Diaper Changing is an Olympic Sport!!!

I cannot be the only person to take one look at Barney the Dinosaur and automatically think that someone has choked the snot out of Donny Osmond. -- Me, 9-12-06


SOMEONE has been getting stronger on a daily basis. SOMEONE is also THIS CLOSE to walking on his own. We taking bets now on when he will take that one small step for boy, one giant leap for boykind. Tim thinks we have a few months...I think he's a very, very funny man. If I haven't missed my guess, I think we have three weeks, tops. I have also decided that diaper changing should be an Olympic sport. Josh is now 20 lbs., 5 oz., and all 28.5 inches of him seem to be pure muscle. Getting him changed nowadays is like trying to land a marlin. He just flops and giggles all over the place (and rips my arms out of the sockets in the process). I have contemplated holding him down with my copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a few encyclopedias, but Jon theorized that squishing him with large books could technically constitute bad form and that such an action is virtually guaranteed to bring the Greats and Grands crashing down about our heads. Jon's fairly certain that he can handle them all, but since Tim and Harry are being darn good sports and helping us rebuild our porch, Jon feels it would be impolitic to annoy them at this time.

Of late, Josh has learned that kiddie jail makes for some good times. His mornings begin with a mad crawl into his playpen, where he hauls himself up, grabs onto the top edge and side-steps around the inside until he's back where he started from. Then he laughs hysterically, and peeks out over the top edge. Then he flumps down, crawls out of the pen, and starts charging around the room.

Josh has taken to testing his two teeth against everything...and everyone. Josh got his happy hands on one of the puppy's rawhide chewies and chomped on it for a little while. Mom and I decided that as long as he didn't poke his eye out (and Grandma O. doesn't find out), that we'd let him chomp for a few minutes. He also likes to gnaw on the arms of our loveseat...(It should be noted that the vast majority of our furniture is post-collage style from the line of El Cheapo and Strong. You can't damage it...believe me, we've tried. So we don't have to be concerned about it. I am concerned about those two teeth, though...I can't quite convince myself that he won't hook his lower jaw like a fish on a line and start flopping arond frantically as he attempts to get free.) As my sister Carrie is fond of saying, "It builds immunities." He will gnaw on toes knees and loves making Jon jump and wiggle away from those tiny, dental stilettos. Since Jon has much bigger feet than I do, his toes make better targets. At this time, poor Jon still has a nasty habit of underestimating how ornery and fast his son really is. Very little gets by Josh, and just when Jon thinks he's safe and Josh is settled and cozy, Josh will rear up and latch onto Jon's nose and slobber all over it. I know that technically, I should not encourage such behavior, but it just gets funnier every time I see it. Even while Jon is trying not to laugh, he attempts to maintain an air of wounded dignity...it doesn't work. I just laugh harder. This makes Josh laugh harder, and Jon eventually gives up.



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I hate football. I have hated football since my mother scared me half-to-death years ago. I was in my room, reading with the stereo cranked up (par for the course back then), when I heard this God-awful, blood-curdling, somebody-was-getting-chain sawed scream. Thinking, as you would, that this cannot possibly be a GOOD thing, I hurled myself out of my room, crashed into the banister post, threw myself down fifteen, slick hardwood stairs IN MY SOCKS...and careened into the lower banister post. After skidding on yet another slick, harwood floor and nearly colliding with the dining room table, I made it around the corner and into the living room. My mother was not being severely murdered by a maniac. No, No....she was in fine health and fine voice, and was howling at some dumb guy on the television who had fumbled a ball at a crucial moment. I counted to ten...I counted my bruises...I counted my nearly twisted ankle...and I counted my mother a very lucky person that she didn 't realize just how close she had come to being throttled unceremoniously by her eldest child. So, it may have been a Pavlovian response, but I have not held football in the highest esteem since that day.

Jon, LOVES football. I repeat, Jon LOVES football. After he realized how big and tall this boy will be, Jon began pondering plans for Josh's imminent future in the sport . My twin brothers, Jamie and Devon, took same look at Josh and have decided that he will be a killer soccer star. As soccer players and football players tend to be at odds regarding each other's sports, I fear this may not bode well...and feel that Josh and I may need to emigrate before a civil war breaks out. I know that Jon loves football, and I try to let him enjoy it sometimes....and then sometimes, I just have to poke him.

"Hey, Jon? Those are grown men, aren't they?" I'll ask.

"Yes."

"Wouldn't you think big, grown men like those would feel awfully silly chasing a teeny, tiny ball up and down a field all of the time?" I'll ask.

"Growl."

"But, Jon, what did that teeny, tiny ball ever do to them? What kind of men are they that they would hold a grudge against a teeny, tiny ball?"

At which point, Jon handed Josh to me, and marched me to the porch. He then turned around and slammed the door. I had been kicked out. Of my own house. By my own husband. It couldn't have worked out better if I had planned it...but then again, I had planned it, so nevermind.

So I went down to Mom's. Her puppy was beside itself. Everyone else was utterly enraptured with this durfy creature (imagine a dustbunny with a tongue...a dustbunny that just happens to weigh about as much as stick of butter), but Josh was unenthralled. The puppy tried to chew his toes, it tried to jump into his lap and lick his face. Josh just threw up his hand to block it, and it went rolling back three feet. A friend of ours once commented that a dog isn't a real dog if you could punt it through the goalposts, but you couldn't convince this little fluff that it was anything but the biggest, fiercest beastie of them all. It was like being attacked by milkweed. A milkweed with a tongue.

Josh sat in the grass and pulled it up in great clumps. It was the first time he's really gotten the chance to play in grass, and he was fascinated. He would look at the handfulls of grass and then throw it into the air or rub it against his belly and talk to it. It was very cute.


Even though trips home tend to recharge my mental batteries, Mom worries about me. I keep making the mistake of visiting when I'm tired, and I am quieter and more pensive at those times. I would like to stop doing that, as I don't like her to worry, but usually, the tired and pensive times are the times I need to come home the most.

"But you guys are doing great!" We hear this a lot. Josh is healthy, amazingly happy...and making great strides...and we want him to be that way, but I'll tell you the one thing that I've learned as a new parent...one thing that the "old-hand" Moms and Dads don't always pass on. So far, parenting seems to be like teaching someone to ride a bike. I feel like all I'm really doing is running along side Josh as he does all the real work, and all I really do is check his balance and hope he figures out how to shift gears and work the brakes before he hits a tree...or that ditch or that cat...or me. for that matter.

I can teach him bike-rideing...but Jon gets to teach him to drive.