New Outside Toys

One of the houses on our morning dog walk route was having a garage sale last weekend, and on the way by I noticed they were selling a very nice kid's picnic table and slide for only $7! So when we got home I let Steph feed Evan his breakfast (I take point on most of his meals on the weekends since Steph has to the whole work week) while I grabbed some cash and went back around the corner to acquire some new back yard furniture. Luckily it was all made of plastic (i.e. light) and small so I could just sling each piece over a shoulder and carry them the couple of blocks home.

Of course, after I bought them they pretty much just sat on the front porch for a few days, forgotten and unloved, until we pulled them out again this weekend. Steph and I spent the morning doing some work in the front yard and Evan joined us and played on his new acquisitions:

Actually he mostly just played on the picnic table -- he's not really up for sliding yet. In a few months he's going to love it, though.

We also took a video of him walking around the table a bit. There isn't that much going on in this video, especially since it's something like a minute and a half long, but he's such a cute kid I thought I'd share it anyway:

Happy Mother's Day

Evan would like to wish all you moms out there a Happy Mother's Day, especially his own and his grandmas:

Haircut

We last cut Evan's hair when Steph's parents were here over a month ago and recently he's been looking a little floppy. I know that's kind of the style these days, but it's not one we're huge fans of so this weekend Steph felt it was time to tackle this challenge again. In the past she's given him haircuts in the bathroom right before a bath but it's been a little problematic cleaning up afterwards -- you want to get him into the bath quickly to wash of the itchy hair bits, but the floor always seems to end up kinda damp after the bath and damp hair does not vacuum up so well. Also, as Evan has become more and more mobile it has become harder and harder to get him to sit still for very long. In fact, the only place he seems content to hang out for a while is his high chair (mostly because there's food involved, but still), and since it has the added benefit of raising him to a workable height it was an obvious solution.

So, we carted the high chair into the front yard (to mostly avoid the cleanup issue), draped it in a towel and Evan in plastic (Steph has a little do-it-yourself haircut kit that includes a simple smock), and we got to work. Actually Steph did almost all the work, I just had to make the dog do tricks and play Near and Far the whole time to keep Evan entertained. He wasn't so sure about this whole haircut process in the beginning:

but he handled it pretty well:

Here he is once we're all done and he got to play with the non-sharp tools (i.e. the comb):

It's nothing too fancy, but I think Steph did a pretty good job.

First Word?

We're not exactly sure, but Evan may have said his first word today, "banana" (or as he seems to say it, "nananana"):

The thing is, he likes to repeat sounds over and over again, and we often (always?) can't discern a correlation between what he's saying and what he's thinking. It really does seem like he'll start saying "nananana" when you say "banana" or show him one, though. I think we're going to count it.

Taking the Spoon

Remember when I said a week ago that the next step in Evan's eating evolution would be for him to take the spoon? Well, he's getting there a little faster than I expected:

More Portraits

Pretty much any time Steph has her studio set up to take pictures of her artwork we use the opportunity to take some portraits of the boy. That was the case again this weekend, and I again made a few montages of the photos, which were black and white this time. She fiddled with the white balance about half way through the pictures, so I divided the montages into light:

and dark:

Visiting the Gales

Our friends Bryan and Shelley and their sons Kyle and Trevor were back in town for a few days for Shelley's dad's 60th birthday, so we got to spend some time with them this weekend. Since we were there for an informal birthday party there were balloons, of course, including one bunch that was big enough to float a small child away -- or it would have been if it wasn't weighed down with a small sand bag. Evan thought the balloons were fine, but the sand bag (actually a balloon filled with sand) was the best! He loves to pick things up and put them down again (as I've mentioned before), and the sand bag was no exception:

Probably the only thing he likes more than the pick-up-and-drop game is walking around holding Mom or Dad's fingers. He's just starting to cruise around holding onto furniture, but give him a pair of fingers to grab and there's no stopping him:

Actually, I guess the owner of the fingers could choose to stop moving and he'd be out of luck, but why would anyone want to do that? He has such a great time doing it that helping him practice walking is fun for the whole family! And as you might be able to tell from his strong list in the picture, he's still got some practicing to do before he's ready to head out on his own.

Big Bites, Part II

About a month ago I posted a video of Evan shoving a whole Wagon Wheel into his mouth at once. Despite the fact that it kinda looks like he's choking I assure you he wasn't -- no babies were harmed in the making of that video.

Well, in the last month Evan's finger-food-eating abilities have made a quantum leap forward. As I mentioned in my last post he can now eat a banana like a big kid, and his Wagon Wheel consumption style is also much more refined:

The next step is him taking the spoon, and that might not be far off at the rate things are going!

