Went to the doctor today... everything checked out.. again. Little Stephen is still hugging that 25th percentile in all categories. 15 months old and still no words. The doctor also yelled at me for not brushing Stephen's teeth.

Age: 15months
Height: 30"
Weight: 22lbs, 9oz
Head Circum: 18.25"

Related charts, graphs, etc.

Apparently any [and every] symptom can be attributed to teething, but no one really knows why. The diaper rash has just about cleared up. No fever, no frequent diarrhea, much less druel.

Stephen suddenly loves books. He comes stumbling over to me with a huge book in his hand several times a day. He sits in my lap, still and calm. After I read all five cardboard pages, he turns it back to the beginning. I've also been trying to get Stephen addicted to a movie before we go on vacation. It appears that he will not reach that critical age (of sitting still for a movie) before we leave for the beach house. Oh well.

He's getting slightly better at switching from "dada" to "mama" on command, and he has developed a certain word for the kitty cat. He says da-DAAAA with the second syllable being a high-pitch shriek (like a cat's meow). A few minutes ago, he walked over to the pet food cabinet, pulled out a can of cat food and said da-DAAAA.

I haven't touched my camera in weeks. I guess I'm in a lull before I go crazy with it on vacation.

Stephen has a bunch of teeth coming in (several have broken through), and I'm not sure what can be attributed to teething. He has:

Diarrhea
Runny nose
Fever
Diaper rash (first time ever)

He is also eating less, drinking less, and sleeping less. The last two days have been hideous. He has been completely pissed off both days, which usually causes him to do something rash and injure himself. The diaper rash didn't show up until he pooped five times yesterday and last night. I was up for two hours last night with him.

Edit: Well, he's super dehydrated and in rough shape. I left a bottle full of water in his crib when I laid him down for a nap. I can't effectively comfort him because I have some spreading rash all over my forearms and his diaper rash irritates him when I'm holding him.

Hello.

I have had a very fast introduction to Lightroom 3. Less than two weeks after purchasing/installing it, I got a job to edit ~250 photos from someone's wedding. That's why I have been well behind on this blog.

Stephen is moving a mile a minute. I find myself constantly saying things I should never have to say, such as "Stephen, do not lick the bottom of Mommy's sneaker!" He can do a lot of the standard baby tricks like clap, dance, wave, give five. He's been able to climb the stairs for almost seven months, but he is just now learning to climb back down. Still no words besides "dada" (and "mama" sometimes on command).

He is quite willful and throws bigger fits every day, but I have adapted by now. When I say he was "good" on a given day, I mean that he only threw maybe... 4 five-minute tantrums that day. Usually over something like me closing the baby gate or getting him off the stairs.

I have a picture of him eating spaghetti, cottage cheese, and toast that I plan to post today.

Sometime in the first half of April, I made the decision to stop eating beef and pork. More generally, I stopped eating mammals. I had been mulling over the idea for a few years ever since the first time I had heard of pesco-pollo vegetarianism from my highschool buddy Josh. Some of the rationale is that it's a healthier form of vegetarianism, but it still saves mammals, our closest relatives, from being raised purely for slaughter. So far I am enjoying it. It makes me feel like an adult, to be making my own decisions about the food that I eat. It makes me do a little bit of research about basic nutrition in order to find out ways to get the complete proteins I am missing. It only took one small step to start me thinking about the ingredients of everything that I eat, which was nearly unheard of before. That thought process was nonexistent for me.

Pescetarianism is sometimes an intentional stepping-stone to full vegetarianism or veganism, but I do not see myself taking those steps. We shall see. Soy bean and fish are a couple of easy ways to get complete proteins without eating mammals. Beyond that, it gets more complicated. So in response to that, I have been trying to acquire a taste for fish. I just ordered the tilapia and crab at Outback Steakhouse tonight, and it was very good. I got some frozen salmon burgers and breaded flounder today, too. Still waiting to try those out.

It is widely known that babies are extremely needy when they are first born. They have no desires of their own, only needs for survival. In other words, newborns do not want anything that they do not absolutely need. For Stephen, this is changing. He has been able to walk around and cause destruction for a little while now, and his curiosity has been piqued about every little thing.

More recently, however, his attitude has changed. He can finally hold a thought in his head for longer than ten seconds, so he is constantly thinking about what he'd rather be doing--that thing you just prevented him from doing 30 seconds ago. Overnight our house has been converted into tantrum city. With little to no provocation, the child just throws his head straight back into the floor (with a bit thud), starts kicking his legs and screaming until his whole head is red. Tonight he even screamed and threw a fit at the restaurant, which he has never ever done in public.

