Experiments in Life

This past month has been super-busy.  Between Ashley and I going to Nashville for our anniversary in mid-May, me working every weekend on cleaning up our yard, a work trip to Orlando last week, prepping for our trip to Gatlinburg for next week, two (count’em two) birthdays, and a toddler who has two speeds (Stop and Tornado), I cannot seem to get enough time to do things like post.  Hopefully having a bit of a break for a week will help things.

On the Emily front, everything seemed fine at her checkup on Wednesday.  She did not care for her shots one bit and she had to get a finger prick.  She kept playing with the bandage on her finger by squeezing it, looking up at us, and then squalling.  We would get her calmed down and then she would repeat.  Such is life with a child, I guess. Her daycare class has basically transitioned into a young toddler class.  They have taken away the cribs for the older children and they now take naps on cots.  Also, they eat their lunch and snacks at a little table instead of high-chairs.  She almost exclusively eats non-baby food now; however, she still is struggling with the cup — the daycare still winds up having to give her bottles during the day.

That is not everything that has happened in the time I have been silent, but it will have to be enough for now.  Will try to do better in the future.

Well, it had to happen. Emily has had her first boo-boo. Roughly three weeks ago, Emily decided to take her first steps without holding onto anything. She made it a whole three steps. By the next weekend, she had begun walking halfway across the room. Now, she can walk pretty much wherever she wants, so long as she is not too tired. That is where the boo-boo comes in. When Mama (Ashley) came home, Emily was so excited that she decided to skip her afternoon nap. Hours later, while trying to walk, Emily takes a tumble into the chair and obtained a nice little goose-egg for her effort. Luckily, she is not going to get pictures taken for another two or three weeks

Well, I know Easter was something like two (OK, three) weeks ago now. However, I finally got Easter pictures up! I do have video of Emily walking behind her walker, but I did not have the right cable to pull it off of the camera tonight. Hopefully I will make it over to Best Buy or something so I can get my cable and get video of my little sweetie pushing her walker. I understand what parents have told me in the past about children not really practicing anything. Saturday she pushed the walker for a few steps and today, she was just zooming with it. Hopefully I will get it up soon.

Well, it has been a wild couple of weeks. Between all three of us having a stomach bug, Emily and I having the flu, me being in San Diego and Ashley and Emily going to Columbus, there has not been a whole lot of time for the whole website thing.

However, I have had some time to take some new pictures (Internet Explorer-friendly link) of Emily. Above, you can see her expressing her displeasure to being put in an N. C. State onesie (Hi Randy!). We all know she was crying cause she wanted to be put in maroon and white. In the past few weeks, Emily has starting chewing on everything with her two partial teeth, crawling around the floor, and pulling up on everything and everyone that she can. I tried to get shots of all of that, but I was not able to get pictures of her crawling towards me — only away.

After a few months delay, I have finally gotten around to taking and posting some new photos. Yes, I know that I am a slacker, but I have been busy with the not sleeping. You see, Emily has decided that she does not need to sleep through the night any more. Sunday night, I spent the whole night going upstairs to try and get her to go back to sleep, trying to read my self tired again, then trying to fall back asleep. Repeat this twice and I slept somewhere around 3 non-consecutive hours Sunday night. Luckily, she slept better last night…

Update: If you are trying to get to the photos and cannot get it to work, rest assured, I know about it. You can got to the photoset on Flickr to see the photos.

There are no pictures in this post. If that is all you are looking for, skip this and come back later Ok, now that is out of the way. Some of you may or may not have noticed that our site was down for a day or so. Apparently, the server had some serious hard drive problems that required them to be replaced. Geof spent the better part of a day backing up and restoring the server to get everything back up and running — while still managing to work a day job! Geof, I just wanted to say that I appreciate everything you do to keep our site (and all of the other sites you host) up and running. I know that it can be a thankless job, so THANK YOU!

As promised, here are the rest of the pictures from Thanksgiving.

Although it is almost Christmas, I have finally gotten pictures up from Thanksgiving holiday. The rest will be coming soon…

So, when Ashley broached the idea of a Halloween costume for Emily, I was a little hesitant. My thoughts were, “She is so young, she will not remember anything we put her in, so why bother?” My next thought was, “She is so young, she will not remember anything we put her in. This is the perfect opportunity to dress her in something embarrassingly cute!” So, without further ado, I present our daughter, Yoda.

I mean, really, how often do you get to dress your daughter up as an 800 year old little green man?

Well, it has been a busy week, but I have finally gotten around to uploading pictures from Emily’s baptism at Wesley United Methodist Church on Sunday, October 7th, 2007. I also included a few pictures from my parents house after church. Notice her pretty little bracelet, courtesy of Rae’s Jewelry. She also had a pretty little necklace on, but you cannot really see for the gown.