Sunday, August 31, 2008

Let The Games Begin

And by games, I mean baby-proofing. It's a game because the trick is to baby-proof before she figures out what she can get into that she shouldn't. So far we're tied, one-one.

Here's a picture of our living room, it's a little old (the cradle is gone now) but you get the gist. The key things to note here are the shelf under the coffee table and the bookcase.

[image]

The coffee table shelf is where we'd been storing games with tiny pieces, like scrabble and dominoes. This is where I lost. She figured out how to break into the games before we figured out we needed to move them (remember she's not crawling yet, supposedly). So, the games have been replaced with a shoebox full of booties, hats, other smallish clothing articles, a box of large Brio blocks, and a couple other more baby-friendly items. I figured she might like opening up the boxes and dumping out the clothing and blocks, since she enjoyed it so much with the games. I was right.


{poor Dragnet, I just noticed his forlorn face in the background}

The lowest shelf of the bookcase, on the other hand, she hadn't discovered yet. This is good because it was chock full of stamps. Stamps in bags, in books, in cigar boxes, in tins, individual stamps floating around, tiny bundles of stamps stacked up and wrapped with twine. In other words, baby heaven. This is the collection Pete inherited from his great-aunt. I have no idea if it's worth anything beyond the shear volume of stamps, but in that it is amazing.

The collection has now been safely moved to an upper shelf of a closet. Phew. It has been replaced with a few bins of toys and stuffed animals, and a few photo albums. I figure by the time she's learned how to pull the albums out she'll be ready to flip through them instead of eat them.

I don't know if moving her toys to the shelf drew her attention or if we were mere seconds away from a baby-stamp fiasco, but I moved the stamps last night and I'd captured this image by mid-afternoon today.



Disaster averted. We'll see what the next round holds.

Teeth

Ellie has two bottom teeth, as I've mentioned in a previous post. I'd been trying but so far hadn't had much luck capturing them on film. Or so I thought. Turns out, thanks to my 10 mpx camera, I actually have several accidental pictures of them if I just choose to look closely enough. Here's the best of them so far.


{original image}


{close-up}

So, there you have it. Evidence of teeth.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Peek-A-Boo

Pete and I have a schedule arranged where he goes into work early and leaves early to pick Ellie up from daycare. I go in late and stay late, which means it's just the two of us (me and Ellie) in the mornings. And I'm almost always running behind. It can be a challenge to keep her occupied some mornings while I get things together. And, if I'm being honest, she's just too much fun. We could probably get out of the house on time most mornings, no problem, but I'm too busy watching her or playing games with her. Like my new favorite, peek-a-boo behind the refrigerator.


{boo! tee hee}

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Mirrors

Ellie, like most babies, has long been a fan of the baby in the mirror. She smiles and laughs and tries to grab the baby through the glass. Our best mirror is the full length one that is our closet door, and she learned, fairly early on, what was coming when the door was hidden and would start giggling as we pulled the mirror over so she could see herself in it.



Today, for the first time, she looked at me in the mirror, then turned around and looked at me sitting behind her. This is a big deal to me because, while I'm pretty sure she doesn't understand that the baby is her, she's beginning to understand what must be an incredibly complex and bizarre thing to a new mind, a reflection.

I'm fascinated by this, how babies pick up abstract notions. Learning the complexities of language, understanding that objects exist even when you can't see them, figuring out not just how but even that it's possible to propel yourself forward on those tiny, wobbly sticks. The reflection in a mirror, I think, is one of the most abstract of these. How do you comprehend a reflection? How do you learn that the baby you see is actually you? You have to match what you see in the mirror to what's going on around you, and that takes quite a bit of awareness, both of yourself and your surroundings. So, figuring out that I exist both in the mirror and behind her, amazing. Another synapse has connected in her mind. Next up, gravity!

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Surprise Visitor

Tuesday afternoon I get an email from a cousin I hadn't heard from in awhile. In fact, I'm so bad at keeping in touch, he learned we were pregnant from my dad's Christmas card this year...a month after Ellie was born. He was in the area for work and wanted to come up, meet the baby, and catch up a bit. So he did!



It was a wonderful, if very short, visit. Turns out he was at the baseball game on Tuesday as well. Funny.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Go Nationals!

We made it to our first baseball game of the season finally Tuesday night.


His aunt and her kids are big Mets fans (it was Nationals v. Mets) and wanted to check out the new stadium, so we tagged along (thanks Sue!!)...as did Pete's mother, other aunt and uncle, and sister. We were quite the crew, especially when we passed Ellie down the line. She got a little tired of this I think.


And eventually she just got a little tired.

[image]

The Nationals ended up losing after a brief meltdown by a relief pitcher. Oh well. It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to get that big "first baseball game" milestone behind us.

The most exciting point of the evening was when Aunt S. discovered Ellie's two bottom teeth had finally broken through! Boy did we feel a little, uh, out of the loop. Who knows how long they'd been there. You check and you check, and she drools and drools and chews on everything, and eventually you kind of stop thinking about it. Sure enough, there they were!



I was semi-successful at getting a picture of them. They're *right* along her lower lip line, very tiny grey lines. You kind of have to see them in person and then look at the picture. But they are there! Good thing she likes yelling right now or I wouldn't have had a prayer of getting a picture of them.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

We're Ba-Ack

I think it's a little funny in an ironic kind of way that the title of my previous post was "The End." It wasn't intended to actually be The End, though for you the reader (hi loyal readers!) it may have seemed like it. Sorry for the long, long wait. Now is time for to catch up.

The next weekend after being back from our big trip, we decided to go for a hike with Aunt S. at Great Falls National Park. It couldn't have been a more perfect day.

[image]

We walked around for a bit, sat and had some lunch, walked some more.

[image]

Got to use our nifty backpack for what it was intended, actual hiking.

[image]

True to fashion, Ellie proved yet again she can sleep pretty much anywhere.

[image]

We had a great time so I'm hoping we do more of this type of thing soon. It seems that we always put off doing these things until the end of the summer when there are only a few weekends left to fit everything in, then enjoy them so much we swear we're going to do more next year...then put it off until the end of the summer. We still want to go camping, anyone want to start taking bets as to whether that will actually happen?