What a great day to be a kid!

Halloween! Is Halloween a great day to be a kid or what? You play dress-up, you run around outside after dark, and you get lots and lots of free candy. And your parents approve of the whole thing. It doesn't get much better than that.

Can you tell they were having a blast or what?



Sammy and William, with Andrew, just prior to taking off for trick-or-treating:















You'd have thought they'd been shot out of a cannon, they moved that fast. They dashed from house to house like it was an Olympic race. William kept bellowing, "To the NEXT house!" And Sammy gamely matched him step for step en route to collecting more candy.

We had a good time, but I was exhausted when it was all over. I'm guessing that next year, when Andrew is walking and wants to tag along, it'll be even more interesting. This year, I just carried him along to enjoy looking at all the people in their costumes, and that seemed to be just fine with him.

I asked Bruce to take a picture of David, me and Andrew the Pumpkin while the boys were doing their thing. I knew there was no chance I'd get William to join us for a family picture, though, so this is as close as I got:

Is he asleep?

Oh boy, Andrew just threw the mother of all fits.

He woke up crying about 9;50, and it's now 10:40. I just got him to calm down about three minutes ago. Wait, is that him crying again?

Anyway, I tried everything. Holding, walking, rocking, nursing. Nothing worked. He just sobbed and cried. I figured, okay, he's tired. He just needs to get back in his bed. But he was so worked up that he couldn't let himself calm down and go back to sleep.

Argh! I'm so bad with this! I've been blessed with two boys who are, by most accounts, really good sleepers. Andrew's been sleeping through the night for ages now, and it's never been that difficult to get him to go to sleep at night. In fact, usually he's the one agitating to go to bed; he starts fussing and scrubbing at his eyes, and you know he's done. We tried to keep him on a similar schedule to William, but he was not having any of that. In fact, some nights it's hard to even keep him up as late as 7:30. He's definitely an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of guy.

Who knows what was wrong with him? But he seems to have quieted back down again. Let's hope for the best.

Two weekend getaways

Oy.

After our soul-and-body-exhausting trip to the beach in August, I made the comment on Facebook that a vacation with small children really isn't a vacation. And a friend of mine remarked that it's really just a relocation.

A-freakin'-men to that.

We've spent the last two weekends on the road. I don't even know how many miles we put on the minivan. Or how many snacks William went through en route. I did learn one important thing, though: it was worth it, just keeping most of the same stufff packed from the first weekend and just reloading it back into the van for the second trip.

Last weekend, David and I loaded up Matilda with Andrew, William, Diane and Aaron and set sail for the mountains of East Tennessee. David and I were invited to attend a wedding, so Diane and Aaron went with us to babysit during the wedding events. And soak up a little cool mountain air in the meantime. Well, we certainly were packed tightly into that minivan! But it was worth the close quarters. We had a lovely weekend, all the way around.

Our cabin,
















which was named "The Three Bears," had stuffed bears and bear decorations all over the place, and William had a ball looking at all of them.

And of course, so did Andrew:


















We did a lot of porch-sitting and chatting in our down time, which, if you think about it, is just about one of the most perfect ways to spend a beautiful fall day:




















Diane with William testing out the "Indiana Jones" bridge in a little park, not far from our cabin:



















And a photo of the boys together in "their" room, which was a sweet little sleeping porch right off our room:

















I should note here, however, that our cabin, while adorable in every way, was perched on top of a precipice. I don't think I've ever driven up a street that was angled that sharply before in my entire life. There are roller coasters in major theme parks that don't go up hills that steep.

Then, a few days after we returned to Music City, I took the boys and we drove down to Natchez to see my parents and brother. We took the scenic route, meaning that we drove through Birmingham and swung by my childhood home so I could show William where I grew up. It's been at least a decade, maybe longer, since I last saw the house. It seemed at once both completely familiar and totally foreign to me. I know it is horribly cliched to say this, but the house--the whole neighborhood, really--looked so much smaller than I remembered it being. The house, which is red brick, used to have yellow, then pale peach, woodwork. Now the wood parts are painted dark green, but they're a faded dark green, and there's this big Bradford pear tree in the front yard that wasn't there when we lived there. It was just...different.

