Today will be marked in our calendars as a very memorable day. Sam went pee pee in his potty for the very first time! I know, I know, the last thing you really wanted to read about is my baby’s potty habits. I couldn’t keep quiet, though, because it was such a magnificent accomplishment for him. When I told my husband about it, he asked, “Did you praise him and make a big deal out of it?” Duh. If there had been a marching band in the vicinity, I would have made them parade through our home.

I posted a few photos on my photoblog. None of them are really artistic, but there are a couple cute ones of Sammy, and, of course, you must take a look at the latest thing Robert built and ooh and ahh over it. There are thumbnails of the latest images in the sidebars on most of the skins.

Grandparents have a penchant for giving children the loudest, most obnoxious toys in the universe. First, Robert’s step-mother, Dianne, gave Sam an electric guitar which, after Elmo invites the musician to jam with him, brays a rock-n-roll version of the Sesame Street theme song. There is no “off” button or volume control–other than removing the batteries.

Just when we were getting used to that delightful toy, my parents gave Sam his very own John Deere lawnmower. Remember those popcorn popper toys which have a long handle and a globe full of balls that make an explosive noise as it’s pushed around the room? This lawnmower is exactly like that, only 1000 times louder. There’s a clear plastic container on the bottom of the mower which is filled with oblong green beads (or grass, if you’re an imaginative child). That is the loudest grass I have ever heard.

Anyway, Sam was thrilled with this toy. He played with it for a couple of hours last night. I have never seen him play with anything for that long. Never. His interest usually dies out after a few minutes. To keep up the excitement, he started pushing the lawnmower and his popcorn popper toy around the house at the same time. I’m partially deaf, now

Of course, the lawnmower was the first thing he went for this morning. I’m afraid he woke everyone up. Well, serves them right for getting him the toy in the first place. muahahahaha! (Unfortunately, they’ll be able to escape by going back to their home. Robert and I are the ones who are going to have to live with it.)

So the question is, what is Grandma Leslie going to produce someday to drive us nuts? A drum set? LOL!

I spent most of the day yesterday at another law firm reviewing documents. *YAWN* It’s sooooo boring. I had a hard time staying awake. In fact, I’m not 100% sure that I didn’t doze off there for a minute or two. Sometimes, document reviews can be interesting. Occasionally, you get a box full of juicy documents in which people’s crazy lives unfold like so many episodes of Days of Our Lives. It’s rare that you get to read those types of documents, though. Most of the time, it’s like what I had to slog through yesterday: thousands upon thousands of tiny slips stuffed into banker’s boxes. Not a juicy detail anywhere. *sigh* I’m going to have to go back this afternoon and continue with it.

All hell broke loose when I went back to my office for lunch, though, which spiced up my day considerably. I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when I heard the excited babble of many voices in the hallway. I couldn’t help but be curious about what was causing all the commotion, so I poked my head out the door. There was a number of people out there discussing a really worrisome smell. It took a while before I could detect what they were talking about, but eventually I smelled the acrid scent of smoke.

The receptionist called building management and then the fire department. We were instructed to evacuate the building immediately. So, we all filed into the stairwell and began descending the stairs. Now, when you’re 56 floors up, it takes a considerable amount of time to get to the ground floor (I don’t even want to think how frightening it would have been to be 100 floors up like those poor people in the World Trade Center buildings). After we had gone down twenty or so flights, building management made a building wide announcement to let us know that there wasn’t actually a fire inside the building, but that a fire elsewhere was sending up a lot of smoke which had been sucked into the building’s ventilation system. They told us that there was no need to leave the building. Well, that was all fine and good, but we were stuck in the stairwell. The doors leading off to various floors were all locked. Someone opened one of the doors from the other side, but wouldn’t let us walk through their office to the elevators. That was irritating. So, we continued down the stairs until someone finally let us out into their office. What a crazy incident!

As some of you know, I have been having a hard time at work lately and had to sit in on a meeting with the HR person and my immediate supervisor. That meeting turned out to be productive. I told them that my motivational problems were closely linked to my boredom with the tasks they had been assigning me. When I trained to be a paralegal, I had learned how to draft documents, research issues and do other interesting and substantive types of work. What they had been having me do, however, was a lot of data entry and document organization. I don’t mind those things in limited doses–in fact, I understand it’s a necessary part of my job, but I do want to be given opportunities to do those more interesting and challenging types of work as well. They agreed to give me a chance to do this–a chance to prove myself. This was a major triumph for me, because this firm doesn’t typically assign that type of work to paralegals.

Last week, one of the attorneys asked me to draft some legal documents and I did so with enthusiasm. Finally, I got to use my brain!!! She was really impressed with my writing and told my supervisor who has just commended me for a job well done. She also said she’ll be asking me to do some briefing in the near future. Woo hoo!