First foods

Dylan is five months old, and the pediatrician gave us the go ahead at his four month appointment to start him on solids whenever he's ready.  We were all excited and bought some local, organic avocados, apples and squash.  First we tried avocado:

He was not terribly impressed. Then we tried apples, then squash.  He seemed to like the flavor of those foods better, and was willing to take a few spoonfuls, but then used his tongue to push most of it out.

I know some apple and squash got into his tummy, since about an hour after eating he spat some up brown (for the apple) and orange (in the case of squash), on my crisp white shirt.  Motherhood is so glamorous.

On a side note, I know I shouldn't be feeding him this, and that it doesn't count as "solid" food, but I gave him a few small spoonfuls of my chicken soup the other day, and he ate it up. So between that, and his enthusiasm for licking and gumming my apple cores, he does seem to like the taste of food, but he's not developmentally ready yet for the physical process of eating solids. We'll give it a rest for a few more weeks and then try it again.

Oh, and there's no 5-month wellness appointment, so we don't have any 5 month stats.

We donated Dylan to science!

Actually we just loaned him.

Dylan took place in a study at UC Berkeley's Infant Cognition and Language Lab.  He sat in a high chair and was shown boxes of yellow and pink ping pong balls. The researcher took samples of balls out of the boxes.  Some samples were representative of the color distribution of balls in the box, and some were not.  The point of the study was to determine whether babies have a sense of probability.  They timed how long Dylan looked at each sample, since babies are known to look longer at unexpected things.

4 month appointment stats

Dylan weighed 13 lb 6 oz (13%ile), and was 24.75" long (32%ile).  His head circumference was 43.75 cm (80%ile). 

And I think the smart money says he'll have blue or grey eyes (photo from this past weekend).

Cuter by the dozen?

Yesterday was the last official meeting of my new mom support group.  We'll continue to meet ad hoc on our own.

Here are the babies:

Dashiell, Elliot, Leo, Dylan, Gabby, Evan, Indira, Simone, Zachary, Kylie and Maya.  (Hayden was sick and had to miss the meeting)

4 months old and in the snow

Dylan turned 4 months on Sunday.  For the full 3-month photo set, click here.

We spent the weekend up at Kathy and Craig's house in Tahoe.  We all went snowboarding on Saturday and the spouses traded off babysitting in the lodge. On Sunday Rich, Dylan and I went cross country skiing at Tahoe Donner.  The weather was in the 50s, so we didn't have to do much in the way of bundling up:

  Here's Dylan with Kathy and Craig's son Cooper, who's almost 3 months old:

Another day in paradise

The high in Berkeley yesterday was 76F, so we decided to do a hike up in Tilden that included the Bay Area Ridgeline Trail.

 Sure beats football :)

A little bit of sunshine

We continue into our third week of freakishly warm weather, just as the East Coast is getting socked by blizzards.  We took Dylan out to the farmers market and park today, where he got to hang out on the grass in the sunshine.

Here he is showing off his ample, yet adorable head.

Even bigger head Dylan

Dylan's head continues to grow to large proportions.  He had his 3 month doctor appointment today, and at 12 lbs. 11 oz. is at 22% for weight.  His height is similar, at 26%, but his head size is now up to a whopping 82%.  So basically, all of his weight gain is going to his head.

One month formula free!!

Breastfeeding is supposed to be "natural", but it certainly wasn't so easy for me.  Dylan lost 14 oz after he was born, so we were supplementing his diet with formula for the first two months, while I struggled to get my supply up.  Taking fenugreek supplements seemed to do the trick for me, and between that, lots of support from Rich and perseverance, Dylan hasn't had a drop of formula since Dec 23.

Here's your dose of Dylan, who has learned to grab at toys (and everything else) within the last week.

One of the women in my new mom's group said that Dylan reminds her of Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time

This makes me very happy.

Dylan at the beach

On Sunday, we took the Tennessee Valley trail in Marin out to the beach. Dylan napped in the Ergo on the trail, but was awake and alert and enjoyed the beach.

 Cool Dylan hanging out in Mommy's shades:

Dylan is big enough now to ride on Daddy's shoulders.

Before taking the trail back to the car, we climbed to the lookout and got a view from above.

For all the pictures, click here.

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.