Many pit stops later, we eventually made our way down to Natchez for the annual hot air balloon festival. Poor Mom. We totally took over her entire house. There was not a single room that didn't have some of our stuff in it. Bags of toys, bags of baby gear, diapers, the Batcave, shoes, the bouncy seat, snacks, and so on. We're like the human version of kudzu. And we even ousted my brother from his room, too. (He's living with her while he finishes grad school.) It was great to be there, but Mom's cat didn't look so pleased about our invasion.

On Friday night, we went to the balloon festival carnival down on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and William got to ride some of the kiddie rides. His favorite was maybe the ricketiest carousel I have ever seen in my life. Every time his horse wobbled upwards on its post, I lunged to make sure I was in position to catch my firstborn, should he be catapulted off.














You can't tell from the photo, but there were massive fireworks exploding out over the river. We watched them for awhile, until the siren call of the next kiddie ride managed to lure William away.

Then, on Saturday morning, the balloons began their first race in the crisp early morning sunshine. They raced right over my mom's house, so we all dashed out into the street in our pajamas to get a look.



































We spent most of Saturday afternoon down at the carnival again. Mom and Daddy sold T-shirts, and William got me, his uncle and his grandfather to take him to ride the rides at various times. Luckily for his grandfather, there are height and weight limits to those rides. I didn't realize that on Friday night, and I made the mistake of insisting on riding some of the rides with William. They should sell Dramamine with the ride tickets, I think.

William was allowed to play one game; at $3 a pop, that's all I was going to spring for. Luckily, he won! He got a stuffed lion. I'll have to post the picture from my iPhone later. But in the interim, here's a photo of him with a couple of the hot air balloons in the background...



















You could wait in line to get in the basket and then float way up in the air (still tethered to the ground, of course). I said, after I stopped wheezing in horror at the very idea, "Um, no thanks." I like looking at hot air balloons a lot. From a distance. Where there's no possible way that I or anyone whom I love could possibly be scooped up into one.

All in all, two lovely weekends with both sets of grandparents. And of course, it's nice to be home again now, too.

Smell Like a Monster

Have any of you laughed as hard as I have over those Old Spice commercials that feature the guy who does the whole commercial all in one take? Well, the Sesame Street folks did a spoof of "Smell Like a Man" that they call "Smell Like a Monster."

I'm 36 years old, and I still love Sesame Street. My son has moved on, and he now prefers "Word Girl," which is pretty awesome. But there's just something about Grover, Bert and Ernie and all the others, you know? (He did like "Smell Like a Monster," though. He didn't get the spoof part, not having seen the original commercials, but he laughed when the clam snapped onto Grover's nose.) They'll always be old friends.

Playtime

Here's a quick photo of Andrew "playing" with his Baby Legos:















I mean, seriously, do you not just want to eat him up? I realize that I am a teensy bit biased, and all, but really.

(Seeing him in those pajamas with that particular set of toys and the Boppy behind him makes me nostalgic for Baby William, too.)

And just like his big brother, Andrew loves to gnaw on those Baby Legos (it's a Lego brand shape sorter for babies, so the shapes are fashioned to look like giant Lego pieces). I wonder if I could run the whole mess through the dishwasher....

Consonants? Check.

So a couple of weeks ago, David asked me if Andrew had started saying any consonants yet. And as I posted here, I told him I wasn't sure. Because I wasn't sure.

Well, the very next day, as if he knew what we'd been discussing, Andrew began saying "da de de da da." Isn't he so very thoughtful? So, yay for consonants!

