A new baby!

Congratulations to Debbie and Eric on the birth of their little boy, Dylan. I saw pictures last night and he is as cute as can be!

Speech! Speech!

Will talks all the time now. He calls the cats by name, though Nanette sounds more like "Neh Neh," and JR sounds more like "RR." Still, though, they are identifiable words, at least to us. And it's really cute. He hung out with my parents' dogs last weekend and came home expecting the cats to be just as tolerant of him as the dogs were, so he gets kind of upset when the cats see him and run. He is better at not trying to eat them than he used to be, but he still sometimes gets too excited and pulls their tails or grabs their fur. Will is also a master at using the word "good," and surprised me the other day while he and I were watching Law and Order: SVU by all of a sudden starting to clap and saying "Good job!" I didn't think he was following the storyline, but maybe I wasn't giving him enough credit. And sometimes when he's sitting in the back seat of the car we know he's on his toy cell phone because he uses this really funny high-pitched voice when conversing with his pretend friends.

Here is a picture of Will with his Grand-Nana:



And here's Will sitting on my lap:

Getting babyproofed

We're making progress on this house. It's going slowly, but we're getting there. One of the first things we did was install a gate at the top of the stairs, and we've just been watching Will carefully when he's downstairs to make sure he doesn't try to make the ascent himself. He's actually quite proficient at going up the stairs on his own and Matt guesses he would have a 30% chance of making it all the way up without falling back down, but those odds are not quite good enough, at least in our opinion. And since my back seized up the other day as I bent to help Will on the stairs, I got somewhat concerned about someday becoming totally paralyzed and having to watch helplessly as he crawled up the stairs on his own, so yesterday we got another gate for the bottom. And tonight Matt installed some locks for the low kitchen cabinets to keep Will from playing with small kitchen appliances and cleaning chemicals. He's going to be pissed off tomorrow when he figures out what we did.

The picture above has nothing to do with babyproofing, but shows you one of Will's new favorite activities, feeding his parents. He's pretty much refusing to eat any sort of babyfood himself these days, but he'll be happy to feed you if you come close enough. He's been sick this week and hasn't had any appetite anyway, but we do have better luck getting him to eat a few bites of our food than anything mushy off of a spoon that he doesn't control himself. And he still doesn't have top teeth (yes, he'll be a year old in a couple of weeks and he still only has two lower teeth), so he has a hard time biting food off. His two top teeth are ready to pop through any day now, this weekend I suspect, and I think he'll be much happier once they do.

They say that Delaware is a small state.

And that's because it is! Yesterday Matt, Will, and I checked out a nice playground a couple of miles from our house and met briefly a mom and her 18-month-old son, who was wearing an adorable Pooh hat. We didn't chat long because this other kid knew how to walk and didn't want to just stand around. And then this morning Will and I were hanging out at the university while Matt did some job-related stuff and ran across this very same mom and boy. I initially recognized the mom, but wasn't sure of myself until I saw the kid's Pooh hat, and then I knew it was the same people. So I screwed up my courage and went over to them and we chatted and hung out for the next hour or so. She gave me a recommendation for a pediatrician that she loves, and we exchanged email addresses. She is my first friend in Delaware!

Other than that, we had a nice visit last weekend with Robbie and Jess on Friday and then with Megan from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon. Here's a picture of Will's play area with the rug that we bought on Saturday.



And here's a picture of the family on vacation in Plum Island, MA. Will is giving me a kiss.



And finally, here's a picture of Will looking ridiculously like a little boy and not at all like a baby. Also a tiny bit like a pole dancer.

In Delaware, back from vacation

Well, I got a complaint today that I haven't updated since before our move. That is because we have been moving, which turned out to be much, much more work than I expected. And it is 100 degrees out in August in Delaware, apparently. I had no idea it would be like this. I'm afraid to check the weather forecast to find out that we should expect more of the same tomorrow. Actually, it's been raining pretty hard this evening, so I'm hoping tomorrow will be bearable. Tomorrow will be a big day here. Robbie and Jess are coming in the morning and staying until early evening, and Megan is coming later in the evening and spending the weekend with us.

In the last week we also went on vacation. We had a lovely time in Cape Cod last weekend visiting Debbie and Eric, Liz, and Megan and Paul. We had a baby shower for Debbie and Eric, and none too soon, since their baby is due late this month. Pictures will be coming once we find the cable for the camera. We also went to Plum Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, about an hour from Boston. There we visited Matt's brother Jon and his girlfriend Kristen. We had fun there too, but the weather was pretty rainy so we didn't get to hang out at the beach much. But we did sit around and be lazy and read as much as we could while also keeping an eye on Will. So that was nice.

And it turns out that Will loves the beach. On Cape Cod the beach that we visited was perfect for a little guy. The water was gentle and relatively warm and the sand was plentiful. The surf was rougher on Plum Island and the water was very cold so Will didn't get to go in the ocean there, but he did play in the sand for a couple of hours on Tuesday. Again, pictures are coming. Eventually.

And finally I'd like to report that setting up a new house is hard. It took us less than a day to set up our apartment when we moved to Alexandria, but I guess now we have more stuff, a baby to watch, and way less will to live since you could boil water in a glass in our new living room. But the heat will pass and we'll get more organized with time.