shouted whatever random letter or number came to mind in no particular order). I was able to contain him with the bribe of a "treat" after we got out of there for about twenty minutes, but then I think it started to dawn on him that this treat, at the rate we were going, might never to come--and, really, how good could a treat be compared to the misery of sitting still for an hour and a half?

And, of course, I hadn't brought him any snacks or juice and I hadn't packed her any formula because I hadn't been expecting it to turn into a day trip, so I didn't even have that.

By the front desk, they have a sign hung up that says, "If you've been waiting for more than twenty minutes, please check back with us" or something to that effect. So, after we'd been waiting for a half hour, I began to get up to do just that but stopped as the flu shot lady came out and called in the first of the four people to get in ahead of us--an old guy who had been dozing in a corner when we first came in. So I didn't go complain at the front desk. There were, after all, people who had been waiting there even longer than me. They didn't have kids with them, of course, so their waits, in relative time, only lasted about 1/4 the time mine did, but they wouldn't accept an argument like that, and I wouldn't have either before I had kids. Anyone with kids who've had to sit in a waiting room for an extended period will doubtlessly back me up on this. There is no time that moves by more slowly than the time you have to spend keeping your kids out of other people's hair while simultaneously trying to be pleasant to them so the entire room doesn't immediately label you a "bad parent" or "monster" or "candidate for electroshock."

But, then again, I have to be thankful that I'm part of a "pay to play" system of medicine. Had it been socialized, I probably would have needed to sedate my kids, bind and gag them, and zip them up in sleeping bags to keep them under control over the multi-day wait I would have had. So, for that I'm thankful, because we don't even have any sleeping bags for them, and we can't afford such luxuries, not when we're still paying off Libby's back surgery from two years ago.

Another Dubious Milestone

Last night Gabe took another step towards big boyness--one that is, undoubtedly, necessary, but one that we're not all too psyched about.

Over the past week or so, we've been making a concerted effort to leave the gates in our house open. We probably SHOULD be to the point now where Gabe is allowed free roam of the place, but he's so far proven incapable of staying out of trouble in the rooms where trouble can be the messiest or most bothersome for everyone else (the kitchen, my office, and the bathroom, where he's fond of opening every container or box of food he can find, pushing every button he can reach on the computer, and running and pouring water all over the place, respectively). But we know that he needs to learn to not do these things and the only way we can drill that into his head is with constant badgering AFTER he's already done it. So we're leaving gates open for extended periods now.

And yesterday he was enjoying his freedom to go up and down the stairs as much as he wanted to--and he wanted to A LOT. He also wanted to experiment with gravity, so he spent much of the day throwing things down the stairs, but that's beside the point.

He also discovered how delicious donuts are yesterday. He'd had donuts, once or twice before, but I guess he didn't remember that he'd had them before (and we rarely have donuts in the house, so it's not something he'd have the chance to get used to), because he went, to put it mildly, ape-shit crazy for them yesterday. How's the saying go? Every time a little boy has a donut, a dietitian gets run over by a beer truck? Well, five dietitians met their makers yesterday. Yeah, that's right. I'm not proud. Gabe ate five donuts yesterday. Well, mostly. He tended to leave anywhere from a bite to a half a donut lying around when he was bored with it, but he MOSTLY ate five donuts.

The first two Libby gave him around breakfast time and kindled in him the kind of love for a food that I've rarely seen him exhibit. The other three he got himself thanks to his newfound access to the kitchen.

We left them sitting on the counter--which he's not really able to reach up to yet, so we thought we were safe. He left them alone for several hours, but then, in the middle of the afternoon, he showed up in the living room holding a donut in his hand. I went into the kitchen and the box was still on the counter, open and one donut short, but it still looked like it should be out of his reach. So I put the box on the stove on the back burner, which was way too far away for him to reach. And he left them alone again until after dinner.

Then, around 6:30, he went upstairs and things got quiet for a bit, which always makes us nervous. Usually, if Gabe is quiet it means that he's either sleepy and in one of those glorious few moments when he will sit quietly and play or watch TV or he's up to no-good. Since he hadn't been acting sleepy yet, we assumed he was up to no-good. Then we heard some clunking on the stairs.

I took a look and found him bringing his little green stool (the one that he discovered he could use to reach the light in our bedroom all those months back) awkwardly down the stairs.

"No, honey," I said. "You need to leave that upstairs. It's too awkward for you to carry down. You will fall and hurt yourself. Plus, you need it to get into your bed."

"Stool downstairs," he responded.

"Why do you need the stool downstairs?" I queried.

"Stool downstairs," he insisted.

I sighed, as I often do. "OK. But let me bring it down so you don't fall." So I went up the stairs and carried the stool down and set it in the dining room.

He came down the stairs then nonchalantly went about his business, joining us in the living room for a little bit to distract our attention away from the stool we just brought down and the lull us into a false sense of security. Then, when we were again distracted by the show we were watching, he went back into the dining room, picked up the stool, and disappeared.

Libby was the first to notice the stool was gone and Gabe was quiet again--and it only took her a few moments from the time he left the living room. So she got up to check on his whereabouts.

He was standing on the stool in the kitchen. The box of donuts was open on the stove and he was pulling out number four. Our first instinct was to get the camera, but we couldn't find it because we'd used it earlier and didn't put it back where it belongs (by "we" I mean Libby). When we eventually did find it, we snapped a few pictures of the aftermath, but failed to catch him in the act. After he got caught, he just smiled at us then picked up his stool, donut in hand, and brought it back into the dining room. He carefully set it down in the exact spot where I had put it earlier and went about eating his donut.

Donut number 4 and a guilty looking boy.

By this point we confronted him about the "We just said no more donuts tonight" aspects of our earlier discussion on healthy eating, so he put the donut down and went into the living room. He returned to reclaim the donut less than a minute later.

The fifth donut, then, was entirely our fault. After this little adventure, we forgot to put them back out of reach, and he went in for another one about ten minutes before bedtime. Miraculously, it didn't affect his sleep even a little bit. Actually, he went to sleep faster than he has for a week or two, which seems odd to me. It did, however, affect MY sleep. Since I am the human garbage disposal in our house, and I have a thing about wasting food, I was the one who got to clean up all of the donut remnants around the house, and I suffered for it to the tune of sugar-induced heartburn all night. Thanks, Krispy Kreme, you and your sugary pastries are bastards.