Are there such things as crawling papers? If so, add them to the list.

Abby got a hold of the camera, and with a little help from Mommy this turned out to be her very first exposure. My armpit.

It's funny how some days are utterly bereft of any writable events, and others are chock-full of them. It's one. Or it's the other. Yet both seem to share the quality of a complete lack of rest for us, which doesn't make sense. Even slow days find us exhausted at the end of them.

Today was a busy day, and I am exhausted, always.

I've started to break out after 14 months of near-criminal lethargy. Jen and I have decided that the our lack of proper exercise is pretty much slowly killing us, so we're going to trade kid duty for activities. She's graciously allowed me Saturday mornings for ultimate frisbee, which is the aerobic equivalent of a cattle prod to my heart. Today was the first day. After that and yesterday's bike ride, I already feel better.

This feeling dissolved in a puddle of malt vinegar tonight when Jen and I were out and I decided fish and chips would be a healthy entree choice. Maybe the two pints I drank helped carry it out my aorta, through the ventricles and out of my body.

Tonight, we went to Andrew Bird at the State Theatre. Good show, not overwhelmingly good, but solid. B+. Dosh was stellar and watchable as always. Somehow the sum of Andrew's live show is not quite equal to the deft skill of its parts.

The enormous marquee event of the day was: Abby figured out crawling. If you weren't already aware, we are proud parents of a 14 month old who hasn't grasped the finer points of transporting herself. That we are also parents of another 14 month old who can practically run the high hurdles (sigh. wishful thinking) just serves to highlight this discrepancy. But let's stay positive here.

Abby has always viewed her legs as lackluster hangers-on body parts. Their true potential, and their pivotal role in locomotion, always seemed to be lost on her. This afternoon she suddenly wanted a cup Lily had a couple feet away. Unable to reach it, she planted her hands on the ground and pulled herself forward. It was an inch, at best. Yet this alone was remarkable enough that I yelled to Jen in the next room about it. Abby doesn't know how to pull; it just doesn't happen.

Right after that, she put her self on her knees, which is not new for her. Then she put a hand forward. 'That's noteworthy', I noted in my mental notepad filled with notes. Then, like a dream, she lifted up her leg - this unnecessary organ of appendix-like proportions for her - and planted it a few inches ahead. Then another hand. Then the other leg. After it was over, she'd gone about two feet.

We were elated. This is off the charts good news for her. I put her in a few more crawlable situations with the toy she wanted, and every time she got up on all fours and moved forward. The fear of it being a fluke was thus assuaged.

I can't wait for the morning so I can try it again.

Day fifty five.

repeat pictures today.

Yay!

Another picture of her in that hat. Love it.

Finger chewing good.

Never drink and blog.

Having a pacifier in my mouth is the only way they pay attention to me.

Today was a ridiculous blur of events. Here it is, in some quick cuts:

Started off with Lily sleeping in until 8:30. She's got a virus, and felt sleep was beneficial.

Went to Jen's school with the girls. Met some MBA students. Met Belinda Jensen's husband, a tall and affable guy who wants to name his new dog Lisa.

Dropped the kids off at daycare. Lily was not a fan of us leaving her there at 10, as she'd been under the assumption that it was a weekend.

Jen and I went for breakfast at Victor's. Ate plaintains, read graffiti, felt claustrophobic.

I took a nap for a few minutes after that. Not sure what Jen did, but when I woke up she had left for the library.

De-winterized my bike, then went for the first ride of the year. Abyssmal. 11.84 miles with an average speed of 14.7 mph. The first ride is always rough; the sore butt, the atrophied muscles, the forgetting how to get out of my clips when I stop. Whee! I rarely enjoy the first ride, but it's now in the past, so onward and upward.

Just barely had time after the ride to change and go take Lily to a doctor appointment. We thought she had an ear infection, instead it is just a throat virus thing. That's a win, since it's the most economic ailment she could possibly get; our prescription was for popsicles to help her throat feel better. Done.

Back home, Lily went for a nap. I had 40 minutes before Jen got home with Abby, enough time to clean or vacuum or do something productive. Instead I laid on the deck with a coke and did nothing. Sometimes doing nothing is the only thing to be done.

Fed kids.

Went to Toys-R-Us. I've always enjoyed the irony that toy stores and party supply stores are easily - easily - the most depressing retail spaces in existence. The joy is sapped from the air in these places. The last party supply store we went to felt like a holocaust museum, a fact made all the more somber in the bar/bat mitzvah aisle. The Toys-R-Us today held all the charm and whimsy of a shooting range. No music. No decoration. Price tags and signs resplendent in arial 20 point type. It seems to be the antithesis of what a toy store should be. My only theory is that kids are so bonkers for toys, they don't care about anything else, so why spend the dough on it?

