My darling sister is getting ready to have her baby! She's only about week from her due date so the whole family is waiting on pins and needles. I'm so excited I could scream. Bring me a baby to cuddle and love on! (but please not another of my own, thankyouverymuch!).  In preparation for baby's imminent arrival (ha! It's too late to back out now sucker!) we've been chatting online quite a bit. This does two things: 1) it keeps me abreast of the happenings in the Walther household, and 2) it reminds me of how much work having a baby is, lest I begin to consider doing it again. For now I'm definitely content to sit back and watch her running around like a chicken with it's head cut off. Although I have to say, she appears to be pretty on top of things. If you ask her, she says she's got everything done and ready for Juniorette to arrive. Of course as the older, wiser sister in the relationship, I feel that it is my duty to keep telling her that she won't realize how much she really hasn't gotten done until after the baby arrives. I can practically hear her rolling her eyes at me from the other end of the phone. But she has no room to talk, because she now looks like a pregnant cartoon character. So there.

 One of the few things that we haven't really discussed a lot is her cats. Her cat Bob weighs in around 20 pounds. And yes, I have an overwhelming urge right now to add "In this corner of the ring..." I mean, that's a full pound and a half more than my 9.5 month old. (I'm hoping that she has begun the process of weaning Bob off eating babies and small children, because if not, she's screwed.) Her other cat, Cotton, is 17 pounds. That's only a pound and half less than my 9.5 month old. "And in the other corner..." (I'm sure Kerry isn't actually feeding them the neighborhood children. It's probably just *ahem* a "thyroid problem.") While I don't know how Kerry and Greg are handling the sumo cats' feeding habits, I do know that, being the good parents-in-training that they are, they've begun the process of transition the cats out of sleeping in their bedroom. They live in a 100+ year old farmhouse so their choices in bedrooms is limited. They have either the master bedroom on the first floor or the 2 deathtraps other bedrooms on the second floor, which you get to by climbing up the steepest, two foot wide staircase you've ever seen. So master bedroom it is. (Which is good, because if they did try to set up one of those upstairs bedrooms as a nursery, the whole family will show up on their doorstep with torches and pitchforks. We may already be a little over-protective of Juniorette.) The problem with the nursery also being in the master bedroom (besides the obvious for poor Greg - HAHAHAHA! His wife is one smart cookie) is that the master bedroom happens to be both cats' domain. Bob actually prefers to sleep on Greg's head at night. And I'm sure transitioning them out isn't an easy task when your cats are capable of breaking down the door every time they want back in. Kerry seems to think that the cats may try to sleep with (read: on) Adelaide. Kevin and I had the same concern with our cats. Come to find out, the LAST thing a cat wants is to be anywhere near the alien creature that you have brought into their house. But, better safe than sorry, right?


It's been really fun to watch Kerry go through the whole pregnancy/getting ready to have a baby phase. Being on the outside looking in has given me a totally different perspective than when I was going through it. I just went along for the ride without really thinking about the impact. Now that I'm watching Kerry do it, I often find myself thinking about how much work this is going to be for her and feeling exhausted just thinking about it, all while ignoring the fact that I'm already doing it. I blame my exhaustion for the slight oversight. Not only that, it's also recently come to my attention that Kevin and I are going to be doing it (and therefore being exhausted) for the rest of our lives. I'm definitely not saying that it's not completely worth it, but you're talking about the two people who have been trying to weasel our way into the senior living apartment complex for the last 5 years so that we don't have to take care of ourselves. (It's slightly depressing to realize that Junior has now completely blown any chance we had of getting in.) Now we have to be the responsible ones. Whose great idea was this again?


It's already becoming more work with the older he gets. For one thing we have to prepare his 3 meals a day, along with our own. Yes, the people who have been surviving on Johnsonville sausages (minus the buns because they require too much effort) and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for the past 9 months are responsible for providing a baby with 3 square meals, plus 2 snacks. In order to make it easier on myself, I have started just giving him what we eat. For example, Spaghetti Night in the Hockenberry Household:

Yes, it's in his eyebrow along with everywhere else. But that's why God invented the kitchen sink, which is where he ended up approximately 30 seconds upon finishing his spaghetti.

I think the only ones who enjoy Greyden getting table food more than Lazy Mommy are the sharks dogs. Funny, they haven't wanted a thing to do with him until now.

Greyden has recently figured out how to go from being on his belly, to sitting up, to standing up, all on his own and all in the last week. I actually found him standing in his crib on Tuesday morning, which was a first. You could tell he was SO proud of himself. And to be honest, it was cute as hell to see him standing there grinning at me when I went in to get him at 7am. It was not so cute when I went in to get him the following morning at 4 am. His favorite place to stand up is at the window in his play area. (How on earth do you baby proof a windowsill???)

His crawling came on literally overnight. One day he was army crawling, the next he was real crawling. Day 1 was a little slow going:

By day 2 however, he was an old pro.

He's also mastered the art of his walker, which I didn't even realize he knew how to use until I stuck him in it while I vacuumed the other day. I'd been vacuuming for about 2 minutes when I realized he was chasing me through the house. And I literally mean chasing. That walker might as well have been a Hummer. Even the rugs were no match for that thing. He cornered me in the hallway, the bathroom, the office, the entry way, the living room, then finally headed me off by taking the opposite way as me around the kitchen island. Vacuuming now easily takes twice as long as it used to.

So our little man is obviously growing up! Of course there is one aspect that he's still hasn't grown up enough for. Remember this photo?

That was taken back when Greyden was 5 months. Here is a more recent picture of him, taken at 9 months:

Yeah, we still might be on the low side of the growth charts.