And he blows lots and lots of raspberries, practicing the "b" sound. More consonants! I think we will have another round of enthusiastic "ba"-ing here in another month or two.

I was right!

Do y'all remember when I sneered at the expensive designer diapers that Target was selling earlier this year?

Well, I was vindicated. Cruising past the baby section a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a big endcap full of those designer diapers, with the original price slashed down to a much more reasonable "clearance" price. Of course, the clearance price was still more expensive than you'd pay for regular old diapers, even the brand-name kind. No wonder no one bought them.

I'm guessing they won't try that little experiment again.

Although I will say this....I know a lot of parents (myself included) who already didn't like the way that diaper companies put little designs on the diapers, like Pooh Bear or Elmo. The designs show through light-colored clothes. For example, in order to keep Cookie Monster's googly-eyed face from beaming through Andrew's white linen baptism outfit, I had to put a plain white onesie on him first. It would have been nice to just have a plain old white diaper. But even the lower-cost diapers like Luvs put pictures on their diapers. (Yes, I probably could have used cloth diapers which are nice and plain. I didn't. That's a discussion for another time.)

So the Pampers folk were especially missing the mark with the designer patterned diapers: they were charging MORE for something than many parents want LESS of. Tsk tsk tsk.

I love it when I'm right.

I don't remember

You know, you'd think I'd know what I was doing this time around. I've had one child already, raised him reasonably well so far, and nothing too bad has happened (well, other than that minivan-door incident, but we won't dwell on that because all's well that ends well, right?).

But here I am, on Kid No. 2, and I can't seem to remember much of what I did the first time around! My friend Mary Clare, who has a baby one week younger than Andrew, and I spent 30 minutes on the phone a couple of weeks ago, trying to remember how much baby food we fed our first kids at six months of age. I actually went back through this blog to look it up. And I'm still not entirely sure. I'll find myself mixing up a little bowl of baby oatmeal for Andrew and then studying it dubiously. "Does that look right?" I then will ask William, who will just shrug and keep slurping up his own bowl of Quaker's instant. Like he remembers.

Now David's doing it. "Has Andrew started saying any consonants?" he asked me earlier today. "Um, I don't know," I said, trying to remember. "Had William started saying any consonants by this time?" David didn't remember. I didn't remember either.

I'm reassuring myself that it really doesn't matter that much. I wrote down most of the big stuff last time, and hopefully I'll write it down this time, too. My motto in life has more or less been "If it matters, I write it down." (Which is better than my runner-up motto in life, which is "If something is stupid, I tend to say so.") I kind of wish now that I had written down even more the first kid around, but I'm glad that at least I wrote down as much as I did. Because while I may still be bumbling around with baby food, I at least have some frame of reference for some of the other stuff.

That is, if I can sort back through all the old posts and find it...

The sweet spot

Andrew will be seven months old next week. It's the sweet spot of babyhood. He's old enough to be able to really engage with us, but he's too young to go anywhere. Or to talk back to us. He sleeps through the night, and I can still pretty much drag him around to wherever I happen to be going. I do know, however, that those days are going to end before too long. So I'm trying to just enjoy him right now as much as I can.

I'm posting a few photos that I took the other night when we all got down on the floor to play with Andrew.

Augh! I just want to gobble him up when he's all bright-eyed like this:


































Hmm. How'd all those rings get on Andrew? Can you tell that this little guy has a big brother?



















If you look closely in this last picture, you can see that David's got one finger hooked in the strap of Andrew's overalls. That's so Andrew won't just pitch forward and land on his face. He's getting better every day, though, about sitting up on his own. He's much more stable than he was even a week ago.

Gross anatomy

William's been obsessed with one of David's old med school textbooks for a couple of months now. It's an anatomy book, full of pictures of cadavers and cross-sections of cadavers and peeled-back pieces of cadavers. Lovely stuff. Fabulous bedtime reading.

