Dessert

After every meal we soak a washcloth with warm water and clean Evan's face off - even though he has a very well developed appreciation for food (i.e. he eats like a pig) he isn't averse to saving part of a meal on his lips and cheeks for later. Sometimes he takes to this quite well and sometimes he pitches a fit about having his face wiped off, but regardless of which response he chooses he usually ends up grabbing the washcloth and sucking on it for a bit. Think of it as his dessert, or if the washcloth is particularly wet his after dinner drink.

Anyway, here's a cute picture of this we got when we went out to lunch today:

On Off

As a child of the 21st century Evan is very concerned with the health of the planet, and he figures one way he can help out even at his young age is by conserving energy. At least I assume that's what he's thinking when he tries to turn off the lights whenever you carry him out of a room, which is what he's been doing for the last month or so. I mean, it's not like flipping a light switch is fun or anything, right?

Anyway, it occurred to me this weekend that Evan could turn the lights off, but he didn't know how to turn them on yet. Conserving energy is great and all, but there are times when it really helps to have a light on to see what you're doing (at night, for instance). I decided that the time had come to lead Evan out of the dark and let him join the rest of the bidirectional switch-flipping world (sorry, but "out of the dark" was the best pun I could come up with).

Fortunately Evan is pretty much a sponge at this point in his life, and after a short demonstration of the basic principle at hand he was Oning and Offing with the best of them:

Also fortunately it's going to be a while before he can reach the switches on his own.

Dog Training

Evan has been able to roll over for a long time now, although he has never done it very consistently. He's recently made two leaps forward in his rolling ability:

1. He can flip from front to back or back to front in either direction at will (actually that ability isn't so new, but the inclination to do it seems to be); and
2. He can do it on command:
   

Roll Over is also one of the dog's tricks (one of the more difficult ones to teach her, actually), so maybe Evan just wants to prove that he can be just as much fun at parties as she is.

Playing Peekaboo

Evan has enjoyed the game of peekaboo for quite some time now, but always in a very passive sense. If he was looking at you and you walked away he would wait for you to poke your head around the corner and say "Peekaboo!" and he would laugh, but in actuality you're the one playing peekaboo and he's just watching. For the first time today Evan really played peekaboo. Let me explain what I mean....

Every morning I go and get Evan up around 7:00, and the first thing I do is take him out of his crib (I went over that a few weeks ago) and change his diaper. Over the last few months he has gotten more squirmy on his changing table, so it's a constant challenge to find things to keep him occupied while you're doing what needs to be done. If there is a cloth diaper on the table (which there often is - we use them as rags instead of diapers and call them his towels, but he uses them as security blankets more than anything else and has trouble sleeping without one or two in his crib) I often play a little peekaboo with him before getting down to business. I'm not actually sure it makes him any less likely to try and roll over and grab the baby wipes or diaper cream, but it almost always makes him laugh, and even though Evan has a fairly rough laugh for a baby it's still the best sound in the history of the world.

So anyway, this morning was one of those times when there was a cloth diaper on the changing table, so I threw it over his face just after I laid him down. Normally Evan grabs the diaper as soon as he can and pulls it off so he can see you and then smiles real big when you say "Peekaboo!" Today, though, he didn't react right away. He just lay there with the towel over his face, so I started in on the whole "Where's Evan?" routine (a critical part of the peekaboo process). After 5 seconds or so he pulled down the diaper to reveal a big smile - he had been hiding from me! I said "There he is!" and we laughed a bit, and then he pulled the towel back over his face and lay still again. He waited several more seconds, and several more calls of "Where's Evan?", before pulling the towel back down and laughing. We repeated that five or six times in total before I decided that I should actually get back to changing his diaper at some point.

Evan is at a stage where he's learning to do something new practically every other day, and it's so much fun to watch him grow and help him along.

