Dylan's first hike

We were feeling cooped up, so we took Dylan on his first hike on Sunday.  We got a late start, but had time to do the Stream Trail loop in Oakland's Redwood Regional Park. He enjoyed looking around at the trees for the first fifteen minutes or so, then conked out, but reawoke for snack time, shown here:

Rich also got to try out the Ergo carrier for Dylan, now that he can hold up his head.

We're looking forward to more adventures with Dylan, and welcome any insight on how to change his diaper outside when it's cold.

Flying baby

We were told that flying with an infant is pretty easy, and it turned out to be the case. Dylan nursed or slept during each of the three legs of the trip.  For what it's worth, the whole family avoided being either groped or scanned in the X-ray backscatter machines in San Francisco, Toronto and Philadelphia. TSA employees were courteous (although a little less so in Philly) and tried to make it easier for us to get through security with all our baby paraphernalia, since now we're those people you don't want to be behind in line.

Here's Dylan smiling at the gate in PHL:

Week in Philly

After Toronto, we flew to Philadelphia to visit Rich's family. The big news on that end is that Larry and Galit got married! Here's a pic from their ceremony at the Media courthouse.  They'll have a Jewish wedding in May in Israel. Click here for more wedding pictures.

Dylan looking suave in Daddy's fedora:

Taken at the celebration dinner, here's Dylan with cousin Matthew, who seems to have quite the way with babies (or at least our baby):

Here are pictures of Dylan with Grandmom and Grandpop Fromm.

We took Dylan to visit Rich's nursery school, although the kids there are quite a bit older.

We also took Dylan to the Macy's light show downtown, and then went to the Reading Terminal and the Christmas Village by City Hall.  Here's a pic in front of Philadelphia City Hall:

Click here for the full Philly photostream.

Thanks to all Fonos and Fromms for a great visit.  If there are any other pictures you have that you'd like posted, send them along.

Toronto visit

Happy new year, loyal readers. As promised, here's the backfill for our trip. We already posted the group shot.  We also went to visit Dylan's great-great-uncle Joe and great-great-aunt Martha.  Here's Judy presenting Dylan to Joe:

Bob and Sherri brought their crew to visit as well.  Here's Dylan with the Sorger kids Jarett, Elly and Sendi (forgive any misspellings):

 The trip also afforded us the opportunity to take Dylan into the snow for the first time. Now he's all ready for Tahoe!   

We also went with Judy and George on a trip downtown to The Coffee Mill so that Rich could have chestnut puree for the first time. We walked down to the Eatons Center and saw this year's Swarovski Christmas Tree.  Dylan was entranced by being in a mall for the first time.  Should we be worried?

Photo credit to Judy for this picture. And of course, for more pictures, go to Rich's flickr photostream.

flickr

I've been doing a decent job of taking digital pictures over the past few years, but I've been doing a somewhat less stellar job of organizing them and making them available to others.  I wrote a bunch of homebrew scripts that I had been using for making web based albums, and a fairly small subset of my photos have been up at http://richandlorien.org/pictures/ courtesy of these.

I have been meaning for quite some time to do some work improving those scripts, but I never can seem to find the time.  And with Dylan's arrival, I am finally forced to admit that it will probably never become a high enough priority.

Enough people I know seem satisfied with flickr as a photo sharing tool that I've decided to give it a try.  My flickr account is dingdingwikki.  My sets and photostream are respectively available at:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/dingdingwikki/sets/ 
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/dingdingwikki/

If you already have a flickr account, feel free to send me your info and/or add me as a contact.

If you do not have a flickr account, one is not required to see (most of) my pictures, but you might want to consider getting one anyway.  Having a flickr account will allow you to comment, tag, etc.  And while the vast majority of my pictures are publicly available, this is already not 100% true.  Also, I may in the future only make the high resolution originals available to my contacts.  Note that a basic flickr account is free.  (You only have to pay if you want a pro account, which I did, since I quickly hit the 300 MB monthly upload max on the free account.  I decided that unlimited uploads and unlimited storage and usefulness for distributing high resolution originals was worth $25/year.)

There will continue to be blog posts (with selected pictures) here, and I will continue to post quick stuff and snapshots on facebook, but for the time being I will be using flickr for more serious photo management.

So far I started at Dylan's birth and have caught up to the present.  It will take a bit of time to go through several years worth of digital photographs and get them edited and captioned and uploaded as well.  Eventually, but not in the near future.  Maybe someday I'll scan in film negatives, but I don't actually have that many of them from my adult life.

Dylan of two cities

In the interest of making sure there are always up-to-date baby pictures on the blog, here's a pic of Dylan taken by my father George in Toronto:

Here's a picture taken at Larry and Galit's wedding in the Media courthouse (near Philly). Thanks to the Taves for getting Dylan his fancy attire.

Back from back east

We just got back on Saturday from our Grand Tour of Toronto and Philadelphia where we took Dylan to visit his extended family. It feels like we're bringing back a very different baby than we left with.  He seems to be acknowledging the cats, and he can hold up his head on his own, more or less.  He's also sleeping longer than before we left, leading me to have visions of actually getting things done!

We plan to post plenty of pictures from our trip, but here are a couple to get started.  This is a shot of the whole Fono (+Fromm) clan, taken by Robyn.

 
Here are the three Fromm grandsons, taken at Eli and Dorothy's house. 

One more cute picture...

This didn't really fit in with the other posts but is worthy of sharing.  Dylan is somewhat ambivalent about being worn in a sling, but he sure is cute in it.

Into the double digits!

Yesterday was also Dylan's 2-month doctors appointment at 8 weeks old.  He weighed in at 10 lb 1 oz, putting him in the 19th percentile (up from the 7th when he weight 6 lb).  The doctor is very pleased with his growth, especially since he's almost entirely off formula now. She's also pleased with his development and his big smile. He also received his first vaccines, and we're very proud of how brave he was.

Dylan's first Hanukkah

Yesterday was the last night of Hannukah. Dylan was suitably impressed by the full array of lit candles.

Here he is playing with his first toy, a gift from Grandma and Grandpa.

Dylan's namesake

Dylan's middle name is Rigel, which is the brightest star in the constellation Orion, which first rises in October.

Due to our schedules and light pollution and objects obscuring the horizon, we hadn't actually managed to see Rigel until now. Lorien was leaving the house to run an errand earlier this hour and pointed out that Orion was visible in the sky. Including Rigel. We took Dylan out to show him.

No pictures -- I really don't have suitable equipment for astronomy photography, even if we lived out in the boonies.

He smiles!

Well, he has for a little while now, but we finally caught a bit of it on camera.

Showering Dylan

Alice and Alicia hosted a baby shower for Dylan today, at Matt and Alice's house. Thank you to everyone who came out to meet Dylan, for the lovely food spread (especially featuring not-safe-for-pregnancy items), and for the wonderful gifts.

Anjali's Birthday

We went with Dylan last Sunday to the 1st birthday party of Anjali, who is Arnab and Alicia's daughter. There were lots of kids there, although none quite as young and tiny as Dylan. As we were getting ready to leave, Anjali took a bit of an interest in Dylan (and vice-versa).

We're hoping she'll be up for babysitting in a few months. ;)

Big Head Dylan

Dylan had his "1 month" doctor's appointment today, although it was actually on the 5 week anniversary of his birth. As we suspected, our previous concerns about weight gain are no longer an issue. Dylan has zoomed way past his birth weight and now tops the scales at 8lb. 8oz. Apparently his birth weight was only in the 7th percentile (which seems a bit surprising to me -- I thought the high 6's was fairly typical, and it's what both Lorien and I were), but now he's up to the 14th percentile. His length is somewhere in the low 30s percentile. But his head size is right around the 50th percentile. So basically we have a skinny, somewhat short baby, with an otherwise big head.

One month birthday

Saturday was Dylan's one month birthday.  We had a busy day in celebration.  We took him to the Kinetic Steamworks open house, which he pretty much slept through.  Here he is with Rich in a snail, and with me on a steam powered tricycle.

Then we headed over to Alice and Matt's place for indian food.  They just got two kittens, Ramekin and Juneau.  Here's Ramekin investigating the little human kitten.

Happy Places

Changing Dylan’s diaper was a struggle until we set up the super plush microfibre changing pad with a space heater to blow warm air over him. Now he relaxes as soon as we put him down. Here he is relaxing after a bath.

 Here's Dylan in his living room bassinet being watched over by the elephant sent to him by Grandma Dorothy and Grandpa Eli.

Dose of Dylan

Sorry, we’ve gotten behind on blogging. Here’s a pic to whet your appetite from week 3. No worries, we don’t cosleep, but it’s nice to bring Dylan into the grown up bed for morning cuddles. Selena is a fan.

Little monkey

The heat arrived, and Dylan developed a little case of baby acne.  The heat has subsided, and the acne seems to be diminishing as well.  Or maybe it's all just hormonal; I hear that's a possibility.

Here's Dylan in a little monkey suit.  Well, not really a full blown monkey suit, although we do have one of those too.  It seems that monkeys are "in" -- an unusually high percentage of the clothing we have seems to have some sort of monkey theme.  I guess that's okay, I don't have a problem with monkeys.  I can think of worse things to be "in".

Trying the newer editor in blogger. I wouldn't say it's necessarily that much better than the older editor, just that it sucks in different ways. Oh well.

Happy Halloween!

Since Dylan is an October baby, Halloween was his first holiday.

Our Halloween pumpkins this year reflected our newly expanded family, with Daddy, Mommy, and baby pumpkins. (As opposed to the ridiculously old Halloween pumpkin family pics still up at http://richandlorien.org/ -- we ought to change that...)

The Daddy pumpkin was big enough (30#) and Dylan is small enough (~7#), that we were able to subject Dylan to the minor indignity of some in-pumpkin photography. He took it in stride. (Better than the passport photo sessions.) We got some nice ones out of it, and the cute pumpkin hat helped.

At night, after lighting our pumpkins, we dressed Dylan in his pumpkin shirt (thanks Alice and Matt!) and took him out for a tiny bit of trick or treating. Mostly it was just showing him off to the nearby neighbors. In light of Lorien's central role for Dylan's food supply, she got to keep the candy collected.