Brooklynn on the Move from Chris&Rhiannon on Vimeo.

Music: White Sky by Vampire Weekend

Last time, we saw Brooklynn walking behind a scooter. Well, she isn’t walking on her own yet, but she’s getting more mobile all the time, which means she’s getting in to more things than ever.

It also leads to many an instance where I turn around for a minute, look back, and wonder, “Hey, where’s the baby? I swore she was just right here.”

We actually got serious enough to buy some childproofing supplies for the house this weekend and we now have some of our cabinets containing hazardous chemicals a little better protected.

Now, I just have to figure out how to get in the cabinets myself and life will be ok.

So the toilet in our master bedroom was out of commission. This isn’t the end of the world for anyone in the house – we have four toilets for three people and one of us isn’t even toilet trained. It seems like we should easily be able to find an available bathroom when the need arises.

The issue comes is that it’s the toilet in the master bathroom which also happens to be attached to the master bedroom, which just so happens to be where we spend our nights and mornings. And trust me, at 5:30am just after the alarm has gone off is not the best time to be remembering that the toilet we’ve used almost every day for the past four years shouldn’t be used.

I only had to reach into the tank and pull the flapper up by hand once.

After one day of forgetting about it, I stopped by the hardware store last night and found a new flapper, one with a metal chain and guaranteed to withstand harsh water and be adjustable to control how fast the toilet flushes. For those of you who haven’t shopped for toilets recently, I honestly suggest going to a store and looking at the toilet repair section. It’s amazing how many products and gadgets that will reduce water use and make the tank quieter and improve the clockwise flow to correspond with the hemisphere’s Coriolis effect, etc.

Ok, I made the last one up, but still. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about flushing mechanisms in a quick 5 minutes.

I got home, took Brooklynn up to the bathroom with me, set her on the floor out in the main part of the room, and got to work. Brooklynn likes to hang out in different places in the house, and as long as she can see you and you talk to her a little bit, she’s a good little helper.

I turned off the water, drained the tank, and changed out the flapper. Added in the new one, hooked up the new metal chain version that won’t break like the old one, and turned the water back on. I still had to adjust the chain length to fine tune the flushing action, and while I was doing this, Brooklynn came sliding into the small room with the toilet to join me.

She starting to flip on her stomach much more often, and when she gets there, she moves. Backwards.

She still doesn’t seem to know where she’s going or head toward anything in particular. More often than not, she moves directly away from whatever she really wants to reach for, but as long as she isn’t against something that doesn’t move she’s usually ok with it.

Yesterday, I looked down at her as she slid into the room, smiled, and waved.

She looked up at me with a look that seemed to say “What are you doing in here? And how did I get here with you anyway? And have I mentioned how excited I am to see you?!”

It seems like she’s developing so fast. Her expressions and mannerisms are exploding and we can see more and more of her personality and intelligence coming out every day.

And then she leaned over and tried to chew on the bottom of the toilet.

This is our daughter. We hope that intelligence keeps kicking in, because we’re not quite there yet.

You may think that having something like this in the house is a product of being parents and buying fun things for the baby, but you would be mistaken.

We ran out of hand soap in our guest bathroom and moved the bottle that was next to my sink in the bathroom, leaving me soapless. Last weekend, while standing in next to the shelves of soap in Target, Rhiannon asked me what kind I wanted.

Now, there are way too many options, but I knew that I didn’t want anything with fish or flowers or anything. Something simple, modern, and understated would do nicely.

And then I saw the SpongeBob bottle. Decision making process over.

Now then…

Yesterday, when I stopped at home, I had noticed that the fan on our freezer in the kitchen was running. I looked inside and found that the food was starting to thaw out, so I assumed that Rhiannon had opened the freezer and failed to make sure the door was shut tight before she left.

I would like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to my wife for my incorrect assumption.

I’m sorry. What I should have noticed when I was home yesterday is that the fan was running but the compressor was not. Our fridge at home decided to stop working when we weren’t at home to notice. I have no idea what we have done to neglect it, but it seems kind of spiteful to me.

I moved all of the food in the freezer downstairs to our chest freezer and all of the food in the fridge that wasn’t past its expiration date got moved into the mini fridges. Yes, plural mini fridges. We have multiple leftover pint size refrigerators that we have said we need to get rid of because we don’t use them enough to justify the electricity they consume.

Well, they are both post-Thanksgiving dinner level stuffed right now, so I think that the expense has just been justified.

And not to scare anyone away from visiting us, but I did find some food that had expiration dates in the middle of 2008. And with he recent year change to 2010, I think we were this close to having one of the first refrigerator towns colonized by the life that sprang up from the out-of-date leftovers lurking in the dark corners.

Maybe it’s not so much that the fridge stopped working but that this was more of a protest of the working conditions. Picket lines and unions and protesters galore. One of us is heading back home tomorrow to see if anything has changed, and if there is a rally with bullhorns, tagboard signs, and kitchen appliances marching around in circles on our driveway, I’m calling the authorities.

Or at least one of those places with the offers for free appliance haul away.

Anybody want a disgruntled food processor?