All C has talked about this week has been Halloween and costumes. I don’t think she really understands Halloween (nor do I), but she does get that this is a time when people dress up as funny things. She also loves all of the ghosts and pumpkins, which she calls “pumpkin patches.” Last night, C got go to Boo at the Zoo with some of my family. Luckily for all of us, my sister-in-law had an extra costume:

C made quite the fierce dragon

Sleepy dragon.

I guess her wings were too tired to fly to the zoo.

I’ve heard that you shouldn’t get married because you want to be with that person but because you couldn’t imagine life without her. When I proposed to Katie, that’s exactly what I told her: “I can’t imagine life without you, Kate, and I don’t want to.”

I love you, Kate, even more than I did three years ago today.

We renewed our zoo annual pass on Sunday, and C had an absolute blast.

My week (or so) of childcare-free days is over, thank goodness. I can clean off my desk, pay some bills, and get caught up. But today the Bug is at her Mimi’s house, instead of here, and all of that dad & girl time have not made me prepared for a completely child-free day. Allow me to reminisce on last week’s babyness.

For a few days, C asked repeatedly if she could wash her hands. She said they were dirty!

She also spent a lot of time last week asking for Elmo; I said yes way more than I probably should have.

But Elmo did teach her to brush her hair:

C loves this duck. Here she is watering the driveway with the duck.

Did I mention that C loves the duck? I couldn’t get her in the car Thursday without the duck accompanying her:

C went swimming, but first she had to fill the pool (in the yard at our office):

We did have some downtime last week:

And some silly time (C does yoga!):

Ok, now I really must find my desk.

Someone once said that one problem with modern photos is that it’s too easy to delete the pictures that don’t look perfect. You end up with white bread pictures of people smiling at the camera. Katie and I tend to go the opposite route and save all pictures except the truly heinous. I guess C can shuffle through them some day and decide which she likes of herself and which to ditch (I don’t pretend this actually true).

But between never tossing photos and the ability to take an infinite amount of photos on digital cameras, I have nearly twenty gigs of photos on my computer, with countless more stored only online.

Simply put, that’s just not cool. I don’t have an infinite amount of resources to categorize and store all of those photos, and it’s nearly impossible to go back now and label them all correctly and put them in easy to find places. So I have a million pictures, and I can never find what I want when I need it.

The only solution I know of is to do it right from now on and work on the archives in my spare time. That’ll happen when C is 30, I think.

The site with the stupid name.

Anyway, flickr has some really good features, such as easy sharing and unlimited uploads and bandwidth for only $25 a year. But it has some pretty big negatives, too. It doesn’t have a lot of customizability, for example, and the organizing features are just terrible. I spent an hour yesterday trying to tag photos that were supposed to have been uploaded into a folder and weren’t. And at the end of tagging dozens and dozens of photos, I had four photos that were correctly tagged.

Anyway, we’ll see how this goes. I have a fourteen day trial. All I know is there’s got to be something better out there than flickr. If it looks worth it, there are several tools for importing your flickr pictures. Obviously I’ll want to try them before paying!

Edit: here’s a pretty cool article about the family business.

Yesterday, C and I had a good day “working from home.” We went to her Aunt’s house and played with her cousins, and we went to a splash park, where she was afraid to get wet, contrary to her normal tendency to beg for water. Then she got a nice nap and more swimming time outside, where she mostly played with dripping water all over the lawn “watering the dirt,” she called it. I considered taking her to the park this morning, but I’m feeling lazy. So I think I’ll set up a pool outside in a few minutes. Should make for a fun day at the office. Then one more day to go sans childcare!