Every year, my sister-in-law comes over to
help us document our growing family.


Karsten at 2 1/2, Alrik at 6, Mikko at 10.


The boys just keep getting taller!


Digging.


Playing it cool.

UPDATE July 3: Photobucket keeps sending me autoresponses and demands for payment, so that's no help. BUT, I did find a viable workaround for myself, so I've updated what I'm doing at LaurenWayne.com.

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I try not to blog too much about blogging on here for fear of having it get too meta. However, there's a situation going down with my archive images that warrants a head's up. I explain it all over on LaurenWayne.com — here's an excerpt:

The pirate's sign that you must pay the ransom or forfeit your photos

A few days ago, without any advance warning, Photobucket sneakily changed its terms of service to disallow third-party hosting, or hotlinking, on nearly all of its plan tiers. Most people use Photobucket explicitly for the ability to link from images on Photobucket to other locations such as blogs and forums, so this seems like a baffling move.

Until you realize the scam that's afoot: The only way to get your images to show up again is to pay Photobucket $400, upfront, as an annual subscription to its most expensive plan.

Ah, I see. It's a ransom demand.

I'm livid. I'd been using Photobucket to host my images on my Blogger blogs for ten years. For several of those years, I paid Photobucket an annual subscription for the benefits of unlimited bandwidth and extra storage.

We visited my parents this month and stayed in my old bedroom, complete with its sheep wallpaper that my mom and I had hung and the dollhouse I had received as a Christmas present.

Karsten and Sam enjoyed an air mattress in my younger brother's old room. Mikko, Alrik, and I squished together on my old queen bed, handed down from my older brother before me, after both refused to endure an entire night on the floor mattress that had been set up. Too many spiders in my parents' house, so I don't blame them.

Alrik was fascinated with the historical sleeping arrangements.

"This was your room when you were a kid?" he asked. "Who did you sleep with?"

No one, just myself, I responded.

He was agog. "You slept by yourself when you were a kid?"

Yep.

He digested this for a bit. "Wow, you were brave."

It seems obvious to me that
all fathers should be as wonderful
as my kids' father.



Thank you for parenting and loving our kids, Sam.



We are so very blessed.

When we moved into our 996-square-foot home, I was elated to finally, finally have my own washer and dryer — but I faced a dilemma: Where do the laundry baskets go?

Our appliances are stacked into a closet that's just barely big enough for them and for socks to fall down the crack between them and the wall. The hallway the closet's in is narrow enough that with the bifold door open, there's barely room to scootch by. There's room on top of the closed washer to fold some clothes but not to fit a basket. Our two bedrooms are petite for a family of five, containing just the requisite furniture without a lot of spare floor space and with minimal closets. Our bathroom is laughably teensy, with room for just a toilet and tub and no extra floor space whatsoever. Yes, even the sink is elsewhere.

Long story short, we got rid of our laundry baskets and our hamper once we realized they fit nowhere and were just being tripped over.

But what to do instead?

But now I am six,
I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six
now and forever.

— A.A. Milne

My little Alrik turned 6. I wrote when Mikko turned this age that 6 always feels firmly in Childhood Age to me, part of an iconic and golden period.

And here we are, with number two moving into it.

Alrik is such a sprite of a child. He was the baby who was born peacefully and precipitously at home, in our first unassisted homebirth, and he was smaller enough than Mikko that my first thought on his emerging was, Oh, no, where's the rest of him? I guess I worried maybe his legs had broken off inside.


But, no, he was just somewhat petite, and he grew more elfin by the day, our skinny, wiry little boy with round Disney eyes and energy for days. Always dancing, always running, always talking.


"Can I say something?" is his catchphrase. And then he does.

He introduces me to his imaginary friends and asks me to join him in Minecraft World, which is a realm he made up that adapts to any sort of creative play. Sometimes he's fighting zombies. Sometimes he's a samurai. Sometimes he's a human who turns into a cat when he brushes against you. He tells me what to do to participate adequately.