Willow's smiles, um, aaarrggh!

Compared to her sister, Willow hasn't been much of a smiling baby.

She laughs and giggles and smiles genuinely when she's happy, and she seems like a happy little girl, but when you ask her to smile, she puts on much fakery.

Up to this weekend, whenever you asked her to smile, she stuck her forefingers in the corners of her mouth and pushed up, or she looked high to the sky and opened up that grin. SMILE!

Things have changed.

She unveiled her new smile at the Dixie Stampede pre-show photo session in Pigeon Forge. It's piracy! As in, she looks as if she's saying AAARGH, and the smile leaves you wondering where her parrot is.

Here's a pick of her new AAARGH smile.

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With baby comes packing (and a lot of it)

Willow, Che and I are traveling to see the grandparents, aunts, cousins and Mos (or is it Moes or is it Mo's or is it Moses?) in Henderson, Tenn., this weekend. And that brings up one of the big differences between being a couple without kids and being a couple with kids: packing for travel (they even have an app for that, God bless us packing-weary parents). Back in my pre-child days, packing hardly mattered, probably taking up 1 zillionth of a tenth of a percent of my brain capacity to do (six days equals six days of socks and underwear plus some T-shirts, some shorts, a pair or two of pants, put on some shoes, throw in some toothpaste, and I was off). That's hardly the case anymore. Take, for example, if you have a spit-up-prone baby. Do you take two burp clothes, four, eight or, maybe, 16? Better take 24. And how many diapers do you take? Or wipes? Do I need to take baby medicine? Is it going to be cold or warm or cold and warm or warm and hot then ... AACK!!! You get t...

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Willow has been giving us fits for months now about brushing her teeth before bed. She's usually better brushing her teeth in the morning, meaning it's less like wrestling an alligator for me, but at night before bed, she turns into the Tasmanian Devil. We've tried making the tooth-brushing as fun as possible for her, but I usually end up holding her against her will while I try, mostly in vain, to pry the toothbrush into her clamped-shut mouth. Sometimes we give up. We've tried singing to her. Dancing. Story-telling. Tickling. Nothing has really worked. But Mommy might have hit on the solution. A singing toothbrush. Yesterday Mommy brought home a toothbrush that belts out Queen singing "We Will Rock You." This toothbrush ROCKS! And Willow loves it. We tried it out last night, and on the inaugural brushing, Willow brushed her teeth successfully all by herself. She danced the whole time too. And I stayed bruise free (I also, surprisingly, had more energ...

Daddy Tree: Tiny Footsteps

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