Standing room only

I know... I know... it's been like forever since my last post. But, in my defense, cheese sandwiches. Also, and probably more importantly, gibbon water bucket plastic. So, as you can plainly see and as I have so clearly articulated, I have had some very good reasons for not posting more often.

However, since my last post, something wonderful has happened. Our little baby girl, our little wee one, our little bundle of wet diapers... has become a toddler. Yep! That's right. She's really not much of a baby anymore (except sometimes when she's tired or wants something that we're not giving her). As a matter of fact, she can now stand (see demonstration of standing illustrated above)! And, with the miracle of standing, she now also crawls!

This all means that the days of setting our little Kate down in one place and leaving her there are over... because she will follow you... she will follow you and then start pulling up on your pants leg. If your pants are not fastened properly, this means that she will then pull them down in her attempt to pull up (this has happened to Chesney and is a practice that I strongly encourage).

One of the many strange things she does (she's a kook) is that she'll stand at the coffee table... and if I'm sitting behind her, she'll let get of the table and will flop back into my lap. Total trust test. Performed multiple times an evening. She thinks it's funny while it scares the cr@p out of me. In my head, I keep seeing her at daycare flopping herself backward with no one around to catch her.

Right now, based off of this particular daredevil tactic and her fascination with our ceiling lamps, we're forecasting that she'll either become a stuntperson or an industrial lighting engineer.

Toofers, rolling "D"s, and a complex sense of humor...

As you can plainly see from the above pic, Kate has some chompers now. She's actually had the bottom two since Christmas and now has one on top as well. Several more have been showing themselves... and in the words of Jim Morrison, they are about ready to "break on through to the other side" (I'm 98% sure that that was what Jim was talking about in that song). Because of these new, little, pointy, sharp additions, Chesney now is slightly fearful of feeding time. It makes my nipples retreat in terror just thinking about it...

(By the way, I'm currently all mellowed out on pain medication due to an ear infection and, thus, am not responsible for what I write in this post)

In other non-nipple news (pretty sweet alliteration there), Kate has developed a highly unusual noise/sound/chirpy thing. Basically, she's figured out how to roll her "R"s. Except that they sound more like "D"s... I'm not sure if there is such a thing as rolling your "D"s, but if so, Kate has mastered it! It's a noise she makes pretty much all of the time and sounds not too unlike the noises the Velociraptors made in "Jurassic Park". It can be somewhat scary at night when you here that noise emanating from her room.
If it were spelled, it would look like this - DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD.
I tell Chesney that Kate is just saying "Dad" over and over again really, really quickly.

And, finally, we're finding that Kate is starting to develop a pretty bizarre sense of humor. She finds the dogs wrestling on the floor hysterical. Sometimes, the act of us carrying her up a flight of stairs is the highest form of comedy. Dancing with her around the living room sends her in to fits of laughter. And, just recently, wearing her toys on our body somewhere (hanging a set of rings off of your ear, sitting a funnel on top of your head) is akin to attacking her most tickilish spot. The little girl is crazy. And, I hope that she doesn't change with how she continually smiles and laughs at the world.

Working through the ickyness...

(This picture - other than being of Kate - has nothing to do with this blog entry)

Ahhh... look at the area around Kate's nose and mouth.  All clear of mucus, snot, icky mess stuff - those were the times!  I remember them fondly.  No gooey, sticky substance stuck to your shoulder all the time after Kate has repeatedly wiped her nose on you.  No snot bubbles popping against her face.  No hacking and coughing at 3:00am.  I never realized how good we had had it!  

It's actually been quite pitiful, the poor girl.  She was running a 103.1 degree temperature on Monday, which - thankfully - has abated.  She now just has the left over congestion, which seems to have decided to set up permanent residence (the moving van just left and they've invited the neighbors over for a BBQ).  Because of her being sick, no one is sleeping well in our household at the moment.  On top of that, the city is currently repaving the streets.  And, when you happen to live downtown, the most convenient time to do that is late at night.  Thus, we have had large truck/machinery/noise making devices right outside our bedroom window the past couple of nights.

To give you an idea how loud it has been... last night, at a break in all of the ruckus, we finally realized that Kate was crying.  The road crew is louder than a crying baby!  Thankfully, they only make noise from about 10:30pm to around 5:30am.  So, we have plenty of time to get some sleep from around 9:00-10:30pm and 5:30-6:00am.

How about them appl... uhm... green beans?

Kate had her second helping of Green Beans this evening and despite a few grimaces here and there (like the one pictured at left), she did much better this time 'round.  There was much less hacking, choking, and gagging tonight - which made the dinner experience far less entertaining for Chesney and me.  But, I guess that it is more important that Kate actually eats and gets food in her stomach than in trying to make her parents laugh at her ridiculous facial expressions (if only we could somehow manage both).  We also got a portion of tonight's feeding on video as well, so hopefully I'll be able to post a few excerpts once I have time to transfer it to my computer.  

On the bathing front... Kate seemed to discover this evening that she could make the water go flying from the tub by violently smacking her hands against it.  Initially, I think that she did it by accident.  She had one of her floating toys in her hand and began to shake it up and down like she does so often with her toys.  This time, however, the toy ended up making contact with the surface of the bath water and it caused a huge splash... causing water to go flying 3-4 feet behind her.  From there, she repeated the experiment several times with the floating fish toy and then moved on to trying it with her bare hands.  Water was going everywhere!  You should have seen the smile on her face (and on mine).  I have a feeling that bath time will become a much more chaotic experience in the days to come...

 

Ho Ho Ho... Green Beans

Kate had her first taste of Green Beans tonight...  and, man, do I wish I had the camera at the ready this evening!  Talk about a wasted opportunity for some hysterical pictures.  For the record, Kate DOES NOT like Green Beans.  Either that or she simultaneously found something else at the dinner table completely distasteful.  Up until now, she's had a pretty good run on enjoying the baby food we've been giving her - bananas, sweet potatoes, etc... so, she's pretty well conditioned to open up her mouth whenever the spoon draws near her face.  Therefore, it was a lot of fun this evening watching the wheels turn in her head as she would instinctively open her mouth to receive the baby food... and then quickly clamp her mouth shut when she would remember that her parents were trying to kill her with that awful tasting Green Bean junk.  

You had to be pretty quick with the spoon to get anything in her mouth and not all over her face.

Kate will be having a second helping of "green sludge" (her name for it) tomorrow night, so we should have some pictures to post then. 

And so it begins...

I'm not entirely sure I'm happy about this new (self-imposed) developement in my life - that of having my very own blog.  One that I am sure will be all time consuming and will be yet another drain on my extremely valuable time... gotta feed the blog, gotta feed the blog.  But, I do enjoy writing every now and then, and as I mention on the little side bar to the left, I now seem to have a little bit of free time every evening as Kate (and my wife for that matter) hits the bed somewhere around 8:00pm.  I also have been fearful as of late that I'll miss out in documenting all of the various Kate-isms that our little daughter exhibits on a daily basis - her absolute devotion to the overhead lamp in our living room (it has a warm red glow), her not entirely accurate Stevie Wonder impersonation (which we refer to as Stevie Steve), and her recent disco neck manuever (the girl's got soul).  As one Kate-ism is replaced by another, I'm afraid that the joys of the day will be forgotten, replaced by equally desrving and entertaining quirks of babydom.  This blog, therefore, is an attempt to preserve in time some of which I am sure (with the dimenishing faculties of my brain) will be lost as time goes by... because, although a picture says 1,000 words, so does 1,000 words.  And, from my experience, the written 1,000 words is far more accurate.   

The blog has begun.  The static friction has been overcome...