The state of the state

Dada got back into town first thing Tuesday morning, and we have been helping him recover from his jet lag, which I know from experience is unexpectedly heinous when you jump 3 time zones. Worse yet, we hardly get any time to enjoy him before his mistress, work, starts to make demands on him. School starts in a little more than a week and he's teaching the class his department recruited him for. He is excited about it, but he's never taught it before and teaching is always a big, time-consuming, and sometimes annoying responsibility.

I, however, am totally stoked about the semester starting because I will be stealing Dada's employee benefits to take a kickboxing class once a week with his grad students. Heeee-yah!

Since Dada's been home, we have almost eradicated nighttime TV. Instead of watching movies together, Dada has rekindled our toddler's love of Thomas. Isaac and Dada build ginormous train configurations and then hook all the trains end-to-end and Isaac makes a career of moving them slooooowly around the track so they don't topple over. The horrible wailing when they inevitably do can be heard for miles.

To celebrate the new action our Thomas collection is getting, we have unofficially declared this weekend to be Spoil Isaac to Pieces Weekend here at the O'Neal estates. You thought he had it good when Meemaw and Pawpaw were here, but nothing compares to what we gots going on here. Tonight we spent at the toy store procuring a castle bridge and, at long last, Emily. The spoiling tour de force, however, happens tomorrow night when we get to see, as Dada explained it to the boy, our homeboys Greg, Anthony, Murray, and Jeff "at their house". Fo' real. It's times like these I really wish I had a camera phone.

Poor Jacob is teething, and, to me, it seems so obvious and awful. He spends the entire day with something between his gums. He sleeps erratically, which is no fun at all, and wants to nurse all the time. At first, I was quite concerned because suddenly (last Friday) he was not cool with eating solids anymore. I thought we'd stop for a few days and try again, but when I did, even with his "favorite" (based on my truly extensive research), bananas, he screamed the whole time. My guess is that the spoon is irritating to his already painful gums, so we are taking a two-week hiatus from the solids until his teething episode settles down a bit. No teeth in sight at all, mind you, so all my surmisings may be complete hogwash, but it does sort of make sense when you look at his enormous and bulging lower gums.