One heck of a week

Matthew is helping me blog today. His first step is to always help me clear my workspace by throwing everything but the computer on the floor. Now he's pretty content to just keep pressing the mouse button for me. Here he is ready to work:

He's had a heck of the week. We finally went in to the clinic because he tugged on his ear exactly once. That was enough for me to finally realize that all this fussing, night-waking etc. might be more than teething and might not have anything to do with solid foods. Sure enough, the Dr. looked in his ear for a nano-second and confirmed he had an ear infection "for a while". So, now we have pain meds and antibiotics and we're on the road to recovery. At least now I know he's not an ear tugger. However, he is also teething (as well as having a cold that went along with the ear infection). Here's his new favorite teether:

In the meantime, maybe Matthew will be the one to figure out how to teach June to lie down. He did a great job the other night!


Thank goodness he's so adorable or this crankiness might just be unbearable.
Meanwhile it's -25 degrees here and the dogs are trying out ways to release their energy indoors instead of playing outside
I love old pictures, specifically pics of my family but truthfully, I enjoy looking at other people's old pictures. Because our family was not exactly well to do, we don't have many pics, professional or otherwise, so I always find it fascinating to ponder why a picture was taken and wonder what its significance was overall and what prompted someone to grab the camera. It's very different than our picture explosion from having cameras that take practically free pictures laying around the house. Since we took this pic so we could take the pictures down and put them back up on the same nails, here's our wall of fame:
Which replaced Grandma's walls of plates:
However, grandma had the right idea in hanging plates because as long as the text was readable, it's much easier to hang plates than to get a bunch of rectangular frames to look level.

Back to old pics, here are some adorable pics we scanned from my cousin.
I love this one, mostly because my aunt is so adorable but also because there's something in the expression, the action, the overalls etc. that feels almost iconic about it.

We also scanned this one and there was some debate as to whether or not this is my uncle John. So family, is this John?

And in the grand typing skills of Matthew "egnnnnnhfbg rvf"