Yes, how could I not mention my 15 minutes of fame at Dragon*Con wearing a big fuzzy plush alien costume. So I recently searched to see if anybody had posted anything more about the yip-yip costume at Dragon*Con.
I’m glad I did because I found two videos. It’s very surreal watching a video of yourself, when it’s not yourself, from a perspective other than the one you remember.
Of course this is also the year when Nate really stepped off into being his own person (literally). The period from 8 months to 19 months is a pretty dramatic one. Personally, this has really been a year for bonding with the little guy now that he reacts and learns and interacts so effectively. I’m looking forward to more of the same.
So many accomplishments… here are just a few.
He started moving on his own,…
learned to crawl,…
learned to walk,…
and kick a ball.
He ate more solid foods,…
tried blueberries (still a favorite),…
tried ice cream,…
tried birthday cake,…
and apples (as well as anything else he can get his hands on).
He learned to play games,…
and color,…
and recognize letters.
He met some fuzzy friends,…
and wet ones,…
and some real ones too.
Mostly he’s just growing up while continuing to be the cutest kid EVAR…
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Did I mention that I hate FeedBurner?
That last post was supposed to get published tomorrow, but I mistyped the date to December 8th instead of 28th… so bing… out it went. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except the FeedBurner plugin snags the post and IMMEDIATELY distributes it to all of your feed-readers with no opportunity for revocation.
This also means that when I edit the posts to correct spelling and grammar that I inevitably spot after posting, MOST of you will NEVER see those changes… because FeedBurner has decided that the first posting is the One True Post… updates don’t seem to be carried through (at least that I can tell).
Hate.
K apparently gets some useful features out of FB which is why it was installed in the first place. Perhaps this will be revisited soon, but obviously this isn’t important enough to annoy her for.
Ahh, the end of December, when the Christmas festivities transition to a swarm of Best of…, List of…, Top x of… posts for the year in passing.
I’ve decided to not resist this trend and write up a few short posts about eventful things that have happened in the last year. This will also allow me to schedule some posts for the next week when I might otherwise neglect to do anything on the internet.
So part 1 corresponds roughly with the first quarter of this year which found me in the highlands of Colorado for work… and just a little play.
We also took our first plane trip with Nate to see family in Texas. This started out as a truly horrible trip with flight delays and illness and grungy hotel vouchers… but Nate was a trooper. The trip itself was a lot of fun and we enjoyed seeing my G-Ma C and the Wilczynski family.
Or should that be unwrapped?
Another Christmas has come and gone with family and presents and way too much good food.
My parents drove out Christmas Eve and joined us in the ceremonial wrapping paper thrashing yesterday morning. Everybody was curious how Nate would react, and after some encouragement we got him to look in his stocking.
However, after the initial novelty wore off, he pretty much played with the first toy that was opened and ignored everything else. At least until my Dad opened the radio controlled helicopters (yes 2!) that Mom bought him. Nate was pretty interested in those, “up! up!” he shouted. Dad and I had a pretty good time trying to figure out how not to crash them instantly… and an even better time reverse engineering one to fix the other (they were fairly fragile.. but luckily far more repairable than I expected).
My sister and her fam drove up from the Philly area to join us just in time for K’s marvelous Christmas dinner (Mmm… spiced ham with red pepper jelly…).
Today we took some time to take portraits of the kids. That went pretty well until Nate turned into a ravenous beast and had to be restrained.
… or at least that’s how this picture looks. He’s actually laughing madly. I mean, in a good way.
After that we went outside to get in some sledding. Although it rained on Christmas eve, we got some fresh snow on Christmas and a bit more today. That put a bit of fluff on top of the crunchy snow underneath.
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Space-X, which has received mucho accolados (!?) from this blogger, has just announced that they have won a NASA contract for resupply of the space station after the shuttle’s retirement. This will make use of their really massive Falcon 9 booster which is yet to make it’s maiden flight. The first pieces of the first Falcon 9 are just arriving at the Cape now for launch early next year. Serious heavy lift capability with built in redundancy not seen since the Saturn boosters developed 40 years ago.
Edit: It’s worth mentioning that a similar contract for cargo services to ISS was also awarded to Orbital Sciences Corp. for the same period. This is another big success for commercial access into space.
I teased you with one of the snow macro shots I took on Saturday and now I’ve posted several others. I’ve broken my usual rule of resizing the images down to 1800×1200 for the gallery because I couldn’t bear to leave the finer details behind. I won’t claim all of these shots are crisp and sharp to that level, but the fractal repetition of snowflakes on snowflakes is breathtaking in its complexity.
So do yourself a favor and click on a few of these and take a look at the full resolution images. I hope you enjoy looking at these as much as I did taking them.
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And yes Heidi, these have definite Christmas card potential.
When we woke up this morning, we saw that the ‘horrible brutal snowstorm that blasted the North East’ had left a beautiful blanket of fresh snow outside. K thankfully bought a brand new plastic sled, so Nate & I went outside to go sledding. K then followed up with the camera.
A track through the snow…
… means it’s time for sledding!
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I hope you enjoyed the snow too.
Nate spent time with Daddy this morning identifying letters of the alphabet. He got 16 out of 25 (we don’t have any “I”s out right now, not sure why).
When he says “R” is cracks me up. He makes the sign for “Z” which is cute.
Because Heidi asked for it…here is a video of Nate from today, hiding under the blanket.
