One Year!

Happy Birthday, William!

It's been a long year and an extremely short year. I don't know where the time has gone even when every day seems to last forever. Of course this could be because the lack of sleep is kicking in, or perhaps a species survival mechanism that makes parents forget most of the hard parts about having their first kid.

William is doing pretty great and absolutely adorable, of course. As proof: he got into my hair stuff earlier this month and wouldn't let go of the mousse container. So I showed him what it did. He got pretty excited when I put some in his hair.
















In the much less cute and awesome category of our lives, we've been keeping busy. We finally got our new furnace installed yesterday! So the space heaters can go into storage (yay) and our electricity bill can go back to reasonable. This past month we've been using them it nearly doubled. On the upside, our gas bill should be way lower than before now that we have a modern, efficient unit. Seth's working like a madman, of course, and we've got the sequester coming up that'll chop about 20% off of his paycheck so we're cutting back on things we'd normally do for fun. I'd already started work on my Caithe sylvari tree person costume, but I'm putting that on hold. Costuming materials get expensive, and we're cutting back at Balticon this year anyways. Normally we get a hotel room and make a mini-vacation of it. This year we're not going to stay overnight at all, and I'm talking to the lady in the costuming guild who's helping organize panels to volunteer and get a free membership badge. I'd still like to make a costume even if it's just for the halls, but if I do it's going to be out of stash fabric only. What that costume will be I have nooooo idea. The fabrics I have significant yardage of very pretty widely. Royal purple linen, a bunch of neon green jersey, two yards of blue velvet, some maroon floral silk velvet burnout, a couple yards of silver satin charmeuse... *sighs* We'll see if it happens.

William's 1st Birthday! 

First off, thank you to everyone who sent William presents! He was jamming out on the xylophone earlier today after I spent a while showing him how to hit it with the mallet instead of eating said mallet. Sadly, he stopped before I could grab the video camera. (bah. Next time!) Anyways, I think we nailed down who they were all from and thanked everyone. It was tricky since none of the presents sent from Amazon arrived with any sort of packing slips or notes to say who they were from!

Our original plans were to go to the aquarium with friends on Saturday, but they wound up getting fevers the night before. So instead we wound up taking William to the zoo on Monday since it was his actual birthday and Seth had taken the day off work for it. It was a fantastic outing and William had a blast seeing all of the animals! 

It was pretty exciting since it was William's Birthday and first trip to the zoo!

The cheetahs weren't all that exciting though. Mostly they just sat there. 

There was a family of ducks living in the beaver habitat that was absolutely enthralling though.  Mommyduck kept diving to the bottom of the pond and there were some babies and Daddyduck swimming around as well. 

The wolf was pretty neat too, he would pace back and forth  up on his hill and they had a nice glass wall for kids  instead  of just the wall and fences. 

The seals were another favorite and a couple of them would zip back and forth in front of the glass 

It was a long day though! We spent three hours walking around so he was glad to have his stroller and make us do all the work of getting around.

Unfortunately, the kids petting area didn't impress. I agree William. It was stinky and they didn't have much of anything that was pettable either. Older kids could, however, muck  out the cow barn. Yay?

This little green guy was particularly friendly and followed William's finger around the glass. He liked that  a lot.

There's a chameleon in the tree! Didn't move much, but William was pretty happy he was close to the glass.

This was a tank of long necked turtles that were swimming all over the place. He sat here for a good five minutes watching them. Reptile House was definitely a hit.

"Come on Dad! What are you doing way back there!?"

Happy Birthday!

He konked right out on the metro ride home. It was a long day.

So we got dinner (chicken, sweet potatoes, and zucchini casserole!) and William even got a couple bites of chocolate cake before bed.  

He was pretty happy AND pretty tired by the time he got to bed. 

Happy New Year! And other stuff and things.

Sorry about the ginormo-pictures last time, not sure what happened. Anyway, picking back up. After a great Christmas in PA with the inlaws Seth, William, and I packed up the car and drove off into the first snow of the year for us... and promptly returned to Dad's house 3 miles later. We'd been nervous about the slick conditions heading out, but figured we'd beat the incoming storm and be fine once on the road and out from the shadow of the mountain they live on. Unfortunately, three miles down the road we crested the top of a hill... and saw flares set up along the road around a car. Going downhill on ice, we managed to avoid the first stopped car but couldn't stop properly- and there at the bottom of the hill a truck had rolled and had a cop car sitting behind them with the lights flashing. We were going pretty slow, under 10 miles an hour but on that hill there was no way we were going to get past them safely. Especially not with oncoming traffic. We wound up spinning into the embankment on our side of the road instead. It was scary, especially with William in the car but he didn't make a peep, just sat there chillin'. We've minor cosmetic damage on the bumper, but didn't get stuck and managed to turn around and get back to Dad's house without further incident.

So January! It's flown by and William just keeps getting cuter every day. I keep thinking he's going to start walking any day now, but he teases me with almost taking a step and then deciding it's too much work and crawling towards whatever I'm using as a lure.  He gets so exited about everything it's a lot of fun. I smile and he gets this huge toothy grin. I giggle and he cracks up entirely. Being a mom is so much fun sometimes. He's doing better sleeping too and will often sleep through the night completely about 25% of the time and get up only once for a diaper change about 50% of the time. He likes exploring new foods too. Oatmeal is not his favorite unless it's flavored with cinnamon or fruit or something. Even then if we take our eyes off him he'll often spit out a bite into his hand so we can figure out what it was we gave him. It's a messy process more often than not.

