Jill: “Look at them! There are THREE of them!”

Bill: “I know!”

Jill: “What were we THINKING? Why did we do that?”

Bill: “I know!”

Jill: “No really! What were we thinking?”

Bill: “I don’t know.”

Okay, so Nate’s eye (see below) isn’t so funny. This post was originally called both “Sunday, bloody son day”, and “I scream Sunday”. While those titles more accurately captured the gist of Nate’s eye, they didn’t really work with the other two pictures. Not pictured is me rescuing Sam from the mudslide of his diaper, him peeing in a dazzling arc from the changing table to the floor, or the look on Jill’s face as he yacked all over himself, and then down into her cleavage. Good ones, Sam.

(Click here to view in higher resolution)

Judging by the amount of powder on Nate’s face and upper torso, I’d say that Liam was the man weilding the baby powder. By the time it settled, there was a heavy to light dusting of powder extending from the bathroom pictured, out into the hallway, down the back staircase, and well into the downstairs hall. Nate looked down after his picture was taken, and powder actually fell from his eyebrow onto the floor. It looked like something that would sift down from the rafters during an earthquake in a mineshaft.

After the cleanup, they ate breakfast, laughed, and then ate powdered donuts, which oddly brought their faces around full circle.

Later, Nate had yet another encounter with the edge of a table. And once again, he emerged scathed and unvictorious.

He heard Liam ask for some ice in his grape juice, and he lost his mind. He excitedly picked up Liam’s cup, and even as Liam began to squeal in protest, Nate was already setting it back down, and his feet were starting to head for the smaller table where his own juice was.

"Eye-iiiiiiiiccccccceeeeee!" he yelled as he pelted feet into the kitchen, tripped, and went forehead first into the table. Ironically, he hit just inches away from where his grape juice sat, and it was his head that ended up needing the ice, which never did make it into his cup.

He did, however, get to watch ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ from my lap. He also got the coveted ‘Boo-Boo Buddy’ from the fridge, although he insisted on holding it directly between his eyes as he leaned against my chest and forlornly watched Thomas from beneath his swelling goose egg.

Here are the after-effects of dinner, unevenly distributed across the Outer Sam. Although it looks like he was eating a pumpkin, I believe this was either apricots, a Baby Mum-Mum biscuit, or both (Jill was feeding him, and I could hear her laughing from the next room).

To me, he looks like the Heat Miser, or someone who just smoked an exploding cartoon cigar. This made necessary a bath, which he promptly ruined shortly after exiting it with the aforementioned yacking.

All in all, a fairly typical Sunday.

Our house was built in 1902, on the crest of a low hill on Main Street. It was at first home to one of the town bankers and his family. When he had it built, he was about the same age as I am now. He and his wife raised five children within these walls, and their names were Floy, Glen, Mark, Charles, and Goldie May.

The banker and his wife are now buried in the old church cemetery off Main Street, as are several of their children, who really stopped being children long before even my grandparents began to be children. But for the briefest of lost moments, they were just children, brimming with play and youth and wholly unconcerned by the graveyard down the street, or their shared destiny within its gates. How many lives were lived within the very room from which I now type? I can feel the impression of them here now, tangible yet untouchable, unseen just below the surface of time, like rings deep within an aged tree. I imagine that it is the echoes of their lost footsteps that I hear as our own boys run through these halls.

Closing my eyes and rubbing the bridge of my nose, I find myself thinking of a poem about the nature of snowflakes, flitting and diving between houses - a wing’s ‘long memory’ across winter - which I admittedly discovered not within some dusty anthology of lesser-known poetry, but on a Baby Einstein DVD, of all places. But I’ll take my culture wherever it finds me.
 

Snow is a mind
falling, a continuous breath
of climbs, loops, spirals,
dips into the earth
like white fireflies
wanting to land, finding
a wind between houses,
diving like moths
into their own light
so that one wonders
if snow is a wing’s
long memory across winter.

~Steve Crow, “Revival”

By the late 1920’s, the house was serving as an inn and overnight boarding for tourists and travelers of the new electric railway between our town and the next. We have a copy of a postcard of it from that time which reads, in part: “Two baths, Shower, and Lavatory. Innerspring Mattresses… Rates 75¢ per person. Meals and Garage.”