My wife and I just kind of looked at each other and said "Our time has finally come. We knew it couldn't last forever." We keep hoping it's a [short] phase and maybe he's unhappy about some teeth coming in, but it's probably a longer phase and due to the fact that our son is no longer an infant. Stephen was a really good newborn and infant because he was good at the things that a lot of babies have trouble with: eating and sleeping. But now we have moved on from those being the main issues. Now our child is old enough and willful enough to act completely bratty--and intentionally so.

The battle of wills has already begun. When I am trying to put him to bed, he goes through a couple of phases to try to get out of it. First, he just tries a brute force escape tactic while he's drinking his bottle. When that doesn't work, he turns to flattery. Oh, Dad. You are so funny that I can't help but laugh every time you look at me. (Try preventing a smile during that: not easy). Then, as he starts to wind down, he starts pulling my fingers off the bottle one at a time, as if he is going to be able to loosen my grip and get the bottle out of his mouth. Eventually I always win. Part of my job is to be stubborn, and I am overqualified in that area.

I installed safety latches to prevent Stephen from getting in the cabinets under the sink/counter. Those things are great. When the doors don't open, Stephen doesn't have anyone to blame. He doesn't get angry and throw himself on the ground. He just tries two times and then moves on.

We have lived here for nearly six years (moved-in date was August 18, 2004). Last night at 1am, we lost power for the first time since I've lived here--the very first time, and it was for no longer than five seconds. Not bad, not bad. Have no idea why though. It was precisely at 1am, so maybe it was a scheduled "reboot."

The computer that I "restored" for my father was acting up yesterday. Sucks. Kept freezing when he was in gmail with Google Chrome (figures). On top of that, it only boots up 20% of the time, haha. Hopefully we can solve the problem even though the computer is 500mi away.

I leave the TV on public television from 8am until Stephen goes down for a nap. I'm not much of a TV guy, so it has never bothered me for a second, but for the next two weeks, Wimbledon and the World Cup are on in the AM. Oh well. Stephen enjoys his educational programming a little more each day. Today one of the characters on Sid the Science Kid was imitating a dog and Stephen was laughing.

There is one thing we have no shortage of in this area, and that is PBS stations and sub-stations. We are close enough to the metropolitan area that we get MPT, Maryland Public Television. This is the station that I watch with Stephen in the morning. Then there is WETA, a powerhouse of public television and radio (not to be confused with our flagship NPR station, WAMU at American University). WETA has lots of spin-off channels such as "WETA Kids," which plays the PBS morning kids shows all day, every day. There is also "WETA create," which has a lot of home improvement or craft-type shows.

One day while cruising the massive block of HD WETA channels, I discovered that The Joy of Painting was sometimes on "WETA create." I popped it into my DVR and have been letting Bob Ross soothe me to sleep from time to time. When I was a kid, my favorite part of staying home from school was watching The Joy of Painting at 2pm on PBS. I mean, I liked Inspector Gadget and Heathcliff too, but Bob Ross has always drawn me in.

What I never understood as a child is that Bob Ross was able to make paintings so quickly because of the wet-on-wet technique. When he starts a taping of a show, the canvas is already completely covered with white paint that is still wet. When most people use oil paint, they a) start with a dry white canvas and b) paint one layer at a time and allow it to dry for weeks or months before they paint the next layer (the last layer applied is the immediate foreground). I of course never knew any of that when I was a child; I was just drawn to the paintings and the demeanor of the host.

I finally got some videos off our camera last night, and I'm a little behind. Later today I will post the video of Stephen's birthday party. I have a few others to upload also.

The tiny dictator is not so tiny as he once was.

Stephen primarily eats adult food now. He drinks about 40oz. of milk/juice per day and eats a little bit of every meal that I eat. He can feed himself with a spoon (if I load up the spoon with the right amount of food every time) and can nearly sip out of a real cup. I'm moving away from bottles since he is proficient with a sippy cup and a straw cup.

He still can't say anything but "dada" and "mama" but he can wave hello/goodbye and he is starting to try to clap. We are pretty well into one nap per day mode now, which is really nice for planning things. If we aren't doing anything all day, he can nap at 11am, but if we have things to do, he can nap at 2 or 3pm instead.

