Four Months

Somebody is four months old today. That's exciting, right? Who's excited? She's excited:

We've been trying to put her to bed unswaddled or giving her in some way an arm free so if she rolls over she has an arm free to help roll back over. It ... has not been going well. We're back to highly choppy nights and even more difficult soothing back to sleep.

Yesterday we drove to the top of Mt. Evans to celebrate my birthday. It is one of the scarier roads I have driven on, but all went well. Brynn did very well, considering it was about 4 hours in the car round trip. We got dinner at Euclid Hall, one of my favorite restaurants, and they did not disappoint. So good!

Roll Over

Well, yesterday it happened. Brynn rolled over. It was a bit disconcerting to peek in the monitor and see her face down. Fortunately it looked like she had just done it. She was holding her head up well; all that tummy time paid off. She was pretty happy about it, and we're excited, but also anxious. We don't want her to roll over and be on her tummy when she's sleeping, so now we're experimenting with swaddling her with one arm out. I gave it my first try tonight and she's currently down for a nap that way. It's not too terrible to do. We just put a little shirt on her that covers her arms and then we pin it down while we put her to sleep. Seems to be working.

We went to the Peach Festival here in Lafayette this weekend. I was surprised that it was as big as it was. They'd pretty much shut down Public Road from South Boulder to Baseline and filled it with food, artists, musicians and the like. I now feel ashamed I haven't been to any festivals in Lafayette, especially since we were invited to the festival by friends who just moved to Lafayette last week. This was pretty good; although I am unaware of any peaches grown in Lafayette. I see a lot more apples and apricots.

We took the last of our apricots to a house warming as well. I filled the apricot halves with melted chocolate and then froze them. Then I pulled them out and topped them with spray whip cream. Unfortunately, before we went to the house warming, I set them out and then Jen and I had a series of phone calls. By the time we were done, they had thawed. The apricots turned to mush and the spray whipped cream deflated into runniness, leaving us with something bearing an uncanny resemblance to bird droppings:

They tasted good, but well ... look at 'em. They also were impossible to pick up without them dribbling down your arm. Needless to say, we came home with quite a few leftovers. We did some more and didn't freeze them and didn't put the whipped cream on until right before serving. Much better! Chocolate and apricots are an awesome combo.

Yesterday Brynn and I went out for a walk around the lake. It was a great temperature, but I wasn't paying much attention to the weather until I looked up and saw this:

Click on the image to get a better look. I started to book it home, but Brynn was super fussy. I had a bottle, but I knew if we stopped to nurse we were going to get drenched. Improvising, I propped the bottle up on a toy and a blanket and let Brynn's sucking keep it in place while we skedaddled. We made it home and within a minute or two the downpour commenced.

And here's one more cute Brynn picture, in case you missed it on Facebook or Twitter. I think she's saying, "This is relevant to mah interests".

RMAUG Preso Recap

My presentation went pretty well at RMAUG, but it nearly was a disaster. I got to the venue and started setting up my laptop, but every time I connected my laptop to the projector, my computer would freak out and eventually both my display and the projector would display nothing. After some frantic attempts to fix this, I eventually borrowed David's laptop and tried to install my presentation on that. Fortunately my files were all up on the Internet. Unfortunately, I couldn't get David's computer to connect to the Internet. After a router reset, finally I could and I feverishly put my presentation together while people filtered in. We started a few minutes late, but the presentation went well despite its beginnings. I think I managed to give a fairly decent presentation on Starling and Nape.

Here are the slides for the presentation and here are the samples used in the preso, including start and complete files. The recording of the presentation should be available on the RMAUG site in a while, if you want to hear me chatter away.

UPDATE: recording is available here: http://rmaug.groups.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=post.display&postid=43560

Brynn Developments

Well, I've been quite remiss in posting. My time has been consumed by a frustrating project at work and preparing for my presentation at RMAUG. More on that later. What I have been meaning to do is to upload some great Brynn videos and photos that document some of her developments. Let's see what we have here:

Sucking on her feet/socks and even removing her own socks with her hands.

Laughing, even if Daddy has to make a lot of farting noises to make it happen

Holding her own bottle. Granted she doesn't do it very well or for very long, but long enough for Daddy to snap some pictures. When I go to feed her, often her hands come up to "help".

Trying to pronounce her B's, even when she's crying.

Brynn in Motion

Brynn is holding her head up really well now. She is even smiling when doing it! I've got the video to prove it!

I'm so proud of how well she can do it. If I'm this proud of this feat, I wonder how it'll be when she rides a bike, acts in a play, wins gold, writes a novel, becomes president or rules the world. She also is good at sucking in her lower lip. She is also very proud of her tongue, which she has learned to stick out at an angle now, as she demonstrates below.

She is very proud, and so is her papa!