Goin' Commando

Hallelujah! After a two-day hunger strike, he finally ate something! Well, to be fair, he had a little bit yesterday, like a teeny tiny little piece of bread and a yogurt and some diaper cream, but other than that he hasn't eaten anything since Monday. We're on Day Two of the Commando Method Of Getting Your Child To Eat Something Other Than Baby Food, Oatmeal, and Cheerios. The Commando Method (our name for it) entails providing healthy, well-rounded meals for the little one and sitting with him and eating the same thing. It also means no snacks and no letting him fill up on milk or water before a meal. At dinner time, he ate tator tots and chicken tenders, our usual Wednesday meal (because P has to leave at 6:30 for tutoring). We also let him have a go at drinking from a regular (but plastic, we're not stupid!) cup, and he did brilliantly. We were so happy that we let him have TWO cereal bars AND yogurt before bed!

The day even started out on a good note, because Gabriel's hives were completely gone. Let's back up for a minute. Last night, the Chipster was looking for anything he could eat that would not meet our approval, so after eating moisturizer, diaper cream, and chewing gum, and after refusing eggs, chicken, raisins, and penne pasta, he found a plate with salt and cajun seasoning on it and got to work. Within an hour, he was covered in hives. His doctor and Gramma said not to worry as long as he was breathing fine and not under any distress - in fact, he was the happiest he'd been all day - so we gave him some Atarax and put him to bed. By the morning, he was all better.

We just found this thing called the Mechanical Contrivium, and it's hilarious. At least it can be, if you put the right thing in the box. Try "my butt."

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

By the way, have you heard about silent dating? Speed dating is so yesterday!

Extra Special Double Monday Bonus Post: Wildlife Edition

You may recall that a few posts ago we showed you our backyard visitor, this guy:

Duplicate picture, not a repeat visit

At the time, we speculated that our hawk was actually a falcon, or maybe it was a hawk after all. Truth is, we had no idea what it was. Thankfully, a lot of people in our family are smarter than we are, or have better bird books, or both. Over the weekend, a very informative phone call was placed to us by Mom Angle and Nick. Nick found a description in one of his books of the Northern Marsh Hawk, also known as the Harrier. No, not this Harrier; while they are certainly cool one of them would have done substantially more damage to our backyard than our feathered friend. When Mom asked if our backyard visitor had a head that looked like an owl (even though it clearly wasn't an owl), we knew we had a winner. The striped tail, the spotted back, all key features. They can range into Georgia during the winter, and often have variations in head color which would explain why ours was buff in the head while most of the harriers you see in pictures are brown.

So there you have it, mystery solved. Not a falcon. Yes, a hawk, but specifically a marsh hawk, also known as a harrier.

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