Gabe goes back to that place where they make him cry

Today was Gabriel's 18 month doctor's visit. Unfortunately for the Chipster, that also meant the injection of several immunizations into his year and a half old body. Of course Gabriel handled it like a champ. The really good news is that our skinny little child has moved up from the 10th percentile in weight to the 25th percentile (he must be getting his height from a grandparent or great-grandparent, since he's at an oustanding 75th percentile in "tallitude"). We left armed with some new techniques for getting Gabriel to eat something other than oatmeal or yogurt (techniques that are much easier for the doctor to tell us about since he doesn't have to sit through the consequences) and we'll see how that goes over the next few weeks.

We always forget Tylenol on immunization days, but thankfully our doc has a supply on hand

There's no substitute for a little comfort from mommy

When we returned home, a little something we'd found online had been delivered to our door.

We want to say that we absolutely adore our Minolta Maxxum and intend to keep using it as our main picture taking device... well, other than the digital so that we can provide you, gentle reader, with copious images of our son. We love the newness of it and all the automatic features and the fact that you can turn it over to complete manual control.

However, we've been talking a lot about learning how to take better pictures and how we'd like to take more black and white. We have been looking for a really good bargain on a second film camera, a manual advance camera, for a while now and a week or so ago Patty found this particular gem on eBay for a really, really, really inexpensive price. It was essentially a steal and we snapped it up (get it? snapped... camera... eh, nevermind). It arrived today and we can't wait to start using it. In the next month or so look for a bunch of artsy-fartsy type pictures and some in black and white (nevermind the fact that we could, actually, turn any picture that we take with the digital camera into a black and white, that's just too easy).

It's in great shape

And has a nifty 50mm lens

Nobody's going to complain about more pictures of Gabriel, are they?

Eating Like A Big Boy

Chip has graduated to eating in a real chair. He keeps climbing onto every chair, including the high counter chairs, and he's pretty good about staying on them until he gets someone to help him down. We decided to let him eat dinner like a big boy today, since he's been acting like such a good big boy lately. He even says (signs) "thank you" on his own now! Anyway, you can see how much we have to cover him up for mealtime. We almost bought him an art smock at Ikea today just for eating.

He's also become quite the virtuoso pianist. He climbs up onto the piano bench, turns on the piano light, and plays very careful melodies that use the full range of keys. We love to watch him lean over to reach the lowest notes and then cross his left hand over right (very advanced!) to tinkle some of the higher keys. His music sounds beautiful, and he even applauds himself after every song! Not too shabby for a year-and-a-half-plus-two-days-old.

Animals and Muppets

It turned out our hawk was a falcon, best we can tell, but we can't identify its exact species. Nothing we could find had a tan head and spotted back. The closest we could find was a peregrine falcon, which would be completely cool, but that wasn't an exact match, either. We're out of its normal range, but that doesn't necessarily rule it out. The fact that it's endangered makes it unlikely, though.

Also on Sunday, we found a surprise in one of our Christmas boxes when we were putting away our decorations. We don't know who was more surprised, the little guy or us. We let him loose back in the basement to eat our spiders. Besides, we like seeing lizards in our basement. They're cute, and as far as we know, they don't do any harm.

Gabriel has a few computer games that he loves to play. They are all on the Sesame Street website. Here they are:

• Keyboard-o-rama
• Peek-a-boo
• Sounds Around Town

The Hawk and the Falcon

We saw a hawk, possibly red-tailed, flying around our backyard today. It was so big that it broke the branch it landed on and fell a good 15 feet before spreading its wings. It was very exciting.

Later, we finished A Streetcar Named Desire, which we'd started on the plane, and then we watched The Maltese Falcon. Both were good, but The Maltese Falcon was a little pulpy.

By the way, щасливого нового року! (for those of you who still use the Julian calendar).

Good Luck, Grammie!

We got to see Grammie for about an hour on Wednesday. A company flew her down here for an interview, but she had to go back right away so we drove her to the airport. No word yet on the job offer. She looked really amazing, as you can see in the photo.

Chip surprises us every day with the things he does. Yesterday, he went into the coat closet and grabbed the broom and dustpan so he could sweep the kitchen floor (while Mommy was on the phone). Then, he went into the living room and grabbed a screwdriver that was lying on the table, turned his dump truck upside down, and went to work. He never did tell us what was wrong with it, but it seems that he's fixed it because it's working fine. Seriously, though, he really did get that screwdriver into a screw hole and started turning it. He must have seen us changing batteries the day before, but we sure didn't think he was paying attention. He's amazing.