Finally, a picture where my inability to smile on cue does not ruin Leah's inability to stop smiling. Here we are in what appears to be a listing ship but is in fact my sister's house with my Dad holding the camera a teeny bit slanty.

As you can see, Max has packed on a few pounds and his face is getting too big for his small neck to hold up, and so the neck up and vanished. The doctor tells us it will return.

We had come to my sister's house that day for the purpose of showering, because now that we are selling our house, it needs grout. And so I grouted. Grouting involves smearing limestone paste in the cracks in tiles immediately after making said cracks with a dangerous and scary little knife and inhaling enough white dust to make your nose full of a glue. It's big fun. But the grout looks good and it is always nice to be able to answer questions about your weeked by saying you grouted. There was also painting, the worst activity ever. Hopefully, the new house will never need any maintenance.

We caved and bought an air conditioner and, after nearly dropping it out the window (ha!), installed it with nary a problem. The hot hot heat had been making us a little crazy, and the fact that the living room is now a place a person who isn’t three months old (!) can sit in semi-comfort is a big quality of life improvement.

Having lived without air conditioning before that, I was surprised to see the New York Times’ assertion the other day (I decided not to bother linking because the link would only last for a week, and it’s a pain in the neck, and I never really link to anything. This is not that sort of a blog.) that it’s generally accepted that people are more bothered by winter than by summer. They were reporting this apparently commonly held theory in the context of saying that the heat was actually making people in New York grouchy. Sort of a “dog bites food” story, if you ask me.

In any event, I have long held that summer is several times less tolerable than is winter. This is because, practically speaking, there is no real limit to how many clothes you may put on to brave the cold. Add that to the fact that, outside of waiting for the bus, most outside winter activities – shoveling, walking, skiing – involve getting all warmed up while you do them.

Summer, on the other hand, does not afford such leeway. Shorts and a t-shirt is not all that much warmer than being naked, and so even if it was cool to wait for the bus or do yard work – careful, now – in the buff, it would hardly be worth it. When it’s 95 degrees out with a dew point of 70, you will just not be comfy outside.

Imagine if winter was exactly the same as summer, only cold: you’d do your best to dress up warmly, but then walking outside would render all your sweaters and fleece hats irrelevant. The cold would be unbearable until you got somewhere with heaters blasting away. No one would be able to shovel, which might be ok, since shoveling is a terrible activity. And don’t give me any guff about how unpleasant it can be to hop into a car that’s been sitting in the driveway all night in January. Yeah, your hands are cold on the wheel, but you aren’t shivering. A hot car sucks right away, and there’s nothing you can wear to mitigate it.

So there’s that. Max disagrees with all this, of course, as the entire world is womb-like during a heatwave. Maybe this is why super hot weather makes people grouchy: it gives the psychological effect of being not-yet-born, which could be unsettling as you try to get things done. Also, though this is for another day, being hot means buying air conditioners, which often means going to Home Depot, which is my candidate for Worst-Run Business, Ever, Including All Spanish Banks and Realtors.

This is just a nice picture of my fam. I don't have any commentary at all for this one.

Grandpa Doctor Z, father of Leah Z. Barcan, takes a turn with the man of the hour. Max is loving the attention.

Now the good Doctor needs to have a little chat with his grandson to convince him to smile for the camera. Max is finding this chat a little scratchy.

Now the Doc has taken to wrestling a smile out of Max by positioning him so the sun is in his eyes. Kids love that.

Yet another grandpa. Only one is missing.

Finally, someone else can point the camera, so we now have a picture of the three of us. This is at my parents' house on Cape Cod, where we have spent the last two weekends passing Max from family member to family member. We even managed to take advantage of the confusion to leave him in a sling with my brother-in-law and sneak off to a wedding, where we missed all the food. Once home from such a raucous weekend, Max's tiny brain is buzzing and he doesn't sleep until weekend, which is why we were walking him around the neighborhood at 1:00 this morning. Watertown is quiet and pleasant at that hour.

Ladies and gentlemen, can you beat that?

Fist chewing: a new favorite. This is good because people who have their fists in their mouths cannot yell very loud. Not that we mind his expressing himself. We cherish it, yessiree. We're good parents. That even though we are now officially part of the pacifier-industral complex. There are many grouches who think anyone who uses a pacifier is dooming their child to a life of havin' it easy: first pacifiers instead of true happiness, then Nintendo instead of friends, then drugs, then crime, then illegal nation-building in the Middle East, all because your father didn't pay you the proper amount of attention. Fact is that he only uses it in the car, and each time it works it probably prevents an accident and it definitely prevents Leah from becoming queasy.

We could use something like a pacifier as we await the results of our rebid on a very nice house near my sister's. The inspection turned up a lot of needs, like rebuilding the house, basically, and so many of the things were surprises that we rebid much lower than the accepted offer. We are hoping that the person who owns the house will interpret our low bid to mean that we are very wonderful people to whom she ought to sell her house at a fair price and all the dickering will soon end. In the meantime, we chew our fists and hope for the best.