Dirty Job. Episode 1.

Dirty Job was born Jan. 5, 2005. It was a fairly uneventful pregnancy, and aside from the fact that my hubs TOOK A NAP DURING LABOR; delivery was normal as well. (My hubs will want me to write in his defense that he was up extremely late the night before putting together a toddler bed for What Not To Wear. I had a checkup the next day and they decided to induce me because my blood pressure was on the rise. He wouldn't have put the bed together if we had known about the induction. That is all.)

Dirty Job was born with GIGANTOR lips. This has nothing to do with anything, I just felt I needed to point it out because I didn't have the "first time mom goggles" on this time around. You can throw things at me, but the fact of the matter is that the birthing process is quite traumatic to the appearance of the baby. Two days in, all adorableness ensues. 1 minute in, your baby is not the cutest thing ever, nor is he/she remotely happy about leaving the womb. That was all for free, folks.

Anyhoo, we had the "textbook" second born personality. Laid back, go with the flow, easy to get on an eating schedule, and for that matter, a cinch to nurse. These were all very good things, because right after he was born, we had to temporarily move out of our condo for what ended up being 3 and a half months.

My little man loved his first taste of food at 4 months, sat up around 6 months, crawled at 7 months, and walked at 9 1/2 months. I found myself enjoying our guy more and more as time went on. He was, most definitely, an easier baby than our girl. Part of that had to do with some of her medical needs, part of it had to do with the fact that, um, hello, I had no clue what on earth I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to survive on 6 hours of sleep. Silly, silly me.

As the summer of '06 approached, we decided we ought to take Dirty Job off the pacifier, and that we'd do so after our summer vacation in July. Around that time, someone had asked me if I was concerned with his lack of talking. I'm pretty sure I rolled my eyes (in my mind) and said I wasn't really concerned at all. He was our second born, a boy, had a deep love for his pacifier, and had hit all developmental milestones with no problems.

Little did we know what was in our future...