The elderly couple we purchased it from six years ago had also raised a family here, and when they left, they took with them over thirty years of memories. There were stories lived here that flared, then faded, leaving faint, interlocking outlines across several generations of a single family. At a point, their stories intersected with our own, and they can all be traced from this very moment back, like the links of a chain disappearing into murky waters, anchored far below to the beginning of things.

Today, the front yard is still dipped where the trolley used to run, and our sidewalk and hedges end abruptly 15 feet short of the current road to accommodate the ghosts of that long ago railway. Sitting and swinging on the front porch, it’s easy to imagine the weary traveler, standing quietly between his suitcases at the end of the cracked walk - ready for the comforts of both the lavatory and the innerspring mattress. Or perhaps not a traveler at all, but a returning son, who followed the light in the windows, and found his way home.

Over the years, its grand originality was never subjected to period remodels. Most of it remains today exactly as it was for each of the five families who came before us. The slate roof is original, and although it is difficult to find people to work on it, as its current stewards, we have a longstanding duty to do so anyway.

The floor in the basement is hard-packed earth, and there’s still a large bin where they used to store potatoes in the summertime. The walls of the old coal room are still blackened and mottled by their years in service as a staging area for the furnace, and although the original furnace is gone, the tools used to tend it still hang on the wall, like chains in a dungeon.

Upstairs, the numerous oak doorways and window casings have never been painted, and all the original built-ins remain now as they were then. Not only are the dining room walls still papered with the original wallpaper, but I found unused rolls of it in an upstairs closet, still wrapped with twine, and labels, yellowed and crumbling, that read, “Sears, Roebuck and Co.”.

The hinges, knobs, and doorstops match the light fixtures and sconces, which are half electric and half gas. Each door can still be locked and unlocked by one of the various skeleton keys on the crowded ring that was passed down to us when our watch began. And in what would one day become Nate’s room, we found a strange-looking brass bed with a missing spindle and a mattress that possessed what I can only imagine could be described as innersprings.

Many of the windows still contain the original, wavy glass, and through them, the late afternoon and early morning sun casts patterns that look like fire, warmly frozen in mid-dance against the golden pine floors. When our boys peer through these antique windows, they are the very same ones that once reflected the looks of hope, expectation and the unfolding stories of those who peered through before them.

And perhaps they see not themselves looking back, but the continuous breath of snow, and within it, the childish faces of Floy, Glen, Mark, Charles, and Goldie May.

One thing you should know about Liam is that he suffers from multiple personality disorder. Among the roughly 37 that we have documented, there are two overriding personalities under which all the others fall. There is Han Solo Liam and there is Dynamic Duo Liam. Solo Liam is way cool, laid back, chilled out, melllllloooow. He listens to Dark Side of the Moon and drives a VW Bus to preschool. Duo Liam is an angsty, whiny, control freak. He drinks way too much coffee and flosses with barbed wire. The difference between the two? The absence/presence of Liam’s perpetually airborne little brother, Nate. (The other little brother, the 20 lb. eating machine called Sam, does not have this effect on Liam. Yet.)

In addition to the assholish behavior mentioned above, Duo Liam also thrives on excluding Nate from things. Bill and I have been making it a point to take the boys out with us separately so that they can spread their turkey wings a little. They’re silly outings, errands really…Safeway, CVS, Wal-Mart. But even more than the adventure, Liam loves telling me about how Nate isn’t with us. ”Just Weem and Mum-Mum are going! Not Nate. Nate’s not going. Just Weem!” He’ll roll around in the idea and scrub the words all over himself again and again. He had a similar reaction last week when I tried explaining to the boys the importance of cooperation, especially during the day when the ratio of crazy parent to crazy kid is 1:3. “We need to help each other and work as a team. OK? Do you think you can do that for Mummy?” Nate beamed his sunny little face my way while Liam crossed his arms over his chest and said, “NO! No Nate is team! Just Weem is team!!” Um-hmm. There’s no L’i'am in ‘team,’ apparently.

So, when we took away Liam’s diapers cold turkey yesterday and began potty training, I used his love of excluding Nate to make the potty look like a delicious indulgence that NATE CAN’T HAVE! And, yes, I did consider the dozen or so ways this manipulation might come back to kick me in the junk in the future. But, having exhausted all logical arguments for not crapping your pants, I opted for the unconventional approach. ”The potty is just for Liam. Not Nate. Nate’s not potty trained like Liam will be.” And, it TOTALLY FREAKIN’ WORKED!

