That exclamation, appropriated from some friends who also have a three-year-old and a newborn, neatly encapsulates our parenting experience over the last couple of days. Andrew has been pushing the behavioral envelope (as can be expected of three-year-olds) and quickly learned that retribution isn’t quite as swift when I’m gone and Elise is feeding Maggie. We’re trying to establish some inviolable rules, such as no backtalk when we tell him to do something. That includes foreign languages; he’s picked up some street Spanish from his friends at preschool. We’ve had a couple of amusing moments when I applied my formidable high-school Spanish skills to try to tell Elise when he’s cursing and when he’s just making it up. I was amused, anyway; Elise mostly throws the book at him. He had a household-record 18 minute time-out today when he repeadtely talked back and stuck his tongue out.
Bilingual potty-mouth notwithstanding, he’s obviously trying to adapt. He has surprised me a couple of times with his willingness to get along. Yesterday I took him to the local playground and he toted along his new favorite toy, a plastic front loader with boy-sized accessory shovel that makes for an above-average sandbox toy. We found one other father-son team in the sandbox on arrival, and the rival three-year-old was predictably attracted to the toy. When asked if he could share, Andrew replied that he would share “in two minutes.” I took that as an indefinite put-off, a preschool equivalent of “in your dreams, Dad!” But sure enough, after a few turns of scooping and dumping, he volunteered that he was ready to share and carried his toy over to his new friend. We dads watched them play happily for a few minutes, Andrew filling the bucket with his shovel, Lucien dumping the sand into a pile.
Lesson learned: he’s always listening. He won’t always admit to it. I won’t do him any favors by underestimating him.

Today we welcomed Margaret Elise to the family! She was born at 6:57 PM at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She weighed 6lbs, 15oz at birth and measured 18.5 inches in length. She has great lungs and wasn’t shy about letting us know it! Mom did great and in general it was a much less trying experience than with Andrew.
More details to come later – Dad needs to get some sleep! In the mean time you can enjoy a few pictures.

We went to Drumlin Farm this weekend with the Culvers, and we have a few pics to share. This is baby animal season so we got to see piglets, kids (the goat kind as well as human), ewes and chicks. The lambs were especially vocal on Saturday.
On a technical note, the Gallery install is new, so if you have any problems please let me know.

“Newborns don’t need much,” one of Elise’s colleagues remarked to her today.
“Yeah, but they do need names and car seats and we haven’t done any work on either one yet,” she replied.
We’re in the final countdown for the oral boards. Elise flies on Monday and takes the test on Tuesday. Maybe after that we’ll get our act together for May.

While we’ve been here in Las Vegas, Andrew decided to start a business. Here’s the movie of his first sale (QuickTime only, for now).

Another milestone for Andrew today: during dinner (while munching his second of three broccoli spears, no less) he announced that “when I grow up, I wanna be a pilot.” Hadn’t heard that phrase before, but I suspect we’ll hear it a bunch from now on. When I picked him up today he was sitting next to one of his buddies and they were flying their teacher to “Dinsneyland” so I think we’ve seen the start of a long-term fascination with flying things. Or at least I hope so; that could be tremendous fun for me, too!

Tonight, while reading his Elmo book, Andrew flipped straight past one of the pages, saying “That’s borin’!” I can hardly keep up.

We were cleaning up the house this weekend – contrary to appearances, we do clean up from time to time – and couldn’t find all of the vacuum accessories. I had seen Andrew playing with them earlier in the week, so I decided to ask him. It went something like this:
Dad – “Andrew, you know the brush for the vacuum?”
Andrew – “Yes!”
D – “Do you know where it is?”
A – “Yes!”
D – “Where is it?”
A – “I don’t know!”
He also exclaims “That’s John Kewwy!” every time a gray-haired man appears on the TV, and almost had me convinced that JK himself had come to the house on Monday. Toddlers do indeed inhabit their own little worlds.