CP has been ruling the roost lately. Just today, she reached her feet with her hands and began playing with them. She has also become more adventuresome during tummy time. She spins around on the mat like Curly from the Three Stooges did. It takes her a while and her mechanism is different, but she still ends up spun around from the way that we put her down. She did it in the crib last night and the LW almost grabbed the wrong end to pick up and kiss this morning. The pic in the yellow onesy is the one that says, "if daddy says no, ask grandma" and yes folks, that's her standing up on the couch. She is perpindicular to terra firma. Today, after I got off the phone with the family's newest retiree, she started pulling her knees up under her hips as if to get only half of the crawling machinery in order. She's posing here on the right while the LW holds her upright. The LW's Fetish Cycles - Discipline is in the background on the rack. Mmmmmmm daddy's gonna steal those forks someday......

I've been sick and has noticed that the LW, well, the LW's feeling a bit stressed and (according to me) may be riding that old-school wooden-trussed hormone coaster that comes as a prize for carrying the majority of the organs and chemicals that are necessary for procreation. It doesn't look like a fun ride and I'm trying to keep his neck off of the tracks.

The LW and I have been watching as Dutch and Wood, the main grownup characters at SweetJuniper, make their way across places where grass grows without irrigation. It screams of the inevitable super long car trip that hangs out there somewhere in our future. The LW grew up making car trips with 3 siblings and remembers all of the games that her mom used to keep them occupied. I mainly remember wrestling with my brother and then being threatened repeatedly with all manner of beatings. I seem to recall a time when we rode, oblivious to any hidden dangers along I-20 and the famous MS Hwy61, in the back of a 1975 Toyota Pickup that had a camper shell and thick foam mats for our protection. We went all over in the back of that thing. My dad was nice enough to install an intercom so that we could ask, "are we there yet?" without having to use hand signals.

The LW just walked in from her latest haircut and just seeing her with short hair brough tears to my eyes. She looks exaclty as she did when I first met her five years ago at that Junior Brown concert in Lawrence, KS. Seeing her smile with that short hair makes me think of our first big trip. We'd just met and we decided that New Orleans was the place to go visit. I wanted her to meet my grandparents anyway, and we could see them on the way through. It was a strange thing going across Ponchartrain, to have a car full of elderly women look at us. I was driving and the then Lovely Girlfriend was my cowboy-hatted co-pilot. They all smiled big happy smiles as they passed and I was struck by how happy we both were. Rolling into a town that we didn't know and into a life together that we couldn't have really imagined or hoped for - those ladies had the wisdom to smile at true happiness when they saw it.