The roughest part this month so far is that our furnace has conked out on us. When the maintenance guy came in earlier this year to fix our pilot light he warned us that it could go out at any time but we were really hoping to make it all the way through the winter. :( We could get it repaired but it's about 20 years old and rather inefficient. One part breaks and another one will go soon thereafter sort of thing. So we're working on getting replacement estimates and will hopefully get it done soon. In the meantime we've got a bunch of space heaters. They don't do much to warm up the main living areas of the house (our huge wall-sized window in the living room doesn't help) so William and I have mostly been playing in his nursery during the day. It's small enough that the space heater gets it nice and toasty warm and it's actually baby proof so William can run around to his heart's content without the baby octagon foiling his plot to chew on the TV wires. Still. I'll be grateful once we have a warm house again. One of the options we're looking into is a geothermal system actually. They're apparently extremely efficient and it'd remove our gas bill completely and possibly cut our electric bill too by taking over water heating. Only problem is initial installation costs tend to be higher than a regular furnace. We're still waiting on the quotes, but online research said it runs the gamut from $7K to $30K depending on environment and company. If it's closer to the $7K it could be a good choice for us. There are a lot of tax incentives and grants for putting one in as well, which can help mitigate the cost.

Christmas! Where has the time gone?

January's gotten away from me so I'll try to backtrack a bit.

  Christmas!

Merry belated Christmas everyone! It was William's First Christmas this year and we went up to Seth's parents house for the holidays. Our original plan was to go up to my Dad's this year since it's been a while since we've done Christmas up north, but with Congress not doing their jobs properly we've been battening the hatches for federal furloughs hitting us and trying not to spend more than absolutely necessary. It's the end of January now and do we know how the furlough is going to affect us? Of course not.

Anyways, going up to PA was nice! We had a great drive up there and William was overjoyed to play with Grandma and Papa and Royce. And the dogs. After getting used to the barking, William was as curious as ever though the dogs were a bit unsure what to make of him. Emmett kept getting scared of him, but Rosie did alright and would come say hi to him.



William was also absolutely enthralled by the Christmas lights everywhere. They were his favorite thing to grab off the wall in the basement play room, and the tree was preeeetty interesting too.
 

His favorite part of the holiday was probably playing with Grandma though.
   

Though Dad got in on the action sometimes too.
 

William did a great job opening presents on Christmas morning too! The first one was especially interesting...



Though of course it was the box he wanted to play with.
 

He also had the most impressive pile of presents and eventually got squeezed out of the pack and play by all the awesomeness. :) Even a month later though, he still loves them all. The hand puppets never fail to get him giggling his head off, the sqeezey bath toys have become essential to diaper change cooperation, and the dog house and piano are his go-to toys- even if half the time he's dragging them over to the side of his baby octagon to use a stool for his escape attempts.
 

He also got his first little bike! It's a walker bike and still just a couple inches too tall for him to zoom around, but he has fun riding it when we push for him!
 

Dad was pretty excited by his brass ash bucket too :) Very stylish.
 

We missed being able to see everyone else at Christmas. It was pretty quiet since even Seth's other siblings were elsewhere, but it was a wonderful time and exactly what Christmas should be about- family, love, and too many cookies.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! We're up in PA with the inlaws today and don't get phone service up here. I'll call Dad and people later today but I'll check the ipad regularly for any skype or facetime calls! So turn Skype on!

First Time Sharing!

I have a longer post with pictures and stuff that I need to get to, but I had to put a little comment up here now. William just shared for the first time. We were sitting on the chaise in the living room and he'd just woken up from a snooze in my arms and was working on destroying a bit of bread he'd left over from lunch. He's actually really good at biting off bits and eating it, but it does meant he chaise and surrounding carpet needs vacuuming rather frequently. Anyways, he's munching away then turns and looks at me and gives me this Smile and holds a bite up to my mouth. He wasn't fooled by mimed nomming and just waited happily until I took a real bite of his somewhat soggy piece. Then he gave me the BIGGEST grin and giggled as he went back to feeding himself. Sorry AnnaMarie, Jesse, Caroline, Jody, and everyone else! I am obviously the luckiest mommy in the world. I might not get much sleep but William is the sweetest little guy and I am so blessed and lucky to have him in my life.

Happy Thanksgiving! (And November)

So a bunch of pictures from November to share!

This is one of my favorite new expressions of his. It usually pops up when he's very intently concentrating on something. 

The quintessential 'Daddy's coming home!' picture! He loves looking out the window and gets so excited when he saw Dad out there.

Daddy gymnastics. Wheee

He's such a camera hog too.

A Thanksgiving baby tryptophan coma?

The boys had a blast scooting around and chasing the dog last night. Ari got very concerned when William gave his walker a go though and wouldn't get off from the side the entire time William was in it. 

William has learned to climb now. That's where he got the little scratch on his nose... tumbling out of his crib. *sighs*

Sleep Training Update

Frankly, while there has been some progress made, we've hit a wall and gone a couple steps back with William's sleep habits. Sure, we put him down between 7:30 and 8, but without fail he's been getting up at midnight again. We'll go in to sooth him and put him back down, often changing a wet diaper along the way... and then he'll cry for another half hour or more regardless of soothing techniques unless I feed him again. Then he'll get up at 3 or 4 and do it all over again. Then 8 or 9, at which point I can't really go back to bed since he doesn't go back to sleep after that. It's very frustrating and while we're getting a bit more time to relax in the evenings, we're not actually getting more sleep. The training has pretty much failed and we're at a loss of what to do. If you guys have any methods that worked on your kids, please let me know. I'm about ready to beat my head against a wall and cry myself to sleep right along with him.