He can do something that's a lot closer to "playing" now. He gets this look in his eye and takes off running--either towards you or away from you. He understands that he can throw himself down on either the couch or a bed and not get hurt. He'll take two quick steps and fall on one of our oversized pillows if we put him on the couch.

He has a growing collection of loud toys. Some of them even have no volume settings. I'm pretty close to taping cotton balls over the speaker of of one toy in particular.

Stephen is now officially off of formula. He drinks around 25oz of milk per day (half soy / half whole) and 15oz of juice. He eats three solid meals a day and all of his snacks are solid food (cheerios, nutri-grain bars, cookies, other finger foods). He can eat pretty much anything that we are eating and enjoys taking bites. Yesterday I gave him two small pieces of my grilled cheese sandwich. Took him a bit, but he ate it. Wheat bread, crust and all.

His ability to cause trouble has increased quite a bit. When he began to walk around, he was still okay, but now his curiosity has increased and he gets into everything (and I mean everything). We are also experiencing our first tantrums these days. The sort of thing where.... he wants something, we don't let him have/do it, and he gets very angry. He tries to escape from his high chair and needs to be restrained with the shoulder straps on the the chair.

He is also shifting towards one nap per day. I shoot for a nap from 10am-1pm and don't waste any time trying to get him to nap in the afternoon. That still puts him at 14hrs of sleep every day. I can not remember the last time either of us had to get up at night. It's been months since we heard even the slightest peep from Stephen before 6am.

Tennis is back but I don't really care this time around. I think I'm sick of all the weather delays and timezone difference issues. I got two tickets to the final match of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic coming this August. I had a good time at last year's matches even though the heat was quite bad in early August. I'm excited to be going again. Going to the Men's finals ensures that you'll see at least one "famous" player in person.

In many ways, babies and dogs go hand-in-hand. For instance, I gave Stephen about ¼ of a leftover biscuit in his highchair this morning. He just mashed it up and made a huge mess. I'm not sure how much he even ate. With one swipe of a clean cloth, a hundred little crumbs fell to the floor. The floor was clean within ten seconds.

I think I have the new/old laptop set up pretty well by now. Didn't take long, once I received my replacement CD drive.

WordPress is now seven years old, and it is growing faster than ever. This tiny blog post is a good recap of the accomplishments of WordPress, most of them happening in recent times. This free software now manages over 20 million of the world's websites.

WordPress (the software used to manage this blog) has changed the way I think about computers and software. The more I learned about WordPress, the more I couldn't believe it was free. That prompted me to try a version of linux (a free alternative to Microsoft Windows), and has eventually landed me here, where I only use free or legally purchased software on all my computers. To be honest, once you learn your way around linux, it takes less effort to operate free software than it does to steal commercially-available software for Windows through means of warez.

I just took the dogs out literally minutes before it started raining out of nowhere. Gotta love it.

Since I began this post this morning (when I said I didn't care about Tennis), Robin Soderling has ended Roger Federer's streak of 23 consecutive appearances in the semifinals of major tournaments. One of the greatest streaks alive in sports, and I saw it end on live tv. To put the streak in perspective, it's like Tiger Woods finishing in the top 4 of every Major Golf Tournament for six straight years. It's equivalent to the same team making it to the "final four" of the NCAA basketball tournament for 23 years in a row. Robin Soderling is now the only player in history to have beaten both Nadal and Federer at the French Open.

It still amazes me how fast Stephen learns things. He got a lot of new toys on his birthday and he seems to have a pretty good understanding of most of them by now. He can also do things like: open the right cupboard, get out a can of green beans, and walk over and put it in the dog's bowl (we feed the dogs green beans as part of their dinner every night. We, of course, open the can before we feed it to the dogs, but he's got the right idea). He can also do really annoying things like unlock the dish washer while it is running or pull all the glass bowls out of the cupboards onto the kitchen floor.

We had a great time at Stephen's birthday party, and I think he handled it well. We managed to squeeze in a bath (after the blood-red icing got all over his face, in his hair, and on his feet) and a nap for him during the party. He opened most of his presents by himself, and thinks wrapping paper is the greatest thing invented by man. Also, the leftovers from the party and dinner with my family kept us going for 4 days after the party.

I ordered an exact copy of the laptop that I killed (used laptop on ebay) in the hopes of plugging in my old hard drive and being able to pick up where I left off. I got the computer via fedex on Tuesday, and no such luck. Old hard drive is destroyed. Old cd drive is destroyed. On a positive note, my old memory worked.

I still have a lot of pictures to post from the past week. I need to get moving on that.