A hairy situation

So I was thinking about chopping Evan's hair off the next time I take him to Shelby (who is a saint to even attempt to cut Evan's hair and she does such a great job on both of us every time). I love his hair, but I get so tired of hearing him scream every Sunday morning when Casey tries to make his hair look like he's freshly bathed and combed and not like he just rolled out of bed after sleeping on a wet head. This rarely works because he gets so mad that he pulls his head away and buries it in the bed, making it look worse than when they started. But if I had his hair cut, he couldn't do hilarious things like this:




What totally completes the look, I think, is the lovely pinkish juice "moosestache" (as Evan would say). Owen, however, while totally adorable in a Burger King crown, (or anything he wears, for that matter) doesn't pull off the same look quite as well:

Which is surprising, considering his rather large head circumference.

Like I said ...

He really does get stuck in and under things. Usually, however, it's his head that gets stuck, which makes him very unhappy. This time he seemed to enjoy just hanging out under our bed, kicking and playing with the bed skirt. Although it was a little frightening to walk into our room and all I could see was Owen's head sticking out from under the bed!


Speaking of frightening ... this is what Evan's face looked like the other night. After almost 2 hours of trying to get him to go to bed, he kept saying his face hurt. I wasn't surprised because he had tripped and fallen on some toys in his room during one of the many treks back to bed. He asked for some "feel better" (diaper rash cream) so I got some plain old lotion and rubbed it on his cheeks (his face cheeks--don't get confused)--anything to get him to go to sleep! Then he really whined about how bad his face hurt. So I took him into the light and saw a bright red, splotchy rash all over his cheeks, chin and the tip of his nose. We never did figure out what it could have been that caused it, but it disappeared the next day.

Evan crawled up on our bed and was "holding" Owen. I said something to the effect of, "Awwwww, how cute!" He said, "Get er [your] camera." So I did. It doesn't take much, does it?

Baby Owen ~7 months old~

Owen turned 7 months old yesterday. Here are some not-so-great 7-month pictures, but they'll do. He loves to sit up, although he's so wiggly he ends up toppling over fairly quickly if there are no barriers around him. He also loves to kick (lying down) and jump (standing up with help) a lot. He rolls all over the place now. If he wants to get something or go somewhere, he rolls. This results in many bonks on the head, getting stuck mid-roll (he hates that), and getting wedged under and in between things. He doesn't get the army-crawling/scooting thing at all yet. (I'm not disappointed--I have a feeling he's going to be a busy one.) He always has to be playing with something. His current favorite toys are paper (seen here), clean diapers (a good, safe alternative to paper), and plastic-y/foil-y packages that crinkle really well (like Kirkland baby wipes and Yogos, which, incidentally, we discovered the latter makes a very good church toy when desperate). And when he's not getting as much supervision, he LOVES rattles. He immediately shakes everything he picks up to see if it makes noise. His favorite new tricks are gurgling, spitting (not just slobbering; I mean actual spitting with his tongue out between his lips), and most recently "da-da-da-da-da-da." And, as you can see, I cannot get out the camera to take his picture without Evan jumping in: "Take a picture of Evan?"

Bad Bear

Yesterday, as I'm walking down the stairs, I hear Evan saying, "Okay, stay here for 1 minute." And this is what I saw--Bear, in the naughty corner. When I asked what Bear did, he said, "not nice." I guess it makes me feel better knowing that Evan gets the concept of the naughty corner, but he sure fights it a lot harder than Bear does.




























Evan was also playing with 2 orange segments yesterday, and he had quite the dialog going between the two:
"Go to work."
"See you later."
"Bye. Love you."
["KISS"]
I guess maybe he's starting to get the whole Valentine's Day thing, too.

