Sunny and Warm, With a Chance of Snakes

Spring Arrives!









We arrived home from the baseball game to find a small snake in the house. It's likely that our cats Baxter and Sophie, feeling neglected over the past year, may have come up with a diabolical scheme to have the serpent assassinate the baby. Baxter brings us all sorts of fun dead things and parts of dead things throughout the year, but this was the first live snake. The animal was unharmed and removed without incident.

We also apparently have lots of ants in the house today. Maybe the snakes will eat the ants.



In other reptile news, one of our neighbors found a slightly larger reptile in their pool. This sign is posted outside of the coffee shop.

Beach Baby, part II

We stopped in Hilton Head on the way home from Florida last week to stay with our colleague-friends Missy and Jake (they are the other husband and wife team in the Dept. of Geography at UNCC) for a couple of days. Missy's family owns a condo close to the beach. We took it easy, made good food, slummed at the coffee shop, and strolled on the beach.

Turns out strollers don't work so well in soft sand, and you have to stroll backwards until you get to the hard-packed stuff near the water. I'm going to have to get some bigger tires on the stroller.



Missy and Jake have made their own new baby human as well, named Lawson. He's about 3 months old. Spud was very interested in Lawson, and perhaps considered giving him the shake test, or the finger poke test at the very least. After protecting Spud for 11 months against all threats real or imagined, Claire and I considered Spud a physical threat to somebody else for a change! He's a big ass-whippin' bruiser baby now, comparatively speaking.







Hilton Head was setting up for their St. Patrick's Day parade.





Hilton Head is in South Carolina. So you have to expect at least one Confederate flag and at least one deer head. These guys had both!

Stand-Up Guy

Alternate title: "What Goes Up, Must Come Down, Eventually, But Might Not Necessarily Come Down Without Some Assistance"

He's learned to stand up by pulling up on tables, chairs, his iPads, his pack n' play, and whatnot. So he's almost just like a real human now! He stands up at every opportunity, and he's gotten pretty good at it. There's one small problem, though. He doesn't really know how to un-stand himself. He'll just hang there indefinitely unless someone comes along and helps him to sit down, or he just falls down. He's taken a couple of ugly de-standing spills, so he doesn't have much confidence in his un-standing ability. As we all know, once you are out there, high above the Earth, it's important to be able to bring yourself home for a safe landing. Just ask those guys on Apollo 13. So we've been practicing his dismount.



Added bonus: now he can reach the toxic houseplants!



Notice that he's dressed in his green St. Patrick's Day duds. Either that, or he's going to grow up to be The Riddler.

Super Baby XLIV

Drew Brees has just won the Super Bowl, has been named MVP of the game and the NFL. He's surrounded by tens of thousands of adoring fans and has given a little hope to a drowned city. Confetti falls from the sky.

Who does he want to share it all with? His baby boy and his wife, of course!



Where can I get some of those headphones? They might come in handy the next time we try to take Spud to the movies.

Road Trip

Here are some random pics from our Spring Break trip to Naples.

As always, he was a champ in the car. Napped and played and ate and watched the world go by.



Mommy, Grandma, Bailey, and Spud.



Claire turned 31 on Saturday. Happy Birthday! One of her favorite websites is Cake Wrecks, devoted to the horrible and humorous mistakes that happen in bakeries. So I got her an intentional "Cake Rex", with a poorly drawn dinosaur and some spacing issues.





He gets comfortable and puts his feet up a lot in the stroller. He is workin' the cuteness in this picture (Awwww Score: 8.2).



At the Waterside Shops in Naples. Fancy shops for fancy folks. It was a nice walk on a warm day.



In the back yard. New things to examine and shake test and attempt to chew on: pine cones, pine needles, sand, and bark.



Claire's friend Lindsay visited with us and took a turn on Baby Duty.



Grandpa and Spud read a book.



Aloha! It's Magnum, B.I.

Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude

We have been in Florida, visiting Grandparents Grimm and soaking up some warm sunshine. There is no better way to recharge a cold soul in the waning months of a bleak winter than to head south to warmer latitudes and sit on a tropical (or sub-tropical, if you want to get technical) beach, slather on sunscreen, and stare dumbfounded at the waves and palm trees and your extremely white legs poking out of the shorts that you haven't worn since September. You can feel the sunshine and warm breeze recharge your spirit, like the battery on your favorite personal electronic gizmo.

I strongly advocate vacations as a way to physically and mentally remove yourself from your dusty daily routines and allow you to look at your life from the outside and find some perspective. After a few days in your temporary vacation mode, you realize that those problems you had to deal with back home weren't necessarily all that dreadful.

There's one small hitch: routines are good if you want babies to sleep through the night. Spud's been getting good 10-11 hour nights of sleep for a couple of months, but he's fallen off the wagon a little on the trip. Also, tooth #3 is here, which probably isn't helping.

The highlight of the trip was Spud's first visit to the beach. When we arrived at the beach he was napping. He's used to waking up in all sorts of different places (the Mall, school, the park, the grocery store), but this time it was an entirely new ecosystem. He groggily took in the waves and sandy beach and was a little intimidated at first, but it grew on him.

Spud and Hobbes

It's strange to realize that he isn't going to remember anything that's happening now. I'm impatient for the time when he can talk and interact and give us his impressions of things.

Caged, Like Some Kinda Wild Animal

He's become increasingly mobile. He can crawl at high speeds now (although his crawling style can still be best described as "drunk tarantula") and a few days ago he pulled himself up into a standing position. We can no longer place him in a safe location someplace with a toy or a bottle and expect him to stay put. On the contrary, when he's put down, he seems to be compelled to crawl toward the nearest breakable or dangerous item in sight. In a room filled with 98 fun and colorful new toys, one expensive and breakable Faberge egg, and one venomous rattlesnake, he would climb over the toys in order to grab the snake and use it as a bullwhip to destroy the Faberge egg.

So we have cordoned off our former "dining" room (number of times "dined" in: two) with baby gates to create a place to dump him while I use the bathroom and to protect the breakable items in our house. Er, I mean, to create a safe, carpeted, and fun environment for him to play and learn in.



We put all of his toys in there and he can play with whatever he wants. He especially likes his brightly-colored electronic button-pushy-flashy-light-sing-songs-musical busy boxes (one from Grandparents Grimm and the other from the McCormick's...thanks!). He calls them his "iPads". He sometimes works on both at once.



"How do you get the Internet on these things?"



No cage will hold him for long.