A story for you

Well, I've got several new photos to upload here, but I'm having some technical difficulties, so you're going to have to be satisfied with a story for now.

Okay, I guess that "technical difficulties" is really just another term for "laziness", but hey, let's not play semantics here. What's happening is that I can't seem to upload photos from my laptop downstairs because the connection keeps timing out. So in order to upload the photos, I have to be upstairs at the desktop, which apparently works better for these things. The real problem lies in my wireless networking--not that it's bad, just that it has trouble finding the pictures on the desktop and then uploading them on the internet before the connection times out. But if I go upstairs, I can't watch TV. Oh, woe is me.

Right, bored yet? Moving on....

Here's the aforementioned funny story. This kid must be a Carroll man, because man, can he ever eat. He has this thing where he'll wake up and eat, squirm around in his crib for about an hour, eat again, and repeat for about four or five hours. This happens in the morning and then again in the evening. It's so funny to watch him because he opens his eyes, squirms out of his swaddling, and throws his arms up in the air. I wish this was an audio blog of some kind and you all could hear the noises he makes.

The cool part of all this is twofold. First, when he starts to wake up one of us will usually grab him and try to convince him that he's really not hungry and that he should go back to sleep. What we do usually is put him down on our chests tummy-down (known as "tummy time" to those who aren't as pediatrically-inclined as I am) and just hang out for a bit. This is evidently good for the kid because he can build up his neck muscles and stuff.

The problem is that this kid already has the strongest neck muscles I've ever seen in an infant (and having done extensive studies in the tensile strength of infant neck muscles, I should know). He can actually raise his head off my chest and look me in the eye. It's so absolutely amazing when he lifts up his neck and stares at me. Wow. This is the reason that people have kids, isn't it? So amazing. Today he even started to figure out how to move himself up my chest toward my neck. Unbelievable.

Second cool part about this whole business is the natural instinct that infants are built with. Even though he can't talk yet (I'm working on it, though--check back next week), he still manages to let us know when he's hungry by making little sucky faces. He also tends to mistake, well, pretty much everything around him for a nipple and tries to latch onto it, often with hilarious results.

Here's one example of the hilarity. Yesterday he looked out and saw his hand passing by. Thinking to himself, "Hey, this looks good," he latched firmly onto his forearm and started to suck. Usually he figures out that he's not getting any food and gives up. But not this time. No, he latched on and stayed there. There was no getting him off. We ended up having to actually pry his mouth away from his arm, much to his chagrin. He finally figured out where the actual food was, but man that was a funny thing to watch. Yum, arm. Delicious.

So that's about all I've got to put up here for now. Like I said, I'm going to post some new pictures soon, but I'll have to wait until I'm done watching TV. Also, I'm trying to convince Steph to start posting on here as well so that you all can get (a) the mommy's perspective, and (b) a break from my writing voice.

See you all soon.