Of course, we did not tell William that the illustration of a skeleton that he was so carefully studying was a photo of an actual skeleton from a person formerly known as alive. Why freak him out, we reasoned. Just let him look at the pictures, and he'll eventually get bored with it.

But he didn't get bored with it. He continued to look at it and ask for explanations of the various parts. Still, we figured, why let him in on what the pictures really are?

Until one day, William hefted the book into my lap so he could ask me yet another question that I could not answer. (My standard responses are either "You're asking the wrong parent, kid" or "Hmmm. Let's see what Dr. Google has to say about this.") And as I tried to figure out exactly what he was pointing to, he said very matter-of-factly, "These are pictures of dead people."

To which I stuttered and managed to stammer out a response something like, "Uh, yes. Yes, they are."

He wasn't fazed in the least. Not in the least. Hopefully this lack of squeamishness bodes well for him as a future scientist and not as a future, I don't know, axe murderer or something.

And for the record, we bought him his own children's book about the human body. He's got a good memory. I'm not really exaggerating when I say that I wonder if he might actually be able to explain the digestive system better than I could.

And so autumn begins at last

My God, how did I get so behind again? Here it is, September already. I love September. I'm already waking up each morning in a better mood, knowing that it's fixing to be autumn.

But wow, a lot has happened. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Andrew weighed 17 lbs 8 oz and was 27 inches long at his six month (plus one week) well-baby visit last Thursday, which puts him smack-dab in the middle of the growth chart. He's in the 50th percentile for both height and weight, which also means that he's smaller than William was at the same age. And here we were, all thinking that he was this giant baby. And he's really not! I'm actually pleased about this. It means that he's much more likely to fit into all of William's hand-me-down clothes for this fall and winter. Hurray! I can't wait to put Andrew in William's sweet little green grasshopper romper, the shark sweater, and all those other outfits that I have such fond memories of.

Andrew is now gobbling down baby food like a champ. He's had rice cereal, peas, green beans, squash, sweet potatoes and carrots. We start him on a new food on Tuesday. I think I'm going to go with either oatmeal or a fruit. Maybe apples or pears. So far, I've introduced everything in the exact same order that I did with William, but maybe we'll get really crazy and go with something totally wild and unexpected next. Like peaches! I like living on the edge, you know.

William started four-year-old school on Friday. Should I call that Pre-K or four-year-old kindergarten, or what? Well, whatever it is, he started it. He loooooves it. He has the cutest little teachers, all young and energetic, and a terrific classroom and they're going to be learning more yoga again this year from their music teacher. He's allowed to bring PBJs in his lunch this year, and there are several boys in his class who love to play Batman on the playground, too. I think it's going to be a good year.

Obligatory First Day of School photo:




















William also started four-year-old Encore on Tuesday. That's the school district's gifted-and-talented program for preschoolers. His schedule is going to be packed this autumn, between going to preschool five days a week and Encore one afternoon a week. I was feeling all guilty for accidentally missing the deadline to sign him up to play soccer this fall, but looking at all the schlepping I'm going to be doing anyway, that might not be such a bad thing.

Um, what else is going on with us?

I guess those are the big things. On a smaller scale....

William keeps asking lots of good questions, so I find myself spending a lot of time on Google, looking up the answers. He and I spent almost an hour the other day looking up information about the South Pole and the North Pole the other day. I don't know how much he learned, but I feel smarter already.

Andrew keeps getting more and more fun. I love this age. He's starting to really pay attention to things, he's figuring things out, and he laughs so much more, too. And the fact that he sleeps through the night reliably helps, too. :) Sometimes I like to just stare at him and stroke his cheek and drink him in. William and I both spend a lot of time telling him how adorable he is. Hopefully we won't spoil him too much.

Sitting up

And right on schedule, we have...tripoding!



Andrew will officially be six months old tomorrow, and last week, he started propping himself up in a sitting position. He can't sit like that for a really long time, though, or he starts listing over. But he's getting better at it each time, as he builds up his strength.

