baby

Milestones

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Today is Evie’s 9 month “birthday” which I think is a significant milestone because it means she has now been out as long as she was in!  Speaking of milestones, our realtor called yesteday to remind us it was the 1 year anniversary of our closing on our condo.  I can’t believe that was a year ago, but on the other hand, it seems like it was a lot longer than that!  So much has happened since then.

Tomorrow we are planning to get our garden into shape, assuming the weather holds.  It is covered with grass and weeds, so we need to rip all of that up and loosen up all the dirt, and then plant some seeds.  We will buy some of the other things that require plants (tomatoes, green peppers) later.

Here is a physics based puzzle type game.  You have to draw shapes and stuff that are then affected by physics to move a ball to a flag.  It can get complicated where you make fixed mounting points and then hinges, etc.  It was interesting for a while but I didn’t get very far before I gave up.  Physics is hard! 😦

Finally, I will leave you with this.  You know how with Snakes on a Plane you knew everything there was to know about the movie based on he title?  Well, there is a movie scheduled to be released this year named Zombie Strippers!  (the exclamation point is part of the title) What more could you possibly need to know?

Putting down roots in the community

/ Shane / Leave a comment

We got our garden plot today!  We had completely give up hope and bought a bunch of pots and stuff to garden on our back porch, and now it looks like we won’t need to after all.  Sara got an email this morning that said, “Be at the garden at 3” so it is a good thing she checked her work email!  And now we have a patch of land to call our own.  We are mostly planning on growing tomatoes, green peppers, green onions and beans, but we are also considering corn, cucumbers and carrots.  Any other ideas?  We already planted some herbs on our porch such as parsley, basil and cilantro.  I think it will be more convenient to have them close.  This is assuming of course that we can get anything to grow!  I am also excited to meet our “gardening neighbors” on each side who both have really nice and obviously well kept plots.

And the best part about it was that I found a $20 bill in an abandoned lot on the way back!  It was super dirty (obviously had been there for a long time) but this was a $20!  I’m lucky to find a nickle normally!  So, if you add that $20 to growing our own food, this garden is really making us self sufficient!

As far as Evie goes, she seems to be picking up new skills every day.  I mentioned her crawling and pulling up to stand already.  She figured out how to go up stairs, so we had to install a gate at the bottom of the stairs in addition to the one at the top.  When we are reading books she likes to turn the pages.  Also sometimes she randomly has to flip back and look at the cover as if to say, “What was this book again?  This is a good one, I’m going to remember it!”  For some reason she randomly started shaking her head no, but I don’t think she knows what that means.  I don’t know where she picked that one up, probably at day care.  I bet they are saying “no” a lot.  I’d say the most amazing thing is that she has learned to raise her arms up in the air when we say, “How big is Evie?  Soooo big!”  She really gets a kick out of that.  Oh yeah, also, just today, she learned to feed herself a puff.  For some reason she previously knew that if you held out a puff she should eat it, but when she had it she just played with it.  Then today she just sort of made the connection.

Now if only she would start eating and / or sleeping…

Must be something in the water…

/ Shane / Leave a comment

So many babies!

Reed Owen

8lbs. 12 oz. and 21 inches long.

Congratulations Shelly, Scott and Ty!

City Babies and Brain Reprogramming

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Wow, hello allergies!  Rough couple of days.

Evie is crawling like a maniac now.  She can move a lot faster than you think and she has been giving us a preview of how difficult this next period is going to be.  She isn’t happy sitting still and she gets into stuff that you didn’t even know was there.  She can also go from lying down to sitting up no problem now.  The only problem she has is that she crawls over to something but then when she sits up she is really far away from whatever she was interested in.  She’s still working on that one.

I realized that in her 8 months of life she has never actually touched grass (sure is different growing up in the city!) so last weekend we took her over to the Midway.  She was NOT thrilled!  I thought she would be very interested since it would be a new experience, but she did not like touching the grass.  She tried to hold herself up on her hands and toes and then just froze so she would be touching the grass as little as possible.  She wouldn’t move or in any way let her legs come in contact with the ground.  When Sara tried to help her stand she just picked up her feet so they wouldn’t touch!  I think she would have liked it, but she was just shocked at how different it was.  At the end she was kind of running her fingers through the grass a little bit.  I gave her a flower and she wouldn’t let go of it for anything, but on the way home she broke the head off and then she was done with it.  Maybe next time it won’t be so alien and she can crawl around some.

Okay, here‘s an old link I’ve been saving since Jan. ’07.  Maybe you’ve already seen it.  Maybe you saw it so long ago its retro.  I had to try it out before posting it and then once I did I never got around to actually linking to it.  Supposedly you are can listen to this special sound which is supposed to adjust your brainwaves to wake you up.  I tried it with an open mind, but I don’t think it really works.  I felt maybe a little more awake at the end of it, but it was most likely due to a placebo effect and/or the fact that I might have felt more awake after 20 minutes even if I had done nothing.  But let me know if you think it works, maybe I’ll have to give it another try.

Congratulations, a little late

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Isaac Paul, born on Feb. 28th.  I know I’m a little late on that one, but that’s his fault not mine.

Anyway, sounds like everybody is doing okay and Isaac is living up to his initials, I PP.  (Again, that one is Reid’s fault, not mine)

So, Congratulations to Reid and Jaime (and Lillian too!)