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Recently Wesley began using possessives.  That is Mommy’s food or baby’s milk or daddy’s shoes.  Being the ever thinking little guy that he is he figured out how to say that something was his.  He generalized “add an apostrophe ‘S’” onto the end of words to indicates who owns them.  Okay, so he probably didn’t think to himself apostrophe “S”, but he did see the pattern.  And being a good scientist he generalized to other situations.  Unfortunately for him this is English and the only patterns that do exist are really just meant to clearly indicate those people for whom English is a second language.

Me + apostrophe “S”  = Me’s.  Me’s shoes.  Me’s milk.  Me’s daddy.  Me’s shirt.

I felt I had to write this quickly while this is still absolutely the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.  I’m not naive enough to think that this will be fun forever.  I know that in no time at all we’ll be hearing Wesley scream: “Mine. Mine. Mine. MIIIIIIIINE!!!!”.  This should occur about the same time Jillian is able to grab things and put them in her mouth.  For now I’m just enjoying me’s kid.

It is amazing how quickly babies change.  This weekend we entered one of my favorite stages with Jillian.  She has started being awake and not screaming for periods lasting more than 30 seconds or so.  Before it was actually pretty accurate to say she was either screaming or sleeping with nothing in between.  It is so much fun to spend time with her when she is awake, looking around, making little cooing sounds and smiling.  She is so much fun right now.

That isn’t to say that the screaming is all gone.  She hates, hates, hates the car.  Hates the car with a passion.  With Wesley we drove around in the middle of the night just to get him to sleep even a little bit.  Jillian screams constantly.  We haven’t gone on any long drives, but I can attest she will not fall asleep or scream herself out while driving stop and go in traffic on I35 for forty minutes.  The one major bonus of her screaming?  It drives Wesley crazy.  You can see the tension on his face.  He can’t handle it and ends up screaming too.  So now we have two kids screaming in misery in the back seat.  It has really sucked the fun out of driving.

Wow!  I’ve written used  some variation of the word “scream” 8 times in this post, well 9 times counting that last one.

Rarely do I get excited by any products designed for kids or for their parents. Usually they are cheap, poorly made, really badly implemented or just plain a waste of money. I can’t count the number of things we thought we needed before Wesley was born that we can live without. Or things that seem like a good idea, but just don’t pan out. The ear thermometer fits into that last category. It seems like a great idea. A thermometer that registers almost instantly. What they don’t tell you is that it hurts like crazy when you use it properly and even if you do jam it in there far enough you’ll get different results every time you use it. So basically its painful, expensive and a waste of time.

Now Amber and I have been looking at this Frog Pod thing by Boon, Inc for a while. It is cute, but not cutesie and we both like it. Basically it is a plastic frog that hangs on your bathroom wall. It holds your kids’ bath toys. Lots of painful plastic toys in the bottom of a tub is a problem all of the time. But when you work really early in the morning like I do it is worse. Wesley and I share a tub so that I don’t wake Amber and Jillian in the morning. I’ve spent the last couple of months at the new house and the last couple of years at the old houses stepping on and kicking out of my a ton of toys that “float or sink”. The Frog Pod is just a beautifully designed, well executed, relatively affordable and practical piece of equipment.

It sticks to your wall in one of three ways. Using either the included suction cups, the included double sided tape, or optional screw mount. The frog is made of three pieces. A mount for the wall, a frog body that slides onto the wall mount and a basket that you use to scoop up the toys. and forms the frog’s back. The mounting is easy and they even include an alcohol wipe to clean the area first. I started with the suction cups assuming that it would fall off, but wanting to give it a shot before using the tape which would have been a ton of work to remove. I assumed it would come crashing down in the middle of the first night sending me flying out of bed like this fellow. Instead it has been on for better than a week even with Wesley’s help picking up the toys.

Once you have the your mounting bracket in place, you just slide the frog’s body on. Nothing but gravity holds them together, but it seems to work pretty well. The body has never fallen down. The frog’s head is away from the wall making a hidden shelf you could use for shampoo or cups or whatever. Very nice. The toes also stick away from the wall. We use it to hang wet wash clothes so they get dry and not smelly. Also very nice. See what I mean? This thing is very well designed.

Finally you have the basket. It doesn’t seem that large, but actually holds all of the standard toys Wesley plays with. If he had any more toys in the tub we wouldn’t need water it would just be a ball pit like they have at Chuck E. Cheese. The basket has some nice large holes in it to quickly drain the water out and a good sturdy handle. You can actually scoop up most of the toys in one go by herding them around the tub a little. The only problem that I’ve encountered is that the basket is a little difficult to slide onto the body. If the scoop is full it usually takes me an extra try or two, but it always go.

We bought the Frog Pod for about $25. Worth every penny.

Boon, Inc: http://www.booninc.com/frog.html

Amazon.com: Boon Frog Pod