Category: Pictures

Happy Birthday, Baby Sister.

This morning Liam awoke to find that his father had put child-safety locks on the remaining kitchen cabinet doors.  Liam is displeased with his findings.  While I’ve had several people tell me about how they left one cabinet door, filled with things that were safe for baby, lock-free so that the child could play in only that cabinet — I have determined that this will not work in my house.

The two doors that remained without locks contained baking pans and plastic storage containers.  Here’re the problems: the cabinet with the baking pans includes a heavy 9×13 cake pan.  This wouldn’t be a problem except that no matter how many times Liam pulls it out onto the floor and makes the same terrible racket, it scares the pee out of him (probably literally, although I admit I haven’t checked) and he sobs uncontrollably until I pick him up (which basically he never does).  So much for that genius habituation theory, eh?  The second problem is the zeal with which he takes every single plastic container out of the other cabinet and scatters them all over the kitchen floor.  I have nearly killed myself countless times in the last week on these containers.  They’re clear.  Some of them are very small.  This will not work.

My guess is that he figures out how to open the child-safety locks in very short order.  After all–the day after we got our wonderful, new, “childproof” trash can he figured that out.  I think the only reason he doesn’t open the can all the time is that he’s much more enthralled with the wheels on the bottom.  Maybe that’s the solution:

I think I’m onto something here…

The race has finally come and gone. Matt and I were sick as dogs and I didn’t sleep for more than 3 hours at a stretch the night before, but we finished and we’re very excited about that! Matt and I timed ourselves (stopping the clock a couple of times for port-a-potty breaks along the course) and our unofficial time was just over 2:31. Our official chip time was 2:37:49 and Gillian’s was 1:46:56. Here are some pictures:

Gillian in the home stretch:

Me and Matt in the home stretch:

Three proud finishers:

I know by now that this is never a good sign — especially lately as Liam has been either sneezing, coughing, or crying for the past four or five days — so he’s really easy to hear when he’s not in my lap (which is where he’s been for 95% of that time). A few minutes ago things got really quiet. I could see his head around the corner in the living room — but I couldn’t see his body. This scenario occurs daily and usually he’s “reading” a book. I assumed that this is what he was doing this time as well. I was wrong. When I came around the corner, I saw this:

It’s one of the first smiles I’ve seen in a while. It’s not his usual ear-to-ear grin, but it’s something.  At this point, I’ll take it.

In the beginning, I lost my mind (which was a necessary first step).  Then came my dignity (as I huffed around town in capris and socks with my iPod slapping very attractively against my flopping stomach).  Next up were my ankle and subsequently my knee (see earlier post).  The most recent casualties were my hip, my groin, and for good measure, my toenail:

My initial goal was to cross the finish line and my stretch goal was to run the whole thing.  Now I’m thinking if I make it to Thanksgiving without a transfusion or the loss of a limb I’ll be doing pretty dang well…

So we cut Liam’s hair today.

Here’s what my sweet, precious boy looked like before:

During:

And (regretfully) afterwards:

There’s a reason why there are hairdressers in the world (and even better reasons why I’m not one)…