That's Not a Jumparoo

Other than his initial trepidation when they first arrived Evan has really enjoyed having his grandparents around. He's been having a great time making faces with Grandpa and exchanging shrieks with Grandma:

As you can also see from this video, now that Evan has experienced the magic and power of the Jumparoo he's figuring out how to turn several of his toys into makeshift Jumparoos.

Meg & Rob Visit

I'm not sure why, but we never seem to take any pictures of new people the first time they visit. To make it into this blog you've evidently got to be a repeat performer (that's not a de jure rule, but it sure seems to be a de facto standard). I bring this up because Meg and her boyfriend Rob came down from Sacramento for dinner today, and we remembered to capture the occasion on film this time... er, make that SD card:

Such a glamorous setting, and wonderful lighting to boot! And I blame Evan for the pile of shredded napkin on the plate in front of me -- he's got a thing for ripping paper.

Anyway, we all had fun, although Meg and Rob had to drive back home that night. I think a 2-hour drive each way is a bit much for dinner, but such is the power of the Prodigal Grandparents (or really the Prodigal Parents in this context).

Potluck

As I mentioned in passing in a previous post, we had a potluck for Jim & Sheilagh at our house while they were here so they could see all their Bay Area family and friends at one time. You'll have to take my word for it that we had 30 or so people over for the afternoon and everyone had a great time, because all the pictures I chose to include are of just our little family. They also all revolve around Evan's new push car for some reason... have I mentioned that he likes it a lot?



Thanks to Kristen Jessie for taking these pictures... as is our normal idiom, we didn't take our camera out once during the whole party. I think you'll agree Kristen got some great shots, though.

New Car

You've seen Evan in his new car before, but have you ever seen him proudly standing next to it? I don't think so! Until now, that is:

Not only does Evan love riding around in his car, he also likes pulling up and standing next to it. It's great for minutes of fun!

The Prodigal Grandparents

Other than the occasional video chat on Skype we haven't seen Steph's parents since they retired in October and sailed away to the Mexican Riviera... literally. They were back in the country for a month to take care of some tax return and visa issues, though, and they stayed with us for almost a week of their whirlwind trip around California. OK, now that they're retired they don't really do anything at a whirlwind pace, but they were staying four or five different places and hitting all the major metropolitan areas of the state so it's not such an inappropriate description.

Evan was a little taken aback when Jim, Sheilagh and Megan first arrived (right in the middle of his lunch, no less!), but he quickly decided they weren't really that scary after all. Here he is with Sheilagh, investigating her chunky necklace (Steph doesn't wear necklaces very often, so this was a rare treat):

Most of the time his grandparents were here Evan stuck to his normal routine (pretty much just playing, eating, and sleeping), he just had some new playmates. He also got to host his first potluck BBQ (more about that in another post soon) and go to the Strictly Sail boat show in Oakland (anyone want to guess whose idea that was?) - all told a pretty exciting week, although I dare say it was over too quickly.

Click Talker

Over the past few weeks Evan has started to really mimic us at times. He's still not extremely consistent, but most of the time when you wave at him he'll wave back, and today Steph was able to get him to make clicking sounds in response to her clicking:

I don't know that I've ever heard him click before, so he was definitely imitating Steph. I suppose it's possible he may have actually said something, but we don't know any African bushmen who might be able to translate. We probably shouldn't count this as his first word, then, huh?

On Safari

This past weekend, when we went over to Rob and Tracy's for the afternoon, Evan fell in love with their push car. He was so taken with it, in fact, that it rubbed off on Steph, and she has spent the last three days preoccupied with the thought of getting him one of his own. Luckily craigslist came through yet again, and today Steph and Evan went to pick up his new dream mobile:

It's a soft-top one-seater, as you can see, and a very nice bonus feature is that the floor board is removable so in the future Evan can Fred Flintstone around to his little heart's content. For the time being, though, he's perfectly happy sitting there and watching the world go by while we push him around the park.

Ferret Universe

This story is not really related to Evan (if you stretch a bit you can navigate a logical path, but it's a reach), but it's funny enough that it has to be told. First, some background....

