A Day in Pictures

Here are a few shots of my beautiful children.

Natalie enjoyed running around the yard after dinner tonight, fending off Elsa (who likes to play catch with a tennis ball but only once because she never gives it back), picking apples from a potato flower plant and fixing up the neglected Rock Zoo where a “family of pillow bugs” —as Gnat calls the little armadillos of the insect world—were visiting the zoo, a collection of rocks hand-picked by Natalie and me from our extensive travels on the slope. She picked weeds for me, which is nice practice for when it becomes her actual job.

Oddly enough, she called me a silly beagle tonight. I was on the slope taking a picture of some flowers (aren’t they beautiful?) and she kept telling me to come down. After about the third time, she yelled, “Get down here right now you silly beagle… you silly Easter beagle.” What a weird thing to say, I thought, but then remembered that her latest video of choice has been an Easter-themed Peanuts movie with, yeah, you guessed it, Snoopy, the lovable beagle.

Okay, so I’m a beagle. There are worse things, I guess.

Matthew is now standing… well, standing as long as he doesn’t let go, which sometimes he does and executes a nicely crafted Nestea plunge to the ground. All he seems to want to do lately is pull himself up onto something, the couch, the ottoman, a chair, your leg, anything, as long as he isn’t crawling on the ground like a commoner. But he falls to often to be trustworthy, and I can always tell when he’s about to go down like a sack of potatoes: He starts to stand like a drunkard, legs apart, knees wobbling, hand reaching out for thin air.

This is why he doesn’t look too happy in the first picture here on the left, though I think he knows the hat makes him look girly and he threw himself on the floor in the hopes that it would disintegrate upon impact. It didn’t, to his chagrin. For bath time, more water ended up on the sink than in the tub, and the whole thing ended up becoming a big water diaper that I had to clean up after he was whisked away to a real diaper to finish his business.

Here's a flower Natalie wanted you to have.

All in all, it was a productive day, and althrough I only accomplished a few things, they were big things. Work went well. I finally finished my latest section (it ended up being nearly 300 pages long) and tomorrow I start on another one. Interesting career development: If I play my cards right and wow the editor with a couple of examples of my idea, next week you might be looking at a weekly history columnist for the Press-Enterprise (http://www.pe.com/) newspaper. So, I’m hopeful, but I won’t be too broken up if they pass on the idea. I’m sure it won’t pay much, but it will be fun and easy. Write 350 words about an old photograph… I can write 350 words about anything. I mean, look at this entry. It’s called “A Day in Pictures” and the word “far” at the end of this sentence is the 565th word so far.

You’re right. It’s late. I’m yammering. I don’t have any pressing deadlines anymore today, so I’m going to bed, finally.

Seven AM comes mighty early at this house.