Christmas Time is Near

Earlier this month, in much the same manner as last year, we took LG to G-Boys Garden & Christmas center to visit Santa. Every year, the good people of G-Boys build an animatronic Christmas village-y thing. It's fun, in a slapdash, trademark-infringing kind of way. What am I talking about?

Behold!

 Yes. One significant scene in this Christmas village is a recreation of a McDonald's drive-thru staffed by a mouse. No. I have no idea why.

 And then, of course, we have non-licensed Winnie the Pooh and Rabbit.

Finally, we have Batman. Or rather, a mannequin in a Batman halloween costume circa 1995. What does any of this have to do with Christmas? Well, we go see it in December. I guess that's close enough.

At the end of all these shenanigans, you get to meet and have your picture taken with Santa Claus.

Things that worked in our favor this year:

1. LG is way cuter this year than last year. If you recall, she was kind of a lump.
2. Cute outfit. We had a tough time finding an outfit we liked this year, but in the end, I'm proud of it.
3. This year's Santa was a Real Bearded Santa.

Things working against us.

1. LG has been very hesitant about meeting strangers of late. And the bearded fellow with the bright red suit? Very strange.
2. The photographer was dead set on getting a picture of LG's happy face, and WOULD NOT start snapping until we got her smiling. It lent itself to more hysterics, rather than less. Eventually we got him to take a picture while she wasn't wailing. The picture below is the result of that compromise.
3. Four hours later, we realized LG had a fever, so the earlier fussiness could also be blamed on that.

Without further ado, here's the Santa picture we managed to get.

 

Sure, it's the whole family, which was not our original intention, but I like it.

Makes me laugh every time I see her little face.

Paternity Leave: And then we came to the end

Today is my final day of paternity leave. Technically, it should've ended around LG's first birthday, because FMLA only covers that sort of thing for 12 months after a life-changing event. But for one reason or another, I had to go to work on a few paternity days over the past year, and so I worked it out with my boss that I'd take those extra days after my term was officially done. Frankly, since I didn't start taking the days until LG was three months old, I don't feel at all bad about stretching it out. I only wish we could make it last longer.

It's a cliche, but a lot has changed in the last 10 months. To be honest, when I first started taking these days off with LG by myself, I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing. Sure, I had watched her on my own for a few hours here and there while Hollie worked part of a weekend, or went out the occasional evening. But by and large, it hadn't just been me and the baby for a whole day, 1-2 days a week.

It wasn't as though I was worried about it, per se, but it's fair to say that you don't feel like a parent--I mean, really, like a parent--until you've taken care of your kid from the moment they wake up in the morning until you lay them down for the night. Naps, feedings, just doing stuff all day long, all while trying to keep after the house, and feed yourself from time to time. It's big. To all those out there doing this every day, I raise a glass in salute.*

* By no means does my experience, by the way, compare to Hollie's. She did it for three months, during the hardest part, and suffered from pneumonia for the bulk of that time.

However I felt at the beginning, whatever trepidation I may have had then, I'm comfortable now. I think I do most of the things I'm supposed to do. I watch her, but I don't hover. I protect her, but I don't live in constant fear of the unknown. We play, but I let her choose how (most of the time. I can only play "take everything out of the toybox" so many times in one day).

When I started this, she had no teeth. Now she has nine. Then, she couldn't talk. Now, she can say "Dada" when she feels like it, has a litany of animals noises at her disposal, and will proudly point out every shoe in the house. She certainly couldn't walk then; I'm not even sure she could push herself up on her arms. Now, in bare feet, socks or shoes, she runs.

When I started this, she barely smiled, and I'm pretty sure it was just mimicry most of the time. Now, when she smiles, I know she's happy. I know I am.

III IIII II IIII I IIII IIIII II (Translated from sparrow, "Happy Halloween!")

Been a bit busy around but these parts of late, but that doesn't mean we haven't been celebrating the season. As I think I made clear last year, I'm a huge fan of Halloween, and having a kid means I get to celebrate that much more.

We got the outdoor decorations up over the course of a few days, and LG's been enamored of them this year, now that she's actually big enough to investigate on her own.


As big as she's gotten, it's kind of funny to me that these things are still bigger than her. I suppose it won't be too long until the reverse is true.

As noted last year, we ran through several ideas before we came up with the Tribble for LG's Halloween costume. It was more or less my idea, so this year, Hollie got to pick. I'm pretty sure we've only got maybe one more year before LG starts picking her own costumes, so we're trying to make the most of it. Next year's effort may have to be collaborative. I'm thinking maybe a family costume, since we'll probably take her trick-or-treating. Any ideas?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I said, Hollie picked this year's costume (and my mom put it together), and if you know Hollie at all, then the costume should be pretty easy to guess.

 
Come on, you can do it!

Yellow comb... a fan tail....

Got it?

Alright, here's a big hint.

Yes, that is a beagle. Although I'm betting there's not a biscuit in the world that would've gotten him to perch on that house naturally.

If you notice that the costume looks a little similar to last year's, it's because the body is basically the same as the Tribble. It turns out that a lot of baby costumes are just big ol' fat suits. Who knew?

Also, I seem to have started a Halloween tradition of awkwardly Photoshopped costume pictures. I am okay with this. And since the cartoon picture above made Hollie laugh out loud when she saw it, I think I'll keep it up!

Run and Squeak and Squawk with the Animals

I'll be honest. After the heady milestone monitoring days of the first year of LG's life, I'm a little burnt out on worrying about whether she's sitting/crawling/walking/talking according to a particular schedule. Now, this may sound like the kind of thing that someone whose child isn't meeting those milestones might say. But truth be told, I'm at the point where I don't really think about it much anymore.

Instead, I find myself thinking the following: Is she struggling with anything day-to-day? Does she learn something new every week? Is she having fun?

As long as I have a satisfactory answer to those questions (and the doctor doesn't tell me to worry about something), I'm just going to go with the flow.

And the flow over the last few weeks has been all about animal noises. It probably started some time close to when we visited the zoo and she walked through the reptile house going "HssssssHssssss." A day or so latter, Hollie was driving her somewhere, singing Old MacDonald, and when she got to ducks, LG started shouting "kack kack kack" (give her a break! 'Q's are hard.)

Since then, her animal vocabulary has grown daily. Will she say "doggy"? Nope. But she'll say "uf uf uf" when you mention dogs. Bring out her favorite owl, and all you'll hear for the next five minutes is "hooooooohoooooo."

These Melissa & Doug puzzles may have helped somewhat, although, to be perfectly honest, most of the animals sound like they're talking over a bad drive-thru speaker.

 

Despite that, she will "moo," occasionally "meow," and very proudly and loudly "BAAAAA!" whenever she sees a sheep. Seriously, a couple of her books have sheep in them, and she'll stop you from reading, grab the book and shout "BAAAA!" You just have to wait until she's done.

And if she doesn't know the sound it makes, it quacks.

She loves the monkey noise, which sounds a lot like an owl, but much gruffer. And she's pretty good at the elephant, pressing her lips close together and blowing like a trumpet.

Excuse the messy shirt. I just had pasta with red sauce.

I really wish I could get some video of this, but I've got to be sneaky. As soon as she sees the camera, she becomes single-mindedly focused on running away with it, and she usually wins.

Belated 12 Months: State of the Baby

Hollie took LG to the doctor for her one-year checkup almost two weeks ago. It was a bit of a rough week, since it was also the first time LG has gotten sick. We've gotten super lucky on that front, but that doesn't mean dealing with everything that comes with a sick child is any fun, regardless of how infrequently it's happened.

So she weighed in at 19 lbs., 10 oz., only 9 oz. more than her 9-month visit. However, I blame the small gain on the fact the aforementioned sickness. Four days of being sick will drop your weight no matter how much Pedialyte you drink. If I had to guess, I'd say her weight should've been closer to 20 lbs. Something like 19 lbs., 15 oz.

