Well, our long national nightmare is soon drawing to a close. K leaves her far-flung destination as I type these words, and after stops in Asia and Europe on her way, she will be back home Wednesday night.

Tonight Reid and I were going to go to a neighborhood babysitting co-op meeting mostly to try and meet other parents in our general area. It's hard when you don't know people in the neighborhood to really forge links. Something like this would be a real treat.

Unfortunately, a combination of things conspired to push the co-op social off our agenda. Hopefully, we can still get involved, but the main loss is the connection to the other parents. We have friends who are having kids, but nobody really in our neighborhood who we can connect with.

Reid is young yet for actual stranger-babysitting. Most of the babysitting we've had has been grandparents or other relatives, and quite a bit of the traditional we're-going-out-tonight babysitting has happened after Reid has already gone to sleep. In most circumstances, he wouldn't know if King Kong was down here.

So, missing the event was a shame.

We did try something new tonight. Based on very little research apart from the anecdotal kind, I've decided to try adding an evening snack to Reid's schedule. A lot of parents do a post-supper snack, and I've decided that a healthy little something something could be the added extra item in Reid's stomach that allows for a better night's sleep. The fact of the matter is that, based on my half-dozen solo no-daycare days this past two weeks, Reid excels at lunch time and has begun to falter at dinner time.

Generally speaking, our schedule is to have a healthy snack about two hours after each meal. So, cereal at 7 or so, banana at 9, lunch at 11:30, Yo-Baby at 2 or so, nap somewhere in here, dinner at 6. Some of our dinners have been stellar eating experiences. Most have not. Certainly on days he is at daycare (where unfortunately, snacking is reckless, seemingly endless and often not healthy), dinner is often wrecked.

But even last night was a good example. Reid ate a great lunch, scrod (!) and corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and some fruit. Great meal. Dinner last night was spaghetti and meatballs and Reid was less than excited. He ate maybe one meatball. It was a big meatball, but still. We were eating around 6:30.

No evening snack, of course, and then, the wake-up call. 2:50 am, moaning with diffuse toddler malaise. No real distress, in fact, just crying for crying's sake. Some parents have told me that baby's don't really wake up with hunger, but if they wake up enough they'll do some cranking even though they probably don't really want to wake all the way up and deal with it. I believe that's what I experienced last night.

So, tonight, I made a roast in the crock pot. Reid ate some carrots, potatoes and a good amount of the meat. But he lost interest quickly, and didn't really "finish" what was probably a normal meal, certainly not as much food as he ate, for instance, at lunch the other day with the fish. So we had a snack at 7:25 before we went up for our bath. We'll see how it goes.

We're excited that Reid's mom is coming home. Okay, I've told Reid that she's coming home, but he just looks around confusedly. Toddlers with limited language don't really understand the whole "coming home in two days" construct, I guess.

The panel of pictures at the right demonstrates Reid's 6-minute campaign of unwavering determination to get the Little People Helicopter somehow into the Little People Playground's upper level. Fortunately for the Little People involved, Reid was called away on urgent business (I was trying to read the paper) and didn't raise the campaign to the next level.