As Olivia is getting bigger, more self-aware, and mobile, we're actually starting to discover many "games" together. The most entertaining by far is the recently worked out "boo daddy!", also known as "got the baby!" However, as with all games there are definite rules, and breaking them can lead to ruin.

"Your turn with this child!" Ellen said as she plopped Olivia on her feet in front of me, with a dripping snaggle-toothed chocolate grin on her face, "M&Ms aren't holding her back and Amber and I need to cook!"

We were over at Ron and Amber's house for dinner. While Ron and I were drinking and discussing the finer points of why car mechanic shows needed a flouncy blonde announcer, Ellen and Amber were in the kitchen doing... oh hell I don't know, doing something that involved a lot of chattering and the occasional high-pitched squeal. When guys are watching TV the women around them turn into blurry clucking objects that flutter around the edges, sort of like chickens in sweatshirts.

But as with all male constructs, a woman simply has to be determined to break through the barrier, and nothing shatters a TV-woven cocoon quite as well as a babbling 2-foot tall M&M addict. "Dah-DEE dah-DEE wup woh ric grrrr" [chocolate-covered hand flops twice], which in Olivia-speak means "pay attention to me now or the couch gets it." So, thinking quickly, I hopped up, yelled "oh no! It's Olivia!" and ran down the hallway.

This puzzled her enough that the upholstery was saved. This was very unusual daddy-behavior. As she peered down the hall I poked my head around the corner, gasped, and quickly pulled back. "Ok, now that's really strange," you could almost hear her think, "I wonder what he's up to? I can see his pants leg... I bet I can smear chocolate on him before he grabs me!" So, with a sly grin, she started toddling down the hall, smudgy hands held high.

Since just about the only thing behind the corner of the hall was my head, I was easily able to track her movements, and once she got about 3/4ths the way down I rushed from around the corner with a "GRRRR!!! GOT THE BABY!" This immediately resulted in wide eyes, a hop of surprise, and a great big belly laugh. I scooped her up as I went by, tickled her belly for a second, set her back down at the other end of the hall, then turned around and ran away with another "oh no! It's Olivia!"

The spark of recognition was instant and obvious. "Time to find daddy!" This time, giggling the whole way, she immediately headed down the hall. When I jumped out we were all regaled with a huge belly laugh that continued the whole way back down the hall. The rest of the game was spent with me dropping Olivia off at the start of the hall and then having to beat her back to the corner as she chased me. Eventually everyone was watching and having a great time.

Fast forward to the next day. Olivia decides she's done eating before we are, so Ellen pops her out of the high chair and sets her down. This is Quite Simply Not Good Enough for the princess, who insists that mommy is also done eating and must come play. So, bowing to the inevitable, Ellen gets up from the table to oblige.

"Why don't you play 'got the baby'? She really liked that." I suggested, innocently enough.

Now, our house is laid out quite differently... no hallways. So instead, Ellen placed Olivia at one end of the living room, then hid behind the kitchen counter.

And when I say hid, I mean hid. It slowly dawned on me that Ellen had not really been paying attention to the rules of "got the baby". The objective was not to in fact hide from the baby, but instead was to allow the baby to find you. An admittedly subtle but very important distinction, as time was quickly to reveal.

You see, Ellen's competitive nature had taken hold and she had obviously decided to improve on daddy's piss-poor hiding performance by completely disappearing from view. This greatly puzzled Olivia, who was cautiously walking up to mommy's disembodied calls of "o-LIVVV-EE-AAA.... o-LIVVV-EE-AAA!", trying to figure out exactly where mommy had gone. I was just opening my mouth to warn Ellen she wasn't playing properly when four things happened in very quick succession:

Ellen leapt out from behind the counter, landing on both feet with a BANG! on the kitchen tile, and immediately ran straight at Olivia with arms extended letting loose not a silly growl but a mighty "ROAR!!!"

Olivia jumped about a foot into the air and landed squarely on her butt, bug-eyed with surprise, and immediately began a huge "silent scream."

Ellen rushed to her side, snatched her up, hugged her and started yelling, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Mommy's so sorry!"

Both then burst into tears.

So there I was, sitting there almost literally with spaghetti hanging out of my mouth, helpless as this tiny opera rapidly unwound in front of me. Greek tragedies don't have this much emotional impact. Hurricanes don't make this much noise. Worse still, like a master chess player who's attention lapses just long enough to make exactly one wrong move, I suddenly could see my fate unfolding, preordained and unavoidable.

Checkmate ocurred slightly later, after everyone had calmed down. "Why didn't you tell me I was doing it wrong?!? You knew she was going to react this way! You were the one that made up this stupid game! Now look how upset you let me make her!"

Sorry you lost the fight against the popcorn tin O. Have a cookie.

