Monday, June 16, 2008

Unfaithful

So....despite my recent post about not being able to have much time to blog, I've committed some time to writing a new blog. I've started a photo blog for Seedlings Photography to share the latest in my photo world. Please visit me there and feel free to comment... I could really use some blog love to get things going!

Thursday, June 12, 2008

fever sleep

Well, it turns out my big boy wanted to show me just how much he still needs me. We've begun day three of a fever here, day three of me basically holding the tot all day long. Tuesday night his fever spiked to 104 and after getting it down, we were able to put him to bed. But, I first had to take the opportunity for a photo session that otherwise would have never occurred. When Finn was a newborn, I never quite got the wonderful photos of him that I had hoped for. So, this sort of makes up for it. It was of course unplanned, so the shots are not perfect and it was at 10:00 at night, but I'm sure I will treasure them for a long time. Here's one of my sweet baby.




I hope this ends soon and he's back to running and laughing. It's so sad to not hear him talk for such a long period of time. I did actually witness a laugh and smile in his dreams on Tuesday night which was such a nice relief. Hope all your babes stay well.

Monday, June 9, 2008

Big boy - 18 months



Not too long ago, this baby of mine turned 18 months old. Sigh... I love the little boy he's becoming, but I'm gonna miss the little baby he's leaving behind.
The stats:
24 pounds and 33 1/4" tall - sooo tall, and handsome, too!

He walks up and down the steps like a big boy. He's adding new words all the time...sticky, dirty, juice (which he doesn't even drink), bib, bowl, book, duckling, quack, night-night (LOVE it), car, go, no. And that last one... for now he is using it completely appropriately when I ask him a question, but hasn't started using it to rebel - I'll try to enjoy it while it lasts.

Our only hurdle in making this progression into boyhood is that we CANNOT get the child to drink milk, unless it's coming directly from me or sometimes a sip from one of our glasses. We've tried chocolate milk, soy milk, various milk concoctions. Reminds me of this post, oh so long ago when we were trying to get little Finn to take a bottle, which never happened. This makes the whole weaning thing a bit of a difficulty. I may have to just feed him cheese, yogurt and ice cream at every meal.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

The Overdue Update or: What We Did on Our Memorial Day Vacation

We made our regular trip to the Lehigh Valley to visit Jen's family for Memorial Day. We set out on Saturday, and Finn slept for most of the first half of the drive, but woke up around lunchtime. We thought that he might be close to a Cranky Freak-out, so we pulled off at the nearest rest stop to eat. Unfortunately, it happened to be a supremely weak rest stop, with only a Sbarro and a Nathan's Hot Dogs. (And probably a Starbucks; they all have a Starbucks, right?) This has caused me to take a vow to Never Eat at Sbarro Again, Unless Snowbound and Out of All Other Possible Options (and I'm keeping this vow too, unlike my I Will Never Watch Forrest Gump vow which I broke and now regret). It's fairly crappy pizza and certainly not worth the jacked-up Turnpike prices. Basically I dropped my iPhone fund on four cheese slices and a root beer.

The rest of the trip out was pretty uneventful, and we arrived to some really beautiful weather. I think that this was Finn's first warm weather visit since achieving bipedalism, and he appreciated having a large, honest-to-goodness country yard to run around in:

Actually, he looks like he's power walking. He'll be doing 20 laps around the mall in no time.


Meanwhile, Jen made an interesting discovery in the upstairs bathroom:




Some of the family was gathered for a strudel dinner (referred to as Strudel Fest '08 or Strudelpalooza). The main course menu included chicken & spinach with cheese, onion, and cabbage, which is better than you might think. For dessert there was apple, cherry, cheese, and apple & sour cream. Jen went up to change Finn and when she came down, she announced that there was a bat in the bathroom. I went up with her to investigate and sure enough there he was, roosting in window. He had apparently squeezed in through a slit in the screen. I thought that he looked a bit dry and said that he might be dead, but Jen wasn't so sure. That made Jen's youngest brother Jon, and Nate, one of the nephews, go check it out as well. They agreed with my assessment. However nobody was willing to open the window until Jen's father went up. He opened the window and the bat fell to the sill, confirming that he was either dead or at the very least, really tired.

The next day was very busy for Finn. In addition to running around all over the yard, he checked out his cousins' sliding board:


and went for a tractor ride with PopPop:



and Daddy, too:


and, um... danced?


I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that he's doing a move from the video for "The Right Stuff" by New Kids on the Block:




Check out the dude on the left (Joey?); replace him with Finn and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

We also had our picnic that day, with tons of great food, more desserts than you could hope to eat (I thought I was finished when I realized that I hadn't had any spice cake; with Finn's assistance I muscled through a large piece), and a growler of Guinness from Jen's brother Russ, a fellow beer lover. Russ has a kegerator, so he always has a growler of something yummy.

Finally, on Monday Jen had a shoot with niece Annie:

On our way back, we again stopped at a rest stop to eat, but this time it was the rebuilt stop at Sidling Hill. It was pretty swanky. Jen had a headache, so I went over to the convenience store area to get one of those single-dose packets of some sort of pain killer. Well, right next to that stuff was a surprisingly impressive selection of condoms. There were probably twice as many kinds of condoms as there were pain killers. I found this a bit odd; is there that much Turnpike lovin' going on out there? Am I missing out on something?

That's all for now. I didn't even get to everything, like Jen's dad switching to a Mac at nearly 70 years old, but I don't want to over do it on my first post (if I haven't already).