Her height (which we can officially call it, since she spends more time upright than prone) came in at 29 3/4 inches, although, again I think that was a little off. Every time I watch the nurses measure her, they just don't get the yardstick in the right position. I'm pretty sure she's over 30 inches.

In any case, aside from the stomach bug she was dealing with (which had almost run its course by the time she went to the doctor), she was just fine for a one-year old.

As for the recovering sicky, there are two things worth noting.

Thing the first: LG isn't a very snuggly kid. She likes to move around. She never stops moving around. When you get a hug, it's a quick squeeze, then she's off to the next thing. But when she got sick, all she wanted to do was sit quietly and be held. Other symptoms (gross, gross symptoms) aside, that's how we knew she really wasn't feeling well.

This was actually a few days after the sickness had passed, and she still just wanted to be held from time to time.

Which leads me to Thing the second: Since she's been sick, she's been super needy. She doesn't like it when we leave the room she's in, even for just a few seconds. She cries a bit more before it's time for bed, like she doesn't want to be alone. It's like she's constantly afraid we're not coming back. I know it's silly to psychoanalyze a 12-month-old kid (even if I were qualified to do so), but it seems to me that being sick finally made her feel a little vulnerable. Even now that she's feeling better, she still feels a bit of that vulnerability, and she wants us nearby all the time. It's the sort of thing that breaks your heart a little.

That said, I'm pretty sure it's just a phase (I hope so, anyway), and we'll get through it like anything else. In the mean time, the season agrees with her. She looks adorable in Halloween outfits, and as it turns out, she really, really likes pumpkins.

12 months: State of the Daddy

I have to admit it. I didn't think I'd make it this far with the blog. It's been a year and five months since I started, and a year and eight days since LG was born. Neither of these are terribly auspicious anniversaries, although if I could go back in time and write this on LG's birthday, it might seem more important. In my defense, I was enjoying time at the beach with LG and Hollie, so ya'll are lucky you got the photo retrospective I already had planned for that day.

But I'm still here, still plugging away, some 70 posts later. What have I learned in that time? What have the intertwined worlds of fatherhood and blogging taught me since I first put text to page and dared claim I was capable of producing something worth reading?

Well, sit back and get ready, cuz I'm about to tell you.

1. It's much easier to write a blog post if you let the pictures do the hard work.
Okay, so I've been a bit lazy of late. But I have two excuses, one of which is slightly better than the other. First, it turns out that being a dad takes a lot of time, and blogging often doesn't make it all the way to the top of the to do list. I mean, I've got to watch Doctor Who some time! And when blogging does creep to the top of the pile, I take the a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words route. By that logic, the post from her birthday was something like 13,000 words. That, my friends, is value.

Laziness aside, my second excuse is a good one. Her pictures are so darn cute! And you don't even get to see all of them! I'd like to tell you that I only post the most super stupendous pictures. But frankly, almost all of her pictures are winners, and every one you don't see is fantastic.

2. I still love cooking.
It's happened. We're on the tail end of baby food. This morning, I doled out the frozen mushed food for the next few days, and I realized there wasn't much left in the freezer. A few weeks ago, we made the conscious decision to switch LG over to full-time solid food. She already eats whatever is on our plates, in addition to her gourmet, organic, pre-portioned, daddy-made baby food melange. We just decided to stop making the mushy stuff.

So as space in the freezer has opened up, I've starting cooking real food, not just mushy stuff. In the freezer right now I've got corn, pepper and acorn squash stew, creamed corn and spinach (alright, so some stuff is still kind of mushy), chicken stock, apple sauce, calico beans, chili and perogies. And today I've turned half a case of tomatoes into a big pot of tomato sauce. It's never not fun. I just wish I had more time to do it.