However, while my deception was well crafted and thorough, I failed to be specific enough in my instruction. What I said was, “I have to put Nate down for his nap. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. If you need to poop while Mum-Mum is gone, please try to put your poop in the potty.” What I should have said was, “I have to put Nate down for his nap. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. If you need to poop while Mum-Mum is gone, please try to put your poop in the potty…and if you do? LEAVE! IT! THERE!” 

So subdued for one who just dipped his toys in a shit fondue pot.

…dipped his toys and his leg.

W! WTF!

I think this ‘Little People’ was supposed to be holding #2. 

It was almost worth the gagging to say, ”EAT SHIT, ELMO!!”

Dear Gaggle of Squirrels Living In Our English Walnut Tree,

I am a busy, temperamental woman. There is no June-Cleaver-string-of-pearls-chirpy-bluebird bullshit in this house. I work my rather large, often unshowered, ASS off taking care of my three giant squirrels (all of whom have their own nuts). The baby squirrel thinks I am his personal chew toy. The middle squirrel is wildly creative and toils away thinking up clever new ways to shred himself and give me a stroke. The eldest squirrel is smarter than I am. (Today during lunch, he lulled me into a false sense of security. He successfully ate two cups of strawberry applesauce ‘like a big boy’, which is to say he used a spoon and got 90% of said sauce into his pie-hole. I gave him a third, at his request, and went to check my e-mail. Ahhhhhh, stupid girl. When I returned, I found the third cup empty, its contents now atop his giant head. His matted, shiny hair was shellacked into a smooth helmet, making him look like GI Liam.)

THEREFORE, I do not need your silly asses making any extra work for me! I do not find it cute or amusing that over the long winter you have forgotten where you hid your nuts and search for them EVERY FUCKING DAY in all twenty of my potted porch plants like amnesiacs on a scavenger hunt. Every day, I sweep the dirt from the porches and every day, you dig for the magic, invisible nuts, leaving drifts of potting soil in your wake.

Look. I admit that you’re kind of cute in a bushy rat way. And, I sympathize with the fact that you run your operation with a brain the size of a cornflake. However. I am an inherently explosive individual with few outlets for this personality flaw. You, my friends, are my outlet, so consider yourselves warned. Pass the word. Put a post-it by the knothole on the tree or call a squirrel town meeting. Let the whole gang know that there is a serious amount of crazy headed your way.

So help me, I will tie raw shrimp to your ludicrous, fluffy tails and sic my unfed-for-a-week cats on you. I will slow cook you in barbeque sauce and serve you up as an appetizer at our next party. I will hide penny-sized land mines in your favorite pots and explode you into squirrel confetti.

Stay. out. of. the. pots.

Suck it,

Jill

Liam and Nate are eating lunch at the cute, little-person-sized table and chairs set they inherited from their cousin, Alec. They have more freedom with this set up than when we strap them into their booster chairs at the big table, and more freedom means more delicious opportunity to stab your brother in the eye or finger paint the glass storm door with ranch dressing.

I head for the laundry room to get a load of clothes started while the boys pound chicken tenders and FLAVOR BLASTED Goldfish Crackers. (I swear I wash clothes I’ve never even seen before. I’m convinced our dirty clothes perform an obscene mating ritual each night, spawning sticky, juice-stained shirts and pee-pee soaked pants by morning.) I don’t even make it to the hamper before all hell breaks loose at the cute table. This version of Hell is punctuated by high pitched squealing and insane jabbering fueled by so much urgency, emotion, and volume that their words turn to jibberish as they leave their mouths. They grit their teeth and bulge their eyes at one another while shuddering their heads side to side to emphasize that they are not! fucking! around!

I’m finally able to figure out that Nate has commandeered all four of the highly coveted Little Einsteins figures, leaving Liam Steinless. Nate totally has the hots for June, the dancing brunette of the Einsteins team, and rarely lets her out of his sight. So, no way is he going to hand her over to Liam. Eventually, I persuade (force) him to share and he disdainfully chucks two of the remaining non-June figures at his brother. They cartwheel off of the table and onto the floor. Nate flips Liam off and spits in his juice as Liam scampers after his prizes.

Lunch resumes and I make attempt #2 at the laundry. After five blissful minutes of no refereeing, I realize that it is peaceful at the cute table. Oddly peaceful. Dangerously peaceful. I think that I hear nothing over the slosh of the washing machine, but then I listen more closely. Evil, evil giggling with with an undercurrent of muttering Liam. I slip back around the corner and hear the mutterer gleefully commanding Nate to “Eat it! Eat it!”

