Where to begin? At last check, I was recovering from a hospital stay (oh, and recovering from the incident that put me there too, but it's hard to tell which is more stressful on the body) and marveling over the Fantastic Voyage that had just happened in my gut. Since then, I've had a false-alarm trip back to the ER (that'll be $200, please), gone back to work, and have recovered much of my strength. My doc's got me on a course of treatment that I'm optimistic about, and I've had a second opinion that confirmed his diagnosis and course of treatment. We've also talked about taking out the defective parts (i.e., surgery), but the thinking is to try achieve better living through chemistry as long as I'm not actively bleeding out my keister. Should that happen again, it's Go Directly to Surgery, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 Because We'll Just Get That And A Whole Lot More Back From You Soon Enough. I'm optimistic about the surgical route too, though, and hey, why not as long as I've met my out-of-pocket maximum for the year?

(Wow. Re-reading that, I'm amazed how quickly I went from grateful, humble, and joyous to snarky and cynical. It's nice to be back.)

On a more grateful note, the girls continue to amaze us and everyone else. A couple of anecdotes:
The other day, while I was helping Julia wash her hands, I patted her on the back and said, "Julia, you're a good kid." Without missing a beat, she replied, "Daddy, you're a good grown-up."

Lily is about to break through on the talking. She's had "bye-bye" (dye-dye), "thank you" (dakoo), and "bottle" (ba-ba) down pat for a while now, but now she's moved on to "ball" (bau), and finally "Mama" and "Daddy." She's also a real pro at "Hi," which comes out as "Huh-Huh-Hi-eee" because our nanny has been teaching consonant sounds to Julia. Best of all, though, is "bow wow," which to hear Lily use it, is the universal sound all animals use to communicate across species and genus. "Look, Lily, a pig!" "Bow-wowww!" "What does the kitty cat say?" "Bow-wowww!" etc. But what's so great about it is how emphatic she is about it. First, there's the deep rasp she puts into it. I've heard lifelong, two-pack-a-day smokers with voices less gravelly than the one she puts on for "bow wow." Then there's the emphatic nodding for each syllable. She really takes the song "Talk with the Animals" seriously.

For a few weeks now, Julia's been able to spell her name with any pre-formed letters. She has two letter puzzles, and j, u, l, i, and a are always the first ones in and the first ones out. She also spells it with magnetic letters on the fridge and recognizes it when she sees it written down.

Tonight we gave Julia a new cup at dinner. It has a cartoon print of a large T-rex sort of dinosaur and a much smaller pteradactyl sort of dinosaur. Julia remarked that the large T-rex was "a capital dinosaur" and the pteradactyl was "a lower case dinosaur."

There's more, but I lost my head of steam on the snarky and cynical update about me when I should've saved my energy for updates on what really matters: