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.

Who's on First?

When's the last time you did something for the first time? I'll give you a minute.

Got something? It's tough to call that sort of thing to mind. I'm having a hard time doing it myself. It was probably some food I'd eaten for the first time. I had ossobucco for the first time a month or two back. But I'm sure there's been something else since then.

There were important firsts back in the day. First day of school, first kiss, first car. And I bet you can remember most of those things. I certainly can. But after you've lived a while, your firsts stop seeming important.

But when you're 11 and a half months old, all the firsts seem significant. There are new firsts practically every day. To be honest, there have been so many firsts for LG, I've probably let a few go past unremarked upon.

But in the spirit of first, her are a few firsts LG has had over the past week.

First Bacon
Two things. No, we didn't give her a piece that big. And no, there's no decent picture of her eating it herself. But she did, and she loved it. Though to be fair, she eats everything. Speaking of which...

First Spaghetti

I'm going to warn you ahead of time. These next few pictures are not for those with weak stomachs. You've heard someone say, "I'm so hungry, I could murder a cheeseburger and fries"? Well, that's what LG looks like she did to this pasta. It's a little gross.
Took a while to get that shot of spaghetti sticking out of her mouth. I'm pretty proud of that.
She was looking fairly pleased with herself as well. And then the bib came off.
I can't remember whether those red chunks are tomato or watermelon. It all got a bit fuzzy by the end. Pasta flying one direction, sauce flying the other. It was chaos.

First Booboo
I'll own up to it. This is my fault. On Monday, I was pushing her in her swing outside (probably higher than I ought to) when out of nowhere, a bird pooped on me. I was so startled that I stopped paying attention to LG for a second or two. Just long enough for the swing to twist slightly and scrape her leg against the tree. Ouch! She didn't cry for very long afterward; she rarely does when she hurts herself. But man did she sleep poorly that night. Up every 2 hours or so. Unpleasant.

First Toybox
We changed the layout of the living room again, and in the process we got LG a toybox for her stuff. As you'd expect, she spends most of her time taking things out of it. But we're working on the concept of putting things away. It's a slow process.

But one day, maybe I'll have a post about the first time she cleaned up her own mess.

In Which Bugs are Consumed

Sometime last week my mom told me that at some point, LG will probably eat dog food. Nothing to be done about it; it won't hurt her. But it will likely happen. I didn't disagree.

That brings us to last Sunday, when LG ate a bug... that I fed to her... on purpose.

Last weekend was Bug Fest at the Academy of Natural Sciences, where Hollie works. I took LG in to check out the exhibits and visit Hollie. I did not go with the intention of feeding her bugs, but, you know, an opportunity presented itself.

Lest you think I swiped a random arthropod from a display table and popped it in her mouth, this was at the end of a bug cooking demo. We missed the portion of the program where the cook prepared these little guys, but I didn't want to pass up the chance to try the extras.
Those are fried crickets, sprinkled with spices, which, if I had to guess, included salt, chili powder, and cayenne. I hesitated a second or two before letting LG eat these, but it was more because of the spicy hotness than the fact that these were bugs.

As it turned out, LG loved 'em. This is not surprising, however. As I've mentioned before, she'll eat almost anything. And for that, I am glad.

I know it may change. I know there's a high degree of likelihood that at some point in the next six months, she'll refuse to eat anything except for hot dogs and white bread. But while it lasts, she'll get whatever we eat, and then some.

In the last two weeks, she's had fish, indian food, (which included tamarind, water chestnuts and baby corn, among other things), Five Guys french fries (fried in peanut oil), and any one of numerous things she's found on the floor that I'm not fast enough to grab out of her mouth.

I know we're lucky that she doesn't have any food allergies, so I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster (with tomato sauce, which she also eats) for that.