Pictures of Saturday

The weather was beautiful today, somewhere around 45 degrees. Sarah and I spent an hour walking around the neighborhood and splashing in every puddle we found. This was the last splash before going back inside. Note the wicked splash action coming off Sarah's right foot in this shot.

The yellow stick is the base of some kind of Swiffer miracle dusting product we've never used. Sarah instead commandeered it for a play session made twice as productive once Mom and I showed her how to release and retract the white duster-holder arm thingy.

Silas smiles widely almost every time we make eye contact with him. But rarely does he hold his smile when the camera's out. More often, I get the Dumbfounded Baby look, which is still darn cute.

Not long after Sarah was born, Tiffany started saving all the caps to our laundry detergent containers. As you can see, we are not loyal to a particular brand and size of detergent, which makes the sorting and stacking of toddler play more fun.

Snow day

Andrew Hicks

I pulled out the computer yesterday in feverish attempts to maximize the ever-brief time Sarah was taking a nap and Silas was sitting in his Bumbo not fussing. Imagine the pleasant surprise of the century when I logged on and remembered I’d already written and posted a blog late the night before. It was like a snow day or something.

It was an actual snow day, coincidentally. There was a fresh inch on the ground, and I didn’t have crap to do. While Silas was napping, I grabbed the baby monitor and put Sarah’s snow clothes on, and we went outside. She’d been excitedly baby-babbling about snow and sledding since she woke up*, but when we finally got outside, she wanted to “play jump” on the next door neighbor’s porch stairs.

Sarah loves to jump on the floor and on the bed, but she really loves to jump off things. Luckily, she’s smart or just naturally cautious enough to insist that I stand below and hold onto her hands before she does any risky jumping. Which is good for peace of mind but a little mind- and back-numbing for Daddy if Sarah decides she wants to jump down the same set of three stairs 25 times consecutively. It’s hard to put an early stop to it, too, because she enjoys Jump #25 as much as the first one. I don’t want to mess with such a simple source of pleasure for such a sweet little kid.

Anyway, when we were out in the snow and she just wanted to “play jump,” I realized that when Sarah has her snow boots on, she can’t jump or climb like she usually does. And she realized it too, early on, so she just took ginger steps down instead of jumping. I’m considering having her wear her snow boots around the house on days I feel like I just don’t have the energy to deal with normal toddler activity.

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*One of Sarah’s wakeup rituals is to have me pick her up from her bed and walk over to her window, then I open the blinds and we talk about whether it’s sunny, cloudy, cold, nice, etc. So she saw that snow before she even got her overnight diaper changed.

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BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

Silas's first Bumbo sit.