One of them has found a black crayon…now half of a black crayon…in a dusty corner of the kitchen. Liam has been productive in his unsupervised minutes, pulling Nate’s marionette strings and making him dance…eat a crayon, rather…because he can. Nate’s beaming face is haphazardly covered in swirls of black (washable!) crayon, like a Wooly Willy picture created by an epileptic artist.

“Open up,” I say. “Let Mum-Mum see your teeth.” He looks like he’s been on an Oreo bender. His molars and the spaces between his teeth are packed with shiny black wax. I clean him up and dispense a too-little-too-late reprimand and time-outs to both. Parenting after the fact. Perfect.

Lunch is cold, but I tell them to finish up so I can hustle them upstairs for their awesome, AWESOME naps. I clean up the kitchen while they ignore their food and drain their juice cups. Without warning or provocation, Liam fixes his eyes on Nate and proceeds to go completely insane. He does that Pentecostal screaming thing again and I can’t make out anything he’s saying. “NAEEEEHAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!” I squat down at the table, convince him to turn the volume down a click, and can finally understand him. And when I say ‘understand,’ I mean in its most basic application.

“NO NATE HAVE EARS!!!!”

He is deadly serious and suddenly furious at the existence of his brother’s ears. He covers his own ears and glares at Nate while he screams his complaint to me. “What??”

“NOOO NAAATE HAAAAAVE EEEARSSS!”

I can’t help it. I have to hear it again. “What did you say, Bean?” I fake the concern that I’m sure he thinks this problem deserves, fixing my expression into one of seriousness and sincerity.

“NO! NATE! HAVE! EEEAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRSSSSSSS!!!”

Nate sits quietly, looking bewildered, as his little-brother-ears taunt Liam in some inexplicable way. I laugh. Hard. I have absolutely no answer for this. The boys laugh with (at?) me and I wonder if they think I’m as crazy as I know they are.

Last Wednesday, Nate arose from his afternoon nap earlier than usual, so we were playing together downstairs, just the two of us. We started chasing each other through rooms, like one of those heavily-edited scenes from an old “Three Stooges” short… back and forth across the hallway, in one door, out another. Him leading one way, me leading the other. Run, Nate, run.

Whenever I’d stop to allow my lungs, each 38 years old, to catch up, Nate too would immediately stop, then go all ‘concerned man’ on me, and yell “Moooore!”. This last would be punctuated by an almost unconscious tapping together of his little hands, making the American Sign Language (ASL) accepted sign for “more”.

If he loves it, then there should be more. More tickle. More ‘choc’! More running. More chasing. More more.

I let the request hang there for a few seconds, and we just stared at each other - my expression fading, his remaining. Then, we were off again, the concern on his brow smoothing as it must in order to run and giggle without concern. He had his more.

And so it was, until it was not.

One thing you’ll notice if you spend more than four steps with Nate is that he has no regard for his surroundings, or his personal safety. Jill put it best when she said exasperatingly, “That kid is full-throttle, no padding!”

He usually spills out of doorways in a full sprawl, and often runs forward while looking backward. Running across the backyard, it looks like he’s constantly being taken down by unseen sniper fire. He careens through the hallways like a pinball, falling down and popping back up. Falling down, and popping back up. Even as he’s jack-knifing back up to his feet like the Son of Chucky, I’ll already be yelling to Jill about how many inches just randomly separated us from a raucous night at the ER, or a raucous night at home.

This night, it was to be the ER.

He was running in a forwardly direction but looking in a backwardly one. Heading north, and facing south. Suddenly, two things happened at once - I saw that a collision with my laptop table was imminent, and Nate tripped, which caused his prior forwardly and backwardly directions to converge into a single downwardly one. As he fell, he brought his head around.

From my position behind him, just as the front of his face became the back of his hair, his little head shuddered as his face chonked into the cutting edge of the table. He connected solidly, and went down hard. He lay there in complete silence for a beat, and then took in one great whooping breath, and began to shriek. Even as I scooped him up, I noticed that there was blood dripping from his mouth, and onto his shirt. I got him into the kitchen and tried to gently wipe everything off and survey the damage. It was bad, so I did what I normally do if there’s tissue exposed or if someone’s choking on something baked or fried.

“Buhbee! You need to come down here!” I yelled up the stairs.

