Four months and four months.

Jim at four months:




Lottie at four months:




See, they really have wildly different baby personalities. Jim was all kinds of active and inquisitive and not particularly interested in me. Lottie is all laid-back and doesn't give a damn about anything but talking to people. Totally different.

Look at him now.

Happy Three-Years-Old to Jim!

Jim is hilarious!

To wit:

He is potty-trained now, and we're in the process of removing his training potty so he can just go in the real thing and make everyone's lives 100% more wonderful. Whenever he pees in the grown-up one, he peels off precisely one square of toilet paper and drops it in the toilet before flushing. Does not wipe anything, just drops the paper in the toilet. Because that's what you do, right? Go potty, put paper in toilet, flush. So that's what Jim does.


Jim got a fever recently. This is him adorably sleeping it off.

He talks funny. I feel bad laughing at him, so I hold it in until he's gone, but seriously, man, he talks really funny. I can't figure out why he says some of the things he does. Fire ants are always "ant fire," and he's deathly afraid of them. He uses pronouns correctly to say "I hungry" or "Dat's mine," but he still says "MY DO IT!!!!!11" when we do something that Jim should have been able to do (which is everything, you know). He gets all ahead of himself and fills in sentences with "deedlydeedly" while he's thinking of the next word. "Dat one" is also a good all-purpose word and is used in a variety of syntactically questionable ways, such as "Dat mine dat one red candy," which presumably means "The red candy is mine." That said, his language is really progressing astonishingly well at the moment.


See, look, isn't he cute?

As you may have guessed from the previous paragraph, Jim is a completely selfish creature right now. All things belong to Jim. All games are on Jim's turn all the time. All tasks must be done by Jim alone with no assistance, lest the calls of "Noooooooooooo dat MY do it!" commence.


He totally commandeered our bed for recovery purposes.

We made the grievous error (or wise strategic choice, maybe, because it worked) of using M&Ms as a potty-training reward. Now he carefully metes out his urine one drop at a time so he can get "one candy peez" each time. This occurs especially around bedtime, when he's figured out that he can drag the proceedings out an extra half hour or so by going to pee fifteen times.


He tried to take Lottie's, too, but she wasn't having it.

Jim can totally play video games now. He knows what buttons do what, and he only needs help on the tricky parts (like anything that requires jumping a gap). Of course, he has no idea that there's any sort of point involved, and god forbid you try to take the controller to reach the goal. That's JIM's do it, you know.

What an old baby.

Tummy-time isn't quite the torture it used to be.

Lottie is 4 months old now! Geez. That seems so old, doesn't it? But it's true. She's becoming quite venerable. She can roll over (from back to front only, but she tries really hard to do it the other way, too), and she now likes to hold and gum anything she can get her hands on, especially if it belongs to Jim. Jim naturally does not approve of this and reclaims all objects immediately, at which point Lottie squalls. Apparently protesting when you remove a toy is a milestone, too. Who'da thunk it?


Dealing with big brother's dubious affections is making her a pretty tough baby, too.

Personality-wise, she's the happiest, most sociable baby you ever saw. She smiles and laughs and talks if anyone so much as glances in her direction. She's a bit melodramatic, too: If anyone stops glancing in her direction, she sobs like she's being beaten. Everyone has to pay attention to Lottie or else. Physically, she's on track with her milestones but super lazy. Tummy-time isn't torturous anymore, but she doesn't really make much of an effort either. She just kind of lies there waiting for somebody to get down and talk to her. I was looking up old videos of Jim at this age and was absolutely shocked to see how much he kicked and wiggled. I'll post a comparison soon so you all can marvel with me. I can't believe how much they neither look nor act like each other. I'm hoping this means she won't be as crashing-through-the-walls insane as Jim is when she's a toddler.


This is what Lottie looks like if you even hint that you're going to talk to her.

To celebrate her being an old baby, we took her to the doctor this week. While Jim observed and gorged himself on goldfish crackers, she was pronounced to be 14 lb (58th percentile) and 24 inches (37th percentile), with a moderately large (but not freakish) head (actually slightly smaller than Jim at this age, much to my surprise). Lottie being Lottie, of course, she smiled and laughed through the whole thing. She even took the shots with remarkable stoicism and only cried for ten seconds. What a tough baby.

Ten minutes with Jim and Lottie.

Boxes are cool, as are the remains of a spaghetti lunch.


Lottie looks sternly at the camera.


Now contemplative.


Now curious.


Aww, hugs. Or squishing. One of those.


Jim likes to pile blankets on Lottie. Apparently it's a tent.


Lottie doesn't mind.


Oh wait, a box! Er, excuse me, a car.


Back to blanketing the baby.


Free at last!


And this is the part where I drop the camera and run to save Lottie from being dropped on her head (...again).


Jim takes a break to sit on his cartoon-watching perch.


A moment's peace before the frenzy resumes.