A little test post

P1030552, originally uploaded by superjaberwocky.

This isn’t really a substantial post, just a quick one to test out a new feature in our photo sharing site, Flickr. The program lets us click on a “blog-this” button above the photos, and it automatically creates a blog post with the chosen photo in it. Neat, huh?

I hope to make some good use of this soon.

New way for photos

And a new look to the site. So, I said in the last post that I switched from using Google’s Picasa service to using Flickr for photos. Well, I’ve got a few photos uploaded to Flickr, and you can now see the latest three photos in the sidebar of this block under the “Latest Photos” section. Just click on one of the photos to see it at full size, or click on the “More Photos” link to see… well, more photos.

Flickr calls your list of photos a “photostream,” so don’t get confused by the jargon. Typically, there’s a list of albums of photos on the right-hand side of the Flickr page, or you can navigate through the photos one-by-one in the main part of the page. The Flickr navigation system is pretty simple, but if you have problems finding photos, let me know, and I can help you out.

Also, the old photos are still available on Google, accessible in the same way as they always have been. I might migrate those photos into Flickr, but that will wait until after June 5, when we have our own Internet service installed (and when I’m not “borrowing” my upstairs neighbor’s wifi).

Early summer update

I know it’s been a while since the last update to this blog, and I apologize for that. Lots of things have prevented the updating, not least among them the fact that we’ve now moved to a new apartment — oh, and the fact that we lost the digital camera’s battery charger for a while. (Just found it this morning, so we’ll get some new photos up soon.)

I’ll hit the big events quickly while Nathan naps this morning:

• We went to Missoula and Helena on Memorial Day weekend to visit some of Susan’s family. We met up with a lot of semi-distant relatives from the western half of the state and Washington. Then we hung out with Susan’s grandma and aunt and uncle and cousins in Helena before heading back to Bozeman on Monday morning. Nathan was a champ. He slept for most of the time that we were in the car and had a great time running around the yard like a madman in Missoula.
• Nathan is understanding and saying more words everyday. He can bark like a dog, roar like a lion, meow like a kitty and regularly say “da da,” “ma ma,” “no,” “banana,” and “hey.” He also shakes his head when he means “no” and is learning to nod when he means “yes.”
• The new apartment is getting settled. I’ll post photos of it when the camera is recharged.

Speaking of photos, I’m going to switch from using Google to store photos to using another online service called Flickr. I’m going to do that because Flickr is built-in to the iPhoto program I use to manage photos, and that makes things a ton easier. I’ll also be posting photos regularly to Facebook now, if you happen to be my friend on that Web site.

Pointing and climbing

Nathan now points at everything, especially the stuff he can’t have. You ask him where his mommy is, and he points. He comes up to you in your chair and points at your soda bottle or a potted plant or the remote control. No, you can’t have that. Thankfully, he also points at some things he can have, so he’s learning that this pointing this is a way to communicate.

The other big development right now is the dangerous one: he can climb. Right now, he’ll climb anything he can get a foothold on. That includes chairs, his bed, our bed, kitchen cabinets, the couch, shelves, and any other random things that happen to be about the right height for him to get a foot up on. He’s even taken to dragging a chair around the kitchen so that he can stand up and watch what’s going on on the counter — though this is not always a good thing. He fell straight off of his chair the other night.

Gravity can be a harsh mistress, and I think with the climbing, he’ll learn that lesson pretty quickly.

Nathan’s Easter present

Mike’s mother came to town yesterday. We all ate lunch, Mike went back to work and Pat, Nate and I went shopping. Nathan got a little fold up table with two little fold up chairs. His inability to move them around with ease frustrated him to no end for most of yesterday afternoon, but this morning he seems content to sit and eat.

Pinned!

As I pinned the wiggly baby down for his diaper change I told him he was “down for the count!”

Neither of us knows how long “the count” actually lasts–we got to 68.

He seemed to really enjoy my enthusiastic counting and stayed still(for once) while I changed him. Maybe I should count for him more often…

A laundry list of updates

Since I haven’t posted a prose update in a while, I thought I’d hit the highlights in list style.

• If you haven’t seen the photos or heard the news yet, Nathan is officially a toddler now. He walks and damn near runs, which means he can get into a lot of places in the apartment that he could not before (see the second bullet point) and reach a lot of things he could only grunt at before.
• Nathan can open some doors, the ones that have the elongated handles, anyway. Thankfully, he can’t yet open the normal, round-handled doors (like the one that leads out of the apartment). As a result of this new skill, Nathan likes to close himself into rooms and closets and then get himself out of them again.
• Nathan is learning to climb. Just tonight, he was able to climb onto the couch with his mommy, which was a first. He’s been more or less climbing out of the tub by himself for weeks now.
• Nathan can give hugs and does so often now.
• Nathan can give you a kiss, when he’s in the mood. Sometimes he even closes his mouth and does it politely.
• Nathan can bite you. On purpose. Watch your fingers, or in my case, your nose.
• He can say a few words. He says things like “num num num” for tasty food and “hey” when he wants your attention. He says “mamamamama” and “dadadadada” occasionally. This is in addition to his “nananana” for banana and his version of “out” when we tell him to get out of whatever he’s gotten into.
• Nathan yells back when you yell at him for getting into stuff he’s not supposed to be into.
• Nathan always, always wants to go outside, even when the weather is horribly inappropriate.
• He understands a lot of words. He can get your shoes for you, and even get the “other one” that matches the one you’ve got. He knows which books are which books and can go and get them from the other side of the apartment. He knows where to go when we tell him to get his diaper changed or take a bath or eat dinner.

I think that’s a pretty good update for one night. I’ll try to be a better blogger in the future so I don’t have to do these catchall posts. In the meantime, enjoy this one.

New photos, finally!

Some new photos from the past two months. He moves around so much now that it’s pretty hard to get a focused image of him, but we do our best. There will be even more photos, as soon as I get the pictures off my camera phone. I’ll post an update when that happens, hopefully by the end of the weekend. Enjoy these, though!

13 to 14 months

Lack of posts

We’ve been pretty negligent about the posts for the past month of so. I’ll try to get photos up tomorrow or the next day.

Walking a little

Nathan can walk. We’ve known that for a while, but now he’s starting to believe it himself. From time to time, when he’s in a good mood or really wants something, he’ll walk a few steps to get it. Usually he’ll do it for food or some particularly good toy (like daddy’s expensive touch screen universal remote).

I try to treat these situations the same way you treat a pitcher who’s working on a no-hitter. Don’t inform them of what’s going on, because the minute you do, you’ll spoil the luck and make them aware of the situation. In other words, I try not to let Nate know that I’m happy about him walking because he’ll immediately plop down on his butt, thinking that he doesn’t know how to walk.

We’ll have more updates as the walking progresses, with some video, I hope, sooner or later.