Remember William at about the same age? We used to prop him up with the Boppy so he could sit up and play with his toys.



I got out the Boppy for Andrew a couple of days ago,m too. He actually does better without it, but you do have to sit right there next to him so he doesn't suddenly throw himself backward and bonk his head.

I bet he'll be sitting up all on his own before I know it. I swear, every time I turn around, he's grown a little bit or doing something new. He started blowing raspberries about a week or so ago, and he loves to do that to get attention. And he's really digging the baby food. Right now, we're on green beans, but in another day or so, I'm going to give him squash. If he's anything like William, the squash will be a Big Hit.

* * *

Side note: we did not get any good family pictures at the beach this year, despite the matching outfits that I bought for the boys specifically for that purpose. Sob. But I did at least get one pretty cute snapshot of them at home in their little outfits. It's hard to set up a pose right now, but I bet it will be easier once Andrew is reliably able to sit up by himself. Check them out:

What, me worry?

I don't know how we got onto the topic of worrying, but I found myself discussing how parents worry about their children with William this morning.

We were driving home from the dentist office, and he was chattering on about Harry Potter (as usual) and asking a billion questions that I refused to answer on the grounds that 1) he needs to read the books in order and find out for himself and 2) I refuse to spoil it for him. And somehow, I was telling him that parents always worry about their kids, even when they're grown up.

William was mystified by this. He wanted to know why. I told him that I couldn't really explain why, except that parents love their children and want them to be healthy, happy and safe, so they worry about them not achieving those things. William might be perfectly safe when he's at school, for example, but part of me still worries about him.

And I found myself uttering something I never really thought I'd say.

"You'll understand when you're a parent one day," I said.

Mom? Is that you?

Really. It was her voice coming out of my mouth. Or maybe it was my dad's voice. Either way, it was like aliens took over my body and began controlling my speech. That happens a lot these days, I've noticed. I open my mouth, and rather than saying something of my own, I parrot something that my mom used to say to me. Eerie how that happens.

In fact, the other day, I chuckled over a cartoon in the paper and had to call my mom to share. (The cartoon was Zits, in case any of you are fans.) The teenaged boy says, in disbelief to his mom, something like, "So you want me to text you every time I go somewhere, even if it makes me look like a dork?" And the mom says, happily, "Yep! Thanks!" I don't even have a teenager, and yet, I totally got it. I'll be that mom in about ten years. Mom texted me back to say, "Ah yes! You just wait!"

The funny thing is that I was totally prepared to worry about my young children--I just didn't really understand that it would keep going on forever and ever amen. All new parents worry. We worry about our babies being born healthy. We worry about whether the baby is still breathing when he's alone in his crib and hasn't cried in a long time. We worry when the baby hasn't had a messy diaper in what seems like too long (can there really be a too long?). We worry about our babies hitting all the milestones on time. So yes, I worry about Andrew. But I still worry about William. In fact, I might worry even more about him now than I used to. And now I know that I will continue to do so for as long as he lives. The specific things that I will worry about will undoubtedly change. But the big ones--health, happiness and safety--will remain constant.

In fact, I even worry about my own parents a lot more these days. It's ridiculous. I admonish them to call me when they're on the road and let me know when they get safely to their destination. I may, er, even have been known to call or text and badger them until I get a satisfactory response. And um, I may even pester my husband to do the same with his parents ("Did you call Diane and Aaron yet? Did they make it to their hotel yet? Is their car doing okay? Are they all right?").

The irony. Yes, yes.

Back to sleep

Lots of people claim that babies sleep better when they sleep on their tummies. I can't speak for all babies, but that was pretty much true for William. Once he was able to sleep on his stomach, he did. From then on, until he started sleeping in a big boy bed, his default sleep position was on his stomach. With his bottom in the air.

