Whitman boys.

BTW, my post counter tells me that this is my post no. 501 since starting this blog as “matt’s angry little thoughts” on blogspot in the wake of the 2002 election. Half a thousand, a post almost every four days, rough math says. Golly.

Anyway, here’s a typical night putting The Gus to bed. When we pick up this narrative, we have brushed teeth, put on pajamas, read two and only two books, and lain down to tell stories, and thence, to sleep.

M: What do you want in your story tonight?
TG: Thunder and lightning and dinosaurs and coyotes!
M: Didn’t you have thunder and lightning and dinosaurs and coyotes in your story last night?
TG: Yeah! And no robots!
M: No robots? Doesn’t that just suck all the fun out of it?
TG: No.
M: [tells long involved story about separate communities of dinosaurs and coyotes during a thunderstorm, culminating in uplifting moral re: hospitality and enduring friendship]
M: Now it’s time for you to tell me a story.
TG: What’s in my story?
M: Llamas and goats and chickens and Tri-Met buses and your friend Isabel…
TG: I like Isabel. She plays with me all the time. She doesn’t hit or shoot.
M: She sounds very nice.
TG: But she spits. Sometimes she spits in the toilet and sometimes she spits in the sink.
M: I see.
TG: Twenty things.
M: Huh?
TG: I want twenty things for my story.
M: And your friend Parker and edamame and corn dogs and Percy the train and coffee and Cheerios and the “Go Away, Monster!” game and Dakota cousin Kai’s dog and a toy kitchen where you can make dinner. That’s twenty things.
TG: OK…. [pause for a full minute, obviously spacing out]
M: Are you going to tell a story?
TG: Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, there was a coyote in my pocket, The End.

I confess, I was concerned that perhaps I had missed an entire calendar month, but no, in fact I have only been absent from the blogosphere for six, maybe seven weeks. Much more excusable. Though the self-indulgence of having a blog, and the contrapositive guilt at not updating that blog, is not a phenomenon I like to dwell on. Instead I just dwell on the guilt.

Gawrsh, where to start?

In non-pictorial news, Sam is doing well– 75th percentile in weight, 50th in length and head circumference. This is pleasing and somewhat startling, as The Gus has straggled along at the fifteenth percentile in all categories, and we thought we would simply raise small kids, who would have to rely on their cutting senses of humor and large vocabularies to get along. Imagine our surprise to find that kid #2 is a relative hulk.

To the pictures!

[break for twenty minutes to find the missing cord to connect the camera to the computer. The Gus uses cords as connective members in his various structures]

[break for forty minutes to download pictures, edit in Picasa, upload to Flickr, edit (title and tags) in Flickr]

Well jeez, let’s just be spontaneous!

Here’s me and the boys, down home:

And the boys, getting along famously:

I can’t figure out whether Sam reminds me of Jon Stewart or Bill Maher in this picture. Either way, he looks like he’s saying something sarcastic and caustic about someone in the news. But in reality, he’s saying “wawrhruhwahr?!”

The Gus has much capacity for joy these days.

And here’s the current box-office star. Our lives have gotten so much better since he started smiling and laughing a couple of weeks ago - -we are no longer dealing with an utter blob, but instead with a tiny underdeveloped person who will someday appreciate the works of Warren Ellis. It is heartening.