It was a curious day when Abby's mommy came home from work and found Abby slithering around under the kitchen table.

Abby's tongue flicked back and forth across her lips quickly. Either she was thinking very hard or was just about to snack on something very delicious. She quietly looked up at Mommy without blinking.

"You must be a snake," Mommy said as she looked down at her under the table, "because you're slithering around under my kitchen table."

Abby pulled her arms legs underneath herself and stood on all fours under the table. "No, I'm not a snake!" Abby barked. "I don't have scaly skin." She crawled out on her hands and knees and pranced about in front of Mommy axiously. Finally she sat still, wiggling her little bottom and looking up at Mommy with big round eyes.

"Oh," Abby's mommy said thoughtfully. "Then you must be a little dog, since you're crawling around on the floor and looking up at me with your big puppy dog eyes."

Abby pulled her hands up off the floor and squatted on her feet. "No, I'm not a dog," Abby chirped. "I don't have any fur." Abby's head bobbed around a bit on top of her head as she got her balance, teetering squatted on her tip-toes.

"Hmm," Abby's mommy thought again to herself. "Then you must be a parrot, since your head is bobbing like that and you're making such a squawk about it."

"No, no, NO!" Abby said, standing up straight. "I'm not a parrot, I don't have wings!" She waved her arms around to demonstrate, and was so excited she teetered back and forth from one leg to the other.

"Well, you've got to be a monkey, then," said Mommy contemplatively. "Look at how you're pretending to swinging your arms like a crazy little monkey."

"Ugh!" cried Abby. "I'm not a monkey! I don't have a tail!" Abby was starting to get tired of all of this monkey business. She told Mommy, "I'm just a little girl!"

Just then, Mommy got a sly look on her face. "Are you sure you're not a frog?" Mommy asked.

And just like that, Abby turned into a little frog and said, "Ribbit!" just before she hopped into Pooh Cat's water bowl, through the pantry, and into the back yard.

The distant sound of croaking was heard coming from the swingset while Mommy made macaroni and cheese for dinner.

We've been kind of reticent about Kid Two. I'm not sure why that is. Did all of the excitement of having the first kid drain out of us before the anticipation of the second?

I was poking around the grocery store today looking for a magazine to read during lunch. It's become a strange obsession these days that I can't simply walk into Subway without something to do with myself other than eat.

In aisle number 4, a full-on lower-middle-class family was buying groceries, as I've noticed they are wont to do early in the afternoon. There were three women, one of them probably the mother of the other two. Later, I noticed the father of the boy who was sitting calmly in the shopping cart.

He was wide-eyed and observant in his little blue jeans and Ernie-striped shirt, and looked as if he had just learned to sit up last week.

Strangely, I've never been one to comment fondly on the looks of babies in such the way that Berta's sisters would go on about how an infant looked "so adorable". Even my own kid, who I admit now to believing - knowing - that she was quite the looker for a girl of 3 months, never spawned a "she's so cute" utterance from my own lips in spite of the palpable necessity of passing strangers to do so.

And yet. I looked at this little boy sitting in the cart. And I would never admit that he was more cute than my own kid - and before you jump to conclusions, that's not really the point of this essay or the truth - he was quite cute in his own right. He was just looking about, curious about the world. Unable to express his feelings about what he was seeing, and still raking it all in.

Momentarily I thought it might be worthwhile to go through all the diapers and bottle feedings again. Stairway gates and emergency room visits. Babysitting and potty training and preschool. Just for a moment I looked past all that, and that's all it took to really sign on to the benefits of having another kid.

I got a magazine, but I spent lunch daydreaming of what life will be like for us in December when I'm playing baby games with my son.

Abby and Nana constructed this pig nose from a paper cup we had at the house. Nana said it was supposed to use a plain white cup and a stick (instead of the pencil), but I thought it looked quite cute as is.

Abby was insistent on showing Aunt Therese her pig nose on Thursday, which is odd because we have no plans to see her then that I know of. So I told Abby that I would take her picture with the pig nose and we would send it to Therese on the computer.

There is a picture of Abby showing off one of her new workbooks. I wrote about these workbooks before, so I won't go on too much about them here. But I will mention that Abby and I started her next level of Hooked On Phonics over the weekend, so she's learning letter sounds. If we keep at it, she should be reading small books custom-tailored to her skill level by the end of October.

