Baby Kisses

What's better than getting smothered with kisses from this little guy?

He woke up from his nap and slobbered me with kisses and zerberts....LOVE baby kisses, their open-mouthed, wet, messiness. I was born to be kissed by babies.
Just standing at the window, waiting for Daddy to get home from work.

My Little Puppy

What is cute, cuddly, furry all over (well, sort-of) and follows you wherever you go, constantly underfoot and ALWAYS begging for food? No, it's not a puppy, as one might think, but it IS my baby boy, Will. He just HAS to be where I am. If I'm in the kitchen, then he's in the kitchen. If I'm in the bathroom, then HE'S in the bathroom (lucky him). But his F-A-V-O-R-I-T-E place to be is at my feet while I am on the computer. He grabs the chair, trying to pull himself up (which is difficult since it's a swivel chair), he sucks on my toes, he scratches the chair, he eats the chair, he crawls under the desk and then gets stuck, he tries to open the desk drawers, etc., etc., etc. So, since he clearly is fascinated with my chair, I decided to let him go for a ride one day. I put him in it, then pushed him around in circles. He just LOVED it. So, I snapped some photos. Funny little boy.

This is the ONLY way I can get him to stay still when I take his picture (he's stuck in between my legs so he would hold still). As SOON as I get out the camera, he goes crawling toward it, trying to grab it. He won't STAY still so that I can snap a clear, not fuzzy, photo! (It seems that Will is in his jammies in most of these photos. That's b/c he's just too darn cute in the mornings when he wakes up that I can't resist taking a picture. I DO get him dressed, I swear!)

The Eyes of a Crawler...

I tried to post this last week (on September 18), but my camera was being funky and I couldn't download any pictures. So, here it is now...

Lo and behold: you are looking into the eyes of an official crawler. No longer is the "worm crawl" the preferable choice of movement around here. It's been brewing for days, but finally our little guy is ready to move on to bigger and better things. Goodbye worm crawl--you have served us well and we will miss you.

Favorite worm crawl moment: we were in Boston last weekend (Josh's dad came out for a conference so Will finally got to meet him, though we have no photos to document it, surprise). We were at church, sitting in the foyer at a singles' ward in Harvard territory. Will was sitting with Josh on the couch across from me. When I dropped a jar of Will's baby food out of his diaper bag, Will spied it from across the room and sped-worm-crawled faster than the speed of light to the food, grabbed it in his hand and whined, whined, whined until he got to eat. Silly Willy, who loves food.

Good Reads

I'm in need of some new reading--something great and relatively easy to get into. I just finished a great book, especially if you love Macbeth like I do. It's called The Third Witch and it is the tale of Macbeth told from the third witch's point of view. It was fascinating--wish I would have known about it when I taught Macbeth because it makes for a wonderful companion to the play. Anyhow, on a friend of a friend of a friend's blog I found this reading list and I wanted to join in on the fun and I thought it would give you an idea of some books I've enjoyed. And then, if you feel like sharing, let me know some books you've enjoyed recently (and yes, I've read the Twilight series where I was highly disappointed with the ending, so no need to pass that along). Here's how it works:

The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE (Note: I'm adding THREE *** stars to the ones I REALLY love).
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

***1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen%
*2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
***3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
***4Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
***5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee**
6 The Bible (parts of it)
**7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
*10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
***11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
**12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
**14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (read most of them--not all the histories, love most of them--not all the histories)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
*19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
**21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolsto
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
*28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia- CS Lewis
***34 Emma - Jane Austen
**35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
**36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
***37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
**39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
**42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
***44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
%46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
*49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
**51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
*53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
***54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
%57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
*59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
*64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
%65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
***68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (I read this at least once a year...love it)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
#70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
%73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
*76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
**80 Possession - AS Byatt (a great movie, too, with Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow)
*81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
*83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
**87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
*89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
*91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
**98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
*99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
**100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


I only really hated Moby Dick. It was just plain boring and long and boring and long. Some of my favorites are obviously Jane Austen, who I adore as well as The Kite Runner and, of course, Bridget Jones' Diary (a funny, if not a tad scandalous, read). But my all time favorite is and forever will be To Kill a Mockingbird. If you haven't read this since 8th grade with Mrs. Donaldson, it's time to read it again. Oh, and fall is a wonderful time to read it.

