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Save Luke!

Well, the "keep Luke alive" program is going fairly well. Yesterday he was particularly interested in chewing on things (more teething, possibly?) and so I spent the day looking for appropriate teethers and taking away the inappropriate. Appropriate in this case means anything that would not hurt him and that he would not hurt.

The problem is that his sisters are not cooperating with the program. They leave all sorts of things on the floor (bits of sidewalk chalk, for example, or little pieces of paper), they leave doors open (come back inside, Luke!), they leave the toilet seat lid up, they distract me when Luke is doing something he shouldn't. He has only fallen down the short flight of stairs once, and he does seem to have learned something from that (it was more like a gentle roll, but still scary). Yesterday as I was washing Eleanor's hair and Luke thought he'd like to eat the toilet paper from off the roll. I successfully distracted him from that and got back to rinsing the conditioner out when I heard a "splash"! Luke took another unexpected bath. Sigh. Eventually one of us will learn, I suppose.

Eleanor is actually starting to make the connection: "If I leave this on the floor, Luke will try to eat it!" She's still a bit slow, i.e., she only sees the potential problem as Luke crawls towards something he shouldn't, so she's sometimes is late in taking away things from Luke. Amanda doesn't make the connection at all, but she is very protective of things she perceives as hers. She'll walk around carrying an armload of toys and things that she has determined are not for Luke. Unfortunately, some of the things she sees as inappropriate are actually Luke's toys, which she has grabbed away from him. By the time we all learn what we are supposed to do, I expect Luke will have moved on to another stage of life.

In Amanda news, she has decided that she is the mother in the family. When I tell her to get into the car so we can go somewhere, she immediately climbs into the front driver's seat. I go to get her out (after buckling Luke in) and she tells me "Hi other mother! We're going to Jumping beans " (or some other desirable place, as opposed to picking Eleanor up from school or the grocery store). This morning she asked me to read her a story, so I did. Then she picked up the story and read it to me (holding the pictures upside down, so that I could see them better). She calls me the "other mother". We have a fun time.

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