(Nice of Timothy to include his sister Catherine in his selfie!)

This is a big week for our family.  Our daughter Elisabeth turned 18 years old today (Happy birthday E!). We’d rather not have Elisa living in India for such a big event, but her Facebook page is filled with birthday greetings, half from friends and family in the U.S and half from Indian friends and friends from other countries.  Really cool.  And Catherine and I can’t wait to see her when we visit and travel with Elisabeth in India at the end of March (I have the last of my pre-India shots today and we start taking malaria pills in 3 weeks).

        

And in addition to it being Timothy’s half birthday (2 ½), Catherine and her friends took part in the Polar Plunge this weekend.  Catherine assembled Team TRBL – made up of thirty (yes, thirty) 16 year old girls, Timothy’s two godmothers and a daring ten year old boy to jump into Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis on Saturday in 3 degree weather (which is a wee bit chilly for a swim).  All told, the team raised over $6,500 at the event for one of our favorite organizations serving people with disabilities, Minnesota Special Olympics.  Congratulations and thanks to everyone on Team TRBL!

      

(Most of Team TRBL above and Timothy with the sole brave boy Plunger, Alex!)

 

The eye doctor recently suggested that Timothy wear an eye patch for an hour every day because his left eye is showing weakness, which is not uncommon.  The patch (which you can see in the top photo, and I am hoping that the photo is just backward and we didn’t put the patch on the wrong eye) covers his right eye and is meant to strengthen the left eye by forcing it to do a little heavy lifting.  If the left eye doesn’t strengthen a bunch, he’ll need to get glasses (which our girls still cheer for because of the fashion possibilities), or, if the eye gets worse, might eventually need surgery.

This ‘patch’ remedy is all fine on paper, but for a toddler who acts like an angry professional wrestler when the doctor is trying to look in his ears, we were having trouble imagining him welcoming us laying a patch over one eye every single day, much less keeping the patch on his eye for the entire hour.  And maybe it’s just the novelty or he likes the designs on his patch, but so far, our little pirate is not fighting the daily black out.  In fact, Bluebeard seems to enjoy looking at his patched self in the mirror, like a kid looking at a cool new scar.

         

I’ve been out of town the past few weekends, and so I looked forward to seeing everyone at home when I returned yesterday.  But I realized that I was a little rusty on the toddler handling when, within a few hours of my return, I closed Timothy’s hand in a cabinet door and then accidentally put baby oil in his hair in his bath instead of shampoo.

Speaking of bathing, there are 2 types of baths for Timothy in our house – a Mommy bath and Daddy bath.  A Mommy bath is always high quality, like one of those nice $20 car washes that thoroughly washes and waxes the car while you sit in a comfortable waiting room and restores that new car smell.  A Daddy bath, on the other hand, may last just as long, but the wash part is more selective, with the quality closer to that of a Saturday morning car wash to raise money for the local high school boys’ cross country team – fun, quick, but with maybe less craftsmanship than Mommy’s.

Regardless, Timothy remains a very active and curious boy — which is code for ‘he’s really good at making a mess’.  Our kitchen has many open shelves and Timothy enjoys pulling everything down.  As mentioned in the past, ‘clean up’ is still a foreign concept, so while the little man is very good at pulling muffin pans and cake pans off the shelves and toting them to other parts of the house, he is less inclined to bring those pans back to their proper home.

And actually, that’s understandable, since for the moment he’s clearly more of a pirate than he is a baker.

Grateful,

The Lee’s

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