Just One

The past few days have felt so strange having just one child around here. Xan's been quite busy in New Mexico going to aquatic parks, baseball games, and the movies. Apparently, he's only told LaLa that he wants to go home a couple of times, and that was because she made him follow rules like eat his dinner before having cake and things of that nature. She's probably the meanest grandma ever :) LaLa had to go back to work today, so Xander gave Grandpop a bit of a hard time when she left, but Grandpop managed to smooth it over with a trip to the movies to see Monsters vs. Aliens, some popcorn, and candy. I guess Xan's also been playing hard out in the field with Dottie by his side most days. It sounds like he's been having a great time. His trip will be coming to an end on Thursday, and I'm really excited to go get him.

With Xander gone, Xaiden has really been enjoying being the only child. He's been doing all kinds of new things over the past few days. He has mastered the art of crawling in just a couple of days, and today he pulled up on the couch and cruised over to the table next to it to play with my keys. Xander is not going to know what to think when he gets home. When he left, Xaiden was still pretty immobile. When he gets home, Xaiden will be following him all over the place!

Xaiden has also discovered recently that he absolutely LOVES drinking out of a glass. Whenever he sees one of us take a drink at mealtime, his eyes get really big and his little arms start flailing around and slapping his highchair tray. When he actually gets a drink, his two teeth make this little "tink, tink, tink" sound on the glass. He usually takes one drink and then he starts blowing bubbles. At dinner yesterday, his Pops was giving him drinks of water while he was feeding him. Xaiden seemed to get confused about what he was doing because he would take a drink, blow bubbles, take a bite, blow bubbles. Anyone who has ever tried this will tell you that it doesn't work out very well, mostly for Pops. Basically what happens when you try to blow bubbles with a mouthful of carrots is carrots fly out of your mouth and all over your tray and your dad. It was quite entertaining, at least Xaiden and I thought so. After honing this new skill with the water glass (and carrots), he decided to put it use in the bathtub. He would lean down and put his little face in the water, blow some bubbles, then look up at me with a big dimpled grin on his face looking so proud of himself.

Today I took him out in the front yard to try to get some good pictures of him in the flower bed. He was quite uncooperative. I'm not sure why I didn't consider the fact that he likes to try to eat everything within reach when I set out on this venture. If I had, then I probably wouldn't have done it at all. I took forty pictures and got two decent ones out of the bunch, the two above. Below are some of the not so decent ones, just for fun.



It looks as though he is in pain or pooping or both in all of these, but at least I managed to get him to look at the camera. Most of the other 34 were pictures of him looking down at the plants, pulling various parts off of the plants, and attempting to eat said plants. In fact, some of them didn't even have him in the picture because I had to drop the camera to keep him from eating plants. Once I figured out that he was not going to be distracted from the flower bed, I had the bright idea to take him out and put him in the grass in front of the flower bed. It worked out much better, he instead looked at the grass, pulled up the grass, and attempted to eat said grass. So, out of ingenious ideas, I gave up and we went inside the house. No sooner had I set him down on the floor did he pull up on to the couch and give me the biggest grin. What a stinker!