The 2nd Christmas (with kid)

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas! We certainly did. We were blessed to have the family come to us this year and help us break in our new family room and kitchen. It was a memorable time experiencing the Christmas spirit.

One unforgettable memory will be from the Christmas Family Service we attended on Christmas Eve at our church. The service consisted of the traditional song singing and children acting out the Christmas Story. We sat towards the back, but there was a star hung from the ceiling in the front of the room that was clearly visible (much like the Star of Bethlehem). Throughout the service a well-behaved Aria was focused on the star and repeatedly pointed to it saying "staaahh". This is a new word for her since last week. It was very cute and made us feel great as we sat there together as a family watching the Christmas Story unfold. These are the types of memories you hold close.

Overall Aria enjoyed the last couple of days visiting with family, enjoying good eats and playing with new toys (including the new couch!).

Thankfully Aria can't climb onto the couch herself yet, but she's trying! It was delivered last Friday and ever since then she's used it as her personal jungle gym.

Aria got into opening a few presents, but her attention span was short lived.

Ring-a-Ding-Ding! Aria loves her new phone. Hopefully this will be a good distraction from the real thing.

Aria tried her first Christmas cookie (made by G-ma Jane). I think her little dance clearly shows that she likes them.

Fun with food

wait a week, then 2 posts at once! er... ok i guess it's been almost 2 weeks. hehe...

We've been giving Aria bite-sized pieces of food for some time, but she is sometimes a lazy baby and doesn't chew everything up completely. Things don't get fully digested... I'll leave it at that. So a couple days ago we decided to try a little experiment. Give her large pieces of food so she has to bite pieces off. She has 13 teeth and she should use them! We started with a quarter of an apple for lunch, which ended up looking like a cute little mouse nibbled about half of it away.

Then for dinner, Dana gave Aria a big piece of tofu and she devoured it bite by bite. Next was some frozen raspberries (thawed). I think Dana was just going with how messy Aria could get. Then the real fun began when she gave her some broccoli, that's the video below. No explanation necessary other than the noise in the background is me vacuuming. :-)

I knew about this dinner so far, but after I was done cleaning the house, Dana showed me what she fed Aria next. She gave her a spoon (Aria's been learning how to use it for the past couple of weeks), and gave her a container of yogurt! Aria did kind of get the hang of it, her technique being dunk the spoon and try to get it all in. Messy Messy! Very funny pics and video.

watch this for what it is, then watch again and notice her left hand—kinda frozen out there! she's inherited that from me i think. :-)

There is nothing better than a fun game of peek-a-boo after we are all cleaned up!

A Thank You goes out to Dana for uploading the pics and videos on these last 2 posts, and doing a little bit of editing. I've been extremely busy with work this week and she's been asking me to post (that did say bugging, but that word is too close to nagging; she's been very polite about it). :-* that ones for you, wifey!

Aria's favorite word

For a while now, Aria's been saying mama, dada, cat, but recently a new word has emerged in her vocabulary. NO. We talked about this a while ago, and we thought we were good in not saying that word. No was replaced with "please don't do that", or "please stop" or "that is not a toy". Unfortunately, no was still part of our normal speech around her, and of course she picked it up. She also picked up the perfect way of using it—one day i asked her to give me a toy she was running around with, and she politely said "no" and ran away! It was so cute, that Dana and I laughed and kept asking her to give us the toy, giving her more positive reinforcement. oh. great. She's so polite about it though, and we haven't had her get cranky and say no to everything yet. So it's all good. That will come in another year or so...

One of the first times Aria says no caught on video!

As an added bonus, here is what we are currently working on...

What sound does a kitty cat make? She almost has it.

2nd Christmas! Decorating Fun

Lovely family picture!

We spent most of the day Saturday decorating for Christmas, Aria had a blast! Dana found all the dead lights in the many strings of lights we inherited when her parents moved, and I put together the tree and got the ornaments ready for Aria. While Aria napped in the morning, I ran out and picked up our new area rug, runner, and kitchen mat (all cut from the same carpet). but abbey carpet had rounded the wrong corners of the kitchen mat... I digress! I'll cover that in the post about the kitchen/family room being finished.

So I start decorating the Christmas tree by putting the most important ornaments up:

Hallmark Star Trek ornaments!!!

