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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

It's been a busy few months

Since Doyle's adventure with the Giant Red Man of Terror, he has really started to turn into a toddler. He walks and even runs everywhere he goes these days, and loves to climb onto anything that he can. We recently got him a mini climber toy with a door to go through and a small slide to go down. He's been playing with the door for a few weeks, but during the last week has really figured out the slide. You can see it in the back left of the picture of him riding on the giraffe scooter. This is the most recent picture of him, taken on Oscar night.

He's also learning new skills by the day. He's learned to open the doors in the house unless you deadbolt them. He's discovered that the remote control makes the television do stuff, and he will walk around the house with the remote to see if it works on other things too. He recently has started playing with the flashlight, and thinks it's great fun since Scarlet, the crazy dachshund, will chase the beam around the room barking. He recognizes that words have meaning, and although he doesn't form them perfectly yet, he has a few words that seem to equate to different concepts.

"Dada" is any adult, or large person, and is a phrase that means "come here," "I want something," "Hey you!" "I want to play," and "You're funny," and about a dozen other phrases you can imagine.

"Baba" is a bottle, sippy cup, or any type of liquid or drink. It is generally said while pointing at the object that he wants.

"Dooohhhh(g)" is dog, but can also mean other creatures with fur.

And although my ears may be deceiving me, I think he sometimes says, "Hi." Either that, or he's agreeing with me in Japanese.

Recently he's started pointing at pictures in books to hear us say the words, and then will point at them again in a different order to hear us say them in a different sequence. This is very funny.

The most recent skill he has learned is picking his nose. Several times this week I have found him with his finger up his nose and the happiest grin on his face. I've tried to convince Katie that he's just pointing at his brain, but she's not convinced.

Katie, who works for the State, has been given two unpaid furlough days a month in order to help reduce the State's budget. It amounts to about a 10% monthly pay cut. On the other hand, it does give her some free time. Since I have almost maxed out my vacation time, we used the first furlough in February as an excuse to travel to see the elephant seals near Cambria.

It was a long drive, and Doyle was a bit cranky, so he probably didn't get the most enjoyment out of watching the seals as I had hoped, but he did look at them for a while, and then promptly realized that the squirrel hanging out nearby was much more interesting.

As a baby, Doyle was fun. As a toddler, he is awesome.

Labels: baby, Vacation

posted by Eric at 11:31 PM Permalink -- 0 Comments

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Update at one month.

Doyle's first month has been very busy.

Over the Thanksgiving week, he traveled with the parents and grandparents to visit friends in New Mexico for Thanksgiving. On his way there, he stopped at Grand Canyon National Park. We purchased his "National Park Passport" which is a tourist gimmick to get you to buy a color picture stamp at each National Park you visit, before stamping the "passport" with the date at the park's visitor center.

Although I have plenty of pictures of the canyon, there's not a single photo in which I don't have some scowling expression on my face. I suppose it was just a lot brighter than I expected. In any event, here's Doyle and I at the canyon. Doyle is showing off his cuteness. I'm showing off the weight I gained during the pregnancy.

On the way out of the park, we saw a coyote in the road. We slowed down to let him cross, and then drove down the road a couple hundred feet before pulling over to take a picture, whereupon a mad scramble to get the telephoto lens began. When we looked up, we realized that the coyote was trotting toward us. He stopped about ten feet from us, waiting for his handout. We got some decent coyote photos, and he lost interest when he realized we weren't going to feed him.

In addition to seeing our friends for Thanksgiving, we did a few of the tourist-type things, such as seeing the "Miraculous" stairway in one of the churches. The story behind this stairway goes all the way back to the old west. While the church was being built, the design of the church included a choir above the entrance way, but unfortunately omitted any way to get up to it. A ladder was one of the options, but the nuns figured it wouldn't be practical for them to climb up there in their gowns. The alternative was a staircase that would switch back and forth across the entrance, but that would block the stained glass window. So the nuns prayed to the saint of carpenters for a solution. A mysterious carpenter arrived, and toiled for six months, building a spiral staircase with no center or side support, and no nails, and then left without ever leaving a bill for labor or materials. On a side note, the stairway didn't originally have rails. Those were added later on because the nuns were afraid to climb the narrow winding stairway without rails.

We also stopped drove through Madrid, New Mexico, where much of the movie Wild Hogs was filmed. The town isn't laid out the way it appears in the movie, and "Maggie's" was built for the movie, and remains in the middle of the town. Also, there was no annual chili festival, but, since everyone starting asking about the annual chili festival after the movie came out, they now have an annual chili festival. Here is a picture of James and Wally looking at the Maggie's set in the middle of Madrid.

The weather during the week was surprisingly warm, however it started snowing the day after Thanksgiving. Here is a picture of Doyle seeing his first snow.

Actually, he slept through it all.

We didn't get enough photos during Doyle's first month, so we broke down and went to the Sears Portrait studio. Doyle wasn't terribly cooperative, so we realized he has no future as a baby actor. Nonetheless a few decent shots came out. I like this photo, especially when I printed it in black and white.