Also of interest in this post is a picture of Berta pregnant with as-yet-unnamed Kid Two at seven months. Bert is a sexy pregnant chick.

We were on a hunt for a new vehicle over the last couple weeks of July. Our CR-V had seen better days, and now after the transmission slipping and the unnatural squealing upon taking turns it was time to get a new car.

This is the most exhaustive search I've ever been on for a car. We went to four dealerships and looked at different models. I wrote about some of them here. I didn't write about the Honda because we hadn't driven it yet, but it was a disappointment. They couldn't put all the options we wanted into the car. The sales guy seemed to know that we would walk away from it before driving it, and after our last Honda experience (the CR-V) I wanted something that wasn't a Honda.

So we went back to the Nissan and Mazda dealers to try those vans out again. I drove the MPV, and it rode quite nicely. I think we might have been satisfied with that car if it had all of the features installed by the factory, but it didn't. They didn't even offer navigation, but now that's an interesting twist on the whole car-buying endeavor.

Savvy readers will note that we selected the Nissan Quest. It's a nice car. I think it grew on me over time. The gadget factor is quite high and will make for very pleasant trips. It will be pleasant as long as there are no more trips to the dealership.

What a nightmare! I have memories of my dad walking out of some car sales places because they wouldn't give him what he wanted. That's basically when these people did to us. They made us sit for hour upon hour while they did nothing, and returned to us with a price that matched the price on the sticker minus the TV-publicized $1000 rebate. The average consumer walks away with a $3000 discount, and the dealer could afford to offer more than that. Plus, they didn't offer as much for our trade as they should have, and the guy had originally offered us a $5000 discount on our first visit. So we were a little perplexed at our treatment.

Anyway, we bought the van. The salesperson isn't going to factor into the use of the car, or so we thought. We got the car home and there were a few things missing, particularly the floor mats.

I don't understand this, really, because the car had little holes all in the rug from the spikes on the back of the floor mats that were in the car when we test-drove it, but the mats had gone missing. We checked the invoice for the car, and they were included. I asumed they had taken them out for cleaning and forgot to put them back in. But when we took the car back to sign loan papers, there were no mats. They had to be ordered. We also couldn't find the headrest storage bag or the included headphones for the A/V system, although it turned out that the headphones were in a secret compartment in the back of the van. They supplied the headrest bag when Berta returned for the floor mats that they ordered.

Our in-car GPS system isn't working. This is a real problem because the map in the car keeps resetting, thinking we're at the LA airport. We're not, by the way. Worse yet even, is that the car's clock is tied to the non-functional GPS, so it's always reporting the time as 0:00. That's irritating.

Everything else seems to be functioning well, though. Abby enjoys riding in her seat in the back and opening and closing the automatic doors. Berta has turned into a crazy person -- With so much room between the seats, she doens't bother to get out and go around the car to unfasten Abby, she just climbs around the inside of the car. I can't fault her too much since I did it last night when Abby and I were out in the rain, but it's still amusing to watch her climb around the inside of the van like a jungle-gym.

There should be plenty of room for trips with Kid Two (and one to three other people!), who will probably sit in Abbys seat, and she'll move to behind the driver's seat. I saw a thing that I want to look for when driving in the Toyota minivan that fit into the sunglasses compartment above the rear-view miror. It's a small, round mirror that lets you see the van passengers in the back. You leave the compartment dropped down and the mirror is exposed. In this car it will cover only a slight portion of the top of the rear-view, but I'd like to try it. It will give a better image of what mischief Kids One and Two are up to.

Our old kid seat must have been a really old model because it didn't have a LATCH tether. There is this LATCH thing that lets you more easily hook the kid seats to newer cars. Fiddling with the seatbelt is a real pain. Anyhow, I bought a conversion kit for the seat and attached it. As Berta says, that seat has never seen a firmer fit than with this LATCH tether. And it was very fast and easy to apply, too. I'll have to look for the LATCH loops in the back seat of my car, since all cars make since 2002 are required to have them.

Today I have Berta's car for transporting my bike to the shop. We're going to the Poconos this weekend and we're taking our bikes. My bike's tubes are both popped somehow, so I'm just going to drop the bike off to have that fixed and have the whole thing tuned, since it's been a while. The whole bike, fully asembled, fits into the back of the van. Yeah, it's that big.

We're going to need to look into these Japanese-designed strollers for when Number Two comes along.