Parker Being Cute

Parker got a hold of the camera again this morning and he took a few more pictures. The cute things he's done today are 1) rubbing oatmeal into his eyelashes, and 2) dragging the old infant tub out from under his bed and pretending it was a boat. He sang "Row, row, row, row" and ate cookies all while sitting in that blue infant tub. Too bad I didn't get any pictures of that.

Parker Smiles at the Sun

This is a modified version of the way that Parker smiles at the sun. We say to him, "Parker, Parker, smile at the sun, Parker." Then he scrunches up his eyes and nose, sticks out his lower jaw and gives us what Michael calls a "big cheesy grin," all teeth. Very cute.

...and I haven't even gotten to the sprinklers yet.

In honor of my parents' trip to China, these are a few family pictures taken at the beginning of the summer, somewhere close to Parker's eighteen month mark. My hair has changed since then, along with everything else. I haven't checked my calendar, but these may have been taken before we found out about the new baby in our future.

Parker Playing in the Rental House Backyard

Robert and Carol have been renting a small house in Madison while their new home is being built. Several months ago we paid a visit, and Parker had a great time playing in the back yard with Michael, the sprinklers, and Pam's dog.

Pictures of Parker from the only time he ever spent any time playing in his baby pool.

He enjoyed it for approximately half an hour, and hasn't shown much interest in it since. It's strange to me because this is the same boy who will play in any other standing water he can find in the back yard. These days he prefers the sprinklers.

Pictures of Parker

I've become sidetracked. I'm supposed to be loading pictures of Parker onto the blog. Instead I've been cleaning out my post list. These are the latest. The first shot is Parker's self portrait. The second is just Parker being cute.

An Old Post, Never Before Published

The reason why I haven't been blogging recently (This is how it goes):

I'm pregnant, and when I am pregnant I have trouble stringing words together. Maybe I'll get together a paragraph in my head while I'm supposed to be working on something else, but then I'll start to write it, and... There's an interruption of some sort, or I can't get it to work the way I want it to. It happens over and over again until I finally decide that I'm not going to do this for a while.

In graduate school just before Parker was born my inability to write proved disastrous. Three papers due at the end of the semester--the one I turned in to my Black Women's Metaphysical Fiction professor was total crap. I couldn't come up with anything interesting to write about, and what I finally did write about was incoherent and possibly offensive without any sort of redeeming usefulness. Seriously. I've tended to feel like an outsider a lot of times in the past and tried to write about being disappointingly marginalized by Ntozake Shange's expressed intent concerning the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.

The paper I turned in for my Shakespeare class that semester, I don't even want to think about, and to this day I turn over and over in my mind possibilities for completing that incomplete earned in Theory of the Novel because I simply couldn't do anything with it. The incomplete haunts me because as long as it exists I damage my chances of ever being able to go back to Graduate School, even though by now I don't know whether or not I really want to go.

At this point I've said way more than I meant to say when I'm supposed to be posting pictures. Anyway here's a post I started at the beginning of May, and so instead of throwing it away, I'm posting it here, almost eight months late:

Parker slept late this morning, which turned out to be a good way to start the day. Especially since I wasn't in the mood to put anything away last night; so there were toys to redistribute, dishes to add to the dishwasher, and others needing personal attention. He atypically slept through one and a half showers, giving me the opportunity to do some devotional reading. I'm slowly and inconsistently working my way through Devotional Classics edited by Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith. Today's selection was from Jonathan Edwards, and I confess that it did not get the attention it deserved. Maybe I'll have better success with comprehension tomorrow.

Parker has lately become a hugger and a cuddler and a climber and a talker. He doesn't blab, blab, blab away all day, but he is saying more and more words.

I've emailed two different people blog worthy material this morning, so I'll lay aside the guilt I feel at not revisiting those subjects afresh, and reproduce what I have already written here.

The first item I considered blog-worthy on May 2, 2008 was a story about how pregnancy hormones affect the mental faculty:

Two coffee cups. One has residue from yesterday's coffee because I found it this morning under my bed. The other has been freshly used then rinsed because I've decided to make a cup of tea. Which cup do you think I chose to put the tea bag and hot water in?

My used-to-be perfectly-good brain says, make sure you use the right cup. My perfectly-good brain does not say, put the old cup in the dishwasher before you do this. Thankfully the tea tastes okay anyway, and Parker is temporarily placated. Unfortunately I just realized that I forgot to put a bib on him, so he has oatmeal down his shirt.

Honestly, I no longer remember what the other blog-worthy post was meant to be.