So awhile ago--I don't remember exactly when--Andrew started sleeping through the night. He's done it off and on for awhile, but then he started doing it fairly reliably a few weeks ago. Sure, we'd get one of those nights, here and there, when he'd need rebinking (read: re-insert the pacifier into mouth of squalling babe) a few times, but they were starting to decrease.

Then he started rolling over onto his tummy. Now his latest trick is to roll himself over onto his stomach, fall asleep, squirm around in his sleep, and then wake up on his stomach. He seems to have forgotten that he can roll back onto his back, so he thinks he's stuck. And oh, that makes him so mad! One night last week, I was jolted out of a sound sleep by the sound of frantic baby cries. I limped as fast as I could into Andrew's room, and there he was, on his stomach, sideways in the crib, with both leg hanging out between the slats. No wonder he was mad!

He's doing better again. He does seem to like sleeping on his stomach. Just not waking up on his stomach. So I'll be really glad when he remembers how to roll back onto his back without assistance again.

The Romanian Orphanage Crib Strikes Again

Remember when I said "so far, so good" about our beach trip?

Yes, well, that was before it stormed and stormed and stormed the rest of the day on Friday. So everyone had to stay inside, rather than get to run around out on the beach. And then we got caught in ridiculous traffic for nearly three hours in the mountains on the way home, which resulted in my throwing in the proverbial towel and convincing David to get us a hotel room in Knoxville for Saturday night.

Guess what showed up in our hotel room? That's right. Another Romanian orphanage crib*. This time, Andrew got the Romanian orphanage crib experience. And like his big brother, he was not so amused by it. Every time he rolled over, he got arms or legs tangled up in between the cold metal bars.

And then he woke up screaming--SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS LIKE HE'D BEEN SHOT--around 1 a.m., and I couldn't convince him to quiet down there for awhile for love or money. David was hyperventilating. Even William, who sleeps like the dead, woke up. The screaming echoed around and 'round those concrete walls in an impressive way, like the acoustics in a European cathedral. This was after we had sat in our minivan for hours upon hours all day AND stupidly taken the boys to eat hamburgers at Littons in Knoxville at 8:15 at night. It was, to put it mildly, perhaps not the most relaxing evening of our lives.

(*And of course, I took pictures of Andrew in the crib! You knew I would. Unfortunately, they're on my iPhone. So I'll have to post them later.)

From earlier in the week, when things were a little more sane:

William doing triangle pose at the beach:



Me and Andrew at sunset:



Dee Dee helping William try to boogie board:





Andrew and his daddy:



I'll post some more photos soon.

Beach babies

This is our last day at the beach, so I thought I'd take advantage of a temporary lull in the action to say hi to all my readers.

Hi!

This was our first big family vacation as a family of four. So far, so good. We loaded down the minivan like we were going to be hiking up Mount Everest, in anticipation of just about anything that could possibly happen. It's amazing that David could still drive it, frankly. Nothing like travelling with small children and all their gear!

We've had mostly good weather. It stormed one morning, and then it rained briefly today, but that's about it. Andrew's only been out to the beach a couple of times, but I don't think he minds. William, on the other hand, has had a ball, playing on the beach. Even I have made it down to the beach a few times, with my gimpy leg. I was wishing that we hadn't rented an oceanfront beach house with the longest possible walk to the beach, but I've managed to do it. Darn stairs, though. The walkway goes up and down, up and down, up and down. Ugh.

Next year, I want to rent a house that has a shorter walk to the beach. Okay, yes, I hopefully will not have a broken ankle next summer, but I will have a one-year-old that I will have to schlep to the beach, along with a five-year-old and all the necessary gear. Man, I'm tired, just thinking about that.

I'll post pictures soon. Wish us luck on the journey home tomorrow...we're going to need it...

Solid food...so to speak

Look who got to eat some tasty rice cereal on Wednesday night!



