Guest Blogger

As our friendly computer (Clem the Data Dromedary) is in the process of being replaced (AMD 64x2 with a RAID system constantly backing up the hard drive), J. isn't able to blog. But news keeps happening, so we wanted to make sure that y'all knew about:

- Carmen and her new necklace (plastic, fit in an Easter egg, $0.25 at target). It's a tough routine. Put it on. Say "Hi" so everyone knows how cute you are. Take it off. Repeat.

- David can do the same thing, but without the "Hi."

- Tortilla soup. Well, not here yet, but breakfast was supposed to be tortillas, mango, and beans. David decided to tear up all of the tortillas, and Carmen signed "banana" and proceeded to eat one instead. So what else do you do with a bunch of torn up tortillas?

- Sneezing is apparently fun. If your brother sneezes, you need to too, even if it comes out more like a raspberry than a sneeze.

- Oh, and we're saying some words now, too. Carmen can kind of say "Banana", and even more kind of "Fish" (more like Shsth) (and of course "Hi", which gets repeated about 10 times an hour). David can do "Hi" and "Daddy", but "Daddy" doesn't really mean anything to him (blocks, fish, sister, food, etc are all apparently "Daddy".) We're doing much better on signs. Extra credit to anyone who can put together a sentance using all of the current vocabulary words: Fish, Shoe, Banana, More, All Done, Milk, Car. Yeah, OK. Time to learn some verbs!

And final news - we are nearing completion on the long process of turning our entire house over to the babies. This has taken many steps:
1) We gave them their own room, with cribs to sleep in. Yeah, right.
2) We gave them a corner of the living room to play in. Lasted as long as they couldn't figure out how to sit up.
3) We penned in a big playpen in the kitchen
4) We gated in the living room, got rid of any furniture except for a changing table and rocking chair #5 (numbers 1-4 are in the big nursery in the sky), and turned it over to them.

The final step was last weekend. We penned in our home office, and have finally turned basically everything else over to them. Well, we parents kept custody of the toilet (you have a gate the middle of your bathroom, too, don't you?) and the garage (um, Fischer-Price doesn't make a table saw for a reason), but that's it.

J. will be back in a few days...