A Lloyd update, for those of you who care to read such things.

His horrendous weight gain up to this point has thankfully leveled out somewhat.  He’s at (only) 84 pounds at the moment, but that’s mostly due to the incredible increase in his height.  If he hadn’t been adding inches to his height, he would weigh a lot more now.  It hasn’t been even growth however, as his back legs have until only recently grown far faster than his front legs, leaving him with a strange downhill aspect wherever he went.  That is now starting to level out, literally, so he’s just uniformly huge.

We have very recently started to leave him out of his crate when we leave the house, and at night.  This has been fairly successful, once past the initial learning curves.  The very first night he decided it was a great idea to leap onto the bed while we were sleeping, right onto Nikki’s head. Not a popular move, which I was able to convince him of with several sleepy whacks about the ears and head.

The main problem is not Lloyd’s fault, but actually Jordy’s fault.  Early on she and Lloyd developed a game where he would go into her room and steal something, usually a sock, and she would chase him for it.  It was adorable to watch, since Jordy would be giggling so hard she could barely catch him.  It’s cute in the daytime, anyway.  Lloyd isn’t so good with telling time, so needless to say the same behaviour doesn’t go over nearly as well at 2am as it did at 4pm.  He was justifiably perplexed by our insistence that nighttime isn’t playtime.  It came to head recently when he was surprised by being unceremoniously hauled by the scruff of the neck and tossed into his crate with the door locked at 3am after raiding Quinn’s closet for a sock.  He has been rather better behaved since then.

Lloyd’s unsupervised nighttime hours also had other consequences.  He would regularly visit each kid’s room and steal something in the hopes that someone would notice and chase him.  Mostly we were asleep so he was left with a mouthful of whatever it was he stole.  So it was that at about 5:15am one morning, perversely 15 minutes before my alarm was set to go off, he started heaving.  Something was coming up, that much was clear.  I jumped out of bed in an effort to haul him off the carpet and into the bathroom where cleanup is much easier.  No matter, Lloyd thoughtfully gave one last heave onto Harvey’s pillow where Harv was seconds before sleeping.  I grabbed some paper towel and turned the light on for cleanup duty, and saw that Lloyd had somehow produced a pair of socks, matched, and not even folded together.  The socks were almost dry, even.  I made a judgment call and decided that no-one would wear these particular socks again, despite their victory against Lloyd they were disposed of.