3. The geekiness has drifted somewhat.
Don't get me wrong; I'm still a dork. But one of the things that happens when you find yourself crunched for time is that some things get left behind. I've probably played video games six times in the past year. Not counting the stuff on my iPhone, at least. My comics reading is down. (Heck, my reading is down across the board. I just finished a novel last night, and I think it might be only the second or third since LG was born.) Still loving Doctor Who, and I've watched the entire run of Enterprise on Netflix (shut up. it's better than you remember. just skip past the theme song), as well as a bunch of choice TNG episodes. I haven't kept up with any of my favorite bands, save for the new Fountains of Wayne record (it's great, BTW). What I'm saying is, it's hard out there for a geekdad.

Lately, I'm mostly just a dad. But I'm a lucky one.
I take it back. Huge, gargantuan geek.

A Very Merry Second 1st Birthday

For LG's second 1st birthday, we stayed home. But we did it up right, with decorations, balloons, and a very special cake.
The cake was a collaborative effort between Hollie and me. She came up with the concept, I baked it, and we tag teamed decorating duties.

LG seemed to like it.
Before she got herself caked in cake, she showed off the present-unwrapping skills she mastered the week before. This kid is going to be a pro by the time Christmas rolls around.
Among her presents: her first baby doll, which she bonded with right off the bat.
The best part about the doll, however, was that it lead to my favorite picture of the whole celebration. Hollie calls this picture "Hey, Dad! Go long!"
That's my girl, hamming it up for the camera!

And I close with this, just because it makes me happy.

A Year in Review: The Pictures

Little G turns one year old today. Since we're at the beach, and I don't have the wherewithal to compose a proper rumination on the past year, I thought I'd share a year's worth of pictures in one post. For those of you who have seen Hollie or me with a camera sometime in the past year, do not be afraid. I'm not going to post all 5,024 pictures we've kept. (That doesn't include the number we've deleted. Hurray for digital cameras!)

For those of you who weren't freaked out by the above statement, leaving this blog never to return, I now present: Solving for G's First Year in Pictures (with commentary as needed)

Just to keep things honest, each of these photos was taken on or near the 12th of each month. Believe it or not, even with as many pictures as we've taken, we didn't always manage to take one on the 12th.

This is actually day two of LG's life, as I couldn't find any from day one with her eyes open.

Somehow, she got more wrinkly in the first month.
I can honestly say I'm thrilled that with the summer months, we haven't needed socks. These socks were cute, but they never stayed on, especially these blue ones.
Hey everybody! It's Christmas time, and I smile now! Sort of.
Sometime around January, tummy time actually happened with some regularity because she stopped yelling when we put her on her belly. Oddly, it doesn't seem to have impacted her development, since she started walking two weeks before her first birthday.Nobody puts baby in the corner (of the couch). Except we did. All the time.And she's at the six month mark! And she grabs her feet! All the time!Sometime around seven months she started using pacifiers. Until she actually went to sleep.
By month eight, her sense of balance was pretty good. As was her sense of looking like an organ grinder's monkey.
And by month nine, she had at least four teeth. The fifth one might've popped through at this point, too.
In month 10, she attended her first wedding. And she made it all about her. Hey, Uncle Mark and Aunt Jac! Thanks for a sweet party, guys!
In month 11, she had an idea. Flowers on her head are cute.And on the morning of her first birthday, she watched dogs and delivery trucks from a balcony in Ocean City, NJ. It made her pensive, perhaps nostalgic for an earlier time when things were simpler, and she didn't have to worry about standing, or walking, or doing stuff. But she looked back on her first year, and decided it was good.

Bonus vacation boardwalkin' picture!

Let the Festivities Begin!

I'm often guilty of burying the lead, so in a joint effort to make the point of this post clear and make the lead picture (that shows up on Facebook) a doozy, this is a post about first birthday celebrations.
Little G isn't quite one year old, but we're close. Schedules being what they are, we visited my parents in Hanover over the weekend and celebrated LG's birthday. It's really just the first 1st birthday celebration. First of at least three, I think.

As first 1st celebrations go, this was pretty good. You can't tell from the picture above, but LG was looking particularly classy.
She spent a good portion of the weekend standing on her own, and even took a few steps every now and again, just to make sure everyone was good and impressed with her.

