Author: Shannon

Liam literally does this every day when he attempts to stab my eye out with his fingernails. When that fails he tries to extract my brains through my nose, also with the lethal nails. As a last resort he claws himself all over his body while napping so that when he wakes up it looks like I put him in a cage fight with a deranged cat. I’m always a little afraid that the doctor will call DFCS on me at every check-up. I feel like I clip his nails all the time. It doesn’t really seem to matter just how often I do it, though, as he can draw blood mere hours after he’s been clipped…

I can’t decide whether it’s our oven I hate or whether it’s the Hormel company I hate, but one of those has caused the current situation in which I put a pork roast in the oven over an hour and a half ago when the package said it should take 45-50 minutes and the dadgum thing’s still not reached 160 degrees.

I’ve demonstrated this all day long while boiling water in my kitchen so that my child could have something to eat out of a clean bottle.  Apparently I will have to continue to do this tomorrow.  I apologize to the people I’m having lunch with tomorrow as my child and I are both dirty and will stay that way until we can use the water out of our taps again or at least until tomorrow night at which point I will begin calling all the people I know in the Metro area outside of Dekalb County and begging to use their showers.

At least I learned on my honeymoon how to brush my teeth with bottled water.  This isn’t a skill I really thought about using again, but here we are.  I have never appreciated clean drinking water as much as I do right now while taking care of a child without being able to clean him properly.

I’m afraid we’re going to have to move.  Everything in our house is now a hazard to our child’s health.  We’re weighing the pros and cons considering a sterile, padded room vs. raising our very own bubble boy.  Even if we go for the bubble, we don’t have room where we currently live so we’ll need to move within the week.  If anyone has any good leads, please let us know.  Time is of the essence and our child’s life is at stake.

Liam has forgotten how to crawl since his breakthrough yesterday.  I’d be happy about it for selfish reasons except that he’s very upset about the situation in general.  Cranky babies are just not as much fun…

Is it reinforcing unwanted behavior when Liam suddenly spits the paci across the room and my response is uncontrollable peels of laughter?

If so, I’m afraid his new favorite thing to do is spit baby food while laughing.  That gets me every time.

He finally did it.

Now–what was the first thing he crawled to get, you might ask?

It was the laptop cord, of course.

My only goal with this kid is ensuring that he does not follow in his father’s footsteps and try to fly.

At least Scottish Rite is very nearby…

I would greatly appreciate it if you decided that the most interesting toy in the room is not the tag on the new basket, the door stop that’s missing the rubber part, or the nearest electrical cord. You have a plethora of brightly colored toys that are generally safe for you to play with, given that they’re made for children. I’ll even let you play with nothing but my Nalgene bottle and the cashew container that you love so much if you’ll stop trying to stick your tongue in the electrical socket. Thanks for your cooperation.

Love,

Mama

I hate our camera. It takes 2 pictures and then the batteries die. It also takes 30 seconds to take a picture which means we have 1,000s of horrible pictures of Liam and very few really good ones. We’re missing the opportunity to have a pictorial chronicle of the life of our son. He’s getting bigger every day and we’re missing it because our camera is horrible. This makes me sad.

I’m still holding on in fervent, false hope that our child will remain relatively immobile until we come back from Florida in mid-August.  I have regular daydreams that involve him ingesting handfuls of sand…

While I’m not doing anything to discourage him from crawling, I’m also not encouraging it in any active way.  I am starting to feel increasingly bad for the little guy, however, as he gets more and more frustrated by the day (demonstrated by grunts, moans, and sometimes face-down-in-the-carpet crying) at his lack of the ability to move himself more directly from place to place.  He shuffles on his tummy and is very good at rolling consecutively as many times as it takes to get to what he wants–but he so clearly wants to be able to get directly from Point A to Point B (usually involving a quest for some sort of cord or other electrical wire) that I do feel for him.  I might even start encouraging the crawling if I didn’t already live in constant fear that he will pull some sort of large, electrical appliance down on top of his head by the cord (much as he did with his clothes hamper the other day).

I also have a feeling that he doesn’t need any encouragement from me…