They'd been in my brother's attic for some time, and now they get to be on display every year! kudos to Dana for not putting up a stink like i thought she would. she might change her mind after hearing Mr. Spock wish us happy holidays and rapping about the shuttlecraft (I like to hit the button real fast so he sounds like max headroom). I'm good like that :-o

on to the cuteness!Aria definitely found the tree more interesting than last year when she was only 2 months old. Smart parents that we are, we knew that anything 3 feet and lower would just get pulled off, so we let Aria play with the little stuffed bear and dog ornaments until we were done decorating the top 2/3s of the tree. :-)

then we tried to teach her to place the bears on the tree with some success.

Problem was that she would lay the bear on a branch or watch us hang the bear and then yank him off and go running away! then we took some family photos, and after more bear snatching and running away, our family photo session turned into what you saw at the beginning of the post. :-) she was just hungry and tired, that's all.

"Shuttlecraft to Enterprise, Shuttlecraft to Enterprise. Spock here.
Happy Holidays. Live long, and Prosper."

pushing tin... sideways

no, not those two movies combined into poorly written fan fiction. Aria's coming up with new and interesting things to do with her toys. most notably she's pushing her plane/walker sideways because the new tile in the kitchen/family room doesn't offer much resistance.

I'll post before/after pics of the remodel job when we get the rugs and the rest of the furniture in place. right now, the family room is empty except for the chaise lounge (craig's listed the old purple couches). expect that post late next week at the earliest. :-\

while you're eating? O RLY.

I've never had the urge to poop while eating. I've also never heard of babies doing this. But pretty much every time we sit Aria down to eat lunch and/or dinner, usually towards the end of her meal, she starts the pushing. Makes for a fun time when we have friends/family over for dinner!

I hope potty training will be easier because of this natural timing. also, since we know this is going to happen 85-90% of the time, we've got a ton of embarrassing videos to show before Aria's first date. :-)

yeah. i know. gross. but this is a quarter of the whole parenting thing right now. and it's almost as funny and cute as the playing, eating, and sleeping (the other three quarters).

a new development is Aria points her toes when she does the deed.

snow!

Aria definitely had fun in the snow we got yesterday. Her reaction can best be summed up as fascinated. we stayed out for as long as i could stand, Aria didn't want to leave! She walked up and down the sidewalk so much that our footprints made it look like there had been a lot more than just the two of us out there. :-)

Aria was interested in the crunchy noise our feet made, as well as our footprints

she played with the snow like it was sand at the beach

ok i think i may actually do this thing...

sigh. ok. i think i can do this. my schedule hasn't been the greatest for blogging, but i just gotta take the time to do it. i think it could really be fun. so here goes...

i had the best intentions to start this once i started my current full-time job as stay at home dad this past January, but see the previous paragraph in this entry for an explanation on that. well, a lot has happened since that last post in June. i never did get a picture of Aria screaming inside the play-yard. in fact, she ended up liking it very much. but now that she's a walker (runner), and we had our family room/kitchen remodeled, we don't even set it up anymore. she's pretty good about not getting into stuff, tho i do have to keep an eye on her. 2 eyes.

We had a great birthday bash for her, mostly for us surviving the year. the first annual Ariafest was the day before her birthday, and i had most of a grolsch minikeg :-o. no hangovers allowed tho, because we had family over the next day for her official birthday party where she got a little messy with some cake. :-)

here's some recent pics of her before, during, and after the thanksgiving holiday:

she loves reading,


drumming,


playing in leaves,


dancing,

running,


talking on the phone even when it's not a phone,

and making weird faces and laughing at herself!

hopefully i'll post again less than 6 months from now...

oh yeah

welcome to my new blog! it's about time, i know, but only recently have i been allowed more time during the day; Aria's a little more self-sufficient now that she can crawl to her toys instead of being just a lump stuck in one place.

so i thought i'd create this to give more insight to what it's like being a stay-at-home-dad. and let me start by saying: IT'S TIRING. i do love it though. :-)

prison cell for the baby

ok so she's terrified of the play yard we got her. i think she feels trapped even though it's a pretty big size. must be that she realizes she can't crawl wherever she wants to. oh well, maybe she'll get used to it? i'll post a pic of her screaming in it :-) BAD DADDY!