Catching Up

Should I quit apologizing for not posting very frequently? I started playing "Fallout: New Vegas", the latest in the Fallout franchise and it's eating my brain. I forgot to send my nephew his birthday present and have been procrastinating on some other legal issues that I really need to look at. *sigh* At least I cleaned my kitchen, but that was only because I had someone coming over.

Declan has learned kisses! :) It's so cute. He'll put a hand on each side of your face and lean in and give you a big kiss. Okay, it's mainly just pressing his mouth against some part of your face, but it counts. He's got "bye-bye" down pat, and he uses it for everything, especially for saying hi to people. He can say "uh-oh" and sometimes he'll say "hi." I think he's trying to say Ball and Book, but all that comes out is Bu. He also does a pretty good job on "up."

He constantly amazes me at his powers of memory. We have a lot of board books, and recently I've been going through the ones that have a repeating motif through all the pages, like a ladybug, or a duck on each page, or the mouse in "Goodnight, Moon." I showed him the ladybugs once, and ever since then he can point them out on each and every page. He loves pointing to the duck. The mouse is hard because it's so small on most pages, but he remembers where they are. Sometimes he does better than me in finding it.

He's discovered knee-walking as a new mode of transportation, and he's still managing to fall from chairs and couches and his own two feet several times a day. But he loves to climb. The best I can do is try to baby-proof the house so he can't get on anything really high.

We did Halloween last night. He was a fighter pilot, courtesy of his Uncle Justin who sent him a toddler costume. Justin's in the Air Force. Everyone adored him in his outfit, even though the hat never stayed on his head more than 2 seconds. We went out with a friend of mine and her 3-year old daughter, dressed as a dragon. The little red wagon came in handy to pull them both.

It took Declan a little bit to figure out that if he carried his bucket to the door, people would hand him things. Annie, the dragon, took care of the "trick-or-treat" part. When she roared, Declan thought that was neat and he had to roar too. Of course, that generated a lot of attention and fun, so he had to keep doing it. It was very, very cute.

They both came back with quite a lot of candy for only being out 30 minutes or so. We went early, so they could make their bedtime. But then I let Declan stay up an hour past his bedtime, since the doorbell kept ringing. I was hoping that he would sleep an extra hour this morning, but no such luck. At least he took a 3-hour nap for Daniel today.

On other news, I finally got all my new herbs and salad greens in the ground in my new raised bed this weekend. Next purchase will be some sort of fishbowl or aquarium to act as mini-greenhouses for the salad greens through the winter. I still need to harvest my basil and the basil seeds, but I bet I still have another month of growing for them. We finally are going to get some rain, at least tomorrow. I've been watering all my new plants by hand every day for over a month. We got zero rain in the month of October. It was so dry that when I dug my new plants in, the soil just crumbled. No moisture at all.

I'd post some pictures, but mysteriously, all my USB cables have disappeared this month. We have a rule in this house that we blame everything on the cats. Now we have a new scapegoat. I told Daniel to buy me a new USB cable tomorrow so I can get the pictures off my camera. I have stuff on there from the Halloween party at the Children's Museum last week, random cute pictures and Halloween night pictures. My smart phone doesn't take great pictures, so I'm not even going to post those here.

Well, back to Fallout. :)