Water baby

In terms of fun per dollar, inflatable pools are probably the best deal on the planet. London and I had a lot of fun with ours in Merced last summer, and both sets of grandparents have one. Papa set this one up in the backyard on Thursday, when London's great-grandparents Bud and Oni, Aunt Sarah, and cousins Abby and Caty came for a visit.


Abby and Caty would run and jump into the pool. By the way, am I a great photographer or what? This shot of Abby in midair ought to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.


Caty also got some serious air-time.


Tiny Man didn't have quite enough oomph for air travel, though. Instead he would run up to the pool, throw a leg over the rim, and plunge in with whatever momentum he had left. He didn't care that it wasn't actually a jump, and neither did the rest of us.


The kids played like this for literally hours.


Here's London piling in again...


...and going back for more. Makes me feel like a kid again.

We got another great London word today. London was watching Stuart Little for the first time, which has a villianous falcon named simply Falcon. London had never tried to say "falcon" before, and it came out "Funkin'."

Any of us: You mean Falcon?
London: It's Funkin'!

London at Mimi's and Papa's

We usually go visit Mimi at her work when we are in town. I took the camera this time--most of the photos we have of Mimi and London are of them in their jammies. Here London is explaining his cars to Mimi.


Papa has been helping London learn to ride a bike. It was fun for me to run along taking these pictures--I remember doing the same thing when Papa taught London's cousin Abby to ride a bike 6 or 7 years ago.


London thought it was pretty cool. He likes being a big boy, and he doesn't like the idea that there are things he can't do yet.


But at the end of the day he will still curl up in my arms for some 'nuggling. For me, that's the best of both worlds.

We're here

We finally got into OKC about midnight last night, and Mimi picked us up and brought us home. On our last night here at Christmas, London's Buzz Lightyear fell down behind the bed and none of us discovered that it was gone until we had gotten back to California. So last night London and Buzz were reunited.

London was a saint on both flights. He's such a good little man.

I keep thinking of more of his words. Here is one of our favorite bits, which is replayed pretty frequently:

London (being held when he doesn't want to be): I want to get down.
Me (lowering him toward the floor headfirst): You want to get upside down?
London: NO! I want to get upside-UP down!

A special time

Whoa! Maybe not that special. I'm talking about my baby brother Ryan's impending wedding, three Saturdays from now, to Miss Courtney Hurst, who is:


- a good sport, considering that London's first inclination is to treat grown-ups as furniture;


- not a bad engineer when it comes to improbably tall block structures (in the background you can see Ryan struggling to read Jester Hats for Fun and Profit);


- good at multitasking, like she is here with her niece and nephew. She's also an all-around good person, which makes her attraction to my obviously troubled brother kinda mystifying. At least she's getting him off the market.

All these pictures are from last Christmas. Like I said, I'm bad at this. At least you're getting some now; the pictures from Christmas 2006 still haven't made it.


Courtney has a big black lab named, er, Cerberus or Megatron or something. I haven't met him, but apparently he is seven feet tall at the shoulder and snorts flames. Courtney's family was so impressed with Ryan that they got him a black lab of his own, a girl puppy he named Valentine.


Wyan wuvs Vawentine and gets vewy angwy if she gets dwessed up in cwoes. In this picture he's glaring at Courtney, from whose tender clutches he's just 'liberated' Val. Don't poke the bear!


Oh, all right, I suppose I've picked on the poor kid enough. Here's a slightly better picture of him. That unsightly mess on the floor next to him is his Uncle Ryan.


But who am I kidding? This isn't Letters to Lovesick Fools, it's Letters to London. So here's some Londony goodness. First in a hat at Mimi and Papa's house...


...then in some antlers at Grandma and Grandpa's. Sorry, grandparents, your pictures with London will have to wait until next time.

More of London's words

About a story: You tell it to me.

Pointing to an unfamiliar dinosaur: I don't know he.

After finding a feather on our walk last night: It's a weaf.
Me: It looks like a leaf, but I think it's a feather.
London: We can take the feaver home and put it in a cup of water for Momma! (which we frequently do with flowers)

Happy Mothers' Day

Click on the picture to see it on the full screen. Happy Mothers' Day! We love you.

London goes FAST!!

Tiny likes looking through all kinds of gadgets. This is the dissecting microscope in Vicki's lab. He's looking at a key for a car we don't even own anymore that we found in our pile of spares. Even though these pictures are only a couple of weeks old, they look ancient now that he's had another haircut.


It was nice this evening so we went outside, and I grilled hamburgers for dinner. Vicki's back is not fixed, not by a long shot, but it's feeling enough better than she can walk without a cane most of the time, and she can hold London more. That's a blessing.

Vicki has lost 24 pounds since January 1. Which is pretty darn good considering she hasn't been able to exercise at all until the past couple of weeks.


We have a long sloping driveway, but the sidewalk is level. If you send down a Hot Wheels car from the top of the driveway it will pick up some speed, but between the bumps and the level (and the fact that most of our Hot Wheels are having alignment problems) they always come to a stop on the sidewalk instead of in the street. We roll nickels down the driveway, too. They're wide and heavy enough to roll really well, and they're big and shiny enough that we can find them again if they veer into the grass. That was actually London's idea, he has some pennies and nickels in his piggybank and he brought some outside and discovered that they could roll.


Here's Tiny with some telescopes. The big black one was my first telescope. I got it last fall with some of my prize money from Spain. The little red one is 13 years old. I found it on Craigslist (community-based classifieds online) and Vicki got it for me for Valentine's Day so I'd have a "baby telescope" to share with London. The skeletal one on the tripod is a compact travel telescope that I built. The struts and rings break down, and it packs up into a space about the size of a big coffee mug (the struts go in the tripod bag). The little table we picked up for free off the sidewalk about a month after we moved in; one of our neighbors was just throwing it out. The legs were a little wobbly, but they just needed to be tightened. Now we use it for all kinds of stuff, but most often as a base for the baby telescope. Saturn is high and bright right now, and often in the evenings I set up a telescope out on the driveway while Tiny plays with his cars. It's a good way to meet the neighbors--everybody loves to look through a telescope, and I've gotten to give a lot of people their first look in the last month.

You can see in the picture that London is wearing a Speed Racer t-shirt. We have been watching the commercials for the Speed Racer movie for about a month, and I told him I would take him when it came out. We went today. It was the first movie he's seen in a theater. We got popcorn and hotdogs and had a great time.

London has discovered that it is possible to make statements that are at odds with reality--to fib, in other words. He doesn't do it very often, and when he does it is always to get out of something he doesn't want to do. So far his most outlandish claim is that, "vegetables make my feet hurt." Sorry, kid. You'll have to do better than that!