Yes, we allowed Andrew to have his first dalliance with solid food. Well, if you can call runny rice cereal "solid." I'm sure it's violating all sorts of laws of physics to refer to it as "solid." It barely stays on a spoon.



Is this the universal baby "I don't know about this stuff" expression or what?



Actually, this might be a better example:



Yeah, look at all that delicious rice cereal just oozing down his chin. Nummy.

We made Andrew the same promise that we made William: it really does get better than this. Really. And soon. Sure, maybe pureed peas aren't the creme de la creme, so to speak, but there is some good stuff coming. I mean, Cheerios are coming in a few months. I still eat--and enjoy--Cheerios to this day.

We're going to have to start working on the sippy cup soon, too, though. I need to refresh myself on the boot camp techniques that worked with William and see if Andrew will buy into them, too.

Mama Lou

My grandmother, Louise Huntley Moore Larson, passed away this morning. She was 92.

She had major surgery earlier this week, and she just never was able to bounce back. She held on for awhile, but ultimately, it was just too much for her. She died around 11:30 this morning in her hospital room in Vicksburg, with my grandfather by her side. And my uncle, aunt, mom and brother were there, too. Unfortunately, my dad was en route, so he wasn't there; however he'd been with her all week, so he had had a chance to be with her when she was still conscious.

You've probably heard me refer to Mama Lou before, and of course, there are pictures of her on this blog. She got to spend time with William a number of times.






































He attended her ninetieth birthday party, and she was present for his baptism. I just wish that she'd gotten the chance to meet Andrew, too...especially since some of us think he resembles Grandaddy Bill.

I'm still feeling sad about her passing away, so I'm not going to write too much more about it right now. I'm just going to tell a short story about something that happened when I was a little girl.

I was probably about three years old, and I went to stay with Mama Lou and Grandaddy Bill for a few days. One day we were going somewhere, so Mama Lou put me in the car. But somehow I managed to lock the doors while she was still outside the car. So she stood there, staring at me in disbelief, while tugging and pulling on the car door. She tried to coax me to unlock the door, but either I didn't understand what she was trying to get me to do, or I didn't want to. She was upset, and then I got upset, and then we both sat there, on opposite sides of the glass from each other, and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed at each other. Grandaddy Bill eventually came and saved the day.

We've laughed about that story countless times over the years, especially a couple of years ago when William locked me and David out of the beach house. I'm sure it wasn't that funny at the time, but it got progressively funnier over the years, like many family stories do.

Mama Lou had not been in very good health these last few years, and there were times when her memory would fade in and out. But when she was feeling good, she was still the same old Mama Lou. I talked to her a couple of months ago about Andrew, and she sounded weak but otherwise the same as I've always known her to sound.

I will miss her.

Let's roll

I know I'm not supposed to compare my sons. I know, I know, I know. They're totally different people who will do things on their own timeframes when they're ready, and it doesn't matter if they do things alike. Blah blah y blah.

But let's face it. We all do it, even if it's just in benign ways. For example, it doesn't matter to me if Andrew does things at the same age that William did things, but part of me just sort of expects them to be similar anyway. So it still took me a little off-guard (in a pleasant way, of course) when Andrew suddenly decided to start rolling over yesterday. William rolled over for the first time shortly before he turned six months old, but Andrew won't even be five months old until Saturday. And yet, there he was, rolling onto his tummy, right there in front of me. "Hey, he's ahead of schedule!" was my first thought. Ahead of William's schedule, sure. But I guess Andrew figured he was ready, and his schedule is the only one that matters to him.

Actually, it was kind of funny. I put Andrew down on his quilt in the front room. He was lying on his back. William was sprawled out on the floor next to him, playing with his iPod. Then I left the room to go check on the tomato sauce that was simmering on the stove. When I dragged myself back into the room a few minutes later, Andrew was somehow on his tummy.

"Hey, William, did you do that?" I asked my elder child, gesturing to his baby brother. "Andrew's on his tummy. Did you help him roll over?"