Oh yeah, that reminds me. Lily was playing with my stomach as I laid on the ground today, and out of nowhere said, "Dough. Dough dough dough." I hadn't actually heard her say this sound yet, until she laid hands on my flabby midsection. Smart girl.

Post-morgues-r-us, made a dinner of our maraca artichokes (see yesterday's post) and bread and cheese and wine. Lotsa wine. Truth be told, I can kinda see two computer screens right now, but I'm managing. It was a nice bottle.

Day fifty four.

Jen dangling some tchotchke in front of the girls.

I'm wiiiiiiiiiiiiiide awake....

She loves drinking from a glass.

Planespotting

The artichoke. Noblest of all the vegetables in the world. A king of produce. Here, though, reduced to acting as a prop for my wife's buffoonery.

The kids have started to notice airplanes, and this excites me. There is not an airplane that flies overhead during our time outside that I don't gawk at. It's a reflex that can't be helped. I hear the whine of high bypass turbofan engines (or in the case of the ubiquitous DC-9, the throaty rumbling of its ridiculously dirty and ineffecient engine), and I feel this hard-wired need to jerk my eyes skyward. This has caused problems for me in the past: while crossing the street, while tending the nets during soccer, when biking down Portland. The soccer thing was especially hard when playing at Ft. Snelling, where the skies are lousy with metal. I can remember being faced with a very palpable offensive threat, tensing every muscle in preparation of having to make (or fail to make) a save, when I would just have to - HAVE to - glance at the A330 that was lumbering overhead, just to make sure. Make sure of what, you ask? I have no clue at all. But I have to look. Every time.

Now the girls are on board. What impresses me is that they notice something that should probably, by all logical accounts, not be there. An airplane just doesn't make sense, really. This is something the dog has failed to grasp for many years. I'm always confused as to why animals aren't going out of their minds with all the marvels of modern living. Why is Olly's reaction to an airplane not, "Holy shit! What the hell is that thing?! Run!!"? Animals are strange, and so accepting of the world, with no questions. Somehow I take pleasure that my girls are starting to analyze what they see. It comforts me, that quizzical spirit.

I like to imagine that, if given the chance to experience, say, a 757 in a hangar, they would likely try to put it in their mouths. It's a nice image...757 in NWA livery (or Delta, whatever) sticking out of Lily's mouth, us shaking our heads at the inevitibility of it all.

We're in that phase - I say "we", but Jen is much better at it - where we say the name of whatever it is they are looking at. This is meant to teach them words, and of course it's working like a charm. Here's how it usually goes:

Us: "Tree!"
Them: "..."
U: "House!"
T: "daaaaaaaaaaaaa"
U: "Drug deal!"
T: "wawwwawwwawww" (that's Lily, mimicking what I can only guess is a cop car)
U: "Northwest Boeing 757 with winglets in the landing configuration!"
T: "..(snore)."

They learned that reaction from their Mommy.

Day fifty three.

Stripey McStriperson.

Monkey feet!

(in case of emergency, insert graham cracker here)

Lily gets her walking papers

F you, winter.

(apologies for the low brow humor. It just felt right.)

How very fitting that today - shortly before I took these pictures of our tulips and other intrepid plants pushing up through the earth - Lily managed to stagger her way through her very first steps. Our little girl.

It was astounding, bordering on what I perceive to be something as ludicrously impossible. It shouldn't be a gargantuan thing, if you think about it; billions of people walk every day with little or no encouragement from us. Yet, the mind-bending shock still exists, because someone I've gotten to know very well over the past 13 months just did something she's never, ever been able to do. It's almost the same as if Jen were to walk across the street to the basketball courts, dunk a ball, then start taunting me in fluent mandarin Chinese.

Succinctly put, we were in awe.

It all happened before dinner, when I put her between Jen and myself on the floor, stood her up, and pointed her towards Mommy. She took maybe a step, nothing worth counting, before she wobbled (became longitudinally unstable is the accurate, aviation term for it) and Jen grabbed her. She spun her around and sent her back, and on this second trip she was visibly much more comfortable with the notion. When Jen let go, she swayed for a second, then took one, then two, then three steps to me when I grabbed her up. And just like that, quite suddenly and with no notice, an era had ended for her. Three steps. I turned her back towards Jen, and she crumpled to the floor, convinced she was done for the day. It was a short but decisive victory. Go team.

I've been privvy to the, "Oh, once they're walking, you're in for it" advice many times, but I just don't get it. Lily can crawl almost as fast I can drive, pull herself up into many dangerous and awkward situations, and find danger in the most benign household accessories (she hooked her pants on a door frame today and was bawling because she couldn't move. A door frame, for god's sake). How this will all become a more dangerous venture now that she will be able to balance herself while not touching anything - such as the dining room table, where she's stretching to get a steak knife we've left too close to the edge - is beyond me. Won't walking be easier? At least when she's walking, she's not trying to climb into the computer armoire and chew on the wiring. This should all be a blessing.

