A birthday party

Eating cupcakes to celebrate the big 5.



Reading a new book.


Showing some other new books.



Henry loves to party hard with a cupcake, too!

Things that go bump in the night

Henry comes to our bed nearly every morning. At about 5 a.m. a sweaty, sometimes naked, sometimes urine scented baby sneaks between his parents to cuddle. He takes over my pillow and snores until one of us wakes up. Those are the easy mornings.

The other mornings Henry heads upstairs. These other mornings come in two types: noisy and stealth silence.

The noisy mornings, when we wake up aware that he is flushing something down the toilet, playing in the bathroom sink, reorganizing the bookshelf. On the noisy mornings our ears can follow the sounds to monitor his activities.

When we wake up to stealth silence we are very nervous. No baby snoring. No toilet flushing. Silence = disasters.


He has been caught red-handed dumping a 4# bag of sugar over the kitchen floor, cutting the dining table with a butcher knife, peeling plaster off the wall and jamming it into the dvd player, helping himself to a box of hot chocolate packs and finger painting brown paw prints over the hallway walls, eating most of a box of chocolates, making his own breakfast (a stick of butter in his cereal bowl) and sitting nicely at the table with a napkin eating politely with a spoon, pouring 5# bag of flour on the dining table (Scooping and pouring into a cup).



And before we are accused of negligence, our house is baby proofed. Locks on most drawers, doors are closed and latched...Henry is a master lock smith.

New bunkbeds.

Today was a family day for El's birthday. All she asked for (repeatedly 1000x) was a bunkbed for Juan and Samantha (and Lucy).

Izaak came through with his craftiness. I am in process on a full compliment of bed linens.

The babies are cozy, finally.