Mmm...Dog food

I was doing the dishes when I saw Thomas make a run for the dog dish. But instead of picking it up like I normally do, I figured, "what the heck?"
I did end up taking the dog food away since he kept putting it in his mouth, but he had a great time with the water. I've got a little video I'll try to add later, but for now it's just pictures.

Pantry fun

Only one week of walking and Thomas already found something fun to dump out in the pantry. I *did* look at the items on the shelf to see if it was alright for him to play in there, but I guess I missed the open bag of birdseed. Oops.
He's also wasting no time in learning how to climb. Last night he leaned over the toy box and grabbed the opposite side and proceeded to pull himself up on top of it. Great...a climber.
The coolest thing though is watching his progression to standing up by himself. At first every time he'd plop down he'd just cry until someone came and helped him up. Then about a day later he figured out that he could crawl to things to pull himself up instead of waiting around for us. Now he's working on getting his feet under him and pushing himself up with his hands. He did it once yesterday, but several other times it just resulted in a face plant.  

Another Cute Video

I'm using this video as an excuse to try out a program I read about in PC Magazine. It's called Qumana. I had never heard of it before I read about it. It's basically an offline blogging tool with many more features than just the web based posting of Blogger. Take a look here at Qumana.com.

Now... on to the cute video. I only have my digital camera to take videos, so unfortunately the quality is never that great. It will do for now though, until I get a real camcorder. I've also been trying out different video editing software. I've tried Pinnacle Studio Plus 10, CyberLink Power Director 5, Windows Movie Maker and Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. CyberLink was actually the easiest to use of them all, but it lacked some more pro features that I thought I would use in the future. Pinnacle just didn't do it for me at all. It was a strain on my computer resources. I have a P4 2.0 with 1GB of RAM which by in large is pretty good for most tasks. I think I've settled on Adobe. After some getting used to it seems to have the best of both worlds. It can do a whole lot and seems pretty simple to use. Ok.. back to the cute video.

This was just some video I took of Thomas while Sorcha, Thomas and I were playing in his room. The video was taken on the 18th, so he wasn't walking much at all. He was just cruising. It wasn't until a week or so ago he decided to walk on his own. He is just the cutest thing around. Hope you like.



Oh yeah, and I'm trying out YouTube. It seems pretty cool. It's like Flikr for videos. You upload your videos, name them, describe them and tag them. You then can view everyone else's videos with the same tags. I've uploaded some other videos that I haven't put on the blog. Take a look.

And he's off...

I've been saying for months that this is what I wanted...I guess we'll see if I *really* wanted it. As of Friday, we officially have a walker. We've known for a while that he could do it and we've even gotten him on video walking but *he's* never thought of himself as a walker until Friday. Everything seemed normal Friday morning with him frantically grabbing my fingers before setting off, but then after his nap it had all changed. It's almost like he made new connections in his sleep or something. When he woke up he just slid off the bed (video of that later), turned around, and walked away! I wasn't quite sure what to make of it at first. So I kept picking him up and putting him down again to see if that little hand would wave in the air searching for mine, but he wanted none of it. You could see on his face the comprehension that he was doing it on his own.



Of course, he's also finally worked out this crawling business as well. He's a much more efficient walker though. Now all he has to master is standing up from a sitting position (without something to pull up on) and he won't need me anymore!! Ok, maybe he'll kind of need me...

A Little Boy

Gigi came over the other day to watch Thomas while Sorcha and I got some things done around the house. A very cool thing let me tell you. All he wanted to do was walk around the house with her with his hat on and his soft toolbox. He was moving so much I couldn't really get a good picture. This was the best I could get. He is growing up so fast.

Light!!

I'm not exactly sure when Thomas started saying his two words, but it was probably at least 2-3 weeks ago. I know I posted a while back that he said a few things, but he hasn't repeated any of them. He started saying uh-oh whenever he dropped something and before I knew it he was saying it all day. At first it was more like "uh-uh-uh-ooooooh." But, with the hours and hours of practice he puts in each day, it's much more precise now. He'll say it and then drop something on purpose. It's pretty funny. Then, out of nowhere he started saying "Ite!!" while pointing to a light. So, we started showing him the sign for light and now he does that too! It's so strange to hear him say something that you can actually understand and to know that he understands what you mean. I can ask him where the light is and he looks up and smiles.
Oh! And you can also ask him where his belly is and he'll show you - about half the time. Weird! I can't believe I have an almost-one year old....

