I just posted a few pictures Lisa took this week. You can see them here. Little Maggie Belle is almost 9 months old. She still isn’t really crawling yet but she is learning to stand and we think she’ll be walking fairly soon. Nothing much new to report but she did get another tooth this week. The two on bottom came in pretty straight. The first two on top had a David Letterman half inch gap between them, and now she’s got a third one on top.

As far as her verbal skills are coming, well, she is having a hard time enunciating some of the tougher words. She’s getting really good at saying “hmmmmmm” and “baaaaaaaaa.” Only knowing these two words however, hasn’t deterred her from talking all the time. We think she’s going to talk as much as her brother. I guess that means we’re not going to get much peace and quiet around here for the next sixteen or so years. Until she goes off to college (or a good trade school.)

Wow, I didn’t realize it has been a month since I last posted anything on here. I think Maggie Belle can sense that I’ve gotten lazy on her site and she’s showing her displeasure here. A quick recap of the last month… The first weekend in May we drove down to Georgia for a quick weekend visit with Lisa’s sister and my mom, dad and sister. I remember taking a lot of pictures, but I think we were using everyone else’s cameras and we’ve got no photographic evidence of our visit. Oh well, it was still a nice visit- albeit a very short one.

The next weekend back in Virginia we spent a couple of hours at the boardwalk in Virginia Beach. We’ve got a few pictures of that trip here. The following weekend, we spent a couple of hours at our beach here in Hampton. More pictures here. And also, Little Matt and I concluded our Great Tadpole Experiment today and released our frogs back into the lake where we caught them back in April.

Here’s our girl with her favorite Devo hat on. I think I need more pictures of her in this hat.

Nothing major to report this weekend. I worked Saturday and I think Lisa did laundry. Anytime I ask Little Matt what his mom is doing, he says she’s probably doing laundry. It was beautiful weather Saturday so we drove out to Bluebird Gap Farm to feed the ducks and pet the goats. And of course play a little bit on the playground. We did take a lot of pictures and you can see them here. I love this one of Mom and Little in front of the white peacock.

Sunday wasn’t as exciting as a trip to the local farm. Little and I caught a few more tadpoles in the morning then spent the rest of the day cutting up a huge tree that had fallen into our backyard. I think that’s going to be our Sunday afternoon project for the next few weekends. Oh joy.

Well I missed a week for posting so I’ll try to write a couple tonight. My dad drove up from Tennessee last weekend to meet his new granddaughter and spend some quality time with the family. It was a mostly uneventful few days but we had a great time visiting. We cooked out a couple of nights which is always great. On Saturday, Little Matt, Granddad and I cruised the ocean front at Virginia Beach while the girls did girly stuff. We met for lunch and came back for a quiet evening at home.

On Sunday morning I got to take my dad on my and Little Matt’s regular Sunday morning routine… we went tadpole hunting in the rain and then had fast food for lunch! We caught four tadpoles and came back and set up the aquarium. When the rain stopped later in the afternoon, we went out to Buckroe Beach to walk around a bit and see the sights. On Monday my dad drove up to DC to visit the Viet Nam Memorial Wall and we had another uneventful evening at home.

Overall it was a great visit and I’m glad my dad got to meet Maggie Belle and spend some quality time with me and Little Matt. Hopefully we’ll get to drive down to Georgia and Tennessee to visit soon.

See the photo album for Granddad’s Visit and Tadpole Hunting here.

So, Little and I had our standard pancake breakfast this morning. And as we have done for the last few weeks we went looking for tadpoles afterwards. With the same results as the last few times - we didn’t find any. I don’t know if it’s still too cold here, or if we just don’t know where to look. But we’re going to find some! And oh yeah, today was the first time Little Matt fell into the mud. It was quite a sight. I was dipping the net into the muck along the bank (scooping up water bugs and crawdads, just no tadpoles). Little was being his active self along the slippery bank when he slipped and fell backwards. I’m sure it didn’t hurt as the four inches of water and soft mud he landed in must have cushioned the fall. But he cried nonetheless. Of course, I told him to quit crying and that he wasn’t hurt. He told me chocolate milk and a Kit-Kat would make him feel better. And I guess it did. It made him forgot all about being cold and riding home in his underwear.

