Just another Saturday here at our house

Sam is what you might call a messy eater. For dinner, we mostly strip him down so that he eats with just a diaper on because skin is so much easier to clean than shirts. I got tired of stain removal awhile back! One of the problems we have is that over the summer, Sam decided he didn't like being in his highchair while Jeff and I were seated at the table. He wanted to be there with us too. So I put away the highchair and took out the travel booster seat and put that on a kitchen chair for him. Unfortunately, because our table has a lip and our chairs are small and Sam is large, he can't bend his knees while he's sitting. They just kind of stick straight out and dangle over the edge. A little bigger and he'd be able to bend them so that at least he'd be able to rest his heels on the top rung of the chair. But as it is, his knees fall in a weird place and he winds up squirming and crying the whole meal.

While we were trying to figure all this out, I had to break out the highchair again for nebulizer treatments. (Yes, Sam is back on Pulmicort twice a day for the rest of the winter.) The highchair has a five-point harness which was useful for restraining Sam until he got used to the nebulizer again. He has a tendency to fight it with all his strength and neither Jeff nor I could hold him without being in danger of inflicting bruises. Because, you know, in addition to BIG he's also STRONG. All of this resulted in two baby chairs in my kitchen, neither of which my son would use. Aaargh!

For the past few days we've just been letting him sit at a regular chair at the table with us. We're using one with arms so he's relatively contained.  While he was a pretty neat eater while strapped into a chair, he's become very messy again in the absence of any restraints.

[caption id="attachment_328" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Exhibit A: peanut butter in the belly button."][/caption]

 This has meant a lot of baths after dinner. Tonight's bath led to this:

 

[caption id="attachment_332" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Bad to the bone!"][/caption]

 Even so, he's not too much of a toughie to pass up a snuggle with Daddy:



He was practically comatose while snuggling with Jeff. We haven't heard a sound from him since we put him down.