Category Archives: Milestones

>Congratulations Class of 2008

>Graduation was today, and I found myself simultaneously getting teary-eyed and scoffing at the concept of getting teary-eyed at a preschool graduation. But, you know what? Luke spent longer at this school/daycare than he will in high school. All the major baby milestones were shared with the staff there and, well, they have helped us raise Luke. I have trusted them with my first born. I didn’t read the card from the director yet, because I knew it would get me. So tears were shed, but not by me. Poor Luke split his lip right before the ceremony, and I think he had a harder time recovering than he normally would, because he was a little emotional too.

As much as we love our crunchy granola daycare, I could do a whole post about how to survive the potlucks. In a nutshell, I get the fried chicken from king soopers, some sort of pre-washed delicious fruit from the produce section, and this year I splurged on all natural chips and really unnatural french onion dip. It’s important to get the right mix of all natural/organic foods and really unhealthy food that people will wish they were eating too. Oh, and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Back to the party: These three go way back. Way, way back. It seems like just last summer that they were throwing down in front of the outdoor screening of Karate Kid. Yeah, it was last summer. I taught them this oldie, but goodie, courtesy of my good friend Krista: Cheers Big Ears, Here’s the to Good Years!

And I fear that if I blink, we’ll be at the Congratulations Preschool Class of 2013.

>Kindergarten Assessment

>Luke had his assessment today at the kindergarten and we found out he is in the afternoon class with the new teacher. No daycare kids, but two neighbors are in his class. He didn’t share to much about the assessment, but he did say, “She asked me to count and I counted to 20. I thought about counting to 30 but then I figured it would take too long.”

Tonight is the pre-school graduation – so I am sure I will have pictures to share later.

>On the Move

>Jack is almost crawling – it isn’t pretty but he is on the move. The problem with capturing it on video is that if you notice your baby doing some amazing crawling, and it’s right before bedtime, and you run to get the camera, and then try to get him to crawl again, you end up with this:

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=6765432673594533853&hl=en&fs=true

I have three videos like that.

But we didn’t give up! Luke and I kept Jack up long enough, and waved the forbidden remote over and over, and he finally realized I would put him to bed once he pushed himself across the floor on his face. Note the diaper wedgie.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=1217594024847469829&hl=en&fs=true

>Milestone Miscellaneous

> Since I am sure no one wants to hear the milk and bottle disaster from this morning, I am just going to skip over it. Have you ever smelled milk and thought maybe it’s bad, but I should taste it just to be sure? Isn’t that dumb?

In other news, I wanted to post this picture because it’s what inspired me to write all about Jack’s new milestones. But I forgot to include the picture, and the fact that he had his first bath in the real tub. Yea! And you can almost see his two new teeth here, which I also forgot to include in the milestone announcement. Speaking of milestones, we are rapidly approaching my 100th post. V. exciting. Also, it’s almost the 19th of July, which I haven’t quite turned into a holiday where people send me gifts, but I always get good wishes on that day. More on that later. So I was thinking of having a joint 19th of July, 100th post celebration, where I encourage people to post a comment and then I randomly pick a winner and send them a prize. The prize is to be determined, but I welcome suggestions. One very talented, funny, and famous blogger recently gave away 5 wii+wii sports to random commenters and she got 42000 comments. Nintendo hasn’t offered me anything yet, so my prize would probably be something lying around the house that I don’t want anymore. Or something I could send through the internets without having to do anything more strenuous than get my credit card out of my wallet. Assuming I can find my wallet and that my credit card is in there. Hopefully no one in my family will include in their comment that it takes me months to get to the post office. I only wish I had bought some kitschy trinkets in Hot Springs. Stay tuned and plan to comment on the 19th of July!

>Independance Day

>Happy Belated Fourth of July! In honor of the anniversary of our nation’s declaration of independence, I am going to update the Jack Milestone list with all the big steps he has taken to declare his own independence. Included on the list: Army crawling! Pulling to Standing! Sheer madness.

