Sex Info

From what the ultrasound technician with spiky hair tells us, it seems the number of testicles in the Tolman family will not be changing over the summer. That's right, Samantha will have herself a little sister come late June. This is extraordinarily convenient in the clothing department, seeing as how we have several crates of frilly, pink things that are already too small for our toddler. We'll just have take the recently purchased infant jock-straps back to Manly Babies R Us. If any of you are wondering what you can get us for Presidents Day, we want to start a Prom Dress Trust Fund.
To round out the news for the past couple weeks, it appears as though Becky's husband is rubbing off on her subconscious. She had a dream in which she obtained the power of flight in order to defeat a squad of anti-spinning Asians. She was dressed in an especially super outfit.


This is the young lady. In the video she was clearly opening and closing her mouth. This is good. Maybe she'll be able to bite Sam and keep her from inserting her fingers too far.

Over the weekend, we went to Denver for a lovely wedding, rife with oragami and puppetry. While we were there, Sam was kidnapped by these two old people. We'll miss her.




This is one of my favorite pictures of Becky. Look at those eyes...as if you could look at anything else.

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.

Christmas

Hello there. Here's a picture of Sam playing in the leaves in our back yard. Ask me if those leaves are still in that pile and decomposing into a pile of brown sludge. Go ahead and ask.
Anyway, Sam wrote our Christmas letter this year. I couldn't figure out how to create a link to download it, so I'll just paste it below: Hi, everybody!
My name is Samantha Love Tolman. My dad said that he didn’t care about people enough to write a Christmas letter and mommy’s always busy in her anthrax lab, so I decided to write you myself.
Our family has three people in it. I’m the most important one. I’m seventeen months old and I’m cuter than anyone in the whole world.
This how my day usually goes: I wake up around 5:30 and I start crying. Dad comes in and gets me, changes my diaper, and gets me a bottle. Then he takes me into my parents’ room and I fall asleep again.
Daddy’s usually gone before I wake up the second time. Mom says he’s at “nursing school” but I’m not so sure. I think he’d study more if he was really taking classes. Sometimes he’ll tell me that he’s too busy to play because he has a pharmacology test the next day or something. All I have to do is break keys off his laptop and he comes around pretty quick.
Anyhoo, after I wake up for real, I let mom make me some breakfast like scrambled eggs or yogurt, or veal. Then I walk around the house rearranging things. We moved into this house about 6 months ago. It’s got a great big yard and an old shed full of hazardous, sharp objects. I’ve heard mom say that she’s really happy to be in our own home. I’ve also heard dad muttering about mowing and raking the stupid yard. Mom’s mood seems to have a more pervasive effect on the atmosphere of the home, so it’s probably a good thing we live here.
Sometimes mom and I will go do stuff like story time at the library, or hanging out with grandma in Liberty, or just napping. Mom says she gets tired because I have a little brother or sister sucking the life out of her from the inside. He or she is supposed to pop out in June. Dad says that mom isn’t puking nearly as much as she did with me. Way to make a girl feel special, Pops.
So Dad gets home in the late afternoon and helps mom with dinner. Dinner is this thing where they put food on plates or in bowls and I try to grab it and throw it on the floor. Good times.
If dinner was a success, mom and/or dad will put me in the bathtub. Sometimes I pee in there, but don’t tell. It’s a secret.
At about eight o’ clock or eight thirty, something happens to Mom and Dad. They turn evil and act sweet and affectionate while they put me in a padded wooden cage in my room. I scream as long as I can. That ranges from about two to twenty minutes, then I lose consciousness.
And that’s my day. I bet you’re jealous. Admit it.
Ok. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and Hanukkah and Kwanza and whatever other weird thing you might celebrate.
Love,
Sam

The Fourth

This is Sam naked in the bathtub with her cousin, Maxwell Thorne. Max was born two weeks before Sam, but he appears to be at least two months behind in his ability to French kiss.



Two thursdays ago, Samantha discovered that Polonium has a half life of more than 2 months when it's diluted into a tranquilizer cartridge. Her mother was so proud.






We dressed up in a theme for this halloween. It was a little bit corny, I know but we went as the old Care-Bear-being-tempted-by-Satan-to-hand-over-state-secrets-to-Belgium combo.

She's getting tall now. As you can see, she has a neck and she thinks she can boss around anyone else that has a neck. Her vocabulary is increasing daily, but her speech still consists mostly of "no" and "Mommy" and "HHhhhmmmmmnnnnhhhh."

The Third

The initial purpose of this blog was to express outrage that Sam's picture was posted on another blog and she was described merely as Hyrum Shakespear's first kiss from a girl his age. The truth is that Sam is six months older than Hyrum, and Hyrum received not only his first kiss from her, but his second, third and on up to about his 14th kiss from our very affectionate little girl. If you'd like to check out the action, you can go here:

http://shakespearshuffle.blogspot.com

This is the picture of the experience that Hyrum Shakspear will forever be trying to replicate.

The Second

Here's a brief, pictoral history of Sam's brief life thus far. This one was just a few hours after her eruption into the world. Note the presence of the yellow clamp that's keeping her abdomen from leaking out.




This is a few months later after she started acting a little bit more like a human.















This is how she looks when we tell her it's time for bed. She's so cute, even when she's upset. It's hard to make her go.


This is the Christmas picture we took of her in 2005. It was nice because she still couldn't move. Like taking a picture of a bowl of fruit.



This is my lovely wife holding my lovely daughter at the Thorne family reunion which was held this last summer. That's my groin on the left side of the picture.

The First

Jon and Becky Tolman met during a bar fight in a seedy little place called "Bloodhound Bob's" in downtown Detroit. Jon had just thown a couple Norweigians through a window when he was set upon by a burly man dressed like Liza Minnelli and a midget with Tourett's syndrome. Becky flung herself off the pool table and planted a stout dragon kick to the cross-dresser's lumbar spine. When Jon heard that crunchy snap, something else snapped in his heart and he knew she was the girl for him.
They were married the very next day by the captain of a salmon trawler. The twitchy, cussing midget gave Becky away and a set of vampire conjoined twins were the witnesses.
Samantha Love Tolman was born nine and a half months later. She was the first documented case of a baby born blue, not due to a lack of oxygen, but to the enormous amount of artificial coloring consumed by her mother during pregnancy.
Sam is now a toddler and already showing proficiency at the crossbow. Jon is currently in nursing school and enjoys Chicken Lo mein. Becky is pregnant and keeps busy ducking and building asphalt sculptures.