Facts about Davis

It's amazing to watch Davis grow and develop. The most exciting part of it for me is seeing his personality emerge.  Here are just a few little known (or well known and recapitulated) facts about our guy:

• Must have a toy in his hand at all times while on the move, good if he has a toy while not on the move as well.
• Loves the "Itsy-Bitsy Spider".  Favorite part of the song is "down came the rain".  He starts wildly waving his hands around when we get to that part of the song.
• Loves music!  As soon as we sing, shake a bell or he hears a song, he starts to move around and dance, no matter what he's doing.  He likes shaking rattles and bells.  Someday, we hope to get him a drum.
  
• Favorite games: hide-and-seek and peek-a-boo.  Tonight, we hit a new level of peek-a-boo/hide-and-seek.  He found me under a blanket and then he covered me up again!
• Likes books and is very helpful at turning the pages.  Favorite books: "This is my dance" (from Kindermusik class) and "Brown Bear, Brown Bear".
• Does not like to nap and possibly miss anything that might be going on.
• Holds one piece of cereal in his left hand, while he eats all the others..until the very end and then he finally eats it.
• Favorite Toys: Whoosit, Dino, Jack-in-the-box, and Bruce the Brown Bear.  This may be replaced soon with cart of toys and Rody the horse.
  
• Favorite Cat: Domino
• Favorite syllables: da, la, ra, and ba.  Mommy is still waiting to hear Ma!
• Favorite foods: For this category it's more appropriate to list foods he has disliked since he's liked most foods.  Dislikes: split peas and those green beans and rice Mom made from scratch one time.
• He loves to shake his head back and forth.  He's been doing this for a long time and John and I have never figured out what he's doing, but Sarah at daycare has started putting words in his mouth when he does it "Oh no you didn't!!".
  

Winding down the weekend

We just wound down a wonderful weekend with Davis.  This morning, we went out to breakfast with friends then spent the rest of the day playing with Davis.  This evening, we put away most of his Christmas toys and just left out his blocks and cart.  Kristen and I built structures out of the blocks and Davis crawled between us and smashing the structures.  We finished the evening with Davis pushing his cart into the structures.  He had a lot of fun with the cart and the blocks.

Walking with the cart.  Notice the block in hand.  Davis always has a toy in his hand while traveling.

Making progress with the cart:

Cruising with the cart:

Getting ready to smash:

Success and a cheer from mom:

Christmas Photos

Ears and Doorknobs

Davis discovered two things tonight: ears and doorknobs. When I was putting Davis to bed tonight, he was exploring with his hands while we read a book before putting him down. While exploring he found my ear and couldn't be focused on anything else. For most of Good Night Moon, he played with my ear and face before I put him down in the crib. It was an interesting new twist on the night time routine.

After initially putting Davis down for bed, Kristen and I were both surprised to hear the doorknob in his room rattling. He has been pulling himself up in the crib for a while, but he has found that he can reach over the crib and grab the doorknob. He either associates the doorknob with us coming and going so, or it was just something he could reach, but either way it was quite a surprise to us. We'll be getting a door knob lock soon.

At last, a phone

Last Sunday morning, we were greeted with a complete failure of our phone and internet, a week later, and we have now switched providers and have a phone and internet! (Knock on wood, after all, it's only been 12 hours). Ironically, or at least I think it's ironic, but now I'm not sure after Alanis Morisette if I understand irony truly, we had to dial 9-1-1. At some point in John's ventures with the previous phone/internet company who was telling him at the time it would be three days before they could come out to look at it, at any point in a 13 hour time frame, John asked "Are you kidding, but what will I do if I have to dial 9-1-1, I don't have a phone??" From only hearing his side of the conversation, I had to fill in, in my head, with "How are you talking to me now?" Anyway, tonight, while we were enjoying root vegetable soup and watching Davis eat his steamed parsnips and squash, I saw flames from across the street. It was hard to tell, but it seemed like there was a fire in the house a few rows in on the street perpindicular to ours, on the back porch. We could both tell it seemed a little more like a B-B-Q and less like a house on fire, but I didn't want to take any chances, so I called it in. Turns out, it's illegal, so regardless of the fact that it did indeed turn out to be a B-B-Q (which John found out by going over ther), on the back porch of the second story, they had to send a truck out anyway. I'm sure we have one pissed-off neighbor, but I feel better knowing that if it had been a fire, we could have saved their house, and anyone inside it. At least now, that guy won't be bbq'ing at night.

We've had a very relaxing weekend, including some monster naps from Davis! Davis is continuing to amaze us daily. Today, he and Dad, walked across the living room. Also, while I was singing the 'itsy bitsy spider' to Davis he started to make the movements with his hand of a spider going up the water spout, at both the beginning and end! It was amazing! Both of his top teeth have broken through, for a total of four teeth, and we think some better sleep at night.