Jill peered through the gore and concurred. Nate and I were off to the ER, with me driving not only in the Sequoia, but also in a cold sweat.

Nate had stopped crying about his ruined lip three minutes after his fall. For the next two hours, he was mostly interested only in thwarting my attempts to keep him off the waiting room’s bubonic play-gear, and in pointing to the hand sanitizer on the wall in the triage room, signing “more”, and gleefully yelling “Tizer!”.

Note: When applying antibacterial foam to Nate’s upturned palms, ensure that each hand contains a liberal amount. If, when he holds them up to your face, you are foolish enough to blow the Tizer from his hands, know that this outcome will be expected from that point on. If you blow it and it goes in his face, know that he will initially laugh, then point seriously to his eyes and say, “Hurt. Hurt eyes-th”.

More.

Nate was good when the doctor finally came in and performed what appeared to be a gynecological examination on his face. He opened his mouth obediently, and was generally calm and regarded the doctor with quiet, concerned-man curiosity.

“Ti-ZER!” He told the doctor.

The doctor looked at me. “What did he say?”

I explained about the tizer.

“Right. Okay, his teeth look fine. I don’t think they were involved.”

This came as a relief, as Jill and I both feared that they might have come through from the inside out, but were too whoomsey to look. The gaping part of the wound was oriented horizontally on the left side of his upper lip - the rest of it was just superficially scratched. It looked like half of a Snidley Whiplash mustache. I asked if he was going to have a scar there, expecting the doctor to laugh warmly and reassure me that he was only two, and, like a starfish, therefore possessed the ability to grow an entirely new face in the event of injury.

“Oh yes. He’ll definitely have a scar there.”

Shit. Maybe it will disappear over time.

“For the rest of his life.”

Shit.

“And I’m going to have to stitch up that lip.”

Sure thing. I’ll be behind those curtains with my shoes in my ears.

“I’m going to need you to hold him down.”

Dagger.

I held him down while a burly orderly held his head in place. Nate screamed like a crash-test monkey in a jet propulsion lab. That is, until the doctor gave him a shot of Novocain, at which time his screaming reached a level previously unmatched in the long history of Frederick Memorial, and with an urgency approximating the brass steam whistles atop locomotives in the Old West. He screamed so loudly that I couldn’t even hear myself assuring him that everything was okay, and that there was no need to scream so loudly.

Three stitches and approximately four years later, the doctor rolled his chair back and announced that it had stitched together tighter than he’d thought it would, actually.

Now free, Nate clung to me and glared at Dr. Scar.

“Bye-bye!” He said, dismissing him.

Then, he looked down at the bed we’d held him into. “Bad!” he said, with a wave of his hand.

Finally, he looked at me. “Muh-mum and Sam Home!” Muh-mum, Sam, and home… no Liam.

And home we went, to disregarded bedtimes, Muh-mum, Sam, (Liam), and a waiting dinner of non-salty, non-spicy macaroni, juice, and Stove-Top Stuffing - made to order by Muh-mum, who had been in constant contact with us throughout the ordeal.

Liam, who must have been quizzing Muh-mum as to Nate’s whereabouts during our absence, solemnly contemplated Nate’s stitches, looked up at us, and said, “Act-ually, Naynay has stitches.”

Yes, he does.

Later, Jill attempted to put Nate into his pajama top without raking his stitches. Just as his head popped out through the neck hole, he happily shouted, “Boom!”, and we laughed the laughs of parents both amused and relieved.

Jill said, “Yep, you’re a Boomer. Hey Boomer!”

Boomer just stood there, beaming and smiling his whiplash smile… beaming and somehow not falling, and his face told me that there would most certainly be more.

Much more.

“Where is Mum-Mum’s nose?”

Liam’s chubby index finger sneaks out from under his sheets and gently pokes the tip of my nose. His skin smells like apple juice and talcum powder. He smiles at me from behind his thumb which is nestled in the roof of his mouth. (Somewhere, our future orthodontist cackles and orders up a Space Shuttle.)

This is my favorite time of day with Liam. He’s peaceful and unguarded, personality #17. There are no little brothers lurking about threatening to steal his toys or my attention. He’s reclined and vulnerable on his bed, little boy armor checked at the door because it would be far too exhausting to bring so much stubbornness and fight to bed after having lugged it around all day.

Although he can be a wildly difficult creature, I secretly love that he is such a little bull. I see something of myself in his fire and anger. Controlling it without crushing it will be tricky as he grows up. While the fire/anger gene it is not my most admirable or desirable component, it is a component with strength.

