It's finally here . . .

[WARNING: This is being posted at 11:00 at night, after a long day of loud and crabby children. There will be no spell or grammar check. You are lucky I am posting at all. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!]

Today was a big day--Anna got her first tooth! It is her bottom left one. She was really crabby all day today, as well as most of yesterday. Bob ran his finger inside her mouth tonight and found the tooth had poked through finally!! We knew it was coming because she has been madly gnawing on anything within reach. I've even given her Tylenol a few times, knowing that it must be teething that was making her so cranky. She's 2 days shy of 5 months. That's fairly early, but she's not my earliest teether. Caleb got his first tooth one day before he turned 4 months old. Before you get too impressed with my steel-trap memory, let me put in a plug for baby sticker calendars . Who has time to meticulously fill in those thick baby books? Not me! So for each child, I have a sticker calendar, and all I have to do is put the appropriate stickers on the date blocks of the calendar pages. It's easy, and even a little fun. And then I can look back at each calendar and see when each child teethed, slept through the night, started solids, crawled, etc. Unfortunately, stores like WalMart and even Baries R Us have stopped selling the calendars and are only selling these huge, unwieldly baby books where you are supposed to fill in all sorts of esoteric details about your baby's first year of life. Maybe some people really do have that kind of time and inclination. Since I couldn't find a calendar in a store, I had to search online, and the one I linked above (and bought for Anna) is at Amazon.

In other news, tomorrow we leave to drive up to Rose's house. Her support hearing is Monday afternoon. We will come back Tuesday, and then we leave again on Friday for the Wright-Patterson retreat at White Sulphur Springs. I can't wait! But, as much as this may surprise you, it is actually a little bit stressful to have to keep packing and unpacking for these little weekend jaunts, so I will also be glad when we are home for a weekend once.