After lunch we drove out to Buckroe Beach for a bit of kite flying. It was a little cold for the baby so she decided to just stay in the stroller with her blanket while Little Matt and I got our shark and Batman kites aloft. It was very windy so it wasn’t much of a challenge getting them up. But it was still fun. Maybe next time we can make our own kites like the kids from the Little House on the Prairie. I think that should be kind of fun. We can start studying some of the principles of physics and see how we can put them to use.

Okay, wrapping up now. Pictures of todays events are here. And since last week I added one of Maggie Belle with food all over her, the next picture that every baby needs is one where they’re sitting in a clothes hamper. So there you go. Maggie Belle sitting in a hamper. How cute.

Every few months or so, Little Matt and I like to make straight-chain polymers out of of polyvinyl acrylic (PVA) and sodium tetraborate. It’s pretty simple to do. We just mix one part PVA with one part dihydrogen oxide. Then make a solution of about 40 mg of Na2B4O7, and 400 cc of more dihydrogen oxide. Then slowly mix this solution into the PVA mixture. Of course, we add a little food coloring for effect. The result is this great fun-to-play-with polymer!

Okay, so Polyvinyl acrylic is just Elmer’s glue. Sodium Tetraborate is household Borax. And dihydrogen oxide is water. And our polymer is more commonly called slime. I figure it’s never too early to start teaching Little Matt the chemistry behind what we were doing. Check back in a couple of weeks when we set up our meth lab.

Okay, I think every baby has had this picture taken. Of course, we as parents think it is just so cute when our precious angel makes a mess at dinner time. I have to admit, I thought it was funny too. At least the first time. After that, I kind of wish she would just eat the delicious mushy sweet potatoes.

Of course, what is amazing, is that she can go from this first picture on the right to the next one in about two seconds. She can be all happy with a belly half full of something squishy one second, and then giving me this nasty look the next second. I haven’t figured out if it’s because she’s still hungry, or if she’s full. I figure the only safe thing to do is to keep feeding her. Maybe that’s why she’s in the top 95th percentile of all six-month old kids. And Maggie Belle, if you’re reading this sometime in your teenage years, yes, that means that you were a pretty round baby. At six months old, there wasn’t much you wouldn’t eat. In fact, I can hear you squealing downstairs right now. Yep, probably wanting another meal. You get that from me– not your mother…

Nothing too exciting this week. Little Matt and Maggie Belle are still doing well. She’s still not very mobile but she’s been thinking more and more about starting to crawl. Still only the two bottom teeth (on Maggie that is. Matt has all his teeth.) Maggie Belle is making a few more sounds and we’re trying to encourage her to talk more. And we’re trying to encourage Little Matt to talk a little less. We’re not having much luck there. That’s all for now. Just a few pictures this week.

Just a regular Sunday here. Little Matt and I had our regular pancake and Hotwheels breakfast. Our weekly treat is to go to McDonald’s for pancakes and then if he’s been good we go to Target or Toys-R-Us and get a Hotwheel car. Lately he’s been more into Legos though.

I just uploaded a few new baby pictures for this week. Nothing too exciting happening here. Maggie Belle is sitting up and wiggling around a lot, but still not very mobile. And she’s still a pretty quiet baby overall. She doesn’t cry too much, just a little bit when she’s trying to tell us that she’s hungry. That’s all. This week’s pictures are at: March 30, 2008.

So last night, Little Matt is upstairs, supposedly getting ready for bath time, when we hear a big crash followed by the extremely loud wailing of a five-year-old. He had pulled out the drawers of his dresser in a nice stair-step manner so he could climb up to the top. Of course this didn’t work and he pulled it over on himself. We’re lucky that he only managed to scratch one finger and one toe, but as he knew he was in trouble, the crying was really something to behold. I’m sure he was scared, and he should have been because he could have really gotten hurt, but in the end he was fine. Maybe he figured if he cried hard enough, he would get the sympathy vote from us and we would forget that he was climbing up his dresser. I would have probably tried the same thing at his age.