Cerin Amroth

Dominic is making good use of his two teeth these days. He especially likes notifying me that he’s hungry by gnawing on me. I take it as a sign of affection, but he’s getting pretty vicious.

It started out innocently enough before he had teeth. He would suck on my chin, as if nursing. Once he got teeth, though, this got a bit painful. He’s also taken a chomp while nursing a few times. He’s quite expert about pulling away with my nipple still in his mouth and taking a bite as it is stretched. A couple weeks ago, he drew blood. At that time, I told him he’s risking losing his milk source. He hasn’t done it since then, so maybe my tone of voice was just right.

That hasn’t kept him from biting me elsewhere … the chin, the shoulder, the arm, the back, and the heel. Now that I know his M.O., I go straight for a bottle the minute I start becoming the chew toy. He doesn’t have to tell me twice!

Behold a HUGE picture dump.

Just now, Ella performed the following operations while I was out of the room:

On my laptop, which she is not usually allowed to mess with, and therefore isn’t all that familiar with, she moved the mouse cursor to the upper left corner of the screen in order to bring all windows into view — something she has seen me do, I guess. Then she clicked on iTunes to bring it to the front — at that moment, music was streaming from my computer to the stereo speakers in the living room.

She clicked Pause on iTunes — not that she’s ever used iTunes before, but she must have recognized the universal double-line symbol for “pause” — to stop the music. (Hey, the new Radiohead’s not for everyone.) Then she proceeded to the DVD player, ejected the tray, rotated it to the disc in there that she wanted to hear (TMBG’s “Bed, Bed, Bed,” he notes with no small amount of pride), closed the tray and hit play — and realized, a few moments later, that she also had to click the “DVD” button on the receiver (it had been set to “Video 2″ to receive music from iTunes).

I deduced all of this after entering the room, realizing that different music was playing, and investigating the scene. And I was so proud of her technical achievement that I was unable to be appropriately stern with her for 1) using my computer without asking and 2) using the DVD player without asking. Once she realizes that she can break rules with me as long as she’s sufficiently clever about it I’m going to be in big trouble.