Oh, Regis

Good day or night to you. Five items are worth mentioning:

1. Becky is now feeling movements from within her body. These movements are likely caused by a little tiny person or by an iguana.

2. Jon managed to alarm his wife with a well-placed puff of bubbles.

3. Samantha finally got going on her dissertation, "Focal transformation and the Gouy phase shift of converging one-cycle surface acoustic waves excited by femtosecond laser pulses." We're excited that she's chosen a focus, but we wish she could concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. She keeps taking breaks to watch Oswald the Octopus, climb up the shelves, or work on laser-cooled Mg+ ions.

4. Becky has entered Sam in the Regis & Kelly Cutest Baby in America Contest. We figure we're a shoe-in as long as Rusty and Brittany don't get their kid involved.

5. Becky is gorgeous.

I think this is the picture we sent to Regis. Should work, right?

This is Rusty and Brittany's kid. I think she's Sam's only competition. It's that cursed hair. Of course, they couldn't use this picture since it looks like she's got something hanging out of her nose.

Here's a sample of Sam's research. I don't really get it.

Oswald the Octopus

The New Year

Well, well. It's 2007, and excluding former Iraqi dictators, everyone seems to have made the transition to the new year without significant change in their well-being. The Tolmans spent a majority of the Christmas holiday cavorting with Becky's family and their numerous offspring. Sam became wonderfully worn-out as she was chased and tickled and carried and gooed at by her extended family, but she also became accustomed to being chased and tickled and carried and gooed at for hours at a time. Her parents, who don't feel like they should feel old, but do sometimes, have a hard time living up to the heightened expectations. Becky is now at week 15 of her gestation, and has a bit of a bump. She's at that stage in which she feels fat, but she's not so pregnant that strangers recognize the condition. I tend to live my life under the wise council of Dave Barry who said: "You should never say anything that remotely implies that a woman is pregnant unless a baby is emerging from her at that moment."

This is Sam doing her little posing thing. As you can see, she's proficient at both the one and two-handed method.

This is Jon and Gordon having a completely frustration-free time teaching Maddy and Ella how to play chess.

One of these pictures is Becky and her sisters, sister-in-law, and mother out to dinner. The other picture is Iron Man and his friends. You decide which is which.