Champion Wavers

After indoor skydiving we went out to dinner just around the corner with Rob, Tracy, and Jeremy. Once his food was gone Jeremy started to get a little rambunctious, as toddlers are want to do, so Tracy packed him into their Ergo carrier and walked him around outside a bit while the rest of us finished our dessert. We had a nice window seat looking onto the outdoor seating area, and Tracy and Jeremy would venture by periodically on their time-killing wanderings. Now, Evan is always up for a wave-a-thon (we're thinking of entering him into the Waving Nationals, or at least a regional competition... as soon as we can find one), and it turns out Jeremy is an accomplished waver as well:

Unfortunately every time Steph panned away from Evan he started going nuts with the two-handed waving again, but you still can get a feel for the occasion.

Indoor Skydiving, Part II

As promised, we were back at iFly this weekend for another round of indoor skydiving with the friends who weren't able to make it on my birthday. Since I described how this works in my first post about it I'll just jump straight to the videos. First, Steph's maiden flight:

And here's the second flight for everyone in our second wave, Chad (first, in green), Steph (in pink), and Rob (also in green):

Since we went on a weekend it was a lot more crowded, so they didn't even give us the option of going a 3rd time. Also, we don't have any video of our first wave (Elizabeth, Tracy, and me) because the second wave (our potential videographers) were busy watching the instructional video and getting geared up while wrangling two babies (Evan and Rob & Tracy's son Jeremy). As you might expect our videos would have looked pretty similar, although I got to wear a snazzy blue jumpsuit that you miss out on seeing. Oh well....

Couch Hand Prints

Evan likes to walk along the furniture when he can. Usually the only evidence of his passing is a trail of discarded toys, but sometimes he leaves more personal markings:

Mr. Tambourine Man

I mentioned in a previous post how Evan has grown more restless on his changing table the last month or two. Well, once he learned how to sit up from a lying position without any help or props he cranked the squirminess up to 11. The only way to keep him prone through the whole diaper change is to physically pin him down, which just doesn't feel like the right answer.

He can be distracted from his compulsion to sit up, however, if you get a little creative. We often will count to 10 with him (he doesn't count yet, of course, but he gets interested in what we're saying), or ask him to say the few words he kind of knows, to keep his mind busy. A toy can do the trick, too, especially if it's new or it makes lots of noise, like a tambourine:

Since Steph just got Evan a set of shaky musical instruments a few days ago this tambourine qualifies as both!

Indoor Skydiving

It's my birthday today, and for my present Steph arranged for us to go indoor skydiving! "Indoor skydiving," you say, "What's that?" There's a place close to us (in Union City) called iFly that is basically a vertical wind tunnel where they simulate free fall (it can achieve wind speeds of over 150 mph). You actually get to experience the free fall portion of skydiving (presumably the most fun part) longer than you would in an actual dive, and you don't have to spend any time or effort getting yourself up to 10,000 feet above the ground to do it.

I've wanted to go skydiving for a long time but circumstances have always conspired to thwart any such efforts. Since Evan was born those circumstances have had their own champion in the person of Stephanie, so I figured any skydiving ambitions were going to have to be put on the back burner for a while.

(A quick aside. When you read that last paragraph it's easy to draw a few negative conclusions which I'd like to assure you are erroneous. First, it's not like I've been on some quest to go skydiving my whole life and have been denied the experience by extraordinarily bad luck or the deliberate actions of others. It's something I think would be fun and I'd like to do eventually, but if I really cared about it that much I would have made it happen by now. I've mostly been too cheap to spend $200+ for essentially 1 minute of entertainment. Second, Steph hasn't forbidden me from skydiving or made threats of dire consequences if I went, she just worries about the possibility of something going wrong and would rather I pursue less risky activities. She readily admits that these are irrational fears, skydiving being statistically safer than driving, but she has them nonetheless. If I really wanted to go she might not be too supportive but she wouldn't stand in my way. But again, if I really wanted to go that much then I already would have gone, and since I haven't it has never seemed to be worth the potential strife to push the issue. Ah, the give and take of marriage....)

Anyway, back to my birthday. Steph had been working for a few weeks to try and arrange a surprise trip to iFly with several of our friends, but shifting schedules and an accidentally-nosy husband downgraded those plans to my friend Dan and I going this afternoon and me being involved in the organizing after all. I don't think that made much difference, though, it was still a blast.

