Happy Belated Pre-Thanksgiving!

Yes, I know. Thanksgiving was ages ago, so of course anything Pre-Thanksgiving is like looking back to something from The Land Before Time. Now here we are, only 4 hours away from 2008, and how, HOW, gentle people, can I possibly deprive you of pictures that have been sitting on my hard drive for over a month before the clock rings 12:00 midnight and then my hard drive wipes out? In fact, all computers will crash and all communication, public utilities and government infrastructure on the Earth as we know it will self-destruct because computers don't know what to do when it becomes January 1, 2008.... oh wait. That was Y2K in 2000 and nothing happened.

Then consider these pictures as a belated pre-Thanksgiving present. Happy belated pre-Thanksgiving, everyone!

One morning, Tim stayed home later than usual to file some reports from home. After a delicious breakfast of oatmeal and yogurt, Evie joined him to try to delete the stuff he had just written.


It's cold here. That's why a puppy hat makes sense. It's really a pity that they don't make puppy hats for adults, too.


Alert: There is a story behind these pictures of a car. So one day during the time of pre-Thanksgiving, I was driving around town in my worn-out 1994 Altima that I only paid $8,500 for back in 1999 and had over 143,000 miles on it, when my car began to shake violently. I mean, really shaking and it didn't matter if I was rolling or sitting at a light. I felt like I was being made into a milkshake. I started to get a little nervous. About an hour later, I discovered I could no longer accelerate beyond 40 mph. I called Tim and told him I was witnessing the death of my beloved car. On Saturday, Tim was out jogging and passed this car for sale on a dealer's lot. On Monday, we went in after work for a test drive. On Tuesday, I was driving to work in our 2004 Subaru Outback. We traded in the Altima at the time of sale and the dealership very graciously gave us $400 for my milk-shake dying car.

In this picture, you can see that the length of the car almost matches the length of our itsy-bitsy backyard.

Okay, this picture is kinda cheating because this picture is actually taken during the time of Thanksgiving while we were in Tennessee. But you can never get tired of Evie with Food On Her Face pictures. This time, it is Evie a la Banana.

Bathroom Business

Warning: This post contains graphic details about poop and pee. If you are even slightly squeamish, I would like to invite you to spend your next five minutes staring out the window and think of beautiful flowers and sunshine.

I know we are behind on posting, but I just HAD to post this latest event.

This past Saturday, we were returning from a lovely jaunt up to New York City. Dad had been in town to visit us and we were returning him to NYC and spent some time with Grandma and Aunty Kay. We had a wonderful time, ate a quick dinner before we left and then drove home to try to catch the end of the Tennessee vs. LSU game.

At some point after we got off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I began to sense a strangeness in the air, as if something was off. I discovered it was a strange smell, but thought maybe it's the Chinese food that Grandma gave us to take home, it could be leaking. No worries, we are only 20 minutes from home.

When we got home, we quickly learned that the strange smell was coming from Evie's diaper. When we got inside the house and extracted Evie from the car seat, we discovered that her diaper had burst its banks and she had leaked all over her jeans and the car seat. When I got her upstairs for a bath, I discovered something more deadly.

After I took off her jeans began and lifted up her onsie, I discovered that Evie had had a massive poosplosion that had exploded up her back and had left long strips of poop stuck to the inside of her onsie. Since I did not want to wipe poop into my daughter's hair and face, I began to remove the strips of poop with toilet paper and tossed them into the toilet.

Then I took off Evie's diaper, which she immediately stepped in. Now she had poop on her foot, which she planted onto the bathmat. While I held her over my knee to wipe the explosive poop from her butt and foot, poop fell from somehwere off her body onto the bathroom floor, smearing. My knee landed in the poop on the bathmat. There were flecks of poop on the toilet seat and Evie was trying to wriggle out of my hands. I felt like I was laying in poop. I began to laugh because I was afraid I might throw up.

After I had removed poop from my baby, I stood a naked Evie next to the tub so she could watch the water filling her bath and I could finish wiping up the poop from the floor and the toilet seat. I looked up at her in time to see her peeing directly onto the bathmat, making two little pools of pee. I started to laugh harder. Her face had a look of wonder, "Where is this liquid coming from?" I began to snort hysterically with laughter when Evie leaned over and used her little index finger to swirl the pools of pee on the bathmat.

At this time, I would just like to add another item to the "Things They Did Not Tell New Mothers" List. Item #72: They did not tell us that we would be so intimately acquainted with our child's bathroom business. Perhaps if They had shared this precious bit of information with us, we would have thought differently about babies and their bodily functions. And folks, we are not even to toilet training yet. Please continue to pray for us.