40 weeks and 4 days: Updates

I really stink at remembering to get the photos and videos off my iPod, so here is a BIG little update with stuff we've been doing.

We have pretty much finished baby proofing the house: outlet covers, a gate at the top and bottom of the stairs, and locks on just two cabinets with dangerous stuff.  Everything else is not dangerous, and therefore we're just going to tell her no.  She listens pretty well now, too.

 This was just a snap I took while we were playing in her room.

This one is hard to see, but I took it to show how she's sleeping on her face a lot now.  The back of her head is to the left, if that helps.  ;)

We borrowed one of the baby gates from my friend Jennifer, and when we went to pick it up, her whole adorable family wanted to play with Devyn.  They even got out an old exersaucer for her to play with!

This is just a sweet little video of Devyn and Bella playing.

This is a funny thing Dev's been doing with the dining room chairs.

And THIS is the piece de la resistance: walking by herself! (with her push toy)

38 weeks, 5 days: Devyn and Dolly

As you can probably tell, I'm trying to take more photos, and when I take them with my iPod, I can email them directly to the blog and post.  So, you will probably be getting more posts, more photos, but possibly less explanation (because it's challenging to type on an iPod when you're used to typing 70wpm on a keyboard!).

24 weeks, 6 days: Exersaucer

I picked this up at the Just Between Friends pre-sale last night.  It was $25 and in great condition!  I thought Devyn might like something like this.  Turns out, she LOVES IT!

Maybe the best $25 I've spent in quite a while!

Bold and True: The Island of Misfit Toys is a Horror Story

(My friend Anne has put out a call for bloggers to be bold and true with their posts every Monday. I don't stick to it religiously, but I do sometimes get inspired.)



I cannot abide the thought of discarded toys—not board games and action figures, but dolls and stuffed animals. I have to hurry past bins of them at thrift stores and garage sales. I get a little misty thinking about my own lost friends of childhood.

And I get positively weepy at the thought of Bean outgrowing her inanimate friends—in fact, I need to stop that line of thinking right now—and she hasn't even met them yet.

I cannot even begin to explain why I have such an emotional attachment to these things, but I do. The less commercial the item, the harder it is for me to imagine someone wanting to part with it.

And I will tell you, unequivocally, that when I discovered that Brandon still had a stuffed bear and stuffed Gizmo from his childhood, it was just one more indication that I had found my soul mate.

Sartorialist Barbie

Should Baby Bean decide, one day, that she wants to play with Barbie dolls, I think we should buy her interesting vintage ones off eBay and then get all their clothes from tinyfrockshop.com — how cool is some of that stuff??

Bonus: none of the other little girls will have those pieces, so no chance of Bean's Barbie showing up to a play date dressed in the same outfit. (HOW EMBARRASSING!)