two weeks in photos

letting it all hang out on thanksgiving

from left to right: grandpa tom, fletcher, random scary old lady, great-grandma katie

walker, making it work

daddy loves sleepy baby

video games tire him out

an oops photo that i have decided is "artistic"

piggyback

does his cap fit yet? maybe not.

yum. cat.

whoooaaa, dude

a drink after a hard day's work

*slurp*

apple

I can't help being jealous of Fletcher, in the best sense of the word. He has no concept of "what other people think." He is exactly what he is, and he has no reason to ever pretend or lie. When he smiles, laughs, or looks happy? He's happy. We should all be so open and unafraid.

He's more than six months old now, and I believe he's learning cause and effect. When he drops the toy from the highchair... it falls. He's probably learning which of his actions will create a response from his father and me. It's possible that he cries now for things that he WANTS but doesn't NEED.

Whenever he cries, I try to give him what he wants, and some people on the outside might think that I'm a first time mother who is spoiling her baby. While there is a critical voice lodged in my head that says I'm doing everything WRONG, I feel strongly on this. I feel confident on this.

I have limits and I trust my limits. I will not give my baby anything that could possibly hurt him, no matter how much he wants it. I will not take him out of his carseat when we're in the checkout line at Wal-Mart, even if that's why he's crying. I will not always come to his aid when he wants to reach a toy, because I know it's important for his development that he learns to move and crawl.

But if he wants something – be it attention or distraction, comfort or nourishment, or help falling asleep – I'm going to give it to him if I think it's in his best interest. I'm obsessed with babying him. He won't be a baby for long.

He sits on his own now, for minutes at a time. He's going to figure out crawling soon. Andy picked out his first "little puffs" finger food that dissolves. He's growing up, and every day my eyes sting with the overwhelming pride I feel just looking at him.

Maybe someday he'll stick his hand in the snow and cry, and I'll be the one who rushes over to cuddle him and take him inside. I'm going to baby him as much as I can. And maybe I'm going to hope that my little apple falls a bit farther from the tree.

ditz

I'm driving along in the dark last night, on a narrow road made bumpy from all the semi-trailer traffic it gets. There's a gentleman ahead of me driving 30 mph in a 40 zone, so I zip on past him. A short distance ahead, I reach the patch of road where there are no houses, no industrial park, no streetlamps to light my way. That's okay; I know this road really well.

Then my headlights go out.

It's pitch black, as in I can't see the road, can't see the side of the road, can't see frigging anything. I don't know if I'm going off the road or into the middle of it.

I'm hyperventilating. I'm pushing buttons and pulling levers with wild abandon. It turns out windshield wiper fluid on a frozen window does NOT help in this situation.

I look in my rear view and note that the geezer is still driving so slow that his (functioning) headlights are an awfully long way back.

An oncoming car flashes its brights at me. Part of me thinks, "Crap! That person thinks I'm a ditz!" The other part of me thinks, "Turn those brights back on! I'm blind, here!"

I finally reach a four-way stop, blessedly lit with streetlamps, and I pull over. It takes two full minutes to find my hazards (maybe I am a ditz) and then I wait impatiently for my husband to arrive.

When he does, it feels like my Superman has come. My car is still demented and neither of us knows what's wrong with it, but it doesn't matter as long as I have my hero. I follow his car home, where I am safe.

But then, this morning the service rep on the phone says that I probably had one light burned out for some time now and just never noticed. Right. Everyone thinks I'm a ditz.