Schierer Space

For the last month or so, Chris and I have been teaching Nate sign language as a way to help him communicate before he can really talk. We used the book Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, which I checked out of our local library to get started.

The sign language has been helping quite a bit, since his only consistent vocal word at this point is vacuum (yes, really, he says vacuum). He’s got a sign vocabulary of about 25 words at this point, and I think it would be higher if his dexterity was a little better.

Nate is very eager to try and learn the signs, and is always looking at my hands to see what I’m doing with them. He even surprised me one day; when he saw a picture of a baby, he started making the sign for baby, which completely confused me because that isn’t a sign I taught him. That sign he only sees on his sign language video.

As of yesterday though, a problem has developed. We figured it was going to happen sooner or later, but I was hoping it was going to be much, much later. Nate has started making up his own signs. I have no idea what they mean. I’ve been trying to figure out the context for the sign (where we are, what we’re doing), but I have yet to notice any patterns.

For the record, here is a list of the signs Nate knows at this point:
more, all done, eat/drink, mom/dad, cat, dog, fish, frog, book, light, hi/bye, baby, ball, swing, hot, cold, milk, nurse, bath, spider, rain, butterfly, hat, help, please, thank-you, and sleep.

It’s been a while since I actually made a post here, so I thought I’d use today’s nap time to do just that. Not a real lot going on here other than just day to day stuff, so it may not be real exciting.

I took Nate to the doctor yesterday. He’s had a cold and a very runny nose for several days now, and after waking up many time screaming on Monday night, I was quite sure that he had an ear infection. He most definitely did, so now he’s on an antibiotic. hopefully it will kick in today, and he’ll be a little less cranky.

Nate and I are taking a Music Together class on Friday mornings. it’s been a lot of fun for both of us. He gets to be around a group of kids his age, and I love to see him interact with them. He’s gotten out of the “babies are for eating” stage into the “I’m going to poke you in the eye” stage. lots of fun. He also seem to be enjoying the music. He gets excited when the jingle bells come out and he gets to play with them. So far a good experience.

Nate’s getting better at walking, and is almost ready to do it on his own. When we’re outside in the lawn, he walks everywhere, just using one hand to hold onto 1 of my fingers. Inside, he still prefers to hold on with both hands. I don’t think it will be long now before he’s walking on his own.

We’ve been spending a lot of time outside since the weather has turned nice. Nate enjoys it, and my gardens are starting to look pretty good because of it. Every time we walk around to look at the flowers, I pause to pull a weed or two. Even managed to trim the hedges the other day. hopefully I’ll be able to keep the weed pulling up all summer.

I’ve been doing more scrapbooking again recently. A couple of the moms I met thru the MOMS Club have been getting together fairly regularly in the evenings to scrap, and I’ve been joining them. I’ve been working on a simple photo album of Nate’s first year pictures. Just a regular 2-up 4×6 album that I’ve been making little 4×6 mini-pages to journal on about the accompanying photo. Goes quite quickly once I get momentum.

Well that’s about all I can think of right now. Gotta get back to the laundry. Maybe more to come soon, but I wouldn’t count on it.

An older gentleman at our church surprised us yesterday by dropping off this rocking horse he had made for Nate. It was quite a surprise! Nate has quite a few adopted grandparents in our church, for which we are very thankful. Nate took right to it, and quickly learned how to make it rock. I think he’ll be enjoying this quite a bit in the years to come. Thank you very much Mr. Daggett.

Here’s another picture that we took last Sunday of Nate dressed in his church clothes. We were ushers, so he needed to look his best to show people down the aisle.

Today was a beautiful 65 degrees, and partly sunny. Such a change from what we have been having. Nate and I took the opportunity to get out and stroll around the neighborhood. We both enjoyed it immensely.

Chris had ordered a new lens for his camera, and it arrived early this afternoon, so Nate and I had to test it out and make sure it worked properly. That means that there are some new photos up in Nate’s 10 month gallery. There are also two new ones in the cat’s gallery.

Nate turned 10 months yesterday, and he’s learning lots of new stuff. In the last month he’s gotten really good at pulling himself up, but he hasn’t learned to sit yet. He’s figured out how to go up the stairs, and has managed 5 before getting tired. Yesterday, he learned to escape from the strap in the shopping cart. He also learned to snap his fingers, sort-of. here’s a little video I took today.

A couple of months ago, I read a blog post about gDiapers, the disposable diaper you can flush or compost. I thought they were an excellent idea, so I looked into trying them out. I could order them online, but the closest store that actually carried them was in Ithaca. I didn’t really want to get into a situation where I had to drive an hour and a half, or pay outrageous shipping and handling to get diapers.

Fast forward to last week when I went grocery shopping. I walked thru the new expanded health food section at Wegmans, and what did I spot? gDiapers. I made an impulsive decision to buy the starter kit and try them out. So far I’m really liking the idea. Nate and I haven’t completely figured out the finer details yet (we’ve had a lot of leaks), but we’re getting better with them. The downside: a)Our toilet isn’t quite powerful enough to flush them. b)Wegmans seems to always be out of the M/L refills. Tomorrow I’ll try the other store that has recently started carrying them. If they have them and we can continue our experiment, I’ll have to set up a system for composting the wet ones.

I am excited about doing something better for the environment. I really hated throwing out all those disposable diapers.

Since some of the features of the gallery are working, I was able to upload the pictures from our Texas trip.

Our hosting company upgraded our server yesterday, which means that we’ve been having some issues since then. Mostly with the gallery. We’re working with them to resolve the issues, and hopefully everything will be back to normal soon.

I was going to make a blog post with pictures about our trip to TX last week, but our gallery seems to be nonexistent so I can’t upload the pictures. We’ll try and get it fixed soon.

Our trip was ok overall, but way too short. We had planned on it being a short trip, but between the weather delays and the stomach flu I developed just before take-off, we ended up getting there about 18 hrs after we were planning on.

We spent what was left of Saturday afternoon visiting with Chris’s aunt, uncle and cousin before taking Chris’s grandmother out for dinner. She was so happy to be able to meet Nate. Sunday we spent some more time visiting with G-Ma. She loved being able to introduce Nate to everyone at the nursing home. In the evening we hung out with Jonny playing with the Wii and Guitar Hero on the Xbox. Monday we stopped in for another quick visit with G-Ma before heading back to the airport. We ended up having a delay on the way home, but that turned out ok because it meant we didn’t have to wait as long in Chicago.

Nate figured out three things today

• Climb up the step from the family room in to the kitchen
• pull to a standing position on a short object like the bathtub
• Splash water everywhere while taking a bath

It was a very productive day.

now if i can only convince my computer that the time has changed, I’ll be all set.