Now, friends, though few of you there may be, share your favorite reads with me!

Oh, How I Love to Stand!

Yes, people, we are in some serious trouble, trouble right here in River City that starts with "T". Trouble because our little guy has learned to stand right on up. It all began in the bath tub one summer night whilst in a land called Spokane (it seems as though a lot of his new techniques have been acquired while bathing.....hmm). And some of the trouble this new skill has caused us:

• Paper messes EVERYWHERE. He can grab books, files, scrapbook paper--you name it-- from every shelf in our office and he likes to EAT it. Yummy. (Right now he is eating Willa Cather's My Antonia. At least he has good taste).
  
• More head-damage due to the falling backwards that accompanies said standing up.
  
• Constant worrying over aforementioned head damage, so I now must watch him like a hawk to protect precious head from any more brain cell loss. (His brain's all he's got since we can't afford to send him to college, seeing as how we spent all our money on his conception).

At least, along with the trouble, this provides pure entertainment and diversion for all of us. His main goal in life is to search out the perfect ledge, crawl to it, pull up to standing position and then proceed to bang on said surface for hours on end.

Some of his favorite places to stand:

• The book shelf in the office.
  
• The shoe basket in the kitchen.
  
• The shoe shelves in the closet (I'm sensing a trend).
  
• The ottoman in the family room.
  
• The couch in the family room.
  
• The bath tub ledge (this one causes the most worrying since he slips and falls so very easily in the bathtub).

Of course, what would a post be without a picture? Here's the proof that the little one can stand:

Standing at the shoe basket. So, he loves shoes and feet (I guess he ought to since he slept the first month of his life in my shoe closet!). When we flew to Spokane, I put him down in the airport and he was soooo excited to be free that he just went a-crawling everywhere. I look over and, sure enough, he had crawled straight over to a guy wearing flip-flops, with his mouth agape, all ready to take a nice big juicy lick right on the unsuspecting man's toes. Luckily, I stopped him in time. Phew!
Look at the happy look on his face!

Below, he is at the troublesome bookshelf where he wreaks all sorts of havoc!

And here he is in the closet with all my beloved shoes. Like mother, like son, I guess. What better thing to love than shoes?

Genius?

Until recently I was totally convinced that my child had the makings of a genius. Yes, I am sure that you'd all say the same thing about your child, but for me, I thought it was oh-so-true. However, notice the past tense in these sentences: was a genius, thought he was destined to become one... What has changed my mind, you ask? Let's just say one too many bumps in the wall has made me seriously reconsider. For one, how smart can he be if he just continues to crawl full throttle directly INTO the wall (or desk or fridge or bed or bath or crib), never stopping, never deviating from his path? For two, how smart can he possibly become if he continues to crawl full throttle directly INTO the wall, losing precious brain cells in the process? How can he go from child prodigy to problem child (as in, we're going to have a problem if you don't stop banging your head) in so short a time?

Here's a picture of the little culprit. Isn't he too cute? (yes, Taraka, I stole this from your blog--just one of many to come). We love this little guy, though we do worry for his head!

Your William Fix....

Whew! We just got home from a two-week vacation in Spokane visiting family. It was a whirlwind of a trip, every day packed with fun adventures. We had lots of fun, lots of craziness and LOTS of food. In fact, so much fun was had that it will take me a while to organize my photos and post about our fun trip, not to mention all the time it will take me to finish all the work at home that has been neglected for two weeks. Coming home from vacation is the PITS! But since I KNEW you couldn't wait much longer for updated pictures of Will, here's your William fix for now! Enjoy...this is after church (and a nap) where he's decked out in this precious outfit. I love the hat and CANNOT get enough of it! Good thing it is still HOT summer in NY, so he can wear this outfit to church this Sunday!