Where's That Woodchuck Man?

Oh, he's still here, and still as woodchucky as ever. Despite A.'s recent impressive advancements in home improvement--his increasing skill at which he ascribes to his beard--he's still just a woodchuck at heart.  He would way rather build some random old-style pack from Fur-Fish-Game than put up wainscoting.

The pack is a frame made of wood with a kind of shelf at the back.  The idea is that, without an actual bag on it, you can just hang any old thing from it anywhere you can tie it.  You can carry a lot more this way.

A. constructed his pack from pieces of pallet wood and the straps from a torn Army duffel bag. 

Yup, you can strap an entire trash can to this pack.  If you're A., that is.

And if that's not woodchuck enough for you, you should know that the contents of that trash can were the head and scraps from the deer and the head, guts, and scraps from a lamb he butchered shortly after the deer.  He hauled it all on his back to dump it in the gully.

Gross.  But all part of the woodchuck lifestyle.

The New World Order

Well.  I finally did it.  I reached the end of my sleepless rope and took measures to fix Charlie's sleep problem.

Yes, for an almost-five-month-old child waking up every two hours (OR MORE FREQUENTLY HELP) and not even seeming hungry at all of those wake-ups is a problem.  I knew what I needed to do: I needed to stay the hell away from him at night and let him fall back asleep by himself.

That meant listening to him cry.  And THAT I was really not looking forward to.

But, as with all parenting decisions, it came down to what I thought was best for both me AND him.  And what is best is more sleep for both of us.

So I listened to him cry last night, on and off from about 1 a.m. to about 1:30 a.m.  He never screamed hysterically; he never even cried for longer than a few minutes at a time before subsiding.

He only ate once in the night.  And he slept for several continuous hours.

HE SLEPT.

I did it again for his first two naps today.  I put him in the crib and listened to him cry.  For about thirty seconds.  And then he slept, again.

Well, that was . . . suspiciously easy.

Perhaps it will all blow up tonight.  Perhaps he'll scream like a banshee all night and wake everyone up and no one will sleep and I will curse myself and the entire awful universe that's conspiring against me.

But more likely, he'll sleep.  And so will I.  Alleluia.

A Momentous Occasion

Okay, not really.  The occasion was Thanksgiving, which was not really so momentous, as it comes every year and we spend it with the same people always.  But this year, my sister-in-law had her camera.  And she was taking pictures.

NO ONE in the MiL's family EVER takes pictures.  Like, ever.  I have never seen a camera at one of these gatherings.  But there was my sister-in-law, asking people to pose all over the place.  

She married into the family, you see.  Hence the aberrant behavior.

She asked if she could take a picture of me with Charlie.  And then there were A. and Cubby running in from the other room.  Which led to the only picture in existence of the four of us.  Literally the ONLY ONE.

I didn't say it was a GOOD picture*.

Give that woman a prize.

* Remember how I mentioned that one time how I get so flushed in other people's houses that I look totally drunk?  Yeah.  There's the photographic evidence.  I was not drunk.  

Family-Style Home Improvement

A. has been working on insulating Charlie's room (I know!  Insulation! It's like we're modern people or something!), and needed some help today when he got to the part where he had to put the insulation on the sloping ceiling.

Whither I goest, so go the children, so the whole happy family trooped up to Charlie's tiny bedroom. I deposited Charlie in his crib and gave his mobile a spin.  Cubby entertained himself with sticking screws through a leftover scrap of insulation.  I held up the large sheet of insulation.

In the two minutes it took for A. to drill in enough screws to secure it, Cubby managed to grab Charlie's hat from his head, pat him a little too hard on the face--which of course made him cry--pull down the soap from the sink in the attached bathroom, and jump on top of the toilet.

So when I let go of the insulation to restore order to the chaos, Charlie was crying and Cubby was leaping from the toilet seat to the floor.  And A. was still drilling.

Welcome to life at Blackrock.