To Calvin, who is six months old today!

Well, Calvin, you are now a half a year old!  The time is just going too fast.  The past month brought wonderful advancements, but it also brought some challenges for you and for your parents.  For the first few weeks of the month you struggled with your acid reflux, eventually leading to you losing an entire pound!  After juggling your medications you are now doing much better, but this will be the first month that you have not gained any weight.  What you have not gained in size, though, you continue to make up for in your other advancements!  Last month you realized how much you enjoyed standing to play, and this month you have learned how to push and pull yourself into that favorite play position!  You have also started to travel!  Thankfully you don't get very far, but you can crawl, in your own creeping sort of way, for very short distances.  You will be able to go much farther as soon as you figure out how to hold your head up off the ground while you are moving!  But our favorite new trick of yours is your new ability to play peek-a-boo!  For months we have played this game with you, covering our faces and then surprising you to make you laugh, but just two days ago you started covering your own face and waiting for us to ask "where's Calvin?" before uncovering and laughing up a storm!  It is so wonderful to have you engage with us this way, and we see this as a very fun milestone!

This past month has been very special to us for another reason, too:  it held the start to this year's holiday season with Thanksgiving and the start of Advent.  This is our favorite time of year, and now we get to share it with you, introducing you to the traditions, spirit, and love of the season.  We had a beautiful Thanksgiving, and decorated the house for the Christmas season.  You were awed by the lights on the tree, and seem to love singing carols with your parents every night (mostly you love sitting on your father's lap and banging along on the keys while he plays the piano).  You don't even seem to mind the cold air!  This season is not just new to you, it also feels new to us because it holds such a special new meaning to us now that you are here.  We have so much to be thankful for!

Two-way play

After nearly 6 months of one way play, our son is finally joining in the fun.  Oh sure, in the past he would grab, chew, and throw his toys, laugh at his toys, and even laugh in response to our antics, but we still consider this one way play.  After all, we would be practically standing on our heads to elicit said laughter, while Mr. Calvin was simply a laughing lump of baby.  Don't get us wrong, those days clearly beat out the days when he didn't even acknowledge our existence (a trait that is sure to return in about 15 years), but they don't hold a candle to the new and improved Calvin, now with real interactive mode so that he will actually take part in the play, rather than just laugh while watching.  Go ahead...laugh while you're watching!

Just call us the Nielsons.

As of yesterday we are now a Homescan Consumer Panel member home, which is a fancy way of saying that we are now an A.C. Nielson family.  We aren't reporting our TV preferences, though, we are reporting our household purchase information.  The job came with its own fancy gadget - a scanner, which we use to scan and record all of our purchases when we bring them home, and then to connect to Homescan division of A.C. Nielson and upload our purchase information.  It doesn't take very long to do, and each time we share information with them we get points, which we can eventually redeem for gifts.  So, our opinions matter.  Or if they don't, we are going to make them. 

And, since this blog really isn't about us anymore,  we'll now move on to news about Calvin.  First and foremost, he is feeling much better.  Although he is still waking once a night, a habit he developed during the reflux issues of the past few weeks, in general he is sleeping well and is having no trouble eating.  He has also discovered his tongue.  He can roll it and twist it, chew on it and use it to spit raspberries.  It's very cute, but very messy.  He has also learned how to pull himself up to a standing position when sitting in front of something (which means that we have to be careful where we put him).  He has not really crawled since the couple of times a week or so ago when he traveled about four or five feet, face planted firmly on the ground.  Evidently he has wizened up and will wait until he can get his face off the ground before trying that again!  And we stopped trying to feed him cereal after we switched him back to the liquid Zantac, but will likely pick it up again some time in the next week or so.  And that, is the Calvin news.

Santa really isn't that scary

We really started to get into the spirit of things today.  Jon accompanied Christmas songs for the PBS telethon (five, or at least one, minutes of fame), and when he got home we sat ourselves down and took Christmas pictures.  We will still go in and have professional ones done, but we wanted to have some to make a Christmas card with, so we had to try some on our own.  It is amazingly difficult to get a baby to look at a camera when there is no person behind it!  This is the first year that our Christmas pictures have not included the dogs, but what are you going to do?  Only so much drool will fit in one snapshot.  Overall the pictures turned out fairly nicely, and you can see them (or at least the ones that won't be going on the Christmas card), and some portraits taken earlier in the week, in our Christmas Photo Shoot album (don't laugh - they're not professional, and PhotoShop is our friend, but we only had time to fix some of them).

And what is more Christmassy (yes, that is a word) than the torture of sitting still in awkward positions for family photos?  Why, that yearly visit to Santa Claus (you'll shoot your eye out...ho ho ho), so after the picture taking episode we packed him up and headed to the mall for his inaugural visit with the fat man in red.  Thankfully Calvin loves people and is not old enough yet to be worried about the bearded anomaly, unlike the two year old screamer behind us in line.  We only got a couple quick pictures, and we are too lazy to scan the picture they gave us, so this is all we have to show for the trip right now, but we'd say it was successful.  This whole first Christmas thing sure is wonderful!

A tree in the house!

 The tree is up and decorated, the  lights are up in the bedrooms, and the animated polar bear is up on our front porch.  We got all of this done during the beautiful fall weather we've had the past week - 50, even 60, degrees and sunny (tell that to Steve who just experienced a record snowfall in Seattle) - but did we get any of our outdoor decorating done?  Noooooo.  Well, the bear, but he doesn't really count, since all you have to do is lean out the front door to set him up and plug him in with a timer.  So now that it's 40, even 30, degrees and rain/snowing all we have left is to put the outdoor decorations up.  Good thinking on our part.  Here's the tree, in any case.  We sure are enjoying it.  And there is something incredibly funny about a little boy and a very big tree...