a new day has come!

(Thanks, Celine Dion! Actually, that's a crazy good song that I will now go listen to-- the violin is so good!)

In addition to a new day coming, it's a new month to boot-- so at the top of every day this month, I'm going to give you a thing or two that this household is thankful for leading up to Thanksgiving... today, it was a game of Candyland. I think that I have been nostalgic recently about the times when the LJ would snuggle in and cuddle with me and just enjoy 'time with daddy' that didn't involve jumping onto my (ahem) lower abdominal region from the couch and rendering me semiconscious while the Queen giggles from afar. (At least she really tries not to laugh too hard!) Anyway, today Elijah asked to 'play Candyland with daddy.' Miracle! W e actually enjoyed the game, with a couple blips like the time when he tried to take the men off the board and conduct a little fight offstage, but overall it was a delight. I think I might actually be looking forward to the next phase with LJ, and for that I am very thankful.

As promised, here are a few of the best of steroidal LJ:

1) We were playing in the living room -- skunks and tomato baths. An interesting thing to play, but apparently if Curious George does it, so can LJ. Anyway, we were about done, and the skunk was about to make one last blast, when LJ blurted out, "Skunks spray poopy everywhere!" Um, not quite. No wonder all the people in Curious George freaked out when the skunk blasted them.

2) I alluded to this one in an earlier post, but Sunday night was the climax of the sterois experiment. I slept in the room with him, and at 2:45 he tried to coax me out of bed, with no real success. At 4:00 he woke me up by 'singing' to me "The moon is in the night, but the sun comes in the morning, the sun comes in the morning. It's mornin', daddy! Play with LJ!" Other than the fun third-person reference, the thing that got me the most is that at 4:00am this morning, as most other morning, the sun definitely wasn't out; thus, by his reasoning, not morning. I pointed this out to him, but somehow it didn't change his mind that I should get up and play with him.

3) It made his already up-and-down little personality even more, shall we say, precipitous. One moment he was about ready to kill me for shoveling the snow on the deck into a big pile; the next, without me even saying anything, he was dancing around saying, "LJ make igloo!" First of all, I want a little credit; I made the igloo. Second, I made sure the in the next breath that he knew the 'igloo' had no doors or windows because, sure enough, he started trying to get into the snow pile.

#4 will have to wait because a teething Judah is having MELTDOWN CITY tonight, so I'm going to help with him. It's funny enough that I'll tell tomorrow. Good night all!