7 Months

Dear North,

You are officially seven months old and still our happy giggling little baby. My favorite time of day is when I open the front door at lunch time and hope for you to be awake. Often I find you bouncing happily in the doorway of the office while daddy works. Or you might be rolling around the office trying to make your way to one of the pets or kissing your reflection in the metal diaper pail. 

You also love to play a game with your dad where he pretends to chase you as you bounce/run away from him. We could listen to your little squeals and giggles all day long.

Your personality has somewhat taken a turn towards stubbornness, which might be explained by the fact that you are an Aries. Sometimes, you are kind of a baby and throw a fit when you don't get your own way. Curiosity draws you to the very objects you are not supposed to have and then when I retrieve said deadly object from your tiny paw, you freak out. I'm not sure of the best way to deal with this new behavior. I mean, I want to teach you early on that you can't always get what you want. But then I remember that you're only 7 months old and logic does not work on you. So normally, I opt to distract you out of your distress by making farting sounds with my mouth or whistling. 

Earlier today, your father managed to stave off a tantrum by putting a magazine a few feet in front of you. You are infatuated with paper.  You have started hybrid crawling, which is part rolling, a little bit of leg dragging and actual crawling used in combination to hilariously and awkwardly get you where you want to go. This new development is amazing to watch as you huff and puff and focus all of your energy on the task of moving. You are one determined little guy already. You are going to be more of a handful as each new day dawns.

Two bottom teeth have sprouted up in the last month, which has made uninterrupted sleep a distant memory. That's not really a new development though. Pain does not seem to be your thing and we can tell the days when your teeth are hurting because you become one sad little puppy. When you feel yucky, you like to keep us in sight as much as possible. The only thing that seems to help is cuddling. And whiskey.

Now that you have some teeth, I've been transitioning you away from purees and towards chunky mushed up food. The process is both comical and painful. Occasionally, you make a sort of choking noise, much like a cat coughing up a hairball when the new texture first hits your tongue. The choking noise is often preceded by a face that cringes as if to say, "why are you feeding me toe jam?" Needless to say, tears have been shed during the dinner hour. Again, this is a new area of parenting where I'm winging it. I'm afraid to give you a bad association with a food by making you finish it and yet, I refuse to waste food either. The thing is North, you cannot live on sweet potatoes, carrots and squash your whole life. I worry about you turning orange if I allowed such habits to form. You don't want to become an oompa loompa do you? I'm not a rascist or anything but in the real world, people just use oompa loompas for their proximity to chocolate rivers. I just don't want to see you degraded by some candy factory recluse and forced to dance while singing rhyming fables. You deserve a better life than that my son. So please start eating green foods for mama okay?

Halloween Recap

This year we made up for the last year's lackluster Halloween with multiple celebrations and costumery.  For starters, there was a certain little monkey we found hanging out in the pumpkin patch we keep on our deck.  

On Friday night, I met up with some friends for the annual Zombie Lurch in downtown Durham. This pic is minus the blood because I had to drive and didn't want to stickify my vehicle, but Jake seemed to like it.  A lot.

Then there was Halloween proper.  We helped some friends hand out candy at their house because they get a ton of trick or treaters.  My friend lured the kids towards the house with her Shakespearean / Nazi-esque accent, while I occasionally let out a scary cackle.  Most of the kids graciously accepted our sideshow with good humor.  But fortunately, a few of the kids thought our act was a bit tired and perhaps lame.  So if we deemed them of appropriate age and guilty of the crime of either greed or rudeness, the scarecrow previously leaning against a tire in the driveway came to life and chased them screaming down  the road. Best. Halloween. Ever.

Note to future self:  cut up a sheet next year and North can be a mummy.  Most frugal and creative costume of the night!

Because everyone really is a winner

By the looks of this picture, I should be taking a nap. Hello bags under my eyes! But I'm not, I'm making cookies! Just in time for the spooktacular holiday that is upon us, I wanted to share the most delicious and easiest pumpkin cookie recipe with you. So easy is this recipe that you could make it with as little as 2 ingredients: one box of spice cake mix and one 15 oz. can of pumpkin.

