A $*&%ing Miracle

Monday night Will screamed his head off for over an hour. Last night he sort of cried for fifteen minutes. Tonight? Five. Holy crap.

CIO take 1

Tonight we let Will "cry it out" for real for the first time ever. You know what's even more heartbreaking than the screaming? The silence after he's totally given up that we're coming for him.

This sucks.

house

I think we're close enough to the end of the house-buying process now that I'm comfortable showing you all the house that we chose. We love it. It is in a nice neighborhood a few miles from the university. It has a pretty deck on the back and beautiful wood floors. The process so far has been way easier than we imagined it would be. We only seriously looked at houses for two days before we decided to make an offer on this one. We negotiated what we thought was a great price and the home inspection went fine. We mailed in our mortgage application today and will start researching homeowner's insurance this week. I have no idea what is next--we take this one step at a time! But we're very excited. We close at the end of June and plan to move at the end of July.

In Will-related news, he crawls all over the place now and pulls himself up to a standing position on pretty much anything he can. He's also been eating like a maniac these last couple of days. I'm thinking it might be time to step his diet up a notch or two. No more of this level-two baby stuff.

We had a very nice Memorial Day weekend. We had brunch yesterday with Craig and Elisa and a barbecue later in the afternoon with Mark and Alisha. We spent a lot of time outside every day this weekend, and it has been HOT out. Hot and muggy. I can't complain, though. This May has been a lot cooler and more pleasant than last May was.

Freaky Willito

This is sad Will, who doesn't want to take a nap. Do you notice anything freaky about him? No? Then take a look at this:



He's standing! Babies don't stand! That's freaky! I guess he won't be a baby for much longer.

Problem solved

Will is back in daycare! Today Matt took a turn at being the stay-at-home parent and this afternoon he and Will walked to the daycare to try to get some answers. His timing was apparently really good because it turned out that so many parents were so angry with and distrustful of the daycare owner that they pulled their kids out, even if they weren't among those forced to disenroll. So as of this afternoon the owner had two spots open, and there happened to be two dads with babies there to talk to her (including Matt and Will), so we got a spot. Also, it turns out that I misunderstood on Tuesday--I thought they said three kids were getting kicked out, but it was thirty. So this is a huge problem for the daycare owner, who was apparently surprised that we even wanted Will back in the daycare. Honestly we'd probably look for an alternative if we weren't moving so soon anyway, but if they can stay open for even just another few weeks, that would help us a lot. I don't wish this woman ill--we've been very happy with this daycare from the start--but it's starting to look more and more like she knew she was over the legal number of kids at least a couple of months ago and did nothing about it. And she was forced to disenroll a third of the kids, which is a pretty large percentage. Plus she was forced to lay off eight employees, including Will's favorite, which makes us sad. But Matt ran into her walking a stroller near the daycare. Apparently she was hired right away to babysit one of the other kids who had been kicked out, so that's good for them.

I don't like Blake Lewis

And I don't think Will does either.

Or maybe Will is upset because he got kicked out of daycare today. Yep, and it wasn't for something cool like beating up the other babies. It was because the management misunderstood maximum occupancy regulations and didn't realize that they included the staff as well as the kids, and are now being prosecuted for being beyond their allowed capacity. So Will was one of the ones who got the boot. Effective immediately. We don't have a lot of information yet, but it's my understanding that only three kids were kicked out. We don't know if he was one of the newest three or what. We expect to find out more soon (and get our tuition back, since we paid through June 8). In any case, this puts me in a pretty awkward situation because we lined this daycare up nine months in advance, and were lucky even then to get a spot. And I can't just quit my job without giving notice, and I don't want to quit, anyway! This isn't the worst possible thing in the world because we are moving in two months anyway, and I still have plenty of FMLA leave without pay left from maternity leave, but still--that's leave WITHOUT pay, if I don't work I'll have to start paying all of our health insurance premiums, and I still have the problem of needing to work my last two weeks. And Matt is trying to finish up experiments before we move this summer, so he's not in the best position to become a stay-at-home dad. Oh well, we'll figure something out, but for today we're all pretty stunned. Well, Will isn't. Believe it or not, he doesn't really seem to care!

(Oh, the truth is he is pooping in this picture.)

getting big

Since Julie told me last week that Oliver uses a Pampers box as a makeshift walker, I figured I'd give it a go at our house. We don't have a Pampers box, but we've got the next best thing--a Target-brand diaper box. It took Will about 0.3 seconds to crawl over and put himself in a near-standing position. He was thrilled with himself! There was a slight breakdown of the teamwork involved, however, when I let go of the box to get the camera, and the box slipped and Will toppled to the ground. But he was fine and I braced the box against the cat condo and he did it all over again, pictured above.

Will has also been talking a lot and Matt and I are wondering if we're hearing the beginning of actual words. He's had "dadadada" down for months now, and he's recently started with "mamamama," which I like. We're not convinced in either case that he associates these sounds with people or things, but we sometimes wonder. But his repetoire of sounds has grown noticeably lately, and I'm sure the other day I heard him say "Bob Loblaw."

Will can crawl!

He's been almost crawling, and really wanting to, for quite a while, but last week he pulled it all together and made a few steps in the forward direction. And since then he's been honing his skills, mostly using Nanette the cat as a target. He's not exactly a graceful crawler, but he gets faster every day. Above he is deciding that he wants his mouth on the camera.

Now he is getting closer.

And now he's just about there. It turns out that he is a very determined little guy, particularly when he wants to eat something alive and hairy (a cat), very expensive (a camera), or containing batteries that could explode in his mouth (a cell phone or remote control).

He also has another tooth now, but I still haven't managed to get a good picture. Here's my best one so far. The second one is right next to the one that you can actually sort of see. It just broke through the skin so it's still hard to see.

Why I was late for work this morning

Well, later than I meant to be. I can't really be late for my job.

He's really cute.

Moving

For those who don't already know, we are moving to Delaware this summer. Matt accepted a job at the University of Delaware, home to the most welcoming group of people I've ever met, not to mention the Blue Hens, so this July we are moving from the big city to Newark, DE, where we could buy a five-bedroom home for the cost of our two-bedroom condo here, if we happened to own our two-bedroom condo here, which we don't. Nonetheless, we're excited to be starting the search for our first house. I hope the search doesn't take too long, and I don't think it will. I have the impression that there are approximately fifteen houses on the market roughly in our price range and desired neighborhoods, and that isn't all that many to choose from, especially since we haven't been inside any of them yet. That is what we are doing this Friday and Saturday.

I'm pretty sure that our apartment here has reached close to its maximum cleanliness level between now and when we move. We've started storing boxes and packing material in our bedroom, and I see myself losing more and more interest over time in really putting things away now that I know that we're moving everything in just a couple of months anyway. On the other hand, Julie and Oliver are staying with us for a few nights in June, so that will inspire me to clean again, I'm sure.

Oh, and this has nothing to do with Will, except that it is our understanding that he will be moving with us. His position seems to be that he'll go where the cats go, and we're pretty sure the cats are moving to Delaware.

Pretty cool, huh?

This is my sister Kate becoming a Bar-admitted Florida lawyer!

Tooth

Will got a tooth last week, but he won't let you see it! See all the ways that he hides it? He's strangely protective of it, and despite our best efforts, we have not captured its image on film. Or digitally. Maybe we'll have better luck when it gets bigger. Now it barely sticks up past his gum.

Will also discovered that he has hair. This has been nice in a way because he used to focus a lot of his energy on other people's hair, which usually involved a lot of pulling. Now he plays with his own hair, even if his hands happen to be covered in a mixture of sweet potato, rice cereal, and chicken. See below.