Being new to birthdays, LG had plenty of things to figure out. She had gotten presents last Christmas, but her dexterity left a little to be desired at the time. She wasn't sure what to do with the wrapped presents at first, since we generally don't approve when she just starts ripping things. But once she realized we were egging her on rather than stopping her, she got into it.
Heck, she even liked opening clothes! Although she did go straight for the tissue paper once she had the boxes open.
But the main event at any 1st birthday party is the cake. We've seen the kind of mess she can make when someone else is feeding her, so we were all very curious as to how much of a mess she'd make when left to her own devices. The story is often told how I pasted my eyes shut with icing on my 1st birthday. There's even 8mm film of the whole event. (And that sentence made me feel way older than anything I've posted to this blog so far.)

As with the unwrapping of gifts, she was a little timid at first. I think she was waiting for someone to stop her.
But as you can see at the top of the post, that didn't last long.
Luckily, she had some help with cleanup.
Of course, that effort was mostly focused on the chair, so we had to make a beeline for the bathtub. Hollie may have gotten a little messy on the way.
All in all, first 1st birthday went well. This can only mean more present pandemonium and cake carnage for second 1st birthday. I look forward to sharing it with you.

Bonus: Here's some video of the cake gorging. It's kind of awesome, but mostly to Hollie and me.

In which animals are pointed at, and mouths hang agape

As luck would have it, Hollie and I both had off work yesterday. It's a rare occurrence these days, so we try to take advantage of it any way we can. The weather was nice, and LG has been in good spirits, sleeping well, eating whatever is in front of her, so we decided to make Thursday our first family trip to the Philadelphia Zoo.

I have to say, it was a great day. LG didn't smile too much, but that's probably because she spent of the bulk of her time staring at animals with a face that seemed to say, "What on earth is that thing?" That and the fact that she was interested enough in what was going on to go almost five hours without a nap tells me that she had a pretty good time.

Among other things, we were particularly excited for her to see a polar bear, since she has a counting book with a polar bear on the cover that she will not put down. So we went to the polar bear exhibit pretty early on.

It took her a few minutes to see the polar bear laying at the back of the exhibit, mostly because she spent her time pointing at the little girl just out of frame who was making faces against the glass.

But when we did see the polar bear...
"Guys, guys, guys! I saw a polar bear! And it yawned at me!!!!"

Here, she's either pointing at a giraffe, or a rhino's butt. She was equally intrigued by both.
Shortly thereafter, we hit the highlight of the trip, if only because of how close LG got to the animals. The McNeil Avian Center, which opened not that long ago, has a bunch of birds that you can practically touch.
Seriously. She is wicked close to that buff crested bustard (shut your mouth!). What? I'm just talkin' bout bustards!

Then she kept trying to chase after these victoria crowned pigeons.
They're behind a small fence here, but they wandered out onto the trail in the middle of the habitat, and she really wanted to get after them.

I didn't get any good pictures of her and the cats at Big Cat Falls, but Hollie snapped a nice one of LG and me underneath the titular falls.
Is it just me, or does the name Big Cat Falls not evoke a waterfall? Every time I say it, I picture a lion stumbling across the savannah, tripping over a scraggly downed tree, all scored to some goofy music and a laugh track a la America's Funniest Home Videos.

Her next up-close-and-personal encounter was with a squirrel monkey at the primate house.
This little guy was eating apples out of that popcorn tub. I think LG wanted one. (An apple, not a squirrel monkey.)

I don't know if LG wanted this gorilla to do something other than pick its nose and burp, but if that's the sort of thing she was interested it, she wasn't disappointed.
One of the last places we hit was the reptile house. I don't know if she picked this up somewhere else, or if Hollie just taught it to her, but LG made hissing noises the entire time we were in there. It started off with snakes, but by the time we were done, she had hissed at turtles, frogs, and mudpuppies, too.
All in all, we had a great time, and I think she did, too.
Although I still don't know what kind of primate this is supposed to be.

For more pictures of our trip to the zoo, including a picture of me being accosted by a puppet, check out the album on my facebook page.