To Calvin, on his first birthday

You are the sun, the music, the bright spot in our lives, and today we celebrate the day of your arrival.  We remember it like yesterday - the anticipation, the excitement, the exact moment we first saw your beautiful face.  But today a sweet poignancy brings awareness of the slippage of time, a truth that is driven home as we watch you chase a pet while signing dog, practically running down the hallway past the picture of you at only 1 week old.  Oh the things that have happened since then!  In the past month alone you have started stacking blocks, and putting your toys away all on your own;  you started dancing to the music you have always loved;  your walking has improved enough that you actually spend part of our evening walks out of the stroller; and you are eating more and more foods, and beginning to learn to drink out of a glass. 

What has really amazed us, though, is your developing ability to communicate.   You have started to use baby sign language!  You sign "more" while you are eating, and have a tentative version of "eat" as well.  You also sign "dog" and can sign "cat," although it looks suspiciously like clapping or the sign for the "more," and you sign "duck" and "nurse" as well.  You watch us carefully now when we sign to you and we see the dawning of understanding on your face and know that it won't be long before you have more signs.   And even beyond the signs you are working very hard to communicate, using varying sounds (some more pleasant than others), expressions, and even hands motions, like pointing.  It is becoming clear that you understand a lot about the world in which you live, and we are simply amazed by you.  Happy birthday Calvin.  We thank you for coming into our lives, turning them upside down and inside out, and brining us the beautiful light of hope.  We cannot wait to find out what the next year has in store for the three of us!

 

Understanding toys.

Before the baby we all read up and stock up on the best toys to be found.  We also swarm to garage sales and hit up friends who are done having kids to build our toy stashes.  Then the baby arrives and we look at this little slug of a thing, and then at the toys, and then at the slug, then the toys, the slug, the toys - why did we buy all these toys?  No worries, as parents of newborns we entertain ourselves during tummy time (the baby's not ours) by fittings shapes in holes, assembling wooden puzzles, and setting off every toy in the room that plays a song or sound of some kind to see if we can time them just right and hit a rhythm. Then the baby starts rolling over/sitting up/crawling and now he or she is suddenly very aware of the toys in the room.  Wow, this is it, the moment we've been waiting for!  Now all the time, effort, and money will be worth something!  And with fascination you watch, day in and day out, as the baby moves from one toy to another, grabbing it up, sticking it in his or her mouth, taking a bite or a lick, then throwing it aside to move on to the next unsuspecting toy.  Well, okay.  It's not what we'd had in mind when we spent all those hours researching every company's promise for development stimulation, but at least they're being used, right?  At least they're being used.

The good news is, there is yet another step in toy usage, and Calvin reached that step over the past couple of months.  He's been removing the rings from the peg for months now, in order to put them in his mouth of course, but when he finally put a ring back on the peg, now that was exciting!  And even that was nothing in comparison to the moment that he stopped filling the hollow circle with drool and started fitting it into the circle indentation on his learning home - wow, we're really making headway now!  But today takes the cake, because today he moved from understanding what hole to put the circle in, to knowing where to put the star.  The moment seemed to be just as big for Calvin as it was for his parents, he is even learning to clap (only for himself, of course).  And so, today we celebrate the validation of toy ownership.

It's Easter again!

At least in our photo galleries it is.  Just this morning we finally got the digital copies of Calvin's 10 month portrait sitting, which we also consider to be his Easter pictures because they were taken the day after Easter, on April 9.  There are 9 pictures in total, but you'll have to visit the 10 month portraits photo album to see the rest.

 

 

A new way to view the world

Or at least a new way to capture our view.  The combination of an increasingly slow camera and an increasingly mobile child finally wore down our patience today.  Turning the camera on takes six seconds alone, then five seconds for it to focus, and another five for it to save the picture to the card before you can start another five seconds of re-focusing to take a second picture.  By this time the kid is gone:  he's walking, remember?  And we are trying to capture the event so we can put it in our scrapbook, but all we get is a burry shot here and there.  So today we spent Jon's lunch hour at the local camera store and came home with a DSLR.  Now, instead of 11 seconds between photos, we can get 2.5 frames taken per second!  That will increase our picture taking over 20 fold!  Watch for results coming soon...

Old camera (that blur is our son...)

New camera...

Officially 9 months

Calvin can now be officially nine months, as we just got the pictures back from our nine month professional sitting.  We think they went pretty well, although Calvin was a little hesitant to smile for them after we waited nearly an hour past our sitting time and well into his cranky time before we even got called into the the camera room.  The rest of the multitude of shots can be viewed in his 9 month photo shoot album.