Scaring the Baby

Today was a nice and mostly lazy Saturday, which I always appreciate. We're getting ready for our trip next week, so I haven't gotten groceries lately and we've been eating our way through the stockpile in more or less creative ways. It's funny because a year ago, I was just ramping up the stockpiling, going into squirrel pregnancy mode as I worried about the baby and money and how we were ever going to make ends meet. It's been just about a year since I started looking into couponing, actually. We had soup for lunch today, since I've gotten a bunch of it very cheap this past few months. For supper, I defrosted one of the steaks I got from my folks. It was a very nice steak! I have another, but I wanted to save it, so I took the steak and pounded it just as flat as I could, till it was more than twice its original size. I cooked it up in a little olive oil then cut it into chunks, and we had delicious steak sandwiches. Creative and tasty!

Robert got three meals of solid foods today, a fact of which I am quite proud. He had banana and rice for breakfast and ate nearly a whole banana. Wow! Lunch was garden veggies and pasta from Gerber, and then for supper he had more pureed kidney beans. He ate about half the beans and got bored of it, so I put a few spoonfuls on his tray and let him fingerpaint with them. He liked that quite a bit, and make a huuuuge mess. Bathtime tomorrow morning before church, definitely! But I think he's going to be very artistic.

After dinner, we both switched off playing with Robert to tire him out for bed. For awhile, we were all playing together on the floor. M laid down on his back and his shirt rode up.  I scooted over there with Robert in my arm and went "I see... belly!" like I often do with Robert,  then started tickling M's stomach. Those of you who know him know that M's reaction to tickling is loud giggling and yelping, punctuated with squirming and the occasional flail. He did all of that as I continued tickling him, till suddenly Robert burst into loud and hysterical tears! He has a special sort of cry he does when he's scared, short little frantic sobs designed to make parents feel terrible about whatever they did. I stopped tickling M immediately, and we both set about trying to comfort the baby and assure him that Daddy was okay and everything was all right. It took several minutes before Robert calmed down and stopped crying. Guess we won't be playing the "Tickle Daddy" game till he's a little older.