My dear friend Courtney, that I have known since Westmont, is a fledgling photographer.  She asked if she could shoot photos of Roly, as he is the smallest newborn she would have been able to do that with.  She’ll be back to do more, but here’s a couple of the gems from the first shoot:

More great things to come… 

Toby has been hearing crazing clawing sounds late at night.  She describes it as sounding like something is trying to pull the siding off our house.  I have heard it on occasion as well.  I thought that it was something that was attacking the metal rain gutter downspout.  I moved some things around and thought I had solved the problem because there was no more noise.

A few days ago Toby began looking for a dirty diaper or old food in the area of our back office because she said there was a rotten smell.  At that time I couldn’t smell anything but over the next few days I got some wiffs of something not right.

On Thursday we took advantage of the kids being gone (Max to Victory Ranch, and Lucy to Poppa & YaYa’s house) to go on a date.  As we returned home from dinner at Gianfranco’s (Toby’s favorite Carpinteria restaurant), I got a strong smell of rottenness at the back door.  I bent over and took a wiff at the vents under the office.  Yikes!!  Now I knew where the stink was coming from: under the house.

So I bought a respirator and some heavy duty cleaning gloves and crawled under the house.  I went under the office and found 2 dead animals.  One was very dried up and un-identifiable, but the other (hidden under some insulation) was a very large, recently dead opossum.  It’s tail was about as big around as my thumb at the base.

The respirator worked very well.  I couldn’t smell a thing while I was down there.  I don’t know if I would have been able to do the work if I had been gagging on the smell in the crawlspace.

For this appointment, Lucy decided to feel OK so I got to attend.  The doctor was very pleased to report that Ro had gained nearly a pound in the 10 days since his last visit.  He is now a portly 8 lbs, 5 oz.  His length was measured at 20.5 inches.  His umbilical stump fell off a few days ago, so he has a nice round belly.

During the time I have been home with the new baby, I have been in charge of getting Lucy and Max to swim lessons at the Carpinteria Community Pool.  Toby works on getting a nap while we are out for an hour and a half.

Lucy is in the Step 1 – Beginning class and has made great progress towards being water safe.  She loves jumping into the water from the dive platform.

Max is in Step 4 – Advanced and is learning to dive and swim with particular strokes:  Freestyle, Butterfly, Breaststroke and Backstroke.

While waiting during Max’s lessons, Lucy decided that she wanted to be a lifeguard.  On a many days, she went right up to the lifeguards and asked to sit in their chair.  Since only the Advanced swimm ers were in the pool, most granted Lucy her wish.

Max is a member of the Coldstone Creamery Brithday Club, so he received a coupon via email for a free ice cream.  The coupon has only a 2 week life, and since Max will be at Victory Ranch for a week of summer camp during this time, we went for an early celebration.  Max got mint ice cream with Reese’s peanut butter cups and Lucy’s choice was chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips.

And since every semi-serious posed shot must be followed by a ‘crazy’ photo: