Here are a bunch of pictures of little Daphne, ranging in age from 10 minutes to 3 days.
Normally I'd post these with comments and so on, but right now I'm just way too tired for that. So, I've just dumped these onto the page, in no particular order.
Daphne visited the pediatrician for the first time today (not counting the times they visited her in the hospital). She is in the 75th percentile for length and the 25th percentile for weight, so apparently she's going to be a supermodel.
She has a tiny bit of jaundice (which is normal), and has lost a bit of weight (also normal). She's as healthy as a horse, basically, and none the worse for wear despite some ill treatment (you try being yanked out of a deep sleep by a latex-gloved hand wrapped around your head!)
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Umm... somebody's a touch upset. | |
| "I'm not sure I trust the hairy one." |
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Getting ready to go home (finally!) | |
| Too many diaper changers wake the baby! |
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Insert interesting caption here | |
| Even the newborn clothes are like wrapping her in a tent. |
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And we're off to the first pediatrician's visit. | |
| She has her mommy's big beautiful eyes. |
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Daphne wore a moocow suit on her one-week birthday. Which was last Sunday, so you can already tell that her daddy is behind on updating this website.
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Happy birthday! | |
| Umm, the daddy doesn't have one of those. No food here, sorry. |
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Sometimes her hair looks red (like here); sometimes it looks blonde. | |
| Ooh, those glisteny eyes! |
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This is a reference picture. Future pictures will be taken with the rabbit for comparison purposes. | |
Daphne is now 3 weeks old. It's amazing how much she has changed already... she is getting nice healthy fat deposits around her face, and has gained a lot of weight in general. She is much stronger; if you hold her in a vertical position, she can keep her head in place and even turn it to look around. She also has a discernible attention span; she loves to look at green plants and trees. Yay trees!
Mmm! Smell that fresh air!
Her eyes are closed here, but she really likes to be outside.
When there's nothing better handy, she likes to gnaw on her fist.
That's a happy dream, I think.
Zonked out!
There's no bed quite so comfy as a Grandpa's lap.
Touchdown!
Grandma Pinette sings litte Daphne to sleep.
Looks like it worked.
She likes to sleep curled up like a potato bug.
Um, yes, definitely a redhead.
Here's Daphne at about 5 weeks. She is strikingly different than she was just a couple of weeks ago. Holding her head up, making cooing noises, sleeping through the night (almost) and straightening her limbs out are all significant. But the thing that gets your attention is the way she, well, pays attention to things.
It is both charming and unnerving when she stares at you unblinkingly while you feed her. She is either bonding like mad, or plotting our destruction (cue theme music from Children of the Damned).
Really, though, we're very excited to see her tracking objects and even turning her head 180 degrees to follow you as you walk by. Now if only we could figure out what she finds so fascinating about the ceiling...
She likes to fly around Superman-style.
A Hat Story, Part IWhen it started she was laying quietly beside her reference bunny, looking cute and feeling fine.
A Hat Story, Part IISuddenly she was lifted aloft. "Well, what's up? Besides me I mean, ha ha."
A Hat Story, Part III"I sense that something has changed. Has a cloud passed before the sun? Have the birds begun their morning song? Have I simply filled my pants again?"
A Hat Story, Part IV"Oh no. They haven't. They've put me in a hat. They know how I feel about hats. I am not going to take this lying down! Not even if they lay me down!
A Hat Story, Part V"Oh, that is just IT! This CANNOT BE BORNE! It's a HAT OF MASS DESTRUCTION! RETALIATION IS IMMINENT! REVENGE is at HAND! Soon you will feel my tiny wrath! When I figure out how to get this thing off, I'm gonna..."
A Hat Story, Part VI"...ahh, that's better. Now I'll go back to being a darling little angel.""(But someday... someday you will be the ones wearing diapers! And when that day arrives... I will dress you in hats!!!!)"
We though that this would be a good time to get a picture of her in nice natural light. She didn't think it was a good time for us to stop holding her. Chalk it up to artistic differences.
These are Daphne at about 3 and one half weeks of age. She was already straining to hold her head up by herself, as you can see.
What a cute little ladybug outfit!
The lady herself is looking sorta flushed and sweaty, though.
Currently starring in the children's spin-off, The Lord of the Rings: The Littlest Ringwraith.
A Frankenstein dream? She looks like she's trying to unscrew her head (to try on another model?)
Here's Daphne at one month old. There are a couple of firsts here: the first picture of her smiling (she does it fairly often, but it's hard to catch her with a photo before she moves on to grimacing or screaming) and the first, requisite, indeed indispensible, naked-baby-in-the-bath snapshot. That's the one we'll keep around for when she's 15 and she thinks she's cool. Oh yeah.
Also captured for posterity: the contents of her nose.
Don't be fooled: she'll only sit in the bouncy chair for about 30 seconds before she starts demanding to be picked up again. :)
You can't tell from this picture, but she really really enjoys the bath. Getting out of the bath, that's a different story.
On her 6 week birthday, Daphne spent some quality time in the park near our apartment. I'm not going to caption these; they're cute enough to speak for themselves. :) The hat-based pictures are the best, as usual.
As usual, I'm about two weeks behind in posting pictures. These are from when she was about 7 weeks old.
Her head area is centered over a rag in this first one because the daddy got tired of changing the crib sheet every time she spit up. :)
So Daphne's going through this phase where she only poops once every few days, but boy, when she does, it's a doozy. I'm told that this is normal and temporary (my coworker Danny knows whereof I speak).
On Thursday evening, Holly put Daphne down in her bouncy chair while we made dinner. And amazingly enough, she sat there happily, apparently very interested in watching her mommy and daddy cook. We finished cooking, sat down, and ate; Daphne gazed on with content all the while.
But when Holly picked Daphne up, she stopped, and spoke a phrase that sent chills down my spine:
"What is on this chair??!?"
Holly dashed Daphne over to the changing table, holding her at arms' length. She left her there, admonishing me to make sure the baby didn't fall off, and dashed back toward the bouncy chair to assess the situation. I, meanwhile, glanced over my tiny daughter, who was looking at me and burbling happily. I wondered why her little onesie looked wet around the area of her waist. I wondered why that wetness looked vaguely green. I wondered why it was creeping slowly north of her belly button.
I must have made some kind of noise, because Holly came running back. I heard her suck a sharp breath between her teeth, and we both stood there for a few seconds, dumbfounded.
We decided that we would have to cut her out of her clothes. There was no way that I was going to move the bottom half of that onesie in the direction of Daphne's head. Holly fetched a pair of scissors, and I cut the onesie through. I peeled it off sideways and gingerly, slowly unstrapped Daphne's diaper.
I think it was the smell that really did me in. The smell is still with me, in my dreams.
When my senses returned, and I regained my higher mental functions, my first thought was, "Dammit, I wish I owned a pair of hip waders."
I'm going to stop here and leave the rest of the details to your imagination; I don't want this website to turn all R-rated. I'll just say this: remember when, two posts ago, I said that Daphne was in the 97th percentile for weight? Well, she's probably not in the 97th percentile anymore. No, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that she was entirely average.
So, now that I've disgusted everybody, I'll reward you with some lovely pictures of Daphne at 8 weeks of age.
Daphne continues to put on weight nicely. She's sleeping through the night, as she has for the last few weeks. She rarely cries. She's cute and undemanding, so everybody likes her. In short, we couldn't ask for a more wonderful baby.
So why are Holly and I so tired all the time?
Anyway, the big news is that we'll be flying out to Utah in July. There are lots of people for Daphne to meet: aunts and uncles, great-grandparents, etc. We're flying, since a 2 day drive with an infant sounded suicidal to us. My coworker Danny recently flew with his 3-month-old, and had a pretty good experience, so we're trying to keep our anxiety in check.
She grins and giggles much more often now. Of course, she saves her biggest luvs for the plush stars on her mobile, which she seems to find very entertaining. She talks to them, too.
She is getting much better at holding her head steady.
Holding her body up is a much different story, of course.
This is one of my favorite pictures. Such joy! Now if only that smile was meant for me, instead of those $%*#! plush stars.
I don't know why it's calming to have your rear end shaken up and down thousands of times per minute, but this picture is testament to the chair.
All dressed up and nowhere to go! She puked right after this picture, of course.
"Frankly, I've become concerned with the management of this place."
"Do you have any idea how tiring it is to run a household with two full-sized adults??"
"I'm constantly giving them detailed directions about everything from when to change my diaper to when to give me food, yet they act as if they don't understand a word I say!"
"It's just so frustrating!!"
Daphne is 3 months old today. Her weight gain seems to have levelled out. That's good, because Daddy's lap is only rated up to 1 ton.
We're excited about bringing her to Utah, and scared of the plane ride. She's always been quiet, but lately she's been developing her shouting skills. Remember those plush stars on her mobile, the ones she talks to all the time? Well, she gave them one heck of a tongue-lashing today. I guess they weren't performing up to par.
She's highly amused by her daddy's birthday smooch.
Birthday haiku:happy birthday girllooks like you had too much cakesumo, anyone?
Yep, there are those stars again.
She looks like she's on the attack. Sometimes she just lunges forward unexpectedly.
And, sometimes she lunges back. She seems to suspect me (behind the camera) of shady dealings of some type.
Did I mention she's much chattier now? At times it seems she's just desperate to communicate. She tries so hard to make words!
She may be large, but she's a strong as an ox. I'm not holding her up at all in this picture, just helping her balance. The downside of having a superstrong baby comes when she does finally learn to walk; then it'll be Hulk smash! all the time.
She isn't smiling for the camera, but she's certainly drooling for it (click through to the full-sized version to see the droolage).
Well, we've returned from Utah. Daphne was an absolute doll; the flight attendants all loved her and people near us on the planes commented on what a good flier she is.
We spent the first few days in Highland with my folks. Highland is located in Utah County (aka Happy Valley), a bit south of Salt Lake City. Daphne was at first a bit overwhelmed; on Sunday, we had many people over for potluck (aunts and uncles, cousins of various types). However, she soon became used to, indeed enamored of, a constant press of attention from all sides. She is no doubt going through withdrawl right now, wondering why she isn't surrounded by cooing, smiling grownups just dying to pay attention to her. She wore out her smile muscles, boy howdy.
Unfortunately, it took me a day to remember that I had brought a camera, and that I should, you know, take pictures of things. Anyway, here are some of the snapshots that I did manage to take.
From left: Grandma Pinette holds Daphne as she's serenaded by my brother Parker. My brother Steve converses with my sister Chrys and her husband Adam, who are almost out of frame. You can just make out the top of Holly's head in the foreground. Color's a bit weird in this one; my parents' kitchen isn't lemon-yellow, I promise.
Driving in the van, Grandpa Pinette listens to Daphne the backseat driver posit an alternate route to Thanksgiving Point.
Bum shot: Holly and Grandma Pinette shelter Daphne from the sun, in a Thanksgiving Point garden canopy.
Another shot of the Thanksgiving Point gardens. Click through to the larger version and play Where's Waldo: you can just spot Daphne doing her best Elton John impression.
Having lunch after walking through the gardens, Daphne ponders the dessert menu. She gave up trying to read and simply licked the plastic soon after this shot was snapped.
Four generations in one picture (if you count my brother Steve in the background): here, Daphne chills with Great-Grandma Bench in the convalescent home as Grandma Pinette looks on.
Daphne hangs loose with Grandma Pinette at Lagoon, Utah's friendly neighborhood amusement park. This was one of many over-100-degree days during our Utah trip, but we went at night, so it wasn't too bad.
Daphne with my sister Chrysalis and her husband, Adam.
Daphne giggles her way through goodbye at Grandpa Pinette's store. This was Tuesday, right before we left to hang out with Holly's family up north. Pictures of that part of the trip will be added soon...
Well, I said that I would post the second batch of Utah pictures "soon", and here it is a week later. Just goes to show how things get away from you. Or how amazingly lazy I am; one or the other.
We drove up to Ogden on the Tuesday of our trip and stayed with Holly's dad and stepmother, Steve and Wendy. Daphne, though she was starting to show signs of a cold (yuck!), was super happy to meet yet more people who wanted to pay attention to her.
Daphne is tickled pink to be held by her aunt Nicolette.
Hoping to convince you, the home viewer, that she really is sitting up by herself, Daphne puts on her best politician's smile whilst wedged into a crease in the cushions. The close observer will note that she's listing a-starboard just slightly, and indeed, she rotated into a more stable, horizontal-type position right after the snapshot.
Daphne in the arms of her great-grandma Winn.
Daphne, held by her grandma Winn, giggles at her second cousin, Emily.
Daphne with her great-grandpa White. She still has more great-grandparents in reserve, but she'll have to go to Florida to meet them.
Daphne has a nice chat with another second cousin, Charles, who is on the lap of Holly's cousin Lori.
She looks like we all felt. Yawn! Travelling is tiring work!
Holly gives Daphne sitting-up lessons.
Little Miss Gnaws-On-Fist with Nicolette's mom, Yvonne.
Daphne being fed by her uncle Greg.
... and later, by her uncle Kip (my brother, who couldn't make it to my parents' place while we were in Utah county, so came to visit in Ogden).
Knowing she's the center of attention, Daphne begins holding court. Somebody fetch her a crown and scepter!
Another day, another heart broken: Daphne gets a goodbye hug from her grandpa Winn.
So Daphne's 4 months old as of, eh, 5 days ago. She'll be visiting the pediatrician tomorrow for another round of shots, which should be fun for everybody - we're told that the second time is worse than the first.
Frankly, we're more worried about what they're going to say about her size... she's sooo big. We're still waiting for her growth to level off. ::sigh::
She's hella cute, though.
Daphne's finally big enough for the Baby Bjorn to be truly useful... she wants to be carried all the time, but it's nice to be able to strap her on and have hands free to accomplish other things. Only trouble is... she's chewing on the fabric next to her mouth. And drooling freely upon it. When I took her out of the Bjorn, there was a 3x5 inch patch of soaking-wet Bjorn fabric. When I say "soaking", I mean that I could have wrung it out into a glass. Yechh!
She's also grown more sophisticated in her reaction to hats. Okay, maybe this picture isn't the best example; she looks to be tolerating the hat, but there's no hat-enthusiasm there. You can, however, get a pretty good look at the stripe in the upper-inside corner of her left eye if you click through to the larger version; there's a little pie-slice of brown iris in the surrounding blue. That's called heterochromia iridis, if anybody cares. :)
She sucks on her fingers constantly. Makes nice loud slurpy noises. Myself, I think it's just a drool-stimulation technique. How she isn't constantly dehydrated is beyond me; we end each day surrounded by soaking wet burpcloths.
We decided to take a picture of Daphne's very last ride with the baby carrier as her carseat. Her feet started hanging over the edge, so we had to buy a new car seat. It isn't as cute. I'm secretly relieved, as that baby carrier was getting to be way too heavy to actually, like, carry.
She still fits in her bouncy chair. Have you ever seen a happier girl than this? Seriously, as soon as she can sit unassisted - and she's well on her way - we'll have to ditch the bouncy chair. It's a safety hazard; she could tip it over too easily. We'll have to investigate other ways of keeping her occupied.
Here she is enjoying a good book. She's spending a lot more of her time on the floor recently. She rolled over spontaneously today. She's rolled twice before, but both times involved large doses of parental coaching and small doses of, frankly, cheating. The rolling thing is a mixed blessing, marking the beginning of a new developmental area for Daphne (mobility) and a new set of worries for the parents (paranoia about falling, floor cleanliness, etc).
Here's Daphne's first attempt at eating:
Good work, girlie!
So Daphne is almost 5 months old. She's hitting all her marks, as measured against the list of developmental stages in the Good Book.
To be specific, she's rolling over (back to front only, for now), lifting her whole chest off the ground when she's in push-up mode, going after objects that are out of her reach, using lots of vowel-consonant combinations, making razz sounds (thpffft!), passing objects from one hand to the other, trying her hardest to sit and stand unassisted, and eating solid food (for a very relaxed definition of 'solid' :).
She's also probably teething (see Holly's page for more on that). This makes her unusually cranky and sleepless. She doesn't like any teethers we've tried, either. ::sigh::
Here she is working on that whole sitting-up thing. I don't think this meets the strictest definition of 'sitting', but you have to give her points for trying. She tends to start out more or less vertically-oriented, then drift forward into this uncomfortable-looking yoga position with her forehead on the ground between her feet. She doesn't seem to mind, though.
The close observer will note that she is not only chewing on the block, but has in fact puked on it as well, which I did not notice until after I snapped the picture.
No puke in this picture, thanks!
Here she is on her way to go bale some hay. The do-rag look is great for concealing that bald spot, eh Daphne?
These are the park pics that Holly mentioned the other day. They are definitely in the running for cutest picture ever, no?
Here are the new pictures I promised. That might be the longest I've gone without posting new pictures, so I apologize if you've all been jonesing for your fix. :)
Daphne's getting to be a big, strong girl. She's a lot more independent recently, as Holly points out. This is not to say that she doesn't demand attention, no sir! But she demands that you rush to fulfill her every desire while also allowing her full autonomy. She doesn't just want to sit up, she wants to sit up all by herself. With your help, of course. Got it, bub?
She really, really enjoys the sensation of standing. She likes to be up high, too - if I hold her up toward the ceiling, she laughs and squeals with delight. She never used to react that way; I guess she's just gotten sophisticated enough to tell the difference.
And here she is sitting.
...for a while, at least. I snapped the picture as she was in mid-fall. She thought sitting was pretty funny, but she thought falling was even funnier.
Quack quack, quack quack quack quack. Quack quack quack; quack quack quack.
Quack quack quack quack - quack quack quack quack quack!
How does that taste, Miss Daph?
Pretty good, apparently.
She'd like a taste of you, too!
As an extra bit of a treat, here's Daphne laughing her head off at, well, who knows what. Note that clicking the picture will get you a video, not another picture.
It's small (for downloading) and a bit dark and grainy (I haven't caught the hang of the camera yet - maybe I should read the manual!) but fun nonetheless. Note that you'll need a recent version of Quicktime for this to work properly.
Tee hee! She's a silly!
Daphne's six months old today! Hard to believe, I know. She's hardly gained weight in the past four months (less than two pounds) but has definitely grown taller.
As far as milestones go, she's started hunching herself up on hands and knees and rocking back and forth, which my mother tells me is a precursor to crawling. She even gets up on hands and feet, rear end pointed straight at the ceiling, from time to time. In fact, she's pretty mobile; she just isn't that great at arriving where she intends to. Every time she tries to move forward, she loses traction on her knees and ends up sliding backward a few inches; after several rounds of this, she can 'crawl' halfway across the apartment, opposite the direction she actually wants to go.
She's also been eating a lot more solid food, having now tried rice cereal and oatmeal, carrots, squash (her very favorite), peas, potato, sweet potato, and banana. I don't recommend the prepackaged (Gerber) banana baby food, by the way; it neither smells nor tastes like bananas. Something similar can be said for most of the vegetables, which I've come to understand actually don't taste of anything until you put salt on them (as I always do, and as the baby food people carefully avoid doing). But the bananas are particularly nasty.
Last but not least, she can sit up unassisted for quite long stretches (minutes at a time) without falling over, which she usually does when watching someone walk by (her eyes swivel straight up, then back over her shoulder, as she tries to track). Yesterday, she came this close (::gestures with forefinger and thumb::) to pushing herself from a tummy position to sitting up, which is another major milestone. Technically, she didn't complete the procedure, since she decided at the last minute to go back to the tummy position after all.
"I'm a grumpy lady!"
"And a toothy lady!"
"And an outdoorsy lady!"
"And a pensive lady!"
"And a froggy lady!"
Ok, those were pretty lame. But hey, you try thinking up witty captions at this time of night. I just don't have it in me. Time to give the girl a smooch and hit the hay.
Well, Holly promised everybody some pictures the other day, and I am finally getting around to it. I am constantly amazed at my inability to get anything accomplished in a timely manner, and will probably remain so until Daphne's packed off on a bus to college.
Meantime, the little lady is just getting around to introducing us to the joys of infant mobility. She crawls! Kind of. She's got the technique down - left hand & right foot, right hand & left foot - but she usually travels only an inch or so each time. Periodically, she'll put on a short burst and move a foot in about 3 seconds, then collapse with exhaustion.
She's definitely improved her sitting-up skills, as well. She regularly sits up in grocery carts, and she sat in one of those crappy wooden high chairs the last time we went out to eat. Well, she sat in it for a minute, anyway, before demanding to be held while we ate.
Where she really gets us is the combination of crawling and sitting, though. She'll be playing with a stuffed animal in the middle of the living room; then you blink and she's on the other side of the room, pawing at the handle to the drawer full of videos or attempting to pull the DVD player down on her head.
Anyway, after a long spell where she spoke very little, apparently focusing on physical stuff, she's got the babble going full force once again. Ba ba ba la ng ow ow, know what I mean? The best part is that she occasionally puts random syllables together into accidental words. She says "hi" a lot (again, on accident; we're not so crazy as to think our 6-month-old is talking to us). Holly reports that yesterday, she said "... bu bu ba ga la i love uv uv va va ...", which is pretty amusing.
Ok, so enough yakking... here are some nifty pics.
Daphne's in full Halloween mode while visiting her aunt Mauria and uncle Bryon last Friday. She didn't get any candy, but I think she'd have liked to gnaw on that jack-o-lantern for a while.
Daphne, strutting her stuff catwalk style, turns to let you glimpse the rear of her costume. The gauzy wings are a nice effect. Iowa has been so inundated with ladybug-impersonating asian beetles recently that the general cuteness of the costume was compromised, I'm afraid.
Again with the Halloween thing. We visited a local fruit market that puts up a bunch of photo-op Halloween decorations each year during their big pumpkin sale. We tried to go twice; both times, it became too dark too fast for good outdoor-light snapshots, and too cold to keep Daphne outside anyway. Of course, on the days we did not go to the pumpkin patch to take pictures, it was warm and bright. We ended up taking this one inside the small building where the cash register is kept, because it was warm and bright enough to pose her next to the plastic witch for a minute.
On a slightly less cold day, we drove up to Lake Macbride in hope of capturing some pretty leaf colors. This was tricky; the wild back-and-forth temperature swings this fall have left the trees confused, and some were showing colors while others were green, and several had dropped their leaves all together. We managed to find a few pretty leaves, though.
Somethin's funny around here! Why isn't this child wearing any shoes, anyway?
Daphne in full color-saturated glory. ("mmmn, saturated....")
I know I complain about being tired all the time, but at least Daphne herself sleeps like a normal human. We could have it a lot worse! Here she is in her crib, with hazy afternoon sunlight streaming in.
This picture looks peaceful, as long as you don't know that the octopus was designed by the devil and his imagineer minions. Push the nose (or jiggle it, or look at it funny, or think impure thoughts) and it starts to vibrate like a paint mixer and play one of the two most annoying songs in the universe. You may wonder, "Jack, why don't you just take the batteries out if it annoys you so much?" Because I am that lazy, that's why.
"Huh? Whass goin' on over there?" I was not present when this picture was taken, yet I'll bet you a jumbo-super-mega-pak of diapers that I know precisely what happened after the snap was taken: she turned back to her original objective, namely to lick, suck, or bite every square inch of the surface area of Holly's jeans.
The latest in our series exploring baby headwear: bear ears! The pink fleecy jacket/vest thing is cute, but has already outgrown its usefulness; it is already so cold out as to require a long-sleeved coat thingy. Which, fortunately, has its own bear ears on the hood part.
Here's a better view of the bear ears. Sooo cute!
Not to belabor the point, but having a baby around really cuts into the time you have available to actually accomplish things. I've spent plenty of time whining about that on this very blog, and those of you who've had kids know exactly what I'm talking about, of course. The point is, baby jail (the crib, pack-n-play, or other enclosed area) is an important piece of the parenting toolkit.
Imagine our chagrin the first time we saw Daphne standing in her crib. It was as if she was taunting us. No bars gonna keep me in, she told me with her eyes. I'm a-gonna bust out, Johnny Law, you just see if'n I don't!
Since we had such an exceptional time for the first few months of her life, what with the consistent sleep patterns and breezy demeanor, I guess this was the month to put the fear of God into us. Having achieved basic mobility, she immediately learned to swivel into a sitting position, and was soon working her hardest at clambering up any surface with appropriate fixtures for gripping. I, for one, could not have been more surprised (and frightened) had she begun to fly.
One plus of Daphne's new development is that she's finally big enough to justify putting shoes on, at least for special occasions. And indeed, Holly has not failed to seek out the cutest footwear available. Here's the little lady getting gussied up for Thanksgiving dinner, clearly delighted to show off her pink suede high-tops. The legs of her overalls have been pre-distressed at the factory in order to spare us the shame of allowing our 7-month-old to look behind the curve, fashion-wise. We're still trying to contact the booking agent for Queer Eye for the Baby Lady.
(Note: you may be wondering why I put that lame joke there at the end. Jack, you are thinking, I have to hear another variant of that stale gag each and every time I accidentally tune in to Leno while flipping channels. Why, oh, why, did you have to add a Queer Eye joke? Good question. The answer is quite elegant, but is too long to fit in this margin. Or, suffice it to say that I'm experimenting with an inline tagging mechanism for identifying the origination dates of written communications. Text containing a joke about "X Eye for the Y Guy", for any values of X and Y? It must be from mid-to-late 2003! Pee-Wee Herman indecent exposure joke? It's early-nineties all the way, baby! I've still a few kinks to work out before I alert the data-mining nerds over at Google.)
Ahem. Back to the pictures, then.
Here's another snapshot of Daphne on her first Thanksgiving, which she spent at her aunt Mauria's place. She even had some turkey and vegetables à la Gerber. Tasty!
She's grown very tall, very recently. In fact, by her height and weight, she could be one year old. She basically has a baby's head on top of a toddler's body. There's a sort of Charlie Brown effect, which in no way interferes with her standing as Cutest Baby on the Planet, of course.
I know I already talked about her standing up in her crib. The crib has nice vertical slats that are perfect for hand-over-hand. We were more puzzled to see her standing one day in her pack-and-play. There's nothing to hold on to - the bars in the corners are too recessed to grip, and there's nothing but netting on the sides. The bar at the top is too high for her to reach unless she's already standing. And yet we kept turning around to find her standing, and even straining up on tippy-toes to see over the top.
We finally caught her in the act... instead of pulling herself up, she pushes against the netting, braces her feet behind her, and sort of tension-walks her way up to verticality - left hand up, right hand up, left foot forward, right foot forward - pushing outward against the netting at all times. Clever baby, to figure out how to stand without handholds! Now stop being so clever; you're scaring the crap out of us!
All joking aside, she has a long way to go before she can stand in any arbitrary situation, right?
Oh, Lord help us.
It's taken her less than two weeks to really master the whole standing-up thing; she spends all her free time trying to clamber up the side of, or over the top of, anything suitably large and close to the floor, such as couches or reclining parents. The baby-proofing process, which has been proceeding at a leisurely pace (we were happy to have safety-inspected the place up to a height of six inches) is about to kick into high gear. At this point, she has the potential to reach objects two feet off the ground, and she seems destined to master the art of climbing sooner or later. To top it all off, she can actually crawl pretty fast now, when she's motivated. I have a dreadful feeling that she's going to follow in the footsteps (ow! pun!) of my sister Chrys, who started walking at around nine months.
I just re-read my last post and had a good laugh while turning over a few sepia-toned memories of the halcyon days of early November, way back when all we had to worry about was Daphne pulling appliances off of shelves. Was I ever so young and naïve? We're older and wiser now.
One could say that we've started paying closer attention to her movements. One could also say we've lost our minds to first-baby paranoia, if one did not believe in understatement.
Guilt keeps us from relegating her to baby jail for the entirety of her waking life, and heaven knows she's too big to carry for long, so she necessarily ends up on the floor. When the eye-strain of staring unblinkingly at her grows too painful, she may pass out of our direct supervision for some hundredths of a second at a time. On occasion, when we feel adventurous, we might even turn away from her for a moment, until the fear pumps our heart rates into hummingbird territory and our bodies start twitching and jerking like consumers of Iowa's most important non-factory-farmed crop. We whip our heads around and scan for signs of Daphne's progress. Has she scaled the seven-foot bookshelf? Clambered over and dropped behind the entertainment center, the better to chew a few feet of coax? Is she, by god, dangling from a lighting fixture? We've lost all confidence in our ability to predict her movements.
In any case, that's why I'm posting this in the middle of the night. I'm off to hit the sack; nighty-night, all!
I know, I know, we haven't posted any pictures of Daphne for a while. Well, there will soon be holiday pictures galore, so please be patient!
In the meantime, and to tide you over, click here to see some recent snapshots of Daphne. These were taken by my coworker and office-mate Denny on Friday. My former co-worker Danny had come to visit, bringing along little Aidan (who is one month Daphne's senior), and Holly had brought Daphne by as well so that the babies could interact.
They did interact a bit, mostly driven by Aidan's curiosity about Daphne (he kept pawing at her face and head-butting her). Daphne, on the other hand, was a little more withdrawn. It often takes her a little while to warm up to people.
The two little-uns had a funny moment of crawling directly toward one another across the office floor - bringing to mind the old slow-motion-running-toward-one-another-romantically-on-the-beach movie cliche. Once they met up, instead of a romantic kiss, they swiveled together and crawl/marched shoulder to shoulder in the direction of Denny, who was trying to capture the whole thing on camera. This interfered pretty heavily with the picture-taking, but they were more interested in the fact that he had a shiny object. Pretty funny, in a you-had-to-be-there kind of way.
Anyhow, stay tuned for holiday pictures...
Merry Christmas, everybody!
These pictures were taken just a couple of weeks ago, on or around Christmas, but it seems like a lot longer. For one thing, it was a lot warmer back then - I mean, it was in the high 60s, setting records - whereas now we're just coming out of a cold snap that has made it feel like an entirely different season. I'm quite finished with the -15 wind chill, thanks very much.
Of course, Daphne has another cold (which she seemed to catch before Holly and I did; not sure how that's possible) and we have all had very little sleep for the past few days. We stuffed extra pillows and things under the head of our mattress and brought Daphne to bed with us, and we all participated in a half-asleep tangle of limbs steeping in a stew of snot, drool, and tangled blankets, rolling like waves on the ocean as we all flopped about trying to find a comfortable position, and shaking violently from time to time with hacking coughs.
The end result is that Holly and I have been dragging ourselves around like zombies, having aged 5 years in 5 days. Daphne, of course, is just as bubbly and active and energetic as ever, come morning time; the only difference being that she's trailing mucus and drool in her wake, instead of drool alone.
Apart from sickness: the lady herself hasn't jumped any major developmental hurdles lately; she crawls like a greyhound bred for the racetrack, and pulls herself to a stand with ease, but hasn't begun to free-stand or walk. She went through a period of saying "da da da da da" almost all the time she was awake, but she didn't mean me, I'm afraid. She's since moved on and is now concentrating on "bu bu bu bu" and making razzing sounds, spraying every major landmark in our home with cold-virus-infested saliva as if marking her territory. As always, I'm occasionally dazzled by how present she is, focusing on what's in front of her with an intensity that I don't have the energy or seratonin to muster, especially since I've been sleeping in 20-minute increments recently.
Anyway, on to the pictures! As I said, it was super-warm for a while there. This was probably taken a day or two before Christmas, and frankly, she could have done without the hat. I myself have been wearing only a light jacket outside, and didn't pull on my real winter coat until the beginning of this week.
Holly found a really nice edition of "T'was the Night Before Christmas" for us to read together on Christmas Eve. Daphne often loses interest before the end of a book, but this time she listened to the whole thing and barely tried to eat the pages at all.
On Christmas morning, Daphne seemed overwhelmed by the piles of swag, and predictably tended to be more interested in the discarded wrapping paper than by her actual presents. She sat and played with a ribbon from the present my brother Kip sent her for maybe 15 minutes, whipping it around like in that one Olympic event that I can't remember the name of. Umm, ribbon-twirling doesn't sound right, somehow.
Anyway, she got around to the toys eventually. She loves her play-table especially; it makes lots of funny noises!
After shredding some wrapping paper and eating some cereal, Daphne was packed up to spend most of the day at her aunt Mauria and uncle Bryon's house. Here she is in front of their tree, looking oddly elfin in her Santa hat.
True to form, Daphne largely ignored the decorations but was fascinated by the depression left in the carpet by the foot of the couch, which had been moved out of the way to give her some space to crawl around. And crawl she did; she also ate prodigiously and puked all over the place. She really hasn't puked much for the last few months, but holidays have turned out to be an exception.
Daphne just turned nine months old, and this time, we're not so late with the pictures. There aren't metric tons of them, but she's a moving target now, so it isn't so easy to catch her face-forward with the camera.
Not long ago (Jan. 2) it was 60 degrees out, and we took a walk through a foggy downtown.
These are just a couple of snaps from around the house. Believe me, it is much harder to take this kind of picture than it used to be. Most of the time, she's just a pink blur of motion.
So Daphne just keeps getting cuter and stuff. She's taken a couple of independent steps, but I do mean 'a couple', and not necessarily at the same time. :) She mostly likes to walk around while holding onto your thumbs for balance. That said, she practically drags you along; this is a gal who knows where she's headed.
As far as other developmental stuff goes, she's a bit more likely to call me 'da-da' and a bit more likely to call Holly 'ma-ma'. She still does it wrong quite often, but at least she's showing a tendency to get it right. She has 6 teeth that are all the way in; two more are in mid-push on the bottom, so she'll soon have 8.
Her mommy and daddy are getting better at discerning whether she's yelling for a bottle because she's hungry, or just because she wants comfort. We still make mistakes, though; here's one.
Here she is sorting books. Sorting them out of the bookshelf, and onto the floor, but hey, ya gotta start somewhere.
Busted!
This is one of her favorite places to stand. There are wires to yank, DVDs to toss around, books to unshelve, buttons to push...
...and if you push the right buttons, all kind of wild crap happens!
She likes to help with laundry, as well as with sorting the books. Anytime she sees some clothes in a container, be it a laundry basket or open drawer or whatever, she'll carefully remove the entire contents, one piece at a time, and put them on the floor for safekeeping.
Boy, she loves to eat. Have you ever seen a girl more excited to eat her peas?
Of course, she's also fickle... she may well decide that this next pea is her last, and complain bitterly if you try to give her any peas for the next week. Controlling parental units, tip #2453: keep 'em guessing at the dinner table!
Ever wonder how Daphne would look with hair? Here's how she probably won't.
Well, I finally got around to uploading the Dancing Daphne video that Holly made. I'm not very good at this video stuff... trying to make it small enough that it doesn't take a year to download, yet high-quality enough to make watching it worthwhile. If I compress it down too far, it just looks like mush, and all of Holly's hard work editing it is for naught.
Anyway, take a look and judge for yourself:
You'll need to have Quicktime installed for this to work.
Stay tuned: Minneapolis pics are coming soon...
She's a walker! Check out some video:
Don't forget to check out Holly's longer Dancing Daphne video from the last post. Quicktime required, of course.
So, this is Daphne's second Easter. Yes, second. We almost bought her a "Baby's first Easter" bib before realizing that she was actually born on Palm Sunday.
It is her first Easter for which we gave her an Easter basket, though. The basket contained candy, but it was for us, not for her. It also contained some flowers, a book, and a bunny rabbit (from Build-A-Bear, natch!).
We spent much of the day with Daphne's aunt Mauria and uncle Bryon, having Easter brunch and eating real-not-Gerber ham and spitting out blackberries and driving around and playing with stuff and grabbing handfuls of dirt out of potted plants and pulling CD-holders down onto our heads and attempting to go downstairs by ourselves when no one was looking.
Here are some of the things Daphne can do this Easter, that she couldn't do last Easter, or even last month:
Daphne squats to inspect an all-dancing, all-singing bunny that her Grandma Pinette bought for her. I should have titled this post "She Squats To Inspect".
Daphne tries to figure our her aunt Mauria's new appendages. She also shows off her belly; who knew the Britneyfication of America's youth extended all the way to 1-year-olds?
Giving her bunny a smooch. Smooch!
Umm. Now Daddy has strange head-growths as well. Is it something in the water?
You didn't think that we avoided holiday-themed bibs altogether, did you? Oh, no. Here's Daphne in a bunny-bib, grinning in anticipation of some... mmm... food... mmm...
"Huh... my ears are tickling..."
Happy Easter everybody!
Well, I'm behind as usual on posting pictures. We had a few people over to celebrate Daphne's birthday on Tuesday (her Aunt Mauria and Uncle Bryon, Eliana and her parents Chuck and Karen). Daphne had a little bit of (non-frosted) cupcake and bounced off the walls for a while. She offered bites of the cupcake to anyone nearby, snatching the bites away at the last minute about 50% of the time. She opened presents and discarded them to play with the wrappings. First birthday fun!
We caught a bit of it on tape, along with the stills below - perhaps at some point we'll be able to post a bit, or incorporate it into another video, so that you all can witness Daphne's sugar-induced monologue, where she stomped around in a tight circle orating to the four winds and flinging her hands about as if conducting an orchestra.
"A lovely sentiment, Daddy, but can I yank it down, please please please?"
My scary cake. It actually turned out ok, despite looking a bit odd. The white frosting lost some of its cohesion and developed tiny craters; close up, it looked like the surface of a chiffon asteroid. Apparently seven-minute frosting should be consumed seven minutes after its creation, not 20 hours.
We were so worried about the cake's edibility, we made some cupcakes as a backup. The center one was Daphne's cake.
"Hoppy birf-day to yuuuuuu...."
"What is this stuff? You guys have been holding out on me!"
Sugar rush!
Sugar crash!
Thanks to everybody who sent loot - we thank you, the Daphne thanks you. The goal is to match Daphne's development by keeping her room filled with toys to about chest-height, and as she grows, your contributions help keep that goal in sight! :)
Here's a pile o' pics: Daphne in the park next to our house.
Daphne got a kitty recently - her name is Lily, she's runty-small at 7 weeks old, and she and Daphne are absolutely in love. Daphne is a little too rough with Lily - when she gets overexcited, she'll grab the cat by the hair and toss her - but Lily doesn't seem to mind.
In fact, Lily will clamber over obstacles to get to Daphne, and bawl piteously if she's taken away from her (and Daphne reciprocates, of course). All of this contributes to the daily horror that is bedtime in our household.
Seriously, though, I'm starting to think that this kitty crosses the line from "friendly" to "needy". She climbed straight up my pantleg, to my shirt, and onto my shoulder, because she felt I wasn't paying enough attention to her. She likes shoulders, because they provide an ideal platform from which to nibble on a person's ears and paw-and-bite through his or her hair.
Here are a few pics of Lily - not that you can make out much detail; black cats weren't designed to be photographed. The one face-on shot of the kitty makes her look very grumpy, but rest assured that this is merely a reaction to the flash. She's not a grumpy kitty.
Fall is in the air, and last weekend, we took Daphne out to a farm (whose name escapes me at the moment) that does a big pumpkin display, featuring such attractions as a corn maze, staged photo-op set pieces, and various animals to peek at. Daphne was a little scared of the emus, and not nearly as interested in the miniature horse as I thought she might be, but she definitely got a kick out of the geese and the newborn chicks.
Since Daphne started out the month of October afraid of pumpkins, Holly bought her a couple of mini-pumpkin gourds to play with. This worked like a charm, and soon enough she was running around shouting with joy about pumpkins ("Puckins!") ("what color are they, Daphne?) ("Owidge!")
Sure enough, she couldn't get enough of the pumpkins at the farm, including the mini versions.
The obligatory photo-op. Note the look on her face: "I'm just tolerating this until I can get back to the puckins." She does like to sit next to her aunt Mauria, though.
She enjoyed the corn maze, too, although I don't think she saw it as anything but an opportunity to run and jump in the mud.
Meanwhile, in fashion news, Daphne got herself a sweet little pink peacoat with matching hat. She actually tolerates the hat, folks (although she finally took it off, the better to play peek-a-boo behind it).
That's all for this update - hopefully I'll get my caboose in gear and start posting pictures more than once per month.
From a distance, Daphne excitedly pointed out each jack-o-lantern she saw ("puckin! issa puckin!"). But when it came time to climb the steps to the landing where the jack-o-lanterns actually sat, she shook her head violently, went dramatically limp, and shouted "no!"
Despite a little bit of lingering pumpkin-fear, though, things went pretty well for Halloween. Daphne thought that the very idea of dressing up as a doggie was too hilarious for words; as during previous trial runs of the costume, she ran around screaming and woofing her delight.
We only went to a few houses, and she didn't end up being too scared. As Holly mentioned, she even ventured to woof at a few people, and to helpfully inform them of the nature of her costume, in case they had missed it.
On the other hand, Daphne provided a few scares herself: once we arrived home, she quickly morphed into that most dreaded of monsters, the Candy Accountant (aka Sugar CPA)!
She dumped all her candy on the floor and then counted it back into the bucket. Then she counted it back out of the bucket, and then back in. Then she selected a representative sampling of the candy in the bucket, counted it three or four times for greater accuracy, mixed it back into the bucket proper, then proceeded to count the entire bucket again.
All this despite the fact that she has no idea what the candy actually is. I'm quite sure of that.
When we went over to Bryon and Mauria's place (after visiting the paltry four houses on our block who were participating in the festivities), Daphne continued the act, even going so far as to insert a few actual numbers into the steady stream of gibberish she was uttering ("...two, fee, foe, six, one...". Bryon tried to help her clean up her bookkeeping:
BRYON: (picking up a piece of candy) Which number is this, Daphne?
DAPHNE: (authoritatively) Fee!
B: (picks up another piece) Which number is this?
D: Fee!
B: How about this one?
D: Fee!
repetition ensues
Anyway, Halloween was a lot of fun, and we savored it, because, as Holly pointed out, this is the last year that we get to pick her costume. She's a willful one, that Daphne.
I wish we had more and better pictures -- these ones don't do credit to the super-cuteness that was Daphne-as-a-dog -- but it's predictably difficult to get good snaps of a child wearing a face-obscuring costume and running around in circles, in low light, all evening long.
Holly has some video, don't worry.
I leave you with this picture, though, and an exercise: write your own caption! If there were a thought bubble above this child's head, what would be in it? (click through to the big version first, to see it better)
I'll start:
"Eighteen rolls of Smarties and a pack of fruit snacks. Huh! Where's the chocolate, people? You disgust me."
Ok, I'm only a few days late, posting Christmas pictures on New Year's Day.
We actually started opening presents on Christmas Eve. If we hadn't, we never would have got through them all. Daphne really cleaned up. :)
Daphne actually slept in a little b