1-Year Stats

24 pounds, 6 ounces (75th percentile)

31.5 inches (90th percentile)

So, he's still keeping up with the height, but all the crawling and
other movement of late have been keeping the weight down. Below are
Mama and the boy, waiting for Doc G.

Experiment

Tonight, Parie put the boy down to bed without nursing him, which has been standard operating procedure for all these many months. Instead, after reading some books, she just got up and put him in his crib. She reports that rather than doing his cute rolling over to one side maneuver, he instead stood straight up and grabbed the top crib rail and released a piercing scream (which I can attest to).

However, the screaming only went on for about 5 minutes. Not bad for the first attempt.

Tidbits

• We had to postpone our visit to Doc G for Sofian's 1-year Well Baby checkup from last week to this Wednesday, so keep sitting tight for official measurements (to be posted on Wednesday night).
  
  
• To celebrate Easter, we went to the Museum of Glass down in Tacoma (which isn't all that Easterish, but it was fun nonetheless). I wore Sofian in the Ergo carrier, and let him point to the different glass pieces to look at. His favorite part, though, was watching the day's artist's fire some of their glass pieces in the Hot Shop. (I think he definitely takes after his pyromaniacal Mama.)
  
  
• The boy is getting up on his knees and occasionally standing (supporting himself against some furniture) more and more easily, so we quickly broke out the Tot Loks last night and installed them on the doors of our living room credenza. Looks like we're gonna have to do some more sooner than later.
  
  
• I think we have a candidate for a first word (other than Mama). Sofian was playing with his Lego set, which includes a gray cat (as a Lego purist, I was a little horrified to find something non-blocky in the set). Last night, he picked up the cat piece and said "kit kat" (I usually refer to our cats as "kitty cats" when he's around them). It was very cute, and he said it a couple of times as we encouraged him to do so.
  

Out at the Zoo on Daddy Day Care Day

Some Fave Photos from Year One

The most amazing day -- I couldn't stop crying for like an hour (March 17, 2007):



Monkey toes (March 22, 2007):



Having fun in the stim-gym (April 10, 2007):



The dark, sleep-deprived days (April 23, 2007):



Snoozin' (May 3, 2007):



The first PEPS gathering at the LD (June 8, 2007):



Obviously picking up style points from his Papa (July 29, 2007):



No, we're not getting into trouble (September 3, 2007):



Hello, Flashdance is on the line and it wants its look back (October 8, 2007):



The end of our long Thanksgiving trek (November 23, 2007):



Hanging out in the crib (December 22, 2007):



Mama and Rooster Boy (February 1, 2008):

Onto the Second Year

It's the 17th of March, and today we celebrated Sofian's 1st birthday with his Grandmother Linda (aka, Mamalama) and Ann (aka, Tutu) as well as his Grandfather Tom (aka, TomTom). (Unfortunately, Mamalama's husband John -- aka, Papalapa -- wasn't able to join us as the two of them literally just got off the boat from a cruise around South America.)

The birthday was really spread out over the weekend, with an open house here at the LemonDrop on Saturday, and we had a huge crowd for our tiny house. It was great to see everyone, and everyone went away very satisfied with a taste treat from the new king of cupcakes here in Seattle -- Trophy Cupcakes. Since butter and eggs are still new to Sofian, his Mama made him a vegan carrot cupcake that he quite enjoyed, both during Saturday's open house and today's proper birthday party.

Wow. It has been quite a year. That's an understatement. We've certainly had some challenging times (specifically those that were sleep deprived), but by and large the learning process of the last year (for both the boy discovering the world and his parents figuring out how to be parents and what makes this kid tick) has been pretty dang wonderful. At the one-year mark, Sofian is really exhibiting some distinct personality traits and it's going to be a lot of fun to see how they continue to manifest.

Now onto the pics and vids:

Sofian's Birthday Cupcake

Sofian unwrapping birthday gifts

Holy Cow, It's March Already

Things are busy, to say the least, around the LemonDrop. Parie is minding the boy four days out of the week, and then trying to finish the plans for the addition on my day of Daddy Day Care as well as during nap times and such. And I've been inundated with loads of work that has taken my eye off of blogging of late. Oh, and it's tax season and we've been prepping an application for a refinancing to fund the coming addition... and we need to get some things figgered out for the big birthday weekend that is fast approaching. So yeah, things are a little crazy.

Here are some quick updates followed by recent pics:

• Went down to Portland a couple weekends back and had a great time with Tutu and Tomtom, as well as had a great time with various and sundry guests at all the meals. Also got a chance to visit our pals Adam and Korey and check out how their kids Owen and Amelia are doing (Amelia liked putting her feet in my goatee).
  
  
• Sofian has graduated from just a GI Joe crawl to full-on hands-and-knees crawling (though he can go between the two pretty easily). He's also getting pretty fast.
  
  
• New teeth are coming in on the bottom, slowly but surely, so soon Sofian will have eight teeth in total (four on top, four on the bottom).
  
  
• The boy is starting to pick up some habits from his old man, which aren't very endearing. Sofian is starting to get a little picky with his eating habits, refusing vegetables for the most part. We've resorted to trying to hide some veg within fruit purees as well as yogurt, but it hasn't been completely successful.
  
  
• We're losing one of our PEPS pals -- Henry and his parents Beth and Pete are leaving Seattle for Kansas City. We'll be saying goodbye to them this week.
  

And now, for a cavalcade of pics:



Jeff and Kim visited with Ellie the other afternoon, and Jeff was showing off his block-building prowess to Sofian -- who left nothing stand.



Henry stopped by for awhile last week as well, while his Mom did some prep work for the move. Unfortunately, Sofian napped during all of Henry's visit, but they'll get a chance to play again this Wednesday.



Sofian got a great new hat and a pair of pants as an early birthday present from Anne, Eric, Mari and Clara. Here are the two boys showing off their hats.



A snap of Tutu and Sofian from the recent Portland visit.



And finally, the boy on the swings (again), taking advantage of some of the great weather we've been having this month in Seattle.