God sure is confusing, even to a six-month old!

I apologize for the arid, desert-like stretch of non-posting that has been the last four months; for those faithful readers who still check out this site, here is your long-awaited oasis of Janelle-related posting.

Andrea felt the need to take this picture after Janelle and I returned home from an hour-long walk this afternoon. (As an aside: no wonder Americans are getting fat and lazy at an amazing and unprecedented rate. Despite being a mere one-mile from our house, the route from here to the nearest Wal-mart is considerably without sidewalk ['pavement' for our friends in the UK]. When our town and city planning makes it so difficult to walk about the community, how can we be surprised when no one does it!) I was "wearing" Janelle in a baby sling (if you don't know what this is, here is the site from which we bought ours), and during the last quarter-mile Janelle was falling asleep with her face adjacent to my chest. As she drifted off to Neverland her nursing reflex kicked in, and thus the wet spot on my shirt. Just to be clear, this is not the result of male lactation. (I know, I know . . . I, too, was surprised that there was a link for this! If you think that link was strange, check out how many hits there are here! You really can find anything on the net.)

But that's not all. When we were about three blocks from home, as I was walking across a particular residential intersection, Janelle's instincts utterly took over, and my teething baby girl bit my left nipple! I almost fell down laughing as I thought to myself, "I guess it would be confusing to a six-month-old for God to put useless nipples on a Papa". Then I realized, it was confusing to a 29-year-old.

So while I still do not know why God saw fit to equip fathers with nipples, I do have an increased appreciation for the plight of nursing mothers with teething children. And if all that comes out of this experience is some resumed posting on my family's blog, then that's enough for me.