Making moves

I shared a video a couple of weeks ago showing Marty walking around while sobbing uncontrollably. You might think that he really hates walking. I promise he doesn't.

See?

He's been very enthusiastic about trying to walk over the last week or so. He's always standing and taking steps, at least until Edie shoves him down when she thinks we aren't looking. He's getting better and better every day. At this rate, he might be able to walk no problem by the time we see our family in a couple of weeks.

Edie has been able to walk for years now, but she, uh, waives that right more often than not. Here she is in her natural habitat, lounging on the couch watching Caillou.

She will start preschool once we get back from vacation, which we're all excited about. We told her that she's going to get a Daniel Tiger backpack for her birthday, and let me tell you, I think she might be contractually unable to talk about anything else.

We have a good couple of kids, I think.

Hats and boxes

We had an activity at our church yesterday. We had a great time, not least because it was the first day in several weeks with a heat index of less than 105.

Edie had a great time because there was a hat involved:

She threw a frisbee back and forth, climbed up in a pioneer handcart, and and tripped several dozen times and skinned her knees pretty good.

Marty, true to form, spent most of the time asleep. His babysitter was there, and she was kind enough to hold him for close to two hours. But what he lacked in church activity excitement, he made up in getting trapped in a big ol' box today:

He's not particularly savvy about looking innocent. He's even less savvy about remaining upright in the box; this picture is about five seconds after he fell over and took all of those boxes in the background with him.

Big steps

Last week Marty surprised us all by standing on his own, then taking seven or eight steps before unceremoniously falling to the ground. Over the last week, he's started to figure things out, and even walks for short distances on his own without us having to drag him around everywhere. It's exciting!

He's generally happier about walking than he is here, I promise.

Edie doesn't particularly care that Marty is walking except in that it takes attention away from her. If either Tamsen or I are holding Marty by the hand and walking him around, she'll immediately shout, "I want to walk too!" and run to grab our hands. My compromise is to let her take his other hand so the three of us can walk around the house together, except Edie doesn't really understand that Marty's top speed is about 0.001 mph, while she likes to run around at top speed pretty much everywhere. (She has a ridiculous number of bruises on her legs that I'm pretty sure are from crashing and tumbling into everything.)

She still loves to play her board games. Here she is absolutely schooling me in Hi Ho! Cherry-O! this afternoon. Let it be known that she beat me twice, completely clearing her tree of cherries while I was left with my full complement of ten. Sometimes, it's a little discouraging having to compete against what is clearly a board game prodigy.

A visit

I promised my co-workers that I would pay them a visit sometime this week and bring the two kids. As today was Friday, I figured we'd better get up and go.

Edie spent a lot of time hiding behind me, plainly terrified of so many kind faces, but Marty was willing to be passed around for a while. One co-worker in particular was especially excited to carry him around. (She's the one who took all of these pictures.) She loves how big he his, and makes a point of calling him "Fat Martin" every chance he gets. Most of the pictures she took and sent me were of the fat rolls on his legs.

She had a great time parading him around until he started whimpering and making very sad little gestures toward me. It was hot, there were a lot of strange people around, and we were all hungry, so we headed home.

We had a pretty uneventful day after that, although Marty really tore into his dinner with gusto, so we gave him a bath afterward. Edie, too, at her insistence. They had a great time in the tub, and Edie even helped to get Marty dressed afterward. She picked out this ensemble entirely on her own.

Yes, that's Marty standing entirely unsupported. He's made a lot of progress even just over the last few days.

Just nothing

I thought we might play in the water outside today, but Edie had a spectacular meltdown this morning when I asked her to wash her hands after sitting on the potty, so I thought maybe more water wouldn't be the best option. We decided to spend the day loafing in our living room, hoping the air would finally get the house cool. (It didn't, not really.)

As long as I wasn't asking her to maintain her personal hygiene, Edie was pretty fun to hang out with today.

