Tomato soup on my baby's face

Well, here (finally) is a picture of our new car, Zorya. She's a little Ford Escort who would really like us to get our butts over the the BMV and get her some real license plates, instead of this tacky temporary stuff she has to put up with now.

I'm very much more coherent than I was this morning, but I'm still kinda having a hard time keeping a straight thread of thought going in my head. Given the aformentioned 3-1/2 hours of sleep (no nap, alas) this is not overly surprising.

This is Thad keeping his baby on a leash. They were having so much fun. :) She was pretty playful today, despite not napping for any significant period of time and only having gotten four hours of sleep the night before.

She particularly got great amusement out of being taller than me when Thad held her. We noticed this when he carried her up the stairs and I followed- she got one look at me and was consumed by giggles! Sweeet baby giggles...

She also got scared for the first time that I can remember today. The story goes like this:

Our landlord came today to replace our air conditioning units upstairs, which is a great relief (let me tell you) because it's been as hot as a tamale-festooned rattlesnake in Hades up there. Well, not really, but I kinda liked coming up with that image.

Really, the air circulation up there just kinda sucks (alas) and we're lucky that it's actually been fairly cool and kinda rainy the last few days. Anyway, out of a desire to get out of our landlord's way, and also to eat food without having to try to cook in our zombified state (tired+fire=bad), we went for a walk and to get some lunch.

Post-lunch, we were wandering past this vintage shop and decided to go in and kill some time. Thad went and looked at trenchcoats (something he's been doing without much luck for a couple years now) and actually managed to find a decent looking one (with a liner and everything) that actually fit him! He decided that This Is The Year to finally do the Sandman costume he's been wanting to do, so we went over to the Army surplus store to get him a gas mask.

Sidenote: This is going to be an awesome costume! I'm going to be Sandman's girlfriend/partner, Dian Belmont. Ari is going to be Sandman's eventual sidekick: Sandy the Golden Boy. It won't even be that hard to put together, and the ensemble will look awesome. Plus, we'll have Baby Costuming Power, and everyone knows how potent that is!

Anyway, we got home, and Thad started putting on what he has for the costume (he lacks only a tie and an appropriate gun) and when he put on the gas mask, Ari started acting frightened! She was crying and trying to get away from him and crawling into my arms. Of course, as soon as he realized what was happening, he took the mask off so she could see it was him- but I don't think she can really remember "it's Daddy under the scary bug mask" yet.

We had a nice (if kind of out-of-it) day. Thad even let me go out with some mothers from my mom's group, all by myself.