"No," William said, still glued to his iPod. "He did it himself."

"Are you sure?" I asked again. "He was on his back. Are you sure you didn't help him roll over onto his tummy?"

"No, Mommy," William said again. "Andrew rolled himself over."

Because William, like many four-year-olds, can be a little bit of an unreliable narrator, I was still skeptical. I flipped Andrew back onto his back and sat down at my desk. A minute or two later, Andrew casually rolled over onto his stomach, and I squealed in delight. William looked up from the iPod and began to smile and laugh at Andrew, too. We both made a big old fuss over him, and I rolled him back onto his back to see if he'd roll over again. And good-natured baby that he is, he indulged us again. I even got him on video once.

And of course, y'all know me. I had to text my family, post it on Facebook and generally use modern technology to make a nuisance of myself, letting people know about my genius baby who can roll! over! all! by! himself! (See? Here I am, doing in here!)

Later on, he rolled from his stomach to his back, too. I haven't captured that one on film yet, but he was practicing some more this evening, so perhaps that will come soon.

My only concern: this doesn't mean that he's going to crawl earlier than William did, too, is he? Because that would be very inconvenient. I'd kind of like him to stay stationary for awhile. Because of course we all know that kids are all about being convenient for their parents.

Mom, why don't you have more pictures of me?

The boys, all dressed up for church yesterday:





Yep, we all went to church yesterday. Diane came out here to drive us in the minivan, since I still can't drive. I'm grateful to her. I'm getting tired of this whole broken ankle thing, though. It's been five weeks, folks. Five looooong weeks.

Anyway, I had to take a few pictures of the boys in their nice clothes, particularly Andrew, since I have already fallen into one of the best-known traps of the Parent of More Than One Child. You may also know it as the "Mom, why did you take so many more pictures of my older sibling?" phenomenon.

Oh sure, I had great intentions of being the exception to the rule. I started out strong, too. I took dozens and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of photos in the first month or so after Andrew was born. I even put a bunch of pictures from Andrew's first six weeks or so into an actual album. I mean, wow, right? I didn't put photos of William into an album for, er, years.

But then inertia set in. Plus, the broken ankle kind of hobbled the whole effort (no pun intended...mostly). Every time Andrew was doing something cute, I'd be stuck on my butt, wondering if he'd still be doing that cute thing, whatever it was, by the time I hoisted myself up on the crutches, hobbled into the other room to get the camera (it was always in another room), limped back and then managed to get the camera out and ready to take photos. Boy, I'm panting a little bit right now, just remembering how much effort it took.

I did get lucky a few times, of course. But mostly, it was a challenge that even I, the shutterbug ordinaire (can't call myself a shutterbug extraordinaire...gotta set myself some goals, you know), couldn't overcome very often. Plus, there are only so many pictures you can take of a baby in a stroller in the same place in the same room. Although you have to admit that the ones I took last week really are amazingly cute. Right? Right??

I even took Andrew to Sears to have a portrait taken. No small task, given that I also brought William along, ostensibly to help baby-wrangle but mostly because I didn't know what else to do with him. But then, just like my mother had to do 30mumbleyears ago with me and my little brother, I ended up inviting William to be in the photos with Andrew. Okay, but I should get a pass on that. The pictures of William and Andrew together are gorgeous. They really are. And I got some good solo pictures of Andrew, too, so it wasn't like there are only pictures of the two of them together.

Anyway, now that I'm more mobile, I am renewing my vow to take more pictures of Andrew so that he doesn't whine, in 20 years or so, that I have so many more pictures of his big brother than I do of him. I probably will still have more pictures of William, but I'm going to try harder to make sure the discrepancy isn't too great.

But really, I can't resist taking some photos of both boys together. I just can't. They love each other so much, and it just makes me happy to see them like this. Those are the sorts of moments that make this parenting thing all totally worth while.