She's FINE. O is learning how to walk. Toddlers wobble. Sometimes they wobble into things.

Another day, another entry in the "Ellen's-family-is-more-redneck-than-mine" contest. This time, my caption is:

If the cutest picture you have of your grandchild is the one where she's holding a beer bottle in her hands...

At the recent "1st-birthday-and-Nina's-graduation-party" celebration in New York.

Oh sit down, the bottle was empty. I was thirsty too!

Now, as to who taught her how to drink out of bottles like that, well, that's none of your damned business.

The box this kitchen came in was ENORMOUS! She already has a certain white cat sleeping in her kitchen sink too.

Set a course Number One, warp five. ENGAGE!

• Men don't wash toddlers, they soak them. Like tea bags. You can always tell how deep the tub was by the scum line on their chest.
• The one who smells it, changes it.
• Being a parent means learning how to breathe through your mouth. A lot.
• Our child is odd. Yours is too!
• Cat food is a special treat when mommy and daddy are not looking.
• Clean, what does clean mean?
• We have our own weather system in the house. It's called Hurricane Olivia.
• Cheese balls are your friend. Especially when bought in bulk.
• Cats like cheese balls too.
• Cheese balls turn white cats orange. This was Olivia's first scientific experiment.
• Vacuum cleaner hoses are the perfect place to hide your extra cheese balls.
• You may be married, you may have a house, you may have a car, your parents still yell at you.
• Your child is they only reason they visit you now.
• Cat boxes are NOT sand boxes!
• You can never have too many binkies! (pacifiers)
• You have 50 binkies in your house (at $2.25 each) and you can only find 4 at a time.
• With high chairs, you can judge how much your child ate by the amount of food you find under their butt.
• Learn to tip well at restaraunts, because they have to call in the cleaning crew to clean up under your child's chair.
• Every household should have the "Redneck's Home Remedy Kit": cotton swabs and Wild Turkey.
• M&M's are really "baby crack".
• Friends? What friends? Oh! Those are the ones running away screaming.
• "NO!!!" is the first word every child learns.
• You can tell, because they grin when you say it.

Up next: When your child's monitor picks up some other baby in the neighborhood.

Scott and I think Olivia looks like a short order cook in this picture. Next time she has spaghetti, she will ONLY be wearing a diaper.

At around 11:30 am (Ellen knows the exact time of course) June 24, Olivia Rachel Johnson was welcomed into this world. In a year, we've gone from this:

To this:

We have indeed come a long way, baby!

Alexis and Olivia FINALLY got to meet!

Go check out the pictures!

FYI- O and Lex were born on the same day.

Seen at the wheel of what I swear to God is not her future prom ride, my Alfa Spider

It's not this picture I'm worried about... it's the one I'll take in 15 years...

And you just keep yer nasty mean Alfa comments to yerself, ya hear?

I bought this toy today for 99 cents (store was going out of buisness). Needless to say, it kept Olivia occupied for over an hour and the cats could not figure out what it was!

Your spouse urgently calls you upstairs while the bath is being drawn. As you round the corner, you see them with a white ball approximately the size and (by heft) weight of a softball.

"Would you look at the size of this diaper?!?"

Ok, so we have two gates. The one guarding the stairwell is obvious... babies don't bounce. The one to the kitchen, that only makes sense when you realize dry and wet cat food sits on the tile floor. Especially when the wet (nasty, four-day-old-fish-smell) cat food comes out, it's like a black hole suddenly swirls to life, drawing, levitating, our child toward the kitchen. Quite disconcerting indeed to have your kid peering down through the mesh of the baby gate, looking at the cat food going, "hoot! hoot! hoot! hoot!"

Of course, sometimes the gate is down anyway...

Ellen: "No no no! No baby! No cat food for you!"

Olivia: "BAH BAH BAH BAH bweee BAH BAH!!!"

Ellen: "NO!"

An aside... less than ten months in, and they're already yelling at each other... year 13 does not look good.

Ellen: "Just because it fits in the mouth does not mean you get to eat it!"

Scott: "No kidding! It was all I could do to keep her from eating quarters upstairs."

Ellen: "Oh that's all I need."

Scott: "Yeah, another Doctor--"

Ellen: "The doctor's not what I'd be worried about. I can just hear the daycare lady, [in lilting Persian accent] 'I'm very very sorry, but you are feeding Olivia the wrong thing again!'"

I've watched my wife flip off construction workers who said the wrong thing, but she is totally beholden to a 4'10" Iranian ex-patriot. Ah, the power of expertise...

Yeah ok, we know, she rolled over right when the pix was taken! Note the cleavage on this child! She has bigger boobs than me!

Green Eggs and O.

In a box? With some rocks? Or breakfast with a fox?

(Seen at work at the bridge of her starship)

Update: The hat came from the Sunday paper. It's not a photoshop!