I think we are all looking forward to our first Chirstmas together as a family. John and I are now talking about what we want our tradition to be, and I think we each have a hard time imagining something different than what we had growing up. I will be taking Wednesday afternoon off and Thursday off with Davis. My paper is finally coming to it's final draft, so I can sit back and relax the holiday for a short bit, before I need to get moving on another piece of work that is due for conference abstract in mid-January.

Today, we recieved about 8" of snow. John and I took turns shoveling, and with our downstairs neighbor (yay!). It was a reward to shovel, it was a first since before I was pregnant. With our working internet, I plan to work from home tomorrow and go cross country skiing at lunch, near Mystic River, just a couple of blocks from our door.

Holiday Party / Weekend

Yesterday, Kristen and Davis came out to my office for our Christmas / Winter family office party. My boss donned a Santa Suit and all the kids had pictures taken with Santa. I haven't got copies of those photos yet, but I snapped a couple. Davis did well with Santa as long as I was right there with him.

This morning, I quickly went grocery shopping and picked up some ice melt for the stairs and walk way, then we went out to breakfast with Megan. The forecast for tonight and tomorrow is for somewhere between 7 to 15 inches of snow, so after breakfast I filled up the car with gas and finally threw the winter supplies in the car.

After Davis had a nap, we played with our studio lighting and took a few shots of Davis. We screwed up the hat in the first batch, but we got a few decent shots.

Tonight we went out to dinner and are going to watch a movie and wait for the snow. Tomorrow will be a day of shoveling and staying in.

There are more new photos in our picasa albums.

Winter has arrived

Despite our first snow coming two months ago, it has not felt like late fall or winter until this week. It was 15 degrees when I took Davis to daycare this morning and the forecast for tomorrow is for a high of 25 and low of 15. If the 5-day forecast holds, we'll have below freezing high temperatures for almost a week. Tomorrow is our office holiday party, so I'll be riding to work and Kristen will drive up later with Davis and join us.

I realize Boston isn't as cold as other places in the country, but it is plenty cold for me.

We don't have a lot of plans this weekend. We'll probably:

• Go out to breakfast on Saturday
• Head to a local book store's story time after breakfast
• Play with taking portraits of Davis
• Get dinner out one day
• Try to stay warm
• Get our new internet and phone service hooked up

Davis Updates

Davis continues to develop before our eyes. He:

• Is getting better and better at standing. He has starting letting go of whatever he is holding onto sometimes.
• Can pull himself along the couch or other things when motivated by a toy out of reach.
• Is turning pages of books.
• Recognizes certain books and pages.
• Apes certain things we do such as shaking our heads back and forth.
• Is no longer commando crawling.
• Now has four teeth.
• Is eating lots of new foods. We've introduced teething biskets and some other foods recently.

I'm sure there are lots of other things that I'm either forgetting or we are missing.

We've had a few more relaxed nights than usual this week and have some new pictures of Davis. There are more on picasa.

Cat Photos

I took these the other day after finishing up taking portraits. I was playing around with using our telephoto with the flash. The results weren't great, but they weren't bad.

Its been a while since Domino and Lilly have been featured in the blog, so here you go:

Internet and phone woes

If any of you have tried to contact us in the last week, you might have noticed that our phone has not been working. Starting on Sunday, our internet cable and digital phone have been very un-reliable. We lost connection at about 9:00 am on Sunday, got it back at 10:45am on Monday, lost it at 4:30 pm and have had hit or miss connectivity since then. This normally wouldn't be such a thorn in our sides, but losing our phone line on Kristen's birthday put us both in a very sour mood.

I took Monday off of work to wait for a technician from RCN, but he was unable to solve the problem (it was working when he showed up). Since then, I waged a battle with RCN technical support in the Philippines to a) figure out what changed with our setup and b) get them to fix it. However, I lost the battle (the best the could offer me was a 13 hour window on Saturday where they might show up) but won the war.

We are switching to Version FIOS on Sunday which will be 1) cheaper and 2) faster. The only downside is that our home phone number will be changing. Please let us know if you need the new number.

Portraits

This last weekend, Kristen and I spent a few hours each day playing with our home lighting system for portrait photography. We are still working on getting the lighting right to co-incide with a good mood from Davis, but I feel like we are making progress. Our ultimate goal is to be able to take the same (or near the same) quality photo you could get from a photography studio. We're learning a lot about photography and portrait photography and are having fun with it. However, it does tend to turn one room in our house into a disaster for a day or two.

Below are a few of the portrait photos from the weekend. More are available on Picasa.