Carter's new tricks

I know, I know, I've been a bad blogger. What's even worse is I haven't been reading other people's blogs, so I have no idea what's going on in any of your lives. But now I'm on Spring Break so I'm going to bang out a post. Without further ado, here's an update on what's going on in Carter's life, since I know that's all you people care about.

Carter started pulling himself up even before he was crawling. It was a problem at first because not everything in our house is entirely stable (No, I'm not talking about Lorein). For example, we have a little green Ikea stool that weighs half as much as him, but he's constantly trying to climb up on it. Of course, it falls over and he cries. Which leads to his other new trick, if you can call it that. If he falls onto his back and he knows you see him, he refuses to get up. He will just lie there on his back waiting for you to help him. If you don't, he starts to kick, and then he'll start to whine. I just sit there and tell him to get up, but he's a stubborn lad. The last time he did it, I covered my face with my hands as he looked up, so he didn't think I saw him and he just rolled over and got up. What a wise guy. Oh, the other thing he does now, as you can see in the picture below, is bite his lower lip. And talk about a drool monster!

Another funny thing he's started doing is yell to keep from falling asleep. He's always fought sleep by groaning as we rocked him, but a couple of weeks ago he started just opening up his mouth and yelling. It's really hard to keep from laughing when he's doing it. The problem, though, is that it's actually pretty effective. It's increased the time it takes to get him to sleep by a few minutes.



This isn't him at his yelling best, but it's the best video I've been able to get. It gives you the gist of his talent though.

Finally, we haven't been very circumspect with what we give him to eat. We're hoping if he's exposed to all foods now, we'll avoid the stage in four years where he won't eat anything but chicken nuggets.

Speaking of chicken nuggets, he loves them!

And he also loves Oreos!

Unfortunately, chicken nuggets and Oreos don't always mix well.

Another salvo

So, it turns out Crest has taken a stand on the bottom vs. middle squeezers. My mom wrote about it in her newspaper column:

Click here -- Neutrality would have been appreciated

If you're gonna have a girl, name her Fiona (not Carla)

Just watched the season finale of "Burn Notice" . . . FREAKIN' AWESOME! I can't wait until June.

The ICC

Great news story today -- the International Criminal Court issued an indictment for Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir. The indictment alleges al-Bashir is responsible for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in the Darfur region of Sudan. Soon after the indictment came out, Sudanese citizens flooded the streets of Khartoum protesting the ICC and the U.S. I read that and had to laugh. Sudanese protestors -- THE U.S. ISN'T A PART OF THE ICC! THE U.S. HASN'T SIGNED THE ICC TREATY! THE U.S. DOESN'T TRUST THE ICC AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT! But it's okay, you just keep blaming the U.S. for everything.
I suppose they do have a small point in that it was actually the UN Security Council that referred the matter to the ICC and the U.S. is a permanent member of the Security Council. The problem is that the U.S. didn't vote for the referral, it abstained. While it's true the U.S. didn't stop the referral by using its veto power, it's not like an abstention is a ringing endorsement of the action. It's basically saying "you guys just do whatever you want to do". So again, how 'bout some protests of the French, British, or Russians who pushed the referral? Furthermore, China didn't use its veto either (which is an interesting side note since China does a ton of business in Sudan and continuously used its veto to keep the Security Council from taking direct action on Darfur); where's the protests against China? Like I said, I just had to laugh. They probably also had thousands of American flags which they burned even though I don't know where I could get a single Sudanese flag, much less thousands of them. You know, assuming I had time to protest.