A Girl and Her Dog

I come to you this morning, hopped up on caffeine (may have exceeded the 1 cup coffee/day allotment this morning...)and general excitement. I am also getting more sleep these days, which is excellent!

This morning started off like many others. Sullivan, a picture of docility 90% of the time, decided it was time to play Jekyll and Hyde with me. While I was in the middle of a disastrous diaper change--a relatively contained poop that Lillian smeared all of herself as she writhed in delight on the changing table--Sullivan grabbed our Supremely Happy, Life-Changing Sleep Book (Ferber, for anyone who cares) and proceeded to have his way with it. Fortunately I got to him before he ate anything beyond the cover, but I was still pretty cranky with him.

I decided to load Lillian up in the Moby wrap , our organically delightful hippy baby carrier, so that we could take him outside and let him burn some energy without him wreaking havoc on any more of our possessions. The picture above shows him in action: a 70 pound black streak sprinting at full speed in figure eights around our backyard, which he has pretty much turned into a dirt track. And as we watched him race like a maniac, Lillian started laughing! Part sheer delight and part smoker's cough, she laughed and laughed as Sullivan ran around us as if he were on a slalom course and we were the marker. The closer he got to us and the more like it appeared he was going to run into us, the harder she laughed. We had heard her laugh once before, about six weeks ago in Aiken with Thomas' family, but try as we might, we could not get her to replicate the action. She is a super smiley and happy baby, but nothing would induce her to giggle.

Except, as it turns out, the antics of my slightly evil but totally forgiven dog.