>Oh. No.

>So much to write about, so little desire to sit in front of a computer during vacation. Alas, I think I start in reverse order and write about our vacation last, Dave’s birthday second last, and first I’ll write about the total insanity that transpired at our house today. And by “write about” I mean, “post pictures” and comment with lots of exclamation points!!!

I had an inkling this would happen, so I was able to catch it on film! But I wasn’t quite fast enough. Jack went from this:

To this:

faster than I could snap a photo and still get his whole head in the picture!!! All my attempts to thwart his progress towards crawling have caused the sublimation of his mild desire to crawl into a burning desire to stand up and walk. Time to baby proof. For reals! For reals. (As Luke would say.)

>We’re Back!

>We are back from our trip to Arkansas! Did you miss me? I scheduled a bunch of posts to appear while we were gone to keep things interesting. I have lots of fodder for future posts, but for now I’ll just say that we had a great time, and our road trip went very well. I have lots of great pictures and I even located the card reader, but alas, I can’t find the camera. (This picture of Luke is Aunt Audrey’s*.)

But, I will just share these two big milestones:
Luke rode a horse!
Jack got a tooth!

(Aunt Audrey is actually cousin Audrey, but since she was Aunt Audrey even in her own internal dialog this week, I’ll just go with it.)

>Dun de dun duh, Dun de DAH!

>Jack had his first non friend/relative babysitter on Saturday. (Milestone for Mommy.) OK, we hired one of the teachers from the daycare, so it’s sort of cheating since she is a professional. Dave and I had dinner, drinks and we saw a movie. I was thinking I could do one of those mastercard, or visa or whatever “Priceless” commercials. But first of all, that has been done to death. And secondly, I can only mentally add up some of the cost without thinking maybe it would have been better spent paying for a year of Jack’s college tuition.

Then I keep reminding myself about how I didn’t see the 3rd Indiana Jones because I went to the theater at the Great Northern Mall with my friend Kristen, and when we found out that ticket prices had gone up from $5.00 to $5.50, we just couldn’t justify that extra 50 cents. That was 19 years ago. If I had seen the movie I am sure I would remember how good it was. Instead I am thinking about all the interest I have earned off those 2 quarters. (At 4% compounded annually for 19 years, it’s $1.05, or approximately enough to pay a babysitter for just slightly more than 6 minutes.)

But enough about how cheap I am.

We saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and it was awesome! At first I was thinking it was sort of cheesy, but then Dave reminded me that Indiana Jones is very, awesomely cheesy. I really wish I would have saved that poster I had of Harrison Ford in my room for all those years. Sadly, I was not able to find a replica in 30 seconds of internet searching. OK, I searched for another 30 seconds. I don’t think this was it exactly, but it’s close.

>Cheerio-ios!

>
This was about the 17th take of this picture. I have a bunch of sound effects on my camera, and every time I would focus, Jack would hear the camera, look up, and smile. It’s impossible to get candid photos of him! But finally the allure of the cheerio won out, and I was able to capture the intense concentration required to match a forefinger to a thumb to pick up something small.

>Sitting Up!

>
I haven’t posted Jack’s stats from his 6 month appointment because I lost track of the sheet of paper from the Dr’s office. They said 10% for weight (15 something pounds?) and 50% for height (some amount of unknown inches).

But as you can see, he is sitting up like a big boy these days! I have to do a lot of hovering and propping, but he is doing well. All this new sitting up and growing interest in the world around him have made nursing quite a challenge. I can see why 6 months is a common time to give up on the whole process. Hmm, is it possible that Jack now prefers to nurse a lot in the middle of the night because he is too distracted during the day? Hopefully his 11 hours of sleep on Wednesday night will become more common then the 2 hour stretches we got last night. ZZZZzzzz. Can’t keep typing… falling asssllllleeeeeep.

P.S. Luke got his summer haircut