“Where are Mum-Mum’s cheeks?”

He reaches out with both hands, presses the flats of his palms against my cheeks, and gently squeezes. I look like a fish. He smiles again and his eyes tell me that he’s in on the game…that he knows that I know that he knows all of these answers. It’s a game we’ve played with him since before he could speak. It’s probably a bit indulgent to have continued on with it for this long, but it’s familiar to Liam and helps him power down for the night.

“Where are Mum-Mum’s eyes?”

His index finger lands on the thin, blue-from-lack-of-sleep skin beneath my eyes. He studies me and I decide to change the game slightly.

“Hey Bean…what color are Mum-Mum’s eyes?”

Liam leans in. He takes his time inspecting me and finally snuggles back into his pillows.

“Ummm… Mum-Mum’s eyes are blue. And, white.”

Indeed. A surprised laugh bubbles out of me. I laugh at how unexpected his answer is as well as how accurate it is. I kiss him. This is my favorite time of day with Liam.

Decked out in their shirts from the Christmas card, the boys decorated their cookies for Santa as Sam - he of furrowed brow and kung-fu hands - rocked gently in his swing behind them. Closer inspection of the picture below may reveal that there is in fact cookie dough and a tray beneath the piles of candy sprinkles in front of Nate. 

Before we put it into the oven, we tipped his tray and almost filled a cereal bowl with sprinkle overflow. We hid this activity from Liam, as it could have easily resulted in all focus shifting from Santa’s cookies to that bowl of homeless sprinkles and their need to be lorded and obsessed over.

The boys left their cookies for Santa, and for reasons known only to him, Liam immediately demanded a second, empty plate for his own use. For reasons known to anyone but Liam, I denied this request based on my desire to get Santa (who was by then drumming his fingers impatiently on the DirecTV dish) going on toy assembly, and out of a sense of fatherly Nate-preservation (in the event that he strayed too closely to Liam’s proposed plate). 

This did not go over well, and Liam staged his protest off camera, near the tree. Nate dropped to the floor, scooted his legs under the cookie stool, and pointed happily at COOKEESTH! 

Sam, who may have not even realized that he was no longer in the kitchen, delivered one of his very first smiles. To a fake, half-decorated tree.

On Christmas morning, the boys discovered their stockings. Amidst all the chocolate and candy, Liam found a toothbrush-holder with a suction cup on the back. Our gift to him? Irony.

Nate wrangled their new Radio Flyer, and I took a moment to appreciate it all.

One day, Jill and I will be gone, and all that will remain of this unfolding morning will be an antique scooter and the distant memories of early childhood… dimly and warmly recalled by three old men: One hunkered over an empty plate, one pointing happily at cookies, and one smiling toothlessly at a tree. 

happy holidays from the Heatons

www.billandjill.com

[version 2006]

happy holidays! from the Heatons. Bill, Jill, Liam, and Nate

keep tabs on us at www.billandjill.com

[version 2005]

Heaton’s Greetings!

from Bill, Jill, Liam, and ‘Baby Boy’ (due 03/2006)

[version 2004]

Happy Holidays! From the Heatons

Bill, Jill, Liam, Charlie, Gordon, Blooper and Moe!

Liam and Nate are adjusting well. Although, I’m not sure they fully grasp the continuing effect that Baby Sam is going to have on their dynamic. Liam likes to help rock Sam, and Nate looks over from his Play-Doh occasionally. They miss Muh-mum’s undivided attention, and Da-da can only take them to the diner but so many times.

So far, they’re much more interested in getting into Sam’s crib, taking his blankets, and batting at his mobile.

They were also surprised to find a strange new object in their toyroom - Sam’s Ocean Wonders Bouncy seat. Think of the scene in “2001: a Space Odyssey” when the monkeys started hopping around, smashing bones into the ground and shrieking at the monolith. A slap-fight quickly ensued as each tried to get into the chair at the same time. During Liam’s turn, the thing sagged to the floor and groaned like the Hulk’s purple pants. In fact, he looked like the Hulk, if the Hulk drove a Volkswagen.

And no human being on Earth has been kissed by Liam more times that little Sam. Nate even dropped his Play-Doh and threw in a few. Poor Sam looked like a blinky baby chick getting pecked to death in the middle of the henhouse.

Jill’s doing great. The rays of our planet’s yellow sun give her power.