Richie: "I'm gonna go see Aurora Snow tomorrow."

Ellen: "Who?"

Richie [in "must talk slowly to the retard" voice]: "Aurora Snow, the porn star?!?

Ellen: "What, another one?"

Richie: "You want anything or not?"

Ellen: "Yeah! Get me an autographed picture for Olivia!"

Richie: "Really?!? For Olivia?"

Ellen: "She needs to start collecting autographs. Might as well start somewhere. I'll frame it and hang it up in the hallway!"

Richie: "What? You will not."

Ellen: "I will too... I just know you can't do it."

Never, ever, ever tell a Carozza they can't do something. It's like yanking on a rodeo bull's tail and then mooning them five feet away. So now I have to explain this to my parents:

In the annals of parenting there are guides, tips, and dirty tricks. This is definitely a dirty trick of the foulest sort.

ELLEN, in sweet, innocent, congested voice: "Could you check Olivia? I can't smell anything because of this cold!"

SCOTT: "Sure, no problem." Leans over to baby gumming a toy block sitting at the foot of the couch... *sniff* "Yup, she needs changing."

ELLEN, in completely clear normal voice: "HA-HA! You found it first! You have to change her!"

SCOTT: "ARG!"

Women are evil. I'm only just beginning to realize the implications of having two in the house.

The horror... the horror...

Olivia is in the process of teething. This is painful not just for the baby, but for the entire family. Sort of like a board game from hell.

We've tried it all by now. Baby Orajel, Baby Ambesol, Baby Solves-it-all, Baby's Paid to Harvard, the works. We even included Baby Tylenol and Baby Motrin. Hey, they work for hangovers! A few nights ago there just wasn't any sleep at all... twenty minutes up, twenty minutes down, and me having to show up and be cheerful for sick cats the next day. That's when Scott decided to bring in the Redneck Home Remedy kit.

Yes, we're talking about Wild Turkey Bourbon and a box of q-tips. We always thought those itty-bitty bottles were for airplanes. Turns out, they're perfect for your teeny-tiny wino's needs.

Scott: "Now if I remember this right, my dad said 3 swabs to stop the pain, 5 to put them to sleep".

Me: "Q-tip swabs or cotton ball swabs?"

Scott: "He just said swabs. 3 good ones."

Me: "Ooooo-kay"

So Scott hands me a bottle and a baby Q-tip. If you've never seen one of these, baby q-tips look more like a tampon for the ear. Sorta swollen in the middle, like a snowman on a stick. You can't put them in the ears period. But, they are good for swabbing gums.

We immediately noticed one real advantage of the booze swab over the oragel: the amount and ease of delivery. With the oragel, you squeeze a bit on your finger and then swab it on their... nose. Try again, swab it on their... lips. One more time, got their... toungue. Eventually you might, might get a bit on their gums, but by that time your kid is drooling and smacking trying to figure out where the front of their face went.

However, with a Q-tip you don't have this problem. With this amazing tool, you can push aside all obstruction and resistance, instantly dousing the affected area. Dunk-dunk, swab swab.

Olivia: "Whaa!!! BA BA BA BA!! GAHHHHH!!!!!" *grasping at mouth screaming her head off.

*SWAB SWAB SWAB!*

First, she got that "stopped in mid-sentence" sort of expression. Trust me, babies learn how to express "wtf?!?" way before you can wash their mouths out with soap for saying it. She crossed her eyes for a bit and got a pretty sour look, but nowhere near as sour as when we tried to give her Coca-Cola (which, by expression, is fist-clenchingly foul.) The kid's got priorities, I guess.

Scott said, in the frantic desperation of a firefighter who just saw part of the flames go out, "hit it again!"

*SWAB SWAB SWAB*

We were awarded with a "well, that's not too bad at all" expression. Plus some extra smacking.

"Again!"

*SWAB SWAB SWAB*

Now things had settled down quite a bit. No more kicking, no more screaming. Just a few left-over grumbles and eye rubs to let us know who's boss. At this point we thought we were done. Nearly everyone we knew suggested at one point or another we do this, but I wonder just how many actually do it because of what happened next.

She started to giggle.

Now, we're not talking a coo or a smile, but big ol' belly laughs. All was fine with Olivia and the world. Wow! Look at these hands! Aren't hands cool? Isn't mommy a fine person? Let's play kick for awhile! And it feels really weird to move our head back and forth... this. is. so. cool! WHEEEEE!!!

I had to play with a very happy baby for about fifteen more minutes before everyone settled down to sleep. Of course, then we wanted a hit of the stuff.

You knew it was only a matter of time; several of you worried quite openly about it. Yup, we finally got around to our very first scientific experiment with our own child, a game we call "choose the jar."

