L is now smiling for real. The above smile is in honor of naked bottom time which she loves. She now shows her pleasure by smiling, laughing and kicking frantically. Then she pees. Sometimes she adds a bonus poop or loud ripping fart to the celebration. It's a good thing that we have over ten changing pads that were given to us. They are like a second diaper.

This blog seems to be dominated exclusively by breastfeeding updates. I know some are interested and others, understandably are not. I will summarize briefly to say that the kid still doesn't want to nurse. She no longer seems terrified of my breast, but sometimes will fall asleep on it, near it, open her mouth and suck for a minute. Ultimately, she screams for the bottle of pumped breast milk. I have tried to reason with her that the breastfeeding would be a much better deal for both of us, but she doesn't seem to care about logic yet. So, the pumping continues. There are still a couple of last ditch techniques not attempted yet - one of which is called "rebirthing". This requires me to get in the tub with the baby with dimmed lights to simulate being in amniotic fluid. My "helper" is supposed to make sure that baby stays warm by splashing warm water continually on baby without submerging her while we wait patiently for the baby to crawl to my nipple. The website says that this can take several hours. I will not begin to list the 3000 reasons why spending several hours in the tub with the baby has seemed difficult to achieve. Cloth diapers have begun. Pretty cool, but the laundering is not so cool. Jeff is stressing over the stains left after following natural cleaning methods touted on the internet. Getting them clean with harsher products will possibly irritate Ls skin or cause damage to the integrity of the diaper (i.e. bleach not allowed). Any suggestions?

D had a sleepover in honor of her 8th birthday party on Friday night. Planned Friday night event was foiled by an Internet mistake which stated that the indoor moonwalk place was open from 4 to 6 that day, when it in fact, was not. So, Jeff took the kids bowling which apparently was not a hit. He says that they were far more interested in "playing" video games without inserting money. D requested a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting in which the cake looked like Barbie's skirt and Barbie standing in the hole of the bundt shape, homemade mac and cheese with hot dogs on top and hamburgers. Jeff and I obliged by cooking all afternoon. Kids stayed up late screaming, watching movies and repeatedly chanting the same song lyrics over and over for several hours. I distinctly remember doing similar annoying chants as a child and I have to apologize to my parents and brother for subjecting them to this. I didn't tell them to stop but man, it was really annoying. In the morning, Jeff brokered a sweet deal with the moonwalk place to let us jump for an hour before a private party. We then returned to coconut chocolate chip waffles and pizza eggs, again requested by D. It was fun, but exhausting. Then the diarrhea and puking began. Thankfully, only D was affected in our house, but all of the other guests were stricken over the weekend. I am pretty sure it wasn't food poisoning since there were ten kids absent on Friday from D's class and we all "ate the fish" too and didn't get sick. The note we got home from school is that there have been simultaneous outbreaks of lice, pink eye, strep throat and the flu. MMMM. E claims that one kid in his class has all of them at once.

Tommorrow it will have been 4 years since they let us take D from the orphanage. In two days, she will have lived with us longer than she did not live with us. In three days she will be 8 years old. She says she wants to celebrate by having a big turkey dinner. How convenient!

Here's a good shot of D and L in the photo booth...