All in the Family

Man, I've been a lousy blogger lately. We've been busy and traveling and busy and... yeah, you all know how it goes.

Here's the latest from around these parts:

• Elliot's outfit yesterday was sized 12-months. He can't fit into anything under 6-9 mo. or 6-12 mo. these days.
• We've had lots of exciting firsts lately: First trip to the zoo and first swimming pool have been a couple of the highlights.
• Elliot has recently discovered that we have other creatures living in our house. And they have fur, which is fun to pet... and grab... and pull. Fortunately our pets are extremely good natured.
• He is so, so close to sitting up on his own. He can do it in the boppy, but he's not quite there without it yet.
• We've introduced rice cereal and he seems to be digging it. He's really getting the hang of the spoon. I think we're going to try oatmeal next. Unfortunately, the addition of solid food has really taken his dirty diapers to a new (and terrible) level. He's had me gagging on more than one occasion.
• We went to a wedding in the Catskills this past weekend. Elliot weathered the change of scenery well and charmed the socks off of everyone, as always. He is such a happy, smiley boy.
• We've temporarily abandoned cloth diapers for overnight use. He's still in them all day, but we've started using one disposable to get us through the night. In a disposable, he consistently sleeps 10+ hours with no problem (ah, heaven) but in cloth, he wakes every few hours and has soaked through his pjs and all of the bedding by the morning. I've been doing mad research on overnight options for heavy wetters and I have 3 different diapers I want to try. I've purchased two of them so far and we're in the process of pre-washing them. I think I'll see how those go before purchasing the third. I truly hope that one of them will work but I am soooo loving these awesome nights we're having (and I think they're better for him, too) and I'm not willing to give them up if we can't find a strong cloth competitor. My fingers are tightly crossed.

So about that post title... Elliot's daycare has a family tree on the wall of the infant room. It's a big construction paper tree and they asked all families to bring in pictures to cut up and put along the branches. Each branch has three individual pictures on it - baby, mommy and daddy - all cut into matching 2 inch diameter circles. It took me a while to bring in pictures of us because all of the pictures I like of M and I have us standing so close together, they wouldn't have been able to cut us apart easily. I finally dug out a few older shots, one of which was a picture of M from our wedding with one of our guests who just happened to be her ex-boyfriend from high school. I brought the three intact pictures in the other day but I forgot to check out at the finished product until this afternoon. There we were, up on the tree, four little circles: Elliot, K, M... and the ex. I pulled him down and re-arranged our pictures so you couldn't tell he was ever there. When I explained to Elliot's teacher that he wasn't exactly part of our family, she more or less said that they didn't want to make any assumptions. How great is that? M and I both got a good chuckle out of the whole thing. We can't wait to tell the ex where his picture ended up. :-)