And that's not to say that Marty wasn't fun, of course. He's just a different sort of fun, in which he's climbing all over you and trying to grab things out of your hands constantly.

Midway through the day, we got a couple of packages from my mom with leftover school supplies from work. We rummaged through the boxes and found books, Legos, and other fun things. Edie liked the books, but when she saw the color explosion markers, she had eyes for nothing else. We sat down at the table and got into them immediately.

As you can see, I wrote her name at the top. She's getting good at recognizing her name, as well as those of everyone else in the family. When I pointed to her name and asked her what it was, she said, "That's my Edie O.!" She then spent the next few minutes carefully coloring over every inch of it so it couldn't be seen. I'm sure it made sense to her.

Marty observed the scene carefully from his high chair, but he didn't let any of it get in the way of enjoying his Goldfish.

I ordered myself a harmonica a few days ago, which coincidentally arrived the same time the packages did. I was sitting at the table feeding Marty some fish and browsing the internet for tips on how to get started with the harmonica, when Edie got my attention by saying, "Daddy, you aren't helping." I guess I should have been paying more attention to her markers.

We'll probably actually do something tomorrow, assuming we're able to get over the hump of getting clean in the morning. Who knows?

Target

I had some ideas for things we could do today, but I asked Edie if she was interested, and she said no to everything. (Marty doesn't get a vote.) So I asked her while she was sitting on the potty this morning what she did want to do. "I want to go to the store," she said.

Well, I mean, sure. Why not?

We ate our lunch, got everyone (me) dressed for the day, and headed up to Kentucky to go visit Target. I figured there were fun toys for the kids to look at, and it was 30 minutes away to boot, so that would give Marty extra nap time. He obliged, sleeping all the way there and all the way back. I figured I'd buy a little something to justify our walking around for an hour or so.

We got there, and while both Edie and Marty loved looking at the toys, we had to get through the clothing section to get there.

This is a very stylish baby.

Marty spent all of his time in his stroller, which came as a bit of a disappointment to him, since there were so many toys crying out to be shoved in his mouth.

Edie was better behaved in terms of chewing on merchandise, but she was very enthusiastic about trying everything out.

You can't see it, but this ball lit up when you bounced it. Edie enjoyed it, but would only bounce it once and then hand it back to me so I could put it back on the shelf.

She loved identifying everything on the shelves, and then explaining them to Marty. Here she is saying, "Look, Marty! Goldfish!" just moments after I told her, "Look, Edie! Goldfish!"

She especially liked walking through the grocery section and identifying everything we saw. She got really excited when she saw the kind of bread Tamsen usually gets. "Look! Mama bread!"

We were prepared to buy a loaf of Mama bread and a package of red cookies, but I got up to the checkout counter and realized that I hadn't actually brought my wallet. Oops. We put everything back on the shelves and quietly slunk out of the store.

Still, a reasonably fun day. I guess Edie knew what she was talking about.

Library

After foolishly telling Edie about our library plans last night, we finally got everything together this morning and set off. They're resealing our street this week, and since our street also doesn't have any sidewalks, it was a challenge finding a path getting there. We soldiered through some deep grass and hills in the stroller before finally getting to level ground.

I've only really been to our library a couple of times, so this trip was as much fun for me as it was for Edie and Marty. There are plenty of books, sure, but Edie was much less interested in those than she was in the wall of toys. She found a little house that she could walk in and play kitchen.

Marty found plenty to occupy himself, too, or at least plenty to chew on.

In fact, he made his way inside the little house and was very contentedly chewing on a couple of toy carrots. Edie even let him stick around and play while she was in there, which is a big deal for her, since she normally freaks out any time Marty is anywhere near her while she's playing.

We had a pretty good time, and Edie was very sad when we had to go home to eat lunch. We made our way home across the resurfaced street and through the hot sun and back to our hot house, since I'd forgotten to turn the air on.

Everyone was pretty worn out once we got home, so that must mean we had a pretty good time, right?