A little over a year ago we started working with a financial advisor to plan for our eventual retirement and figure out how we can become fabulously wealthy in the meantime (he's only promised that we'll be able to retire someday - and he's oddly mum on the issue of fabulous wealth - but that's a subject for another time). One of the first things he recommended we do was get more life insurance for each of us, which was no surprise since the last time we thought about that was just after we got married. Now that we had a much bigger house and a baby on the way our needs were different.

We were able to get a policy for me right away (at a "Preferred Plus" rate thanks to my excellent health, thank you very much), but we had to wait on Steph due to her "condition." As it turns out it's next to impossible to get life insurance for a pregnant woman at a reasonable price because your blood chemistry goes all out-of-whack when you're circulating for two.

One year later, now that Evan is well established outside of the womb the out-of-whackness he causes is more psychological than chemical, so it was time for Steph to join me on the Worth More Dead Than Alive Train. That meant it was also time for a medical technician to come to the house to draw some blood and do the poking and prodding they deem necessary to prove that Steph is also of excellent health (which in the end they decided she is - also "Preferred Plus").

She got the results of her blood work yesterday, which was a list of 20 or so familiar-but-unintelligible terms with meaningless numbers next to them. And what do you do when you have new information like this that you don't understand? You go to google to find the explanation, of course. Steph searched for blood chemistry ranges and got back a list of web pages that seemed to fit the bill. She skipped the first result, "CWS Blood Chemistry Definitions", in favor of the next one, "Understanding the Blood Chemistry/CBC Report", which seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do. Her goal, as you remember, was to understand the results of her blood chemistry report - pretty much a perfect match. Google orders their search results based on how many people who perform an equivalent search follow each link, so this was the 3rd most popular page, the 2nd most popular site, on all the Internets for people who are looking for explanations about blood work.

Anyway, Steph is reading along and learning that her blood chemistry says she's basically healthy although a little dehydrated. Then she arrives at the explanation for glucose:

Is blood sugar. Decreased number is indication of insulinoma, when too low ferret can have seizures. Increased number is rarely seen.

Wait a minute, seizures?!

Wait a freakin' minute, ferret can have seizures?!?! WTF, mate?

To understand what was going on you have to see the full URL for the page:

http://www.ferret-universe.com/health/resources/understanding%20_chem_cbc.pdf

That's right, Ferret Universe. It turns out Steph had been reading a pamphlet describing how to interpret a ferret's blood chemistry - at least she's a fairly healthy ferret. She'd been having a rough couple of days - feeling a bit under the weather, Evan had been teething pretty hard, and her time in the studio was yielding more frustration than satisfaction - and this was the perfect remedy. She stumbled out of the office crying from laughing so hard, and she had to just point for me to come in and read the article myself since she couldn't really talk through the giggles.

Obviously this was a funny episode, one I imagine we'll be relating to everyone we meet for a while. That's not the only reason I'm telling it here, though. I think the universe (not the Ferret Universe, the whole actual universe) is pulling a bigger prank behind the scenes. Here's what I want to know: How is it possible that we live in a world where the 2nd-most-popular answer to a query on blood chemistry IS ABOUT FERRETS!?!?! How? I'd like to think this is a Google bomb or something like that, but the next 4 results are about dogs and cats, fish, dogs and cats again, and marmosets, and I can't accept that there are that many whack-job pet owners with the resources and wherewithal to pull that off. I'd say I was speechless if I hadn't just written close to 1,000 words, so I'll say I'm explanationless. Please, someone come up with something that doesn't involve the majority of web-going humanity caring more about the health of their pets than their friends, their kids, and themselves.

