Woznation

Ahhh, my little boy is one.  I can hardly believe it.  Hes such a big guy that everyone always thinks hes older than he is, but he’s still very much a baby to me.  He still not interested in walking that much. He pushes his walking cart around, but wont take a go at it on his own.  He says a few select sounds at certain objects.  For example, he says ‘dada’ at every dog we pass, but he also says ‘dada’  when phil gets home from work, and at the refrigerator.  We still dont know what his first word is, since he kind of calls everything the same thing and its not consistent yet.  I’m enjoying this time before true toddler-hood starts. And we celebrated his 1st first a number of ways.  For his actual birthday, it was just Phil, Wil and I in Baltimore.  He spent the day at the children’s museum, skyping with family, opening presents and eating his first cupcake!

Wil was a bit hesitant with the cupcake.  He would actually take a bite of it, but he liked picking off the icing and eating that.  We dont have a picture of when the thing was torn apart, but I think we have a video.

Of course, the box the toys came in was more fun than the toys themselves.

We also had a family celebration in Bloomington the week after:

Since the cupcake wasnt a hit, I decided for something a little more dense (he doesnt seem to like fluffy things, like bread or cake).  So my mom and I made these cute sugar cookies and made a sprinkles ‘1’ with a cookie-cutter on top.  I was pretty proud of them.

Even though it was hot, we set up camp in a shelter at Highland park where we opened presents, played with balloons, sang happy birthday, and ate cookies. I dont seem to have a copy of the group shot, but all Wileks grandparents, and Auntie Em were there to celebrate!  Thank you everyone one who came out and made Wil’s first birthday so special!

For my first mothers day, Wilek got me tickets to an Os game.  A big group of friends of us met and sat in the shade in the upper deck.  There was one other mom celebrating her first mothers day with us, too, so that was fun.  Wil, again, did not make it through the whole game.  But it was beautiful weather and we had a great time.

Fathers day weekend was even more beautiful.  It was the 200-anniversary of the war or 1812, which apparently has some ties to Baltimore, so the weekend was dubbed the ‘Sailibration’ weekend (which sounds like ‘Celebration’ with a red-neck accent) and there  were fun events all over town in honor of it.  There were like 50 huge ships docked in the harbor that were free to go on board and look at – hense the ‘sail’ part of the sailibration.  There were also softball tournaments in the park for all the crew members of the ships, fireworks, and a blue angels show.  It really felt like a holiday weekend around here and we took full advantage.

On Saturday we took Wilek to the park and then let him stay up extra late to watch his first fireworks show.  He was tired, grumpy, and not impressed.  But Phil and I liked it.

Hes such a city boy.  He has no idea what grass is or what to do with it.  This was one of the few pictures I could get of him before he crawled back over to the blanket.  On Sunday we walked down to the harbor and snagged an outdoor table at Alexanders, one of our favorite brunch locations. Score!  We walked past a lot of the boats, but the lines were too long to actually go on board.  Then we made our way back to our friends house, who has a roof-top deck to watch the Blue angels show!  Phil had some really good videos that he’ll post soon.  Fathers day in 4 pics:

One thing I really wanted to do with this blog, along with keeping and sharing pictures, was to also share stories of our experience with Wilek as a baby.  And I haven’t really gotten down anything lately – so I’ll use this opportunity to share a few tidbits with ya’ll.

(1) The stroller incident

About a month ago, we are getting ready to go on a nice family walk around the park.  So I head outside and put him in his stroller – aaaaand forgot to put the break on.  So I walk away for 2 seconds to shut the front door and the stroller starts going down the sidewalk on its own, off the curb, into the street where it hit a car and fell onto its side in the road.  I got the front door closed just in time to turn around and witness the whole thing, but couldnt get to him fast enough to stop it from happening. Wil got jostled around a bit, but luckily I had him all strapped in and no cars were coming.  He screamed bloody murder but he didnt seem to really hit his head or anything.  We checked him all over, and he calmed down within minutes. We assumed he was fine and went on our walk.

(2) Homemade baby food

Since Wil started eating solids 3 times a day, I decided to try my hand at some homemade baby purees.  I spent a whole afternoon cooking, steaming, puree-ing and freezing carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes, and white potatoes. I was so proud of myself.  Well it just so happened, the very day I started incorporating these into his diet – he seemed to come down with some sort of stomach bug.  He surprised us with this by throwing up over everything, including me, two nights in a row. Massive cleaning sessions needed to take place because of this.  But he was fine both days leading up to his night time bottle! We couldnt make sense of why he was getting sick just at night.  Finally by the 3rd night, we were terrified of his nighttime feeding – so I stripped down to basically nothing and fed Wil over a blanket on the hard wood floor. I wouldnt let Phil take any pictures, but it was a hilarious scene. I couldnt believe it had come to that.  Coincidentally that same night, instead of his delicious homemade baby puree dinner, we fed him some baby cereal.  And he was perfectly fine.  We finally realized that he didnt have a mysterious night-time-only stomach bug.  My purees were just disgusting to him.  They were promptly throw out and he was fine ever since.

(3) The perfect sippy cup

I had heard that babies should be ‘off the bottle’ by 1-year old, so I started my search for the perfect sippy cup for him a few months ago, but had serious trouble.  He has no concept of holding a bottle or cup by himself and tipping it up to get the water to come out.  We tried repeated to get him to hold it, tried showing him how the water comes out.  At first we thought maybe he needed one with handles, then we thought he needed a softer spout.  We seriously bought like 10 different sippy cups trying to find the right one, never finding the trick.  Until one day Phil had his camelback water bottle on the ground next to him, and Wilek magically crawled right up to it, put his mouth on the spout and started drinking from it.  It was at the perfect height that he didnt have to hold it and it had a straw so that he didnt have to tip it for the water (Picture in slideshow below).  Uuuuuunbelievable.  10 trips to babies-r-us for the ‘perfect’ sippy cup results in him preferring a 1-liter adult-water bottle. Hey – whatever works.

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