I am going to eat this baby

Seriously. Can you blame me?





Those two pictures are in his little cradle/cosleeper thing, which is getting put away permanently this weekend because 1) he is working on pulling himself up and throwing himself out of it and 2) he's sleeping in his crib now. Of course, almost none of this crib sleeping occurs at night, but we'll settle for what we can get.



I really like how he puts his feet up in his stroller. He's like, "Check it out. I just sit here in the sun and they wheel me around. Crawling is for losers." Still, he has figured out how to commando crawl backwards but this just makes him mad, so we won't dwell on that.

good bye house

Tomorrow we move.



You've been good to us, house.

the wearing of the green

Today I had a helper while I was trying to baste the quilt. He helped by trying to grab the trees and flowers off the fabric. You can see that he's figured out how to get his knees up under himself, so I suppose crawling is on the way. Horrifying. Last week he discovered that he can push himself around on the floors: he lies on his belly and then pushes himself up and smacks the floor until he moves. Sadly for him, he can only go backwards this way, so he can never reach what he's trying to. But he can maneuver clear across the room, which must be pretty thrilling for a baby who just a few weeks ago couldn't even roll over.

In the last week or so he has also started to babble--he's making noises that sound like speech, albeit in some very foreign language. So now he has a whole repertoire of sounds: babbling, squealing, happy shrieking, raspberries, and the usual variety of cries. He makes quacking noises when he's trying to fall asleep. He starts with loud, confrontational-sounding quacks (like one duck if challenging another to a fight, I suppose) and ends with quiet moany quacks just before he falls asleep. Last night he didn't want to fall asleep so he happily quacked, blew raspberries, and bicycled his feet until he passed out. It was pretty much the sweetest thing I ever saw.

crazy town

I've been saying that when somebody comes to our door and is greeted by two frantic dogs and one frantic baby-wielding lady yelling at the dogs, it's like "welcome to crazy town." Of course, Indiana is the mayor of crazy town but the rest of the city's elected offices have remained vacant. Well it seems that the people of crazy town have spoken and elected a sheriff:




Isn't he authoratative? The bib was made by a friend, and I can't even stand how adorable it is. I'm not sure if you can see how Joseph's face is slathered with apple sauce, but trust me that it is.


Also, you can see in that photo our latest cloth diapering effort. It's been a week and so far, no major leakages. Hooray for us.

ducks

This weekend we went to the park, where we saw ducks, swans, waterfalls, the kind of little kid tiny amusement park that I dimly remember from childhood, and all kinds of happy families doing happy-family things like barbecuing and playing with dogs. We left our dogs at home (sadly, many outings are better when we don't include the dogs). Joseph seemed to enjoy watching things from his stroller (if by "seemed to enjoy" you mean "did not scream") , and Scott and I embarassed ourselves by not being able to tell a duck from a goose. Seriously, we need help sorting out ducks vs. swans vs. geese. Water fowl. Sheesh.

Also, any doubts I've had about the cuteness potential of baby boy clothing have been set to rest by Joseph's hat. He has matching overalls but he isn't wearing them because the combined cuteness would cause the other babies to despair.

Freckles loves Joseph and Joseph loves Freckes.

This makes me so happy. For a few weeks Joseph has been laughing, squealinlg, and stomping his feet when he sees the dogs. Also, now that Joseph needs to grab everything he sees, Freckles--and especially her ears--are extremely wonderful to him. He tries to lunge out of my lap to grab her, and she has been more than patient with this. She's basically a good natured dog--tortured by anxiety, but ready to love anybody. From the beginning she's been interested in the baby; when Joseph was a newborn Freckles would follow Scott or my mother around when they were holding him, as if to make sure they knew what they were doing. If the baby was sleeping in his cradle (ha ha) she would perch on the bed watching him. We don't know what inspired this interest, whether it's because she has some maternal instinct because she had puppies before we met her or because she likes the baby's smell. Probably the latter.

Can you believe how small Joseph is? I think he's three or four days old. Freckles clearly is impressed by the diaper. She's like "Finally! I've been trying to get these people to stop washing themselves for years. I respect and admire the filth of this small human."



Indiana, meanwhile, not so much. We have dozens of pictures of Freckles and Joseph, but hardly any of Indiana and Joseph because Indiana pretty much just runs away from the baby.

danger boy

Joseph seems determined to show me how dangerous everything around him actually is. In the past week he has figured out how to roll over onto his stomach and how to grab things with almost perfect accuracy and then shove them into his mouth. He has managed to combine these skills to flip his play mat (the thing with the foam bars that the toys hang from) over on top of himself. Here he is, amid the wreckage:


Doesn't he look triumphant? Or smug?


Yesterday morning he liberated one of the sea creatures from his mobile. He figured out that if he grabs quickly and pulls with all his might, he will be rewarded with a fistful of octopus, which he then eats.

I do think that most of the conventional baby rearing wisdom overstates the dangers of practically everything, but now that he can roll over onto his belly and get stuck there, or possibly roll off the bed, or suffocate himself with his play mat, or strangle himself with the string from his mobile (or, as Scott pointed out, swallow the string from his mobile), I am a little concerned. This, I suppose, is why people have play pens. Except for how proper play pens don't seem to exist anymore, and have been replaced by those extremely ugly pack and plays, which I do not want to see in my house, and which, if I did have one, would probably host a cage match between the baby and one of the dogs. So I think I will just keep my eyes glued to the baby.