Geckos, Fireworks, & Toddlerhood

I'm very grateful today. My accidental BFF Tara was in a nasty car accident and is doing AWESOME (and has a pretty killer shiner), my brother is about to close on a house near us, Beckett finally met Knox... we're blessed.

Geckos

Something happened a few weeks ago that I haven't been able to talk about until now - a trauma of sorts.

Unless my mom is coming to visit, our bathroom rugs don't get washed very often. It's really easy to forget about them when your husband is going, "Hey babe...I just used the last clean undershirt. The ones from the dryer. They actually never even made it to the drawer before I used them all."

I'm not the best launderer you've ever seen.

So during my bi-annual washing of the bathroom rugs, I grabbed an armful from the washer, put them in the dryer, turned to grab another armful, and saw something stuck to the side of the washer. It appeared to be a tail. A tail that used to be attached to something.

After further inspection, I found the tail's other half stuck to another part of the washer. A gecko, presumably intact at the time, had infiltrated my wash cycle. After soaking and spinning with some bathroom rugs, he ended up one tail and one hand short. And skinless. Or scale-less. Whatever gecko epidermis is made of.

I gagged a bit, texted Taylor to come home and remove the corpse, gagged more, decided I'd rather just deal with it than let it sit there all day, put on elbow-length rubber gloves, and cleaned it up using 18 wadded up paper towels.

I mean, it's one thing to know you washed rugs in gecko water. It's another thing to not ever find his other hand.

The rugs were rewashed 8 more times consecutively. I never did find that other appendage, but I can promise you that if it's still stuck in one of my rugs it is very very clean.

Fireworks

My kid is such a trooper. He stayed up 3 hours past his bedtime last week to watch a fireworks show. I thought he'd be scared of the noise, but he loved it. He didn't even flinch, which of course begs the question, "How loud IS your natural environment (read: my voice) if the deafening boom of fireworks doesn't even faze you?"

After a while, Beckett gave the show a round of applause and then tried to grab them as they exploded. Very cute.

Toddlerhood

The past few weeks have been developmentally insane. I can see a HUGE difference in how much Beckett actually understands. He says words, he moos and barks when you ask what cows and puppies say, he's taken a step, he rearranges our bistro-height kitchen chairs all over the house... Every day is one step closer to toddlerhood it is terrifying. It's about to get real, y'all.

For instance, this is what happens when I leave him unattended in the kitchen for 2 seconds.

 

(He opened that and climbed in by himself in about 7 seconds.)

 

He tries to escape from safety equipment.

He plays so hard he gets stuff velcroed to his diaper.

When meeting new people, he offers food then decides to eat it instead. (We're working on that. That is no way to make friends.)

He eats dirt.

He drinks out of big people straws.

He got a tattoo.

I'm not sure where our baby went but having a little boy is pretty fun, too.