Hurricane Andrew

While winter weather seems to have (finally) settled into Pennsylvania and other regions of the East coast, an unusual (on second thought, maybe not so unusual) weather phenomenon hit our house: this phenomenon is perhaps better known as Hurricane Andrew. Using his usual initiative, Andrew seized the opportunity afforded by an inattentive moment on his mother's part (I was talking to my boss at the Writing Center), to pull a nearly-full box of Kleenex off the table and strew the contents merrily in his path. I didn't notice until the dirty deed was a fait accompli. When I tried to clean up the mess by stuffing the kleenex back in the original box, Andrew helpfully tried to pull them back out again.



To escape the frigid temperatures that seemed to have settled into State College during the latter part of the week, we took the opportunity on Saturday to drive down to the balmier climes of Washington DC to attend the temple. Some friends of ours (Adam and Lauren Christensen) kindly invited us to go with them and offered to trade babysitting. Personally, I think we got the better end of the deal. While they had to entertain an active Andrew, we got to hold their placid eight-week-old baby, who slept for about half of our shift anyway. It was certainly nice to go to the temple again, not only because we were able to attend a session together! The weather was also cooperative--the sun was shining and the weather was in the fifties. It also seemed to be a day for running into old friends acquaintances: I saw Caitlin Thompson Torgerson (a former roommate); Caitlin's mother (who was a temple worker that day); and my brother Jared's old roommate and former BYU Stat department graduate Alvin (I don't remember his last name!) and his wife; Dan also ran into an old acquaintance from SUU; and we both saw our current bishop and his wife. I suppose that the world is already fairly small when you're Mormon (we seem to have some sort of connection just about anywhere)--but it's even smaller at the temple.

In other news, Andrew seems to have inherited his dad's passion for music--he hasn't quite figured out how to dance to music, but whenever he hears music played he waves his arm up and down in time (sort of) to the music. (He seemed particularly interested in Pat Benatar's "Heartbreaker", but that's a different story!) He's pretty funny.

Andrew has also discovered a favorite cubby-hole. He likes to pull aside the box that is nominally supposed to protect our boombox (which is so ancient it probably doesn't really need protection) from Andrew's ravages, and wedge himself in the resulting space. Below, you can see him, sitting proudly by the boombox below the entertainment center. I really think we need to find him some sort of child's chair, since he has this new fascination with sitting in confined spaces. Well, only when it's voluntary--he still hates being restrained in his car seat!