Day care is on a federal holiday schedule, my work is on a federal holiday schedule, but Ellen's workplace is not on a federal holiday schedule. Therefore most holidays are known around here as "daddy bonding days."

Now, lately Olivia has turned into a bottomless pit. She eats anything, and often. We've been transitioning her to baby foods to supplement (and ultimately supplant) her bottles.

Now, I'd been thinking. If it were me, I wouldn't necessarily want a whole jar full of the same stuff. And even though it was pretty mushy, it seemed to me having a bottle full of juice to wash it down with wouldn't hurt either. So for lunch today we pulled out a jar of "chicken noodle soup" (how one purees a soup I will leave to the reader's imagination), a jar of "vegetable medley", and a bottle of apple juice.

Now, "vegetable medley" looked an awful lot like "chicken noodle soup" ... vaguely yellow-brown, consistency of tile grout, smelled of, well, smelled of not much at all. As part of the control, I worked up the nerve to actually taste them and, as suspected, "vegetable medley" tasted an awful lot like a pizza box and "chicken noodle soup" tasted a lot like a paper grocery sack. There was a difference, but you had to think about it for a bit to tell.

Interestingly enough, I noticed that sometimes Olivia would eat readily, and sometimes she wouldn't. I sensed a pattern, so I got scientific. She seemed to want "vegetable medley." So I very carefully spooned out "vegetable medley" in front of her and spooned in "chicken noodle soup." I was watched intently, and sure enough the light fixture got real interesting when I tried to spoon the erstwhile soup-cum-tile-adhesive into the child

Spoon out "chicken noodle soup", spoon in "vegetable medley" and, as predicted, gravity altered as my daughter sucked the stuff down with a satisfied grunt.

Again, both things smelled the same, both things looked the same. The only difference I could tell was one came out of jar A, the other from jar B. Olivia had figured out the good stuff came from jar A, the bad stuff from jar B, simply by watching, and chose accordingly.

Not that it mattered too much, because the fuzzy-cat-shaped-vultures had to be beaten off "chicken noodle soup" just to get a spoon in. So, after the experiment had been confirmed, I simply spooned it into them instead. Double-fisted-feeding, as it were.

As an added bonus, occasionally she'd stop eating then "hoot! hoot! hoot! hoot!" and bounce while looking at the bottle of apple juice. Sure enough, a few pulls from the ol' juice bottle and we were ready for some more "vegetable medley."

I'm sure all parents out there are simply nodding their head and saying "dur" to the screen. Consider it a reminder of an era when you were first-time parents.

And be sure to save some "chicken noodle soup" for me. It did, eventually, end up tasting like the real thing. Sort of.

Apparently one picture was not good enough, so take a gander at this one.

As requsted, an "Olivia happy" pix. The girl just won't smile for the camera!

As promised! Scott had to download the images from the digital cam into the main computer.

How cute is this baby?

Note the neck rolls. You just want to bite them.

Olivia and the ice pop. Or whats left of the ice pop my sister Nina was sharing with her.

Note how long the tongue has to come out of the mouth for maximum ice pop enjoyment.

Mind you this pix was taken before the "Baby O" got sick this week.

Everyone's home now, fine as possible. The cute little germ vector has given us both her flu. I spent all of last night sitting on the toilet with a bucket in my lap, and apparently Ellen's experience wasn't too different. Never lick the pacifier of a sick baby so it'll go in her mouth easier!

I've been sicker in the last six months than I have in the last six years. I used to think it was funny when my co-workers were constantly inflicted with colds and flu while I stayed hale & healthy. Had I been paying attention, I would've noticed they all had small children.

Now, I'm all for variety, especially when I don't have to eat it. So every time I go to the grocery store, I pick up something unsual for "the baby 'O'".

This time around it was creamed spinach. Now, those of you who don't have children will go, "yeah, so?", while those who do will go, "HA-ha!"

You see, the stuff that comes out of the back end of your child (well, our child) is a dark olive drab, about the consistency of cake icing. It even forms little peaks! You're haunted with nightmares about spatulas, baby bottoms, and odors that peel paint.

Creamed spinach, we only just now discovered, is a dark olive drab, smells like three-day-old-grass, and has the consistency of tapioca pudding. The thing is, she likes it. A lot.

So there Ellen sat, spooning in what for all the world looked like what comes out. She was getting loud complaints because she wasn't spooning it fast enough. Meanwhile I'm watching her turn pale, and my own fingers curling into claws. There's just something wrong about thinking, "I just got done scraping this off your ass" while you clean their face.

Ok, nothing against Gerber, nothing against Spinach, but let's just say we won't be buying that particular flavor again any time soon.

Much to Olivia's disappointment. *shudder*

One of the many presents Olivia got for Christmas!

The series of Oliva the Pig.