But here in the Killer household I like to kick things up a notch; not to mention plagiarize the catchphrases of the Food Network chef that is annoying me the most that day. I also like to make things difficult and to get rid of things that have been taking up space in my pantry. Point is, if you are feeling saucy and throwing these cookies together, you might want to try adding in any of the following: chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, walnuts, pecans, cranberries, raisins, a touch of orange zest or cream cheese frosting on top.

Because it's Halloween, I wanted to make mine chocolatey. I lurve chocolate.

Here's the recipe I used:

1 box spice cake mix
1 15 oz. can pumpkin

1/2 bag semi sweet chocolate chips
1/2 bag butterscotch chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Now this is the hard part, open the spice cake mix and dump it into your mixer bowl. Are you still with me? Now open the can of pumpkin and plop it on top of the cake mix. In that order! Geez, do you want worlds to collide if you happened to put the pumpkin in first? Now turn your mixer on slowly! Let the magic combine and then add in the chips. BAM! Cookie dough!

Grease your cookie sheet. Drop the cookie dough onto the sheet using a half filled ice cream scoop or a cookie scoop if you're a fancypants. Bake 9 to 12 minutes. Allow to cool for a few minutes before removing them to cool on your wire rack or as we like to call it, paper towel. Once they are cooled, package them up and give them to that nice Sonya girl. Oh nevermind, I don't need anymore...(makes about 2 dozen)

And the winner is....

So this whole blog contest thing was probably not my best thought out plan. Even though North did pick the winner's name a little while ago, I now have to ask that person to send me her address so I can mail out her grab bag of happy things. It also never occurred to me that a six month old baby would not really understand the concept of picking a name out of a hat. I mean, I explained it to him in very simple terms and he looked at me the whole time as if he was listening while sucking on his fists, so I thought we were good. The first run through took a good five minutes for him to drop the pile of paper he grabbed from the hat. For such little hands, he can fit quite a few slips of paper in them! But all of that effort was for naught and the winner of the trial run through was my mom. Although she deserves a prize every single day for all that she's done for us, this blog is more of a gift to her than anything I could buy in a store. Right mom?....ahem. Mom?



So I had North pick a new winner---Melissa! Oh, I also loved your idea about writing a post about non-essential baby items and it looks like you'll need this info sooner rather than later. I hope to get that on the blog soon for you. Congratulations! (I mean this more on that beautiful belly than for this silly little contest!)

Obligatory pumpkin pictures

Last Saturday we woke up early, haha as if you couldn't have guessed as much considering I have a six month old pants pooper living with me. But anyway, we threw on some layers and hightailed it to some yard sales a few miles away. Unfortunately, we forgot to stop at the ATM along the way which cut our thrift shopping a little short. But it was just as well considering Mr. Littlepants was getting cold and bored. On the way home, we stopped at a pumpkin patch staged at a local church and let the kid loose on the gourds.

Yes, he's still wearing his pajamas in this picture. Guess I won't be winning any Mother of the Year Award anytime soon.

Speaking of contests, this is my 99 post! Things have been pretty busy in the Killer household so it took a little longer to get here than anticipated. Sorry about that. But my next post will announce the winner of the weird little thank you contest I'm running. There may even be video of North picking and attempting the eat the winner's name. Then I'll ask the winner to send me their address because I'm not a creepy internet person that knows how to track a computer's IP Address and find out where people live from a comment left on my blog. Details on all this to follow. Wow, I have goosebumps already.

On corning

I could smell October in the air this morning as I tiptoed out the front door into the early morning darkness. It smelled wet, cold and slightly sweet with vegetable rot. The smell struck a memory and I recalled sneaking out of my mother's house when I was a mischievous thirteen year old. In those days, my girlfriends and I waited until the house went still with sleep. Then we suited up into our all black attire, grabbed our supplies and in slow motion soundlessly slipped out of the house. Once blanketed in the freedom of night, we ran through the neighborhood until the wee hours of morning corning as many houses as we could. Somehow, we never got caught. Even though of all the houses in the neighborhood, mine somehow managed to escape the bloody corn bath the others had fallen victim to the night before. No one ever put two and two together.