So go, Lily. Walk. Out in the open, away from the cutlery. And practice your mandarin while you're out there.

Day fifty two.

Sedums dipping a toe in the pool.

The cat has been underrepresented here, hasn't he? Here is Guinness. Not pictured: his enormous ponch that swings hypnotizingly to and fro while he walks

I'm a fan of this one, even though I almost deleted it. In this photo you can see: our kitchen, Jen, Lily, Olly, me, the camera, our backyard, the houses behind our house, our dining room, our front porch (kinda), through the front yard to the church across the street. It's rather complex when you think about it.

Tub is a battlefield

All they want is the chance to cook.

Today's heaping serving of happy-making music du jour: Bag of Hammers by Thao & the Get Down, Stay Down.

Turn up; get down.

I wish I could say that we did in fact shake the floorboards to this song today. That would be a shameful lie. While we did dance with the girls, it was instead to an ad hoc a capella rendition of "I've Had the Time of My Life". It just felt right.

I think a bit of competitiveness is starting to blossom between Blondie and Brownie. During bathtime, they like to face one another and see who can splash the biggest splash with their tiny legs. They laugh, take turns splashing, laugh again, repeat. It could simply be aquatic revelry, but it seems to me that there's an element of one-up-twinship there, a "beat my splash" attitude.

I like to reward the winner with hugs and clapping and candy. It's a positive message on the importance of winning.

Day fifty one.

I just can't bring myself to trust this face.

She was so excited to see Mommy scratch her face.

We'll never let them out into the world, NEVER!

Dancing with monkeys

What does the tube say, you may wonder? Butt paste.

There's not much cooler in my life than dancing with the girls. It is the epitome of all things foolish and spontaneous; plus they love it, and I get an embarrassingly thorough workout. One kooky song, and I'm usually left gasping for breath, dizzy and elated at the perfect way to spend 3 minutes with the kids. Jen and I can goofy-dance like nobody's business.

Getting just the right song to dance to is crucial, at least for me. I doubt the girls care, so long as there's lots of crazy un-tempo movements and chaotic jerkiness. But I care about the song. And I still believe that these positive experiences will somehow form a synapse in their brain that will connect it forever to the sounds of good tunes.

In an effort to further this awesome pasttime, and to better illustrate just how things go down in the Gels house, I'm launching a new feature where I post a new song that is a perfectly juicy pop gem that is just screaming to be danced to. If you've got kids nearby, click on the link to today's song, set the volume to a decent level, swoop that kid into your arms and move like a maniac. It works wonders.

(If you'd like be able to continue on this page, right click and choose to open in a new window. Somehow I couldn't figure out how to do that automatically.)

Boring Fountain by Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin

Day fifty

ps. it would have been super cool to have pictures of the girls and us dancing today, but I didn't have any handy and they were actually a little cranky tonight. Not a dancing type of mood.

Abby slowly eating a graham cracker just like that kid in The Golden Child.

Abigail in profile.

Lily sporting Daddy's hat. I thought she would tear this right off her head, but she posed deliberately, soaking up the attention.

Ears are on the house.

The Easter bunny came early! (and apparently did not impress our children)

I can't say enough how much I love their expressions here. Totally nonplussed. These are the same looks I'd get from pilots while teaching ground school. Maybe I shouldn't have worn the ears.

Thanks go out to Tracey for giving us the ears, they were a hit, I swear.

We just spent the entire night in front of this damn computer toiling on our taxes. I want to put my fist through the monitor. So, I'm going to defer tonight because I just can't take being here for any longer. I will leave you with pictures, and one small amusing tidbit:

While doing our quite-itemized return, with its many HSA complexities and double-secret deduct-o-reduction credits and 1098-T fractal chaos theory formulas, we did not receive any error messages from our software, save one. One red flag. What was it? When we entered our day care expenses, it informed us that, "This seems unusually high. Are you sure?"

It's rare, that moment during a tax return when two folks (filing jointly) are laughing so hard that tears are streaming down their faces. Our smarmy little H+R Block Tax Cut software package apparently has the gall to laugh at us for overpaying for child care. Definitely one of the funnier moments of the weekend, but maybe we only found it amusing because it's late and we spent 30 minutes trying to figure why we didn't get a bigger stimulus check for having kids last year.

For those nosy few out there whose interest is piqued and want to know how much child care dough would raise such a flag, here's what we paid for 31 weeks for two girls:

Wait for it....

$13,400

This, however, is peanuts compared to Jen's MBA, which sadly does not even include diaper changes by the faculty.

Day forty nine.

Easter beagle. Look how thrilled he is.

Easter Lily, exhibiting her claw apperatus.

Easter Abigail.