"Daddy, when Emily was inside of Mommy, why was her tummy so big?"
"Well, Rachel, because she had a baby inside her. Your tummy would be big, too, if you had a baby inside of you."
"When I get bigger I want a baby inside my tummy"
"You do?"
"Yes. What will you name it?"
"Well, sweetie, if you have a baby when you grow up, it's not my baby to name. It would be your baby. Mommies and Daddies get to name their own little boys or little girls whatever they want to name them.
"I don't want it to be a boy. I want a girl."
(Stifling laughter) "Honey, you don't get to choose."
"But why not? Why can't Mommies and Daddies choose if they want to have a boy or a girl?"
"That's just the way it works. You get what you get."

...but with this one, I just had to...

[Via: Medical Billing

]

Coming in late July....

In case you're keeping track, the old Laleblog has been at it for three years.

OK...three years and five days, officially, but you know, sometimes these things get lost in the shuffle that is life.

Thanks for tuning in.

It seems like Cubs fans are as split on this decision as America was (and still is) on the election.

I, for one, am in the relief column. I think Woody should have been let go a long time ago. He was a great pitcher when he was young, but he never corrected his mechanics and it led to years of injuries and paying him millions of dollars for not pitching.

If you ask me, he and Prior should have been cut the Cubs should have kept the core of their starters from the 2003 season, instead of dismantling a team that came closer to a World Series than any other Cub's team since 1945.

So long Kerry...thanks for the memories. Maybe we can use your salary to buy some decent pitching.

Enough said.

What a difference a few days makes.

Three days ago, this was the forecast for Hurricane Ike:

And that would be San Antonio, right in the middle of the path that was forecast. We stocked up on supplies, local weather guy was predicting 100 MPH winds, and it was general doom and gloom us.

Of course, we all know how difficult it is to predict the track of storms, as has been evident by all of the doom and gloom that just didn't come true this year.

This is Ike's current track:

At this rate, it looks like Mom and Dad may get more rain out of it than we will. I've been watching the skies all day, and we've had some beautiful high clouds, but that's it. No rain, no wind.

I hope we get some rain tomorrow, but with as far off as the forecasts have been all week, I won't be surprised if we get left high and dry from Ike. It's a lot like Rita a few years ago...pouring rain in Houston, just three hours east, and not a drop of rain here.

I'm not going to go into details here, because it's really not my place to do so, but just know that our good friend Maria needs all of the prayers and good thoughts she can get right now.

We're all pulling for you, girl, and we hope you get well soon.

We made it back from our trip to New York. It was a great trip, and all of my worries about going there turned out to be just that...worries. Nothing more.

We had a wonderful time and I'm glad I don't have to be back at work right away so I can take some time to recover. We walked way more in those 5 days than I think we walked the rest of the year!

Instead of posting a bunch of pictures here (I took over 300) I'll just direct you to my Flickr photostream. If you've been checking in over the past couple of days, I'm sure you've seen those four thumbnails on the right changing every couple of hours as I upload.

I've created a few sets on Flickr to kind of categorize things, so if you want to see the wedding pictures or touristy things, or architecture, pictures of our family, gargoyles, or pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge (yes, I took enough pictures of it for its own category), they're all there. You don't have to go wading through all of them to see the things you like.

I think we're going to have to go back. Soon. The list of things we didn't do is about as long as the list of things we did do.