For those of you not brought up with a pastime as sophisticated as corning, allow me to explain. Corning is not throwing a full ear of corn at a house; that would be silly, wasteful and way too easy for the victim to clean up. Rather, the corn is in dried loose form. The 'corner' scoops a handful of the stuff and whips it as hard as he/she can at the 'cornees' house. An explosion of successful hits is then heard as the corner runs like hell on to the next house while the cornee turns on their porch light realizing they've just been corned. But alas, cornee, it is too late.

This corning phenomenon begs the question: who was supplying all of this dried loose corn to so many children? Is there a black market for corn in Western Pennsylvania and some son of a farmer spent his free time shucking and cutting corn off the ears to supply all of his rogue friends ammunition for their nighttime hijinks? If so, I bet that kid is rich now because every kid in my hometown corned a house at one time or another I'm sure.

Laugh all you want about corning, I think we were ahead of our time. Considering all the different forms of vandalism we could have chosen, corning is certainly the most green choice. For example, we could have been toilet papering houses and trees. What a mean thing to do to a tree anyway. From the tree's perspective, that's like hanging their dead brothers and sisters all over them. The horror! And have you seen the price of toilet paper these days? Only the spoiled rich kids could afford to partake in such pranks in the current bathroom tissue market. Even poor kids deserve to wreak a little havoc!

I need to explore this topic further and find out if kids raised in different parts of the country threw different vegetables than we did. Perhaps it's a regional thing and kids in Idaho throw potatoes at houses. Or kids in the south throw cotton and cigarettes? Maybe those hippies out in California throw flower seeds and patchouli? Does it extend beyond our American borders?Could it be a worldwide phenomenon?

My poor kid may never know the joys of corning though. With ethanol production and rising corn demand, I'm afraid kids will not be able to afford the black market corn prices any longer. But I will dazzle him with the stories of my youth and a time when corn was so abundant and cheap, kids threw it at houses to be funny.

6 months

Dear North,

So here we are at month six of life with you and as usual, I'm blown away how quickly the time has passed. My constant wishing that I could lock you in time is becoming a little ad nauseam isn't it? I guess my fear is that I'll forget what you were like at each of these stages because as you grow you become a slightly different person than I thought you were last month. I suppose I might as well get used to it now though.

Maybe I'm spoiling you even though the baby books say that is nearly impossible this early in life. But I have a hard time putting you down sometimes. You're my little snuggle bug right now and I'm taking advantage of it while I still can. Maybe tomorrow instead of lifting your hand to touch my face or put your fingers up my nose as it were, you will slap my hugs away wanting to be put down so you can explore on your own. So I hug you tight each day and smother you with kisses while you'll still let me.

If later in life we discover that you are a good dancer, I'm just going to take credit for that now. You enjoy whirling me around the living room dance floor like a floating 24 inch tall Fred Astaire. You even dip me when you get into the groove. Maybe one day when you find yourself at a school dance nervous to step on your partner's feet, these early dance lessons will kick in and you'll whisk her away with your smooth moves. Hmm, maybe these dance lessons aren't such a good idea after all...

You spend your days chatting with your stuffed animals in your crib, chewing on various toys/my face/your appendages and rolling around on the floor. We're just at the point of needing to Northy-proof the house because you are getting so mobile. I will put you down on the floor, turn my back for an instant and the next thing I know, you are underneath the futon or have trapped yourself under your bouncy seat. Although you're not crawling yet, we are amazed at how independent you are becoming and what a little explorer you are.

You are already proving to be a helpful guy to have around the house. Yesterday, you were fussy, so I wore you as I vacuumed the house because you like to be close to us when you're upset. Actually, you were quite helpful and held onto the cord the entire time keeping it out of my way. I was shocked at how much you seemed to like vacuuming though when you started whimpering when I shut it off. I think you may have also developed my love of sweeping the back deck too. I often wear you as I sweep leaves too. It's so cute to watch you stick out your tiny hand and hold onto the broom with each swoosh. I wonder if in your mind it is you that is doing the sweeping? Do you think I work you too hard? Do we need to start talking allowance already?

This week I put away your summer baby clothes now that the cooler temperatures are upon us. The comfy sweaters and warm jeans are conspiring against me and pushing you to grow up faster than I can handle. Wearing them you look like a little boy. But like the summer temperatures, I'm not ready to let go of the past six months with my little baby just yet.
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