Three anecdotes.

1. This one is less of an anecdote and more of a current habit. Jim's been on a major cereal kick lately, and I'm guilty of occasionally leaving him on the couch with a bowl of cheerios and a stack of books or an episode of Curious George. Inevitably he pours his milkless cheerios all over the couch, at which point he runs to get me, tugs on my shirt, and announces "cereal uh-oh!" This is pronounced "see-ree-deedle uh-owwwwwwwwwwwwwwww" and is the cutest thing you've ever heard.


The pictures in this post have nothing to do with the stories, but I figured y'all might stage a coup if I made a post with no pictures, so here.

2. This one illustrates the importance of wording when dealing with tiny children who want to do everything for themselves. Yesterday Jim asked me for a banana. So naturally I get him one, but when I go to peel it before handing it to him, he starts sobbing hysterically, so I just give him the unpeeled banana and figure he'll come get me when he feels like eating it. No such luck.
"Do you want me to peel your banana?" I ask.
"No no no," Jim says, clutching his banana.
I come back a couple minutes later. "Can I peel the banana for you?"
"NO!" And out come the angry eyes.
I return, feeling proud of my idea for convincing him. "Do you want me to help you peel your banana?"
"...no."
Aha. Uncertainty. "Do you want to help me peel the banana?"
"Da," he says, with a decisive nod, and he hands it over.



3. Scene: I'm making brownies while Jim watches from his high chair. Jim sees me get out the baking chocolate, and his eyes get HUGE. Before I can hide toss it in the melting pot, he starts pointing and making an assortment of oh-god-I'm-starving noises.
"Mmmmmmmm," he howls, signing for cookies as vigorously as he can.
"Buddy, this isn't good. It's yucky. Not yummy. Yucky."
I'm trying to make myself clear, but he's obviously not having it. He keeps signing and looking distraught, so I hand him a bit of the unsweetened chocolate. Let the poor kid find out for himself how gross it is, right? Ought to be more effective than trying to tell him, anyway. So I give him the chocolate, and he pops it into his mouth without hesitation.
Immediately his face changes from glee to tragedy. His eyes scrunch shut, his mouth puckers, he turns bright red like he's about to cry. But he's not about to be proven wrong, so he steels himself with everything he has and slowly raises a trembling finger into the air: "GOOD."

MOO.

As soon as we got back from Christmas, Noah started building.


The finished product took all of forty minutes for him to make.


And here it is in service.


Yes, he's cute. Yes, we're going to eat him (and his unpictured holstein pal).

I'm surrounded by baby things.

Seriously, my world is absolutely flooded with babies at the moment. Jim, of course, and also a puppy, and also two baby cows, and soon forty-five day-old chicks and ten goslings. So much cuteness, so much chaos. Jim is in every post, naturally, but the cows will have to wait until tomorrow (and the baby birds until they arrive). For now, here's Alfred.


We got him at six weeks old, because the owner was kind of a moron and wouldn't keep him until the proper age.


Jim looks uninterested, but don't let that fool you.


He likes him. Mostly. When he's not going into Ferocious Puppy Warrior mode.




Six weeks old in this picture.


Nine weeks old in this one.


Deceptively peaceful-looking here. Most of the time he's racing through the house like a maniac and trying to chomp on whatever his little jaws can fit around.


Like Emmy's sleeve, for example.


His dad is a lab/pit bull mix, and his mother is a rottweiler/something mix. Your guess is as good as mine as far his adult appearance goes.

Two series.

Series One: Noah tosses Jim about











Series Two: Jim discovers how cameras work (or, Jim takes his first MySpace picture)

Size comparison.

June 11, 2011 - about two weeks old.


February 5, 2013 - about eighty-seven weeks old.

In other news, I now have pictures uploaded, so prepare to be inundated.

Rarrr.

Yes, I've been gone a while. Blame Christmas and Pennsylvania and visits to relations and getting unpacked, etc. There's a LOT to show you at the moment. We've got Christmas pictures and bottle calves and a puppy - and Big Jim, of course. Unfortunately, the pictures are all on my camera and not on the computer, so there aren't any pictures in this post. All I've got for you today is some ranting.

So today I took Jim to the playground. Sounds like a good idea on a Sunday afternoon, right? It's actually kind of a trial to get a toddler from the parking lot to the playground (we had to pass the baseball field and a super-cool water fountain and a picnic area full of teenagers and a smaller semi-broken slide and many other fascinating things before we got to the real playground), but by the time we got there, he was excited and raring to go start sliding. Alas, just as he started climbing the stairs to get to the slide, here came the teenagers. The whole gang of them just descended on the playground like a flock of loudly-dressed acne-ridden crows. Great. Every time Jim tried to do something, one of them would block him. He heads for the slide? One of the gals throws her backpack on top of the slide. He goes to climb the ladder? One of the guys sits down on the ladder and starts kicking his legs back and forth. So Jim and I just went back to the tiny crappy slide so he could at least have a little fun. Then they came over to take over that one too, so we left.

I know that sounds unfortunate enough, but oh, it gets worse. Jim was understandably not pleased to be leaving, so he decided to have a tantrum by the parking lot. On top of a fire ant nest. So he starts stomping and hurling himself to the ground, and ants start swarming up him, which makes it even worse, and... Gah. What can you even do in that situation? I hustled him away, stripped him down, locked him in the car, and sealed his clothes in a grocery bag until such a time as I could figure out how to get the ants off his clothes without actually burning them. Any advice? I still can't think of anything that won't end in pain and despair.

But wait, there's more! So at this point Jim is buck naked in his car seat, hollering because I apparently missed an ant or two (or because he still wants more slides, who knows), and can you guess what happens? Of course you can. Shit. No, that's not just an expletive. It's what happened. At least smearing it all over his chest and face cheered him up for the rest of the drive home.

Neighbors (and their critters).

We've only lived here for a month, but we've already gotten to know more neighbors than we ever met in two years of living in suburbia. Allow me to elaborate.

I met the first one the same day we moved in when Jim and I were interrupted in a cracker break by a skinny basset hound and an even skinnier pit bull hopping up on the porch to share our snack. After feeding them the rest of the sleeve of crackers (against Jim's hearty objections, naturally), I walked over to the nearest neighbor's house to ask if they knew whose dogs they were. Said neighbor was out the door to greet us before we were halfway to the front door. Clearly, this was the obligatory Nosy Neighbor. And so she was. I told her my name, and she told me everything I needed to know about the rest of the neighbors, plus some. The main gist of it was that everyone around is terrible and the place is filled with marauding packs of unkempt pets. I'm thinking we should try not to give her any dirt on us (either that or deliberately feed her false information, just for giggles).

To the left we have said Nosy Neighbor and also Grouchy Roaming Goat Man (the man is grouchy, not the goats, or so I'm told). I haven't met him yet, so I'm just going on NN's word, which may or may not be suspect. I haven't actually seen his goats, but I hear them an awful lot. I've met his pigs a number of time - we share a fence-line with the giant pig pasture. He has the biggest boar I've ever seen, but fortunately the hogs are pretty well-contained. Unfortunately, Jim likes to both try to visit the pigs and play with their super-cool buzzing electric fence, so that's a bit of a bother. Don't worry, grandmothers - he's only gotten himself shocked once.

To the right we have the Stereotypical Old Couple. There isn't much to say about them other than that their southern accents are hilariously thick, they invite me to church whenever I see them, and their lawn/garden is impeccably maintained.

And to the rear we have Way-the-Hell Too Many Animals Family. We met them for the first time as they were boosting one of their many kids over the pig fence to retrieve their potbellied pig (named either Suzy or Rosy, can't remember which) from Grouchy Roaming Goat Man's big pig pen. They have a lot of animals, and they don't really contain any of them. They're the owners of the basset and pit bull (who come over to visit us at least weekly), as well as a coonhound who seems to be more of a homebody. In addition to the roaming dogs, escaping pig, and a few additional cats, they also have some horses who like our pasture more than their own. These are our favorite neighbors so far. With them around, we don't even need to get our own critters - we can just borrow theirs!


Our barn looks much better with a horse in front of it, doesn't it? We have since fixed the fence so they can't come up past the barn, which is a big improvement.


This one is Eyebrows, and he is in our pasture every day without exception. The other one, Walnut, seems to be a little shyer and only visits once a week or so.


Don't worry, this is the closest we let Jim get. Walnut here seems to be a nice horse, but no sense taking chances with 1000 lb horse vs 25 lb baby.