Amazing feats

(or should I say "Amazing Feets"?)

Today, the babies decided to show off a few of their hidden talents.

First, Daniel.  Joe was taking a break from dawn-to-dusk baby duty and I was entertaining the children.  I'd already given Caroline a pedicure and had been paged by Daniel that it was time his toenails got a little attention.  In an attempt to keep his complaining to a minimum, I brought his pacifier with me to the couch where I propped him up on my knee and unzipped his pajamas to expose his toes.

On a side note, and not really important to the story, it's amazing how long his toenails get!  And since they're still so thin, they follow the curve of the end of his toe, like he's got his own little set of not-so-steel toe protectors on there.

But back to the story.

I was done trimming the toenails and zipped him back up.  As I picked him up for a quick game of "Hi, Daniel" (a variation of the hit game "Hi, Max", which involves holding Max way high above my head and squealing, "Hi, Max!", then lowering him and saying, "Low Max!", and then repeating as long as he keeps giggling), I saw there was no pacifier in Daniel's mouth.

Uh oh.

You don't want to lose the pacifier.  The babies love their pacifiers.  So I started looking all over for it.  Then Joe came in the room, and I felt even stupider that I'd lost the pacifier.  I mean - it was JUST IN HIS MOUTH - where could it have gone?  We handed the baby back and forth as we tore apart the couch, the mats on the floor, the blankets around their chairs, everything - no pacifier.

And all the while, Daniel is laughing at us.  LAUGHING!

And do you know why?  Because HE HAD SNUCK THE PACIFIER INSIDE HIS PAJAMAS just before I zipped him up and he'd been hiding it on his hip THE WHOLE TIME!  Sneaky little guy!

Then a little later, Daniel was sitting on my lap while Caroline was doing her ab work-out on the activity mat.  The babies have learned that they can set off the music toy's motion detector by kicking the poles that hold up the toys.  In fact, they trigger the thing so much that the batteries have been running low (and we've heard it so many times that I actually caught Joe singing one of its songs to the babies yesterday to entertain them).

 I took the toy off and replaced the batteries and returned it to its place on the mat.  The little lights flash a little brighter now and the music is a bit more up-tempo, and Caroline seemed quite pleased with it all.  She kept kicking the pole to turn it on.  And then she kicked really, really hard.

It's a good thing I had Daniel on my lap, since the end of that dislodged pole smacked right into the chair he would normally be sitting in!

I can hardly wait to see what Max does to keep up with his brother and sister.