Almost 15 months old...

...and the issue of the day/month/year of course is still sleep. How sad.

I return from blogging hiatus at the request of my work beleaguered wife, so that she may enjoy at work pictures of her issue who so often haunts our nights to the point of waking.

Lately, heat has been the main culprit in keeping our child from traipsing about in dreamland. Last night....well, who knows. We were up from midnight to 4am, almost straight through, trying to figure out what Ben needed. Temperature? Check. Milk? Check. Finally, at 3:30am, Tylenol and a small cheese/hard salami/strawberry/honeydew snack. Check and mate.

So, Josh, that means he probably let you sleep in till like 10 am right? Er, nope. Wow, 11am? Nooooo... You mean, he slept till noon!? Try 7am dear reader. Seven. A. M.

But enough complaining. About this anyway.

The summer has gone swimmingly, and Ben seems to be headed that way as well. During this heat wave we seem to be heading to the pool almost daily; we are very fortunate to have a pool so close by and a pool pass that is so affordable.

However (and you knew that was coming), Ben has recently come to the conclusion that he is not in fact a one year old, but rather, he is a 3 or 4 year old.

The first few times at the pool Ben was just happy to be there. We'd hold him on his stomach and swim him around and he loved it! Then he discovered the edge, and soon we were jumping in and out constantly, and that was great too! Then he discovered the diving pool, and the bolts on the summer diversion machine started to loosen a little.

Now when he gets out of the pool, it's not to jump back in, it's to run over to the diving pool.

As of yesterday, his ambition escalated to an alarming level. He started making a dash for the grown up side of the pool, as well as other people's interesting personal property near the outer fence. But why stop there?

Hopefully it was just a cranky side effect of his very short nap yesterday, but he decided that he didn't want help in the deep part anymore. He'll now walk, it's actually closer to a run, from the shallow end to the deep without stopping, despite the height differential between his hair and the oh so tasty oxygen above. When I try to help him get back up to the aforementioned oxygen, he kicks and claws and scrapes my face till I either let him go (and he sinks) or I get him out of baby arms reach. It's quite a dilemma.

Nevertheless, the summer has been great so far, and I expect Ben might very well be swimming by the end of it...or, at least learning how to hold his breath I hope.