I would tell you the other funny thing he said, but I would have to label my blog "explicit" if I did. :)

My Funny (and cute) Valentines

We have good news and bad news:
-Good news: We got the photos back.
-Bad news: 1) It cost us $80 for the file recovery software (but it was worth it). 2) I have to sort through thousands of jpg's to find most of the photos because the software recovers any and every image ever deleted or cached in your computer. 3) I have to put everything back the way it was. Right now, anything that is imported into iPhoto is in a big, fat, jumbled mess. This was the one area of my life where I was completely organized. When we got this computer a little over a year ago, I started out right by putting everything in order chronologically, placing the photos in folders organized by year and month, sometimes even special event. I get to start over. If nothing else, it will be a very humbling experience.

And here are my little Valentines:
How can you resist this face, even with cereal on it???

Memories ...

No luck on finding the pictures folder yet. Casey told Evan tonight that he may have deleted all the pictures of himself from the past year. I added that, according to our photos, baby Owen doesn't even exist! I think Evan's response was a blank stare.

Well, it's a good thing I pulled out some pictures from 2007 to make a 2008 calendar this past December. Let's just take a look at a few random pictures--some dull highlights from 2007 ... possibly the only visual reminders that we will have that 2007 even existed.

Oh look, Evan doing what he does best (probably messing something up):

He is a really cute and sweet kid most of the time.

Wait, who's this? Could it be Evan's younger brother who we have no visual documentation of pre-1-month-old?



So dang cute! And there were sooooo many more of them.

If there is a lesson to be learned here it is this: please, everyone, back up any digital photos on your computer. And don't let a computer-hungry toddler start playing around without setting up his own user account for him which allows him very little experimentation.

GONE!!!

Well, I might have added a picture or two to my blog tonight, but I don't have any to add. They are gone. Yes, ALL of them, completely gone! Why? Good question. We got back from a short overnight trip tonight and in the ca. 36 hours we were gone, they disappeared. Where? Who knows! Evan, who has pretty much been a computer genius (or so we thought) since before he was 2, somehow sent them into that computer land in the sky where things go away and you don't know where they go or how to get them back.

Lately, when he's been playing on the Internet (Disney Playhouse), he's been a little braver and more experimental--clicking on icons, resizing windows, etc. I keep threatening him, saying he can't play on the computer if he keeps clicking on things and messing things up, but obviously that has done nothing.

I clicked on iPhoto tonight and it said "Your photo library was not found." Neither was the one in Photo Booth. In fact, the entire Pictures folder no longer exists! Yes, we've looked around, but we're not going to do anything drastic until Casey talks to Travis at work. He's gotten us out of a few hiccups before so I have great faith in him.

Since we have a Mac I do have high hopes that nothing is gone for good, but it's more than a little disconcerting to come home and find over a year's worth of family photos gone! Evan's last 2 birthdays (we'll see if he makes it to another one after this incident), Owen's entire life, all of Casey's reference photos for his paintings ... I'm getting sick just thinking about it.

If anyone knows how to recover my Pictures folder, please let me know. Otherwise, keep your fingers crossed for me because this is going to be a pretty lame blog without any pictures. And please don't lecture me about backing things up, saving to CDs, etc. I've been feeling guilty about not doing that for quite some time now. I think I've learned my lesson.

We're on the 'puter

I never thought I'd do it, but I now have a blog. I love keeping track of friends and family that I don't get to see often very often via their blogs, and I thought this would be a good way for others to keep track of us ... especially grandparents (you know who you are)! Which leads me to the title of my blog ...

"The Children" has double meaning: 1) This blog will mostly be about my children. They are my life. Not like, "Oh, I love them so much, they are my life" (although I do, and they are), but more like they literally are my life. With 2 crazy boys I don't do a whole lot more than keep track of them. 2) More than a few times we've been called "The Children" because our last name is "Childs." Yes, the incorrect plural of "child"; hence, "children." There you go.

And here they are ... the children:



These were taken at Christmas (obviously), but I don't have any great recent pictures. Evan is now 3 and Owen is almost 7 months. And this will have to do for our first post since Evan wants to use the computer, Owen needs to eat, and there is lots of laundry waiting for me.