Person of the Year

I almost forgot to post this. Back in December, Time magazine was doing a promotion that allowed anyone to upload any picture they wanted to "nominate" them for the Person of the Year. When you uploaded the picture it put a frame around it and made it look like it was the cover of the actual magazine. Cute. But... for some, they actually chose some and displayed that cover in Times Square. Thomas' picture got chosen to be in Times Square! How cool is that? Of course, when we did the calculation of how many pictures were shown every day... it was only up for about 2 minutes. Still... Very cool. They had a webcam taking pictures of Times Square and if your picture was chosen they sent you an email with the webcam view of the picture being shown. Again... Very cool! So... to make a long story short... T.M. is famous.

Some Play Time

Well... Home again with the little man. One of his favorite things to do now is stand next to a bookcase we have in his room and play a toy piano on one of the shelves. He also likes to pull everything on the shelves off... and on to the floor. This bookcase is where we keep most of the toys he likes to play with, so he's hanging out here a lot. He also loves to take the containers of blocks on the bottom shelf and dump them out. He'll put some blocks back in and dump them out again. He loves it. I took some photos of him doing all these things. The photos aren't great, but I also took some movies which are very cute. Follow the link and enjoy.

Walking

Thomas is getting much better at walking by himself. He still likes to cruise and is much more comfortable holding on to things. But every now and then he'll go off on his own. I took a movie of him walking with his walker a couple of months ago. I can't remember if I presented it on the blog or not. I just took a quick movie of him walking to mama, but he actually changes course and heads for a closer chair. It's pretty cute. Take a look at both movies here. Enjoy.

SuperFriends

There is simply no excuse for how long it's taken me to post about our amazing playgroup. We call ourselves SuperFriends (yes, we are SuperDorks). We started meeting in August, but a few months ago the group was getting too big so we decided to break off into "toddler" and "infant" groups. Thomas and his friend Eva were technically below the age cut-off, but since we've been in since the beginning, we stuck with our older friends. One of the mamas had the great idea of trying to get all the babies (minus one not there that day) in a picture together. We plopped them all down and started singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" to try to keep them from running away. They were so curious what we were doing that they stayed still long enough for a great picture! This group has been so amazing. It's been quite an experience to have a group of close friends going through new motherhood together. Yay SuperFriends!

Thomas and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

We've finally received our visit from "child's first illness". I guess I should be happy that it took almost 10 months to arrive, but who is ever happy about being sick?
Poor little man was so sick of being attacked with a tissue and/or medicine that he eventually became wary of a hand coming in his direction. The picture is how he fell asleep after lunging to get away from me to avoid a swipe of the nose. He just fell onto the pillow and cried (and 30 seconds later, fell asleep). This is extremely unusual for him in that if he's crying, he's always also reaching for me. I don't think he's ever cried and been happy to be away from me at the same time before.
I'd say this was easily one of the hardest weeks of my life. And he really wasn't even all that sick. Hats off the mamas in our playgroup who went through Rotavirus. Luckily if/when he gets that sick, I can (and WILL) call in reinforcements - GiGi.
I don't know what he had (and neither did the doctor), but I'm guessing it was just a virus of some kind. He had a really bad runny nose, a fever for several days and then a cough. The hard part was sleeping. The first two days he just wanted to be held non-stop. He would just lay his head on your shoulder and whimper. Talk about heart-wrenching! But those days were actually easier than the rest of the week because once he felt well enough to play (a little), he wanted to get down all day, but then everything that happened was HORRIBLE. He was standing and fell on his bottom - EARTH SHATTERING. He bonks himself in the head with a book - THE HORROR! He wanted to play but just couldn't cope with anything. By Thursday (started previous Friday night) I was on the verge of a breakdown. Of course, like many unpleasant things, my memory of last week is already starting to grow fuzzy. Honestly, sometimes I'm not sure how we'd get through this parenting adventure if that weren't the case.