You've been so patient.

The least I can do is share some photos.

Go Longhorns!


Miso Cute


Make yourself at home, Noah.


It's a jungle out there


PlayDoh!

We're still here!

(just finding more things to do with my computer time, now that school is back in session.)

Here's a thought I'll share. Sorry I don't have the photos to back it up. I've got to go dig that camera thing out of it's drawer!

Noah amazes me with his sense of humor. The strangest things make him burst out laughing. Sunday night I was singing him to sleep, and I started the song like you would if you were waiting to come in on a round, singing:
Row, Row, Row your boat,
Row, Row, Row your boat,
Row, Row, Row your boat, gently down the stream.
By the time I got to the third Row, Row, Noah was giggling uncontrollably. He knew that I had "messed up" the song and he thought it was hilarious. Needless to say, that didn't make a very good lullaby. Then yesterday in the backyard, Dave and I started throwing a frisbee back and forth, and Noah thought it was the funniest thing of all time. Especially when it went over the fence! He also giggles like mad if he's about to get what he wants, like cottage cheese from the fridge. Yesterday I got to hear that precious giggle when I picked him up from daycare (unusual because Dave usually does it). He heard my voice as I was climbing the stairs, and started laughing before he could even see me. It's such a joyful sound that it overwhelms me with happiness every time!

Training for the Circus

We start 'em young around here!

Caught on Film!

Oh man, this cracks me up. Especially the last 10 seconds or so. It's short and sweet, and no sound required:



Dave took those sprinkler photos that I posted yesterday, so I didn't get to see this in action till later. In the first part of the video, he's trying to fill the little green eggshell toy with water. Fairly successfully, I might add.

What is he DOING?

Crazy little Noah, drinking from the sprinkler!

He seems to be growing up so fast these days. I'm still in the habit of using the word "baby" around him, but these days every time that word comes out of my mouth, it hits me that he's not much of a baby anymore at all. It's amazing how clearly he thinks and how well he understands... I just still can't understand 99.9% of what he's talking about. Today he brought my shoes to me. I didn't think too much of it because he likes to play with our shoes. But then he went and stood by the back door. Nobody had mentioned going outside, but he knew what he wanted, and he knew mommy needed shoes for that!

He also seems to be growing up fast in more measurable ways. Between two recent doctor's appointments not even a month apart, he grew nearly two full inches. I know teenagers can sprout like that over a summer, but for my little guy... wow! And my arms are swearing up and down that he has put on several pounds in the last couple of days. Tomorrow I should try to weigh and measure him to find out why his clothes keep shrinking and why my elbows are whimpering. I think it might be time to start measuring HEIGHT instead of length, with marks on the wall and everything. How exciting!!!

Hamilton's Pool

We went to Hamilton's Pool this weekend with my sister's family. It's a natural spring-fed pool where an underground river caved in. The trail down from the parking lot is rocky and steep (especially carrying an extra 22 lb tub-o-giggles), but the hike was worth it. We all had a lot of fun and ended up staying longer than we thought Noah would let us. Noah's favorite part was throwing rocks into the water. Here are a couple of photos:

He looks like he's falling in, but he's really throwing rocks:


Those tiny dots on the boulder are Noah's cousins, who swam to the other side of the pool:


We hiked around the grotto (on the left of the photo above). This might have been a good family photo, except for the expression on Noah's face!


The trail around the back side of the pool gets really narrow. The rock right behind Dave is so close to the wall that you have to lean over and walk sideways to get past. That was challenging to get Noah through!


We also hiked down to the nearby river. Here's Noah and Dave watching the little fish swim by:

A Very Important Job

Ever since he's been toddling about with confidence and purpose, Noah has been throwing away his own dirty diapers. (Yes, I wrap them up tight so there's no "dirty" peeking out!) He treats it like the most important job in the world, and he's quite proud of his new responsibility. The funny part is, the whole thing was his idea. I vaguely remember one day when he stood up from a diaper change, picked up the diaper and walked away with it, so I showed him where the trashcan in the laundry room was. Then I remember one time when one of his grandmas thought he was playing with a "nasty old diaper" and wanted to take it away, and I slowly realized that he wanted to throw it away. So she tried to lead him to the kitchen trash, but NO, he wanted to go to the laundry room! These days it's every diaper every time. Wednesday I changed him right before we both laid down for a nap together, so I tossed the wrapped-up diaper to the floor at the foot of the bed. First thing Noah did when he woke up? Spotted that diaper and carried it across the house. Yesterday I caught him patiently waiting at the laundry room door, which I had closed earlier, diaper in hand. This morning he had a diaper so heavy (thank you, Huggies Overnites!) that it literally took both hands -- he kept dropping it because he didn't believe it was that heavy. Funny stuff.

Of course, along with the convenience of having my very own diaper-trasher, I now have the extra mom duty of checking that trashcan for stray socks and other dirty laundry. It seems he's training for his second job as laundry sorter, and unfortunately, the dirty laundry hamper is right next to the trash can.

Given that he's also been acting as a human vacuum cleaner since he could crawl (Oh, Noah, you found a treasure! Now hand it to mommy before you put it in your mouth), I think we've got a pretty talented little helper over here. Now why doesn't my house look cleaner than it does?

The Big Read

I used to devour books like a starving bookworm. Other than Harry Potter, it's been an embarrassingly long while since I made time for a good book. But a friend of mine posted this, and I had fun remembering all the great books I used to read (and some that I was forced, err... encouraged, to read in school). There were quite a few that I feel like I probably read, but I don't remember for sure. That just goes to show how much I used to read, that I couldn't keep track of what I'd read and what I hadn't. Or maybe it goes to show what a spotty swiss-cheese memory I have. But I digress...

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list. How many have you read? Look at the list: Bold those you have read. Italicize those you intend to read. Underline the books you LOVE. (and Carol, don't mark the ones you don't remember whether you might have read them once upon a time).

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. 1984 - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My Little Hero

Guitar Hero, that is!

I scream, you scream, we all scream for...

... popsicles?



Noah hasn't been feeling well for the last several days, and he's been eating poorly. So I had the bright idea to make him some smoothie popsicles with yogurt and bananas and blueberries. He thought it was pretty cool, but he had a hard time holding it himself. So either I held it for him, or he gripped it by the cold part. In the end, I think more melted onto his hands than into his mouth before he got bored with it. But it got me thinking, is there a better* popsicle mold for toddlers out there? Leave me a comment if you have suggestions -- I'm all ears. This mold is just the standard issue from Target that I picked up yesterday when inspiration hit.

For the record, he guzzled down quite a bit of non-frozen smoothie after he gave up on the frozen one, and that was enough to whet his appetite for some real food. Success!

*For Noah right now, this mold is too big, the pop is too top-heavy, and the stick is too small.