When you get there you first watch a short video about what you'll be doing and your instructor goes over the hand signals he'll use to tell you what to do (because it's too loud when the wind is pumping to even hear yourself scream, let alone communicate instructions). It's pretty simple, basically "straighten your legs", "bend your legs", and "keep your chin up". Then you get geared up in your flight suit, goggles and helmet and you're off to the wind tunnel. Here are Dan and I all dressed up and ready to go:

I'd like to point out that the goggles fit really tightly and make your face look kinda funny. For instance, Dan does not normally look like Luke Wilson in a tornado.

For the normal beginner package your 1 minute of flight time is broken into two 30 second chunks, but just before you enter the wind tunnel they tell you you have the option of going a third time for only $15 more (the base package costs $50). This is brilliant salesmanship, because after the first two flights there's no way you're not going to pay a couple of bucks more to go again!

Here are the videos Steph took of my three flights. Hopefully you'll see that I was more in control in each successive pass and able to tinker more with how different motions affected my flight, but maybe not.... Anyway, here's my 1st flight:

And my 2nd:

And my 3rd:

Finally, Steph also took as much video as she could (our camera's memory card filled up with all the video since I didn't get around to emptying it before we went) of our instructor playing around after we were done. It gives you some idea of what I'm going to be doing the next time we go:

I mention the next time because next weekend is Hayden's Birthday, Part II! Since none of the group Steph was trying to get together was able to make it on my birthday besides Dan we decided we'd go again next Saturday so more people can join us. Also Steph will get a chance to go then since we'll have enough people to warrant scheduling two time slots, allowing for a convenient baby swap. So check back in a week for more cool video!

Doin' the Evie Crawl

You may have noticed that I've referred to Evan being close to crawling in the past, but I've never announced that he's actually crawling. That's because he's never crawled. Ever since he was six months old (he's eleven months old now) it's seemed like he was on the verge of hopping up on his hands and knees and moving around, but he's never actually done it. Recently he's been focusing all his attention on trying to stand and walk, so we've been figuring he might skip moving on all fours and go straight to walking (which apparently happens fairly often nowadays since parents are told to have their babies sleep on their backs).

Just because he's not "crawling" doesn't mean he's immobile, though. For the last few weeks he's been moving around when he's sitting on the ground by stretching his legs out and then rocking forward onto his hands and feet (like a position he might use to stand up except he doesn't quite have the balance for that yet) and then sitting back down, which results in a net gain of a couple of inches for his butt. Think of it as a modified inchworm maneuver. It gets him where he wants to go eventually but it's pretty slow going, and he usually gets distracted by something else along the way to his destination.

This morning though he moved around in a manner that could reasonably be called crawling! He rocked forward into a hybrid crawling position with one leg as you'd expect (your basic hands-and-knees position) and the other leg curled under him like for sitting Indian-style. He then moved forward normally with the crawling leg and with his old sitting/starting-to-stand motion with the other leg. It's hard to describe... you can kinda see what I mean in this video Steph took later in the day:

What does this mean for us? Well, for starters it means that one of our projects for this holiday weekend is installing baby locks on the cabinets and plugging in a bunch of outlet covers. So much fun!

Baby Pool

It's been fiendishly hot in the Bay Area for the last few days, so Steph was inspired to put a pool in the back yard. We decided to go with an above-ground model that we could install ourselves:

Sure, it won't be much help when it's time to teach Evan to swim, but it's good for splashing in... or next to:

Unfortunately we didn't pull the camera out until after he'd done most of his best splashing. Take my word for it, though, he thoroughly enjoyed playing in his own pool.

Linda's New Apartment

Our friend (and frequent house sitter and occasional babysitter) Linda moved into a new apartment recently, and Steph and Evan went by to check it out today. Here Evan is taking up his normal position holding onto the coffee table, in this case alongside Linda's dog Brandy:

As you can tell Evan and Brandy are very good friends. It helps that Evan likes dogs of every size, shape and color and Brandy likes kids of every size, shape and color:

You also may notice from these pictures that Linda has excellent taste in coffee tables.

Learning to Walk

Evan has been doing lots of assisted walking the last few weeks, mostly holding onto Mom or Dad's fingers, the edge of the coffee table, or the bed. He also gets some help from his alligator walker at times:

Not every attempt turns out so well, though:

As you can tell by the way the video ends Steph was a bit worried by Evan's twist-and-flop maneuver, but he was just fine. In fact, the first video was actually recorded immediately after the second one.

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: