A Little Birdie...

came to see us today. While Gabriel and Mommy were eating breakfast, and Daddy was getting some much-earned rest, our newest hummingbird came to see us. This one is black, while the other one was lighter. He's been around for the past few weeks. Anyway, we saw two black specks; one was a big black butterfly that's been hanging around lately, and the other was our little birdie friend. He flew right up to the window by the Chipster and put his little beak right up to the window and watched us for several long seconds. He then flew up to his feeder and took a quick sip before Gabriel watched him fly away.

We had a very nice day today. Gabriel went to playgroup, which we combined with another playgroup just for today so we could discuss changing our schedule since we didn't have our regular group this week. He met Gabrielle, Katie May, and Jackson, and P liked their mommies very much.

After playgroup, the three of us were reunited at Starbucks and walked over to Belly, since our favorite Thai restaurant, Panita, was closed between lunch and dinner. Gabriel fell asleep in his stroller, so we stayed there for a while, eating, browsing the general store, and chatting with the people who work there. We had a great time.

We finally left and went to Lenox mall to return some shoes to Steve Madden. Whitney and Bobby weren't there, but there was a limousine at the hotel next door where they stay, so maybe we'd just missed them going in! We returned the shoes without a problem, got some makeup for P at Aveda while Chip charmed the ladies there, visited the Apple store to gawk at the new iPod nano while the typically male customers there joked with G, and ended the saga of the nursery curtains when we got them at Pottery Barn kids. We got some navy blue tab-top sailcloth curtains, and they are going to look great.

They are especially going to look great with the new rug that Chip got from Gramma yesterday. It has planes on it and is very plush and comfortable, and we'll put photo of these things on the blog when we finish the room, probably tomorrow.

Chip got tooth #9 today. It's his upper left first molar, which usually comes in around 14 months, so he's right on track. He got #8, his lower right lateral incisor, on 25 August. Those usually come in around 7 months, so it was long overdue. He certainly had a lot of pain and discomfort with that one over the months.

With these new teeth, Chipdip is learning to feed himself more chunky grown-up food. Yesterday, he fed himself chunky steamed sweet potatoes with his own fork for lunch, and for dinner he used a fork to eat steamed corn. Sometimes, he won't even let us feed him at all, because he wants to do it himself. It is common at breakfast these days to give him a bowl of oatmeal or a banana with a sippy cup of milk, open up the newspaper, and enjoy our own breakfast while he eats his. Breakfasts are pretty nice, even if they are messy.