Movin' On Up

Once upon a time there was an expectant mother who looked like this:

Rock out with your bellybutton out.

And an expectant father who, seeing his wife's increasingly gargantuan belly, decided that the time was ripe to assemble a crib for his growing baby girl.  That process looked a lot like this:

He's just pretending to hammer.  Our crew of crib-building elves is just out of frame.

And this crib worked for a long, long time.  Like when that baby looked like this:

Yes, I know I was supposed to take the bib off before her nap.  I can't go back in time, so don't nag.

or like this:

Cat always was, cat always is, and cat always will be Livy's snuggly little nighttime pal.

But now that that baby has started looking more like this, it was time to think about transitioning the crib into a toddler bed.

She never climbed out, but she could have.  It just never occurred to her to do it when yelling for us to get her out was so much more efficient.

And so now she sleeps in a Big Girl Bed that looks exactly like this:

Why is it that pretending to go to bed is always more fun than actually going to bed?  Why would you play at something you apparently don't like much anyway?

The transition to a Big Girl Bed wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, but I can't say it was easy given how much sleep we've lost in the last week or so now that the crib is gone.  Livy stays in it well enough, but she has a hard time getting herself back to sleep when she wakes up in the night in her new bed.  This means, of course, that we have to help her settle down and then settle down ourselves, often to just have to get up again and calm her down again.  She loves playing in it, though, and just hanging out in her bed with her toys and books keeps her occupied for whole dozens of minutes.  That alone makes the switch worth it.

We celebrated her first day with her Big Girl Bed with another first: Mama's first attempt at making a Mickey Mouse pancake.  While I would never post a photo of what it wound up looking like, it started off looking like this:

A little misshapen, but delicious nonetheless.

And, in the spirit of "out with the old and in with the new," SLB finally replaced his old collegiate printer with one from this millennium.  The old one, an Okidata (???), looked like this:

It printed at maximum 3 pages before it would jam, and sometimes it had to be hand-fed paper.  My blood pressure is spiking just thinking about it.

We also finally man-,woman-,and childed-up and said goodbye to Livy's cardboard clubhouse, which we've had in our "formal" (HA!) living room since we bought our new range back in April.  She misses it, but it was starting to stink and collapse.  So getting rid of it was good practice for when she shoves us off onto an ice floe when we start to stink and collapse too much, too.  You know, like in the next year.  That fetid, structurally unsound hideaway looked like this:

Yes, we remembered to take the toys and daughter out before hauling it to the dump.

So, as we're upgrading and improving around these parts (this leak-plugging has become a real family affair), I'm just grateful that there's one old thing we aren't tossing out yet.  And that looks like this:

Because, DANG, I don't want to find a real job.