"Mobile 1, this is Mobile 2..."

Ah, summer. A time for fireflies, farmer's markets, and runaway babies. As if we haven't had enough to keep track of, what with a precocious 3-year-old and a curious infant, we now have a crawler. Kind of. I guess it's more accurate to say he's doing a spot-on impression of a caterpillar. In any case, he's mobile and we're screwed. People always say this, and I used to always roll my eyes when I heard it, but now that I'm one of them, please have sympathy: Annie and Oscar are NIGHT AND DAY in terms of their babyhood. I'm not prepared. I have to retrain all of my motherly assumptions like "Oh, he won't crawl over there, that's a heating vent, Annie hated that kind of thing." DOH! or "He won't eat that piece of paper, Annie just liked the way it sounded." DOH! Yes, I'm proverbially being beaten senseless by an 8-month-old. Touche, Oscar, touche.

On a lighter note, we had our first party on our great deck: a fourth of July to-do including the inaugural run of our charcoal grill (which unfortunately had to be manned by one of our guests as we're still a little bit afraid of it. What? It's really HOT!). We invited some of our neighborhood friends and others that added up to about 12 adults and 50 kids (well not 50, more like 8, but it sounded like 50). Jay made a killer jicima salad, I made a panzanella and fruit cobbler. And to top it all off, our friend Marie made the killer flag cake shown here. And to ensure the comfort of our guests, Jay created the great wall o' flaming citronella around our deck, or as I like to call it, Mosquito Massacre 2010. The kids did great, running through the sprinklers and competing in their own personal World Cup soccer championship. Oscar hung with our friend and landlords Beverly and Al, the surrogate grandparents, for most of the party. Annie was SO excited to be the hostess. After the first guest arrived, she proudly beamed, "NOW the party can STAAAARRRT!!"

We're gearing up for our visit to Connecticut in a couple of weeks. We can't wait to see our cousins and grandparents and we WILL see them ALL, both sides. Before we go, we just hope Oscar gets these two teeth he's been working on since before conception. They are taking FOREVER to poke through and he's not happy about it. No one is, really. Fever, naps so short you'd think he was just taking his time blinking, lots of waking up during the night. Well, nothing some ibuprofen for him and wine for me can't dull. We're all doing our best. What's so sad in the sweetest way possible is that even in utter pain, Oscar does his best to smile. It kills us. Where did we order him from? We should get more.