Wind-Up Bug

We have this wind-up toy that I can best describe as a vibrating metal bug -- you twist the key a few times and it wiggles and walks around on the floor until it runs out of juice. Whatever you call it, Evan likes it. Of course, he mostly wants to grab it and put it in his mouth (like he does with most things), but he likes it:

Interesting Photos

We took all these pictures at pretty much the same time, and while none of them are especially good they're all rather interesting in their own way:



I've got to talk to the third picture in particular just a bit. Steph really didn't want me to post this one, presumably because Evan looks... well, like kind of a doofus I guess. And in some respects she's right, it's not the most flattering picture of him we've taken, and some day he's probably going to hate me (or at least be very perturbed) for posting it on this blog. To this I have three responses:

1. I'm his dad, and one of a dad's God-given rights... heck, one of his jobs... is to embarrass his kids. So it was for my father before me, and his father before him, and so on and so on. Who am I to attempt to break with this natural order?
2. Pursuant to response #1, I'm sure there are already a plethora of pictures and stories on this blog that Evan will someday find distasteful. He's just going to have to deal with that.
3. I love that picture. It's not a great picture, but it's real, and it's the kind of thing he does. I love the fact that he sometimes makes faces that bely his tender age, that say to me "What do you expect, I'm only 10 months old?" (You could certainly make the argument that I've been staring at this picture so long while writing this post that I'm reading too much into it, but oh well.). The more I look at it the more I like it. Maybe you'll feel the same way.
   

So obviously in the end I chose to include the picture (after running it by Steph again).

Big Bites

Without a doubt, if Evan could talk he'd tell you that the best part of any meal is the finger food portion at the end (and that's really saying something, because we're talking about a boy who loves to eat). It doesn't matter if it's Cheerios, pieces of fruit, bites of bread, Puffs, or anything else, if you are supposed to pick it up and shove it in your mouth he's happy. Some of the time he's good about eating one bite at a time, but more often than not he tries to cram as many pieces of whatever you're feeding him in at the same time. And then there are the times this happens:

Even though he has his four front teeth (two top and two bottom), plus starters on the next four, Evan is still not much of a chewer as you can see. He apparently hasn't made the connection yet between having teeth and using them to bite food. Hopefully he'll get it soon.

Bathtime

When I saw this picture Steph took after Evan's bath today I immediately thought it was blog-worthy, but I was afraid there might be a few too many "right out of the bath" pictures on the blog already. I did some searching around, though, and it looks like there aren't that many bath photos after all, so I can post this one with a clean conscience (I try not to be overly repetitive in my blog topics, after all):

We don't have any pictures or video of this, but ever since we've started swimming at the YMCA Evan is really enjoying splashing in the bath. This means that more water gets shared among all participants than is strictly necessary, but what can you do? Besides, bath time is better for everyone when you're having fun.

Squinchy Face

Evan has taken to scrunching up his face and making funny noises at times when he's eating, but we've been having trouble catching it on camera. I finally got lucky today at lunch while Evan was eating his pear (he loves pears). You have to wait till the very end of the video to see the face, but I think you'll find it's worth it:

Swinging

We went over to our friends Rob and Tracy's house today to have lunch with them and their son Jeremy, who is a couple of months older than Evan. It was a relatively nice day, so afterwards we walked to a park near their house so the kids could get some air and play on the swings and in the sand. We were going to take Evan in his stroller, but before we pulled it out of the car we noticed that Jeremy had a cool push car, so we thought we'd give that a shot first. It would be a mild understatement to say that the car was a hit. Here Evan is sitting in it just in front of Rob and Tracy's house:

Doesn't he look pleased with himself? As soon as we put him down in the seat he grabbed the steering wheel and waited for someone to make it go. I don't think he stopped smiling the whole ride to the park. Here's another shot during our walk - if you zoom in you'll see he's still grinning away a few blocks in:

So the chance to ride around in the push car was an unexpected treat. The main thing I was excited about was the chance to see Evan in the baby swing. He'd enjoyed his only other swing experience (although I wasn't there to see it), and this time was also a resounding success:

Evan is a big fan of playing Near and Far (you may remember Grover teaching the difference between near and far on Sesame Street) - it never fails to make him laugh, no matter what mood he's in. As Steph first noticed, being on the swing is like playing Near and Far, with the added benefit that no one has to run back and forth like a Muppet. This picture obviously shows "near".