Well, the little guy made it - a year old! We celebrated in abbreviated fashion today with a little cake and song:
We plan to have a little more elaborate birthday party for him this weekend when we are more recovered from our recent trip to Singapore (more about that in a future post) and our friends here will be able to attend. Here's a few more photos from today:
Lance will be 9 months old this week. Hard to believe how time flies! I am really enjoying seeing him grow up. There are a lot of things I missed when John was a baby because I was deployed – his first tooth, learning to crawl, pulling himself up, and standing on his own. (Just for a second!) His hair is growing in and starting to get longer. I have been able to see all these things with Lance, and I am very grateful.
He can do more and more each day. He loves to explore the house now that he is a good crawler, especially, it seems, the bathroom. If you let him crawl where he wants to, invariably he will head there. He is completely fascinated by the toilet and the toilet brush. (!) We are doing our best to keep him away from both things, but especially the latter. The other day, Barb caught him standing next to the toilet, seemingly trying to reach in and touch the water. No, baby, no!
I love this toy!
While he once really enjoyed spending much of the day in his walker, he now enjoys crawling and exploring without it much more, for he can get to places this way that he was unable to when in the walker. He pulls himself up on furniture and other items all the time. Sometimes he will walk while holding on to my or Barb’s hands. Too cute!
One recent evening the family went to a one-year old's birthday party and we came home well after the boys's bedtime. I had Lance in the back carrier, sleeping peacefully, and John fell asleep on the subway ride home. I decided the easiest way to get him home was to carry him. Here you go - action shot!
I explained to Barb that even though they probably weighed 60 lbs together, that was peanuts compared to the average load of any combat soldier, so it was an easy day!
Grafitti near our home that I just noticed this week
Hard to believe, but it's already been a week since Lance was born! I tell you, this past week has gone by as if I was in a time warp! Where has the time gone?
Sign Barb and John made for our front door
Significant developments:
Lance
Yesterday (Sunday) we took Lance on his first trip outside since coming home from the hospital. We visited the park. Lance was awake the whole time and seemed to enjoy the trip. There were a ton of people out in the park for some wedding-related thing at the Water Square and an ECFA speech in the speech plaza.
The new stroller works great!
The wedding "thing" in the park
Lance gets some attention from a local woman
This morning (Monday) there was another park trip, but this time Lance pretty much slept the whole time.
Since we've got a few pics of Lance, I wanted to compare how he looks with how John looked. I was only able to find a couple pics of John here on Garblog from the first month or so after he was born, and in one of them, you can't see much of him (I am holding him while bottle feeding for the first time at three weeks old). Here's one that we can probably use (I sure didn't take many photos back then - at least compared to now!):
Obviously, it's easy to notice that Lance's eyes are dark (they appear to be brown), while John's were blue and later changed to grey, and that Lance's hair is darker and a bit thicker than John's was (although the perceived greater thickness could be largely attributed to the darker color - hard to tell for sure right now).
Will try to post more on differences between John and Lance as time goes on.
He's not come out yet...but we had the latest check-up yesterday and I wanted to share the results. Everything is coming along fine, he probably weighs close to 7 lbs. now (at about 37 weeks), so we figure that if he stays in there for another month or so (John was born about a week past his due date) he will approach a birth weight equivalent to what John's was (9 lbs. 3 oz.). While we are very happy that Barb is producing big, healthy babies, I was sort of hoping that maybe this one might be a little bit smaller (8 lbs.?) so that it might have a little bit easier time coming into the world. (John took some extra help to come out.) Well, whatever happens, I'm certain it will work out fine!
While we were at the hospital, John took the chance to get his vitals measured. Here's his "stats":
Top: 17.0 kg; bottom: 104.9 cm
Grandpa S. was able to quickly convert these metric totals to pounds and inches today when we told him about them on Skype (he is used to dealing with metric measurements at work), but for those who aren't as savvy, I'll save you the need to get out your calculator. It's 37.5 lbs. and 41.3 inches (about 3 ft 5 inches). No wonder John gets heavy so fast nowadays when I carry him!
