Sam has been remarkably affectionate of late. When I arrive at the daycare, he races across the room with a smile on his face, grabs me around the legs and gives me a bone-crushing hug. At other times, he’ll climb on my lap just to snuggle (I swear it’s not because he’s after the cookie I’m munching on…) All this love is like a heady drug. It makes me feel so good. I love my little boy!

He’s very “affectionate” towards the kitty as well, although she doesn’t seem nearly as pleased with his attentions as I am. She puts up with the heavy-handed “petting,” fur-yanking, tail-pulling…at least for a time, and then she escapes to some temporary sanctuary where he can’t get at her.

Some of Sam’s most recent accomplishments:

(1) Robert tells me that Sam picked up a book, looked at him and said, “tory,” i.e “story.” At other times, we believe he said, “cat,” “ba-ba” (bottle), and “bye-bye.” He babbles constantly, but until recently none of it was intelligible.

(2) He can scale just about anything. A couple of nights ago, he climbed on top of the piano. He looked very pleased with himself. We tried not to freak out.

(3) He *loves* to ride his toy fire engine around the house. Vroom vroom!

(4) He’s mastered the shape sorter. He’s very proud of his ability to fit things inside other things. Sometimes he fits things inside other things that shouldn’t be fit inside other things and then we have a devil of a time separating them. (What a sentence!)

(5) He can charm a smile out of anyone.

Thank you so much for the sympathy and the hugs. It’s wonderful to know I have friends out there who care

Onto more mundane matters:

If the page looks funny, it’s because I’ve reconfigured the blog so it’s accessible via mysteriouswhisper.org. Try typing that in your address bar and you should see the site in its full glory.

I think I’ll be redoing the design. As proud as I am of ol’ Frosty over there, this layout doesn’t do much for me. I’ll keep him up somewhere on the site, so you can play with him if you like It’s kind of therapeutic for me to push around some pixels anyway.

Want a sneak preview of one of my linkware designs? I think it’s pretty festive!

Ho Ho Ho

user: quixotic
password: pixels

I still have some tweaking to do before I offer it on my design site. It should be up this weekend if you’re in need of a holiday look for your blog

I’m considering making some of my designs shareware or exclusive use. I’m not sure whether or not that would go over very well though. If I did go that route, I’d probably precode the MT templates for them, so there’d be an added incentive to purchase the designs. We’ll see.

At 3:30 AM, the call we had been dreading came. Robert’s father had passed away. He will be missed.