Monkey Food

The very first time we gave Evan some banana he wasn't a big fan (I think it made him throw up the rest of his lunch, in fact), but that was quite a while ago. Since that first encounter he's decided bananas are pretty OK, and in the last month or two they've become one of his favorite finger foods. He especially likes to grab a chunk in his hand, make a fist with the banana inside, and eat the parts that squish out between his fingers. They're both food and entertainment at the same time -- what's not to like about that?!

I've mentioned before that Evan isn't much of a chewer despite having a plethora of teeth for a few months now, but that's finally starting to change. A few days ago Steph tried giving him half of a banana in one piece (instead of cutting it up into bite-sized pieces) and he ate it like a big kid, biting off chunks he could handle, mostly chewing them up, and swallowing one chunk before moving on to the next one! This was a major accomplishment, so today I tried repeating the experiment and caught it on camera. First, the lead-in still shot:

If you crop the picture to show just his head and shoulders he looks just like a hairless monkey (which is kinda what he is) with that banana shoved into his mouth. I got a video of it too (he looks less simian in the video):

Subscribing to Updates

You may have noticed that in the sidebar along the right of the page I've added a "Subscribe" section. We've received a few "Why don't you send out emails when you update the blog?" questions from people, to which I have two responses:

1. Since we started the blog 10 months ago I've averaged more than a post every other day. I know I often add new posts in bunches, but even allowing for that there's still something new just about every week. I feel like if I was sending out emails that often it would be bordering on spam. That leads me to my second point...
2. The whole point of writing a blog was to avoid having to repeatedly send out broadcast emails with pictures and updates on Evan's exploits! (I would have put that all in bold text but it seemed a little too obnoxious... but when I read it in my head it's still loud.)
   
3. Did I say two responses? I meant three. One of the nice things about Blogger is that it automatically produces an RSS feed for your blog so people can easily subscribe to receive updates.
   

Given the last point, I assume the reason people ask about updates is that they don't know about RSS or don't get it. That's fair enough, so let me give you the one-line tutorial. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technology that is used to publish frequently updated content on the web (such as this blog) where you use a program called a "feed reader" or an "aggregator" to consume that content (i.e. read the updates). That one sentence really should have been two but I had already emotionally committed to the "one-line tutorial" idea.

Anyway, the feed reader can either be an application you run on your computer (which often looks similar to email software like Outlook or Eudora) or a web-based application that runs in your browser (like a webmail client like Hotmail or Gmail). I personally use Google Reader, which is a web-based feed reader. Whatever kind of application you use, there has always been a link at the very bottom of the blog (it says "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)") that you plug in to the reader and updates to the blog automagically appear. You can subscribe to feeds for lots of different web sites and then you just go to your reader to see what's new on the sites you're interested in. For example, I subscribe to my own blog (so I know that it's working), and Steph's parent's blog, and her sister Kim's about her trip to Europe, and my friend's about their twins, and a few of my favorite writers on ESPN.com, and a writer for the Baltimore Sun who covers the Terrapins, and the blog from the Google Maps team, and... you get the picture.

So I think RSS and feed readers are great for anyone who regularly browses the same sites on the web (which I bet is just about everyone who reads this blog), but maybe you don't. And maybe you'd still like a way to subscribe to blog updates, presumably through email. Well, I finally found a way to help you too. I found a web site called RssFwd that does exactly what you want - it takes the URL for an RSS feed and your email address and then emails you the updates. Violà! There are three caveats, though:

1. You have to give it an actual email address, not an alias. For instance, the email address I normally use is actually an alias to my Gmail account, so I had to use my Gmail address, not the alias. I imagine this is not an issue for the vast majority of people, but I wanted to mention it anyway.
2. You'll probably have to add the address the emails come from, "rssfwd@rssfwd.com", to the "Not Spam" list in your email client (I know both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail tagged the incoming messages as junk mail at first).
3. The web site claims up and down that they won't sell your email address to anyone and you won't receive any email from them other than the desired RSS updates. The issue is that the company that provides the web site, Blue Sky Factory, is an email marketing company -- they're spammers. So technically they could keep the first half of their promise and not sell your address to anyone and still cause a problem since they are the kind of people you'd be worried a web site would sell your address to in the first place. Now, they do state quite clearly that they won't spam you, and I've been subscribed to updates through this service (I don't really need them since I use a reader, but I had to make sure it worked first) for almost two weeks now and haven't received a single spurious email that looked like it was their fault, but I wanted to make you aware of the potential issue.
   

So, if you want to subscribe to updates to this blog you can go to the Subscribe section on the right and either enter your email address in the "Through email" box (and click the "Subscribe" button next to it) or just click Subscribe next to "Through RSS feed" to use a reader (after you install and/or setup your reader application, of course). Or you can just periodically check the blog when the mood strikes you like you've been doing for the last 10 months.

Enjoy!