Evan

Finally, pictures from the party!

Another fine creation by Lisa.

The kids are shivering with antici...pation.

Singing Happy Birthday and getting ready to blow out the candle. Luckily we had a few kids willing to do it, since Evan couldn't quite do it on his own.

Birthday boy wearing birthday shirt and hat. Just getting started on the cake.

Chowing down now, forget the hat, it was just getting in the way of the uncoordinated hands trying to shovel food into the mouth, and mostly getting face.

Double fisted cake eating action.

Caught him in the act of his favorite head slapping.

I'm not sure when the crown came in, but Ellie's always been a birthday princess, so why not a birthday prince?

Later, adding ice cream to the mix. What the heck? Couldn't get messier?

Proud parents with the birthday boy!

Evan officially turned one year old yesterday, and he celebrated with a cupcake from Buzz. We did something similar when Ellie turned one, sort of a test run to see how they would like their first big treat. And trust me, both of them were really into it.

Evan ponders: "What is the strange concoction? Is it mine?"

Well, I put everything else into my mouth, I might as well try this. Not bad!

Like his sister, he's still working on the frosting at this point, but he's clearly loving it!

Getting the hang of it. He loves feeding himself, so this was doubly fun for him.

Really into it now. Somewhere around this time I made the mistake of looking at the floor. What a mess! I tried to clean up as much as possible afterward, but I really needed a vacuum to do the job.

Slowing down a bit now. I think he was starting to go into a sugar-induced coma. Dude, you gotta get in on these munchies man!

The cupcake was officially demolished. We're pretty sure he will do just fine at the party on Saturday. The hard part is going to be keeping him away until we sing and blow out the candle!

Happy birthday little man!

Last night, I was giving Evan a quick bath before I had to head off to curling. Like Ellie, he loves bathtime and splashes around. Lately, he's taken to picking up bath toys and dumping them over the side of the bath. He's definitely in gravity-testing mode as he does the same thing with his food at the dinner table. So anyway, he's splashing around after having emptied the bath for the third time, when he opens his hand, looks at it, and proceeds to smack himself in the head with it, Homer Simpson style. Doh! I laugh, because it just looked funny. He starts giggling too, and then looks at his hand, and does it again! Smack! More giggling and smacking for the next five minutes, until Lisa walks in and just shakes her head at us.
We were having a good time, but then he decided to lean forward, dipping his face in the water, and sucked up a lungful of water. Bathtime over.
Definitely my boy.

When decorating for Halloween recently, Ellie found a pumpkin ink stamper and went nuts with it. Bathtime that night was spent scrubbing ink till the water ran black.
Unfortunately, Evan also found the stamper, but he hasn't quite figured out how to use it yet.

Lisa just called from the pharmacy after taking Evan to the doctor for the second time in as many weeks. He had a new rash pop up yesterday, and even though I wasn't concerned about it, she said it had gotten worse throughout the day and wanted to take him in. The result? Penicillin allergy. Apparently it pops up about 7 days after you take it, and now that I think about it, his rash faded a bit throughout the day, and then got worse again right after I gave him his antibiotics last night.
So, all potential babysitters and caregivers of Evan: he's allergic to penicillin and can never have it again. Some common penicillin antibiotics are amoxicillin (Amoxil, Amoxicot, Biomox, Dispermox, Trimox), ampicillin (Omnipen, Principen). carbenicillin (Geocillin), dicloxacillin (Dycill, Dynapen) and oxacillin (Bactocill). Evan was taking amoxicillin, which Lisa couldn't stand the smell of, so I guess that's a bright side.
The good news is that we caught it now and we know, so we can be aware in the future. The bad news is that every form we or he ever has to fill out at a doctor's office from here on will have to check that penicillin allergy box.

Somehow, we managed to make it through Ellie's early years with no ear infections or any major illnesses for that matter. Contrast that to our neighbor across the street who had to have tubes put in his ears, he got so many ear infections.
Well, our luck ran out. Last week, Evan was running a mild fever, which wasn't too alarming, but it also lasted for a few days, which is more than Lisa was comfortable with. She took him to the doctor, who determined that he had roseola and an ear infection. Damn! He has always tended to claw at his ears when he gets fussy, but previous doctor visits haven't turned up anything when looking at the ears, so we didn't think much of it. Now though, we're hoping this will be the only one. No wonder he was so pissed when we tried to take his temperature with the ear thermometer!

Evan is officially crawling! Well, more like a shimmy scooch type of movement, but he's successfully figured out how to move his legs in concert with his arms for forward motion, so we're counting that as crawling. In honor of this occasion, I present to you some photos of Evan's awesomely mussy hair.

Yep, that's some wild hair. Wait till you see him for Halloween!

Did I mention that he's now getting his second tooth in???

Evan is nine months old today, so I figured I should probably post some long overdue pictures.

Ellie is borrowing a space shuttle costume for her upcoming space-themed birthday party (and Halloween, most likely), but we just had to see how Evan looked in it.

Did we mention he's on the verge of crawling? Yeah, this is what he looks like more often than not these days. It's only a matter of time before he figures out how to move his legs.

Evan is hitting a major spurt lately. When Ellie was his age, she had a hard time sleeping when learning something new, or growing. She would be trying to roll over in her sleep, and a few days later, she'd have it in the conscious world. Evan seems to be similar. He's fighting sleep a lot more lately, and he's trying all sorts of new things. He never really rolled over much, once or twice at the most with the traditional log roll (he prefers the sit up and sort of lever yourself over method), so he's decided to skip that and move on to bigger and more dangerous things.
He is real big on leaning forward from the sitting position to get on his knees. Not crawling yet, but very useful for grabbing things that used to be out of reach. He gets a good rocking action going too, and it's a matter of time before he figures out to move his legs under him.
More dangerously, he is scooting himself across the floor (using that rocking motion I mentioned), and getting up next to something that he can use to pull himself up. Last night, he was really interested in some paper sitting on the piano bench, and got his little hands up on top and pulled himself almost to a standing position. Very dangerous, especially since he really has no sense of balance at the moment. If you hold him up by his hands, you have to hold on tight because he will wobble all over.
Last but not least, he's getting his first tooth! Lisa checked this morning and said she could feel a bit of the tooth when rubbing his gums. I'm fairly sure this was accompanied by a lecture on breastfeeding etiquette (no biting!!!!).

This actually happened just after our trip to Disneyworld, but you saw how long it took me to get the Disney pictures up. Evan is eating solid food now! It's still only about once a day, but it's a start. It also seems he's also not nearly as big a fan of solids as Ellie once was, but he's getting into it. Now he only makes faces every other bite instead of every bite.

There's that face. This was his first ever bite though so he was a little surprised at the taste.

Trying to figure out what to do with the spoon in his mouth. The answer was not sucking on it to get milk out of it, though he tried like heck.

He should be feeding himself soon enough. He liked trying to help you guide the spoon into his mouth.

He started getting happy by the end of the meal, and nowadays he usually likes eating. So far he seems to like sweet potatoes and pears.