My first year here at Penn State I remember playing a game of Ex Libris with some fellow ward members. For anyone not familiar with this game, it requires you to write the first or last line to a novel, and then everyone tries to guess which response is the correct one (like balderdash, only with novels instead of obscure word definitions). One memorable evening, the cue was for Milne's House at Pooh Corner. I wrote, "It's raining, Pooh," said Christopher Robin . . . or something to that effect. The individual reading all of the entries, however, missed the crucial comma in Christopher Robin's statement, which came out as "It's raining poo. . ." You can probably imagine the reaction. Even now this line comes back to haunt me occasionally.

Why do I bring this experience up now, you ask? Well, the phrase has come to seem somewhat portentous around our house this week. (I apologize in advance for those of our gentle readers whose "gross-out" tolerance is rather low!). In the last couple of days, Andrew has had some rather spectacular blow-outs (in quantity and quality). At first, we were somewhat mystified as to the cause, until we realized that, for the last couple of days, we've been feeding him a tasty little Gerber mixture called "plums and apples." (With an emphasis on the plums, apparently). Clearly, plums are a hazardous ingredient to add to an internal plumbing system that already processes with admirable regularity!

(It might be indicative of the level of excitement around our house that we're reduced to a discussion of Andrew's bowel productivity. Needless to say, this was not, perhaps, the most exciting week that we have ever had). We did reconfirm that Andrew likes to suck/chew/gnaw on dill pickles, although we have to watch him carefully, or he'll try to bite off chunks too big to swallow. As you can perhaps tell from this post, Andrew remains the most exciting thing to have happened to us.