The Week of the Nose Sucker and a Really Good Pizza Pie!

Samuel has a runny nose. Again. I think it may be on the up and up, but at this point we're a little pessimistic. We had a good week, though, aside from the many, many scream sessions with the nose sucker (torture instrument disguised as helpful tool). Samuel hates the nose clearing process but, for some reason, ADORES the little green plastic instrument. He wants to hold it constantly. He often wants to eat it (babies are so gross). He smiles when he sees it across the room. If given the opportunity to walk anywhere in our house, he will make his way ever so quickly to our room, find the nose sucker in its usual spot, and return with it in his mouth (much to our horror). Here he is after a particularly fun evening of demolishing everything in his path (most likely in search of the nose sucker):

Monday evening we had a dinner guest: Shelby! She was in town for work, and we had a relaxing evening of lasagna eating, Olympics watching, and catching up on each others lives. We had a great time, and here's a picture of Sammy (looking really weird and dazed) and the lovely Shelby (looking beautiful, as always):

The rest of the week we pretty much stayed home and during the day tried to teach Sammy to blow his own nose (a failure) and at night either (a) cleaned up Samuel's vomit (a nice side effect of his runny nose: a heightened gag reflex) or (b) watched the Olympics. Yesterday evening we went to Home Slice for a good NY Style Pizza. It was ridiculously tasty; this has got to be one of our favorite Austin restaurants. It rivals the pizza we had in New York! It is also quintessentially Austin: nobody's dressed up, the food is excellent, and the bar is made out of salvaged doors. Here's Samuel outside on their patio as we waited for a table:

Look at the cutie-pants in his outfit from Oma and his new big-boy shoes from Ami:

Also of interest, yesterday was Samuel's first ever photo session. Yep, we took him to get his picture taken at an actual photo-specializing place (as opposed to the usual family-paparazzi pictures). This was in honor of his first birthday which is fast approaching, folks. Our baby is almost a year old! The pictures turned out great; he looks like a little miniature man. He also has a nice scratch under his nose in every single photo--this courtesy of a Wednesday evening nose scratching session he decided on. Fun times!