Halloween at the Dallas Arboretum

We had a wonderful day on Saturday at the Dallas Arboretum. The plan was to take pictures of Sam in his pumpkin costume in the pumpkin patch. I wish I could say that we were packed the night before and got up early so we could spend the whole day there. But, anyone that knows us knows that didn't happen! We left the house around 2:45 p.m. so we didn't get there until around 3:15 p.m. And, we had to feed Sam when we got there. The Arboretum closes at 5:00 p.m. so we felt a little rushed.



This is Daddy and Sam posing together when we first arrived at the Arboretum. I thought they were really cute and matchy with their hats - too bad Sam didn't have his shades too. I think Sam spends most of his time with Daddy in the Baby Bjorn carrier on the weekends. They both love it! (Thank you Aunt Sharon)

Seems like everyone else in Dallas had the same idea, so the pumpkin patch was crowded. We tried to find a spot where we could prop Sam up (he isn't sitting yet) and where we could get a shot without other people in it. It was a beautiful day with a high in the low 70s, but it seemed extremely hot in that pumpkin patch, especially with this big fleece pumpkin costume on him.



This is the best shot that we got of Sam in his pumpkin costume. Chris says the more you want a particular shot the less likely it is to come out. I'm not sure if that's just Murphy's law or what. It's still a cute picture, but we felt rushed and pressured and I'm sure Sam picked up on that.

After we got our pumpkin picture we changed Sam into a cooler outfit. Chris gave me grief because I packed too many outfits for our photo shoot, oh I mean fun family outing, but this was the last thing that I packed. I thought it was going to be cooler outside for some reason, so everything else was too hot for him to wear. We had Sam's stroller loaded down with camera gear and outfits. We had no intention of actually putting him in it!



This is a shot of Mommy and Sam playing together after we went to the petting zoo. They had bunnies, chicken, sheep, goats, and a pony. Sam didn't actually pet any of the animals. We just looked at them. We couldn't tell what he thought of them. He gets more excited when he sees Cleo.



As we were leaving the pumpkin patch, we found a spot with a lot more color which was more interesting. Sam was in a great mood, so we decided to take a few more shots. He was giving us lots of great smiles. We got lots of great pictures there. Everyone was coming up and telling us what a happy baby he was.



Chris saw this bench around this tree and decided that he wanted to take a few shots of Sam and Mommy playing together. Sam thought it would be fun to bite, I mean kiss, Mommy.



I had seen a really neat spot on our way to the pumpkin patch. It was a little nook with two giant pumpkins (giant = taller than Sam). I thought it would be neat to get a picture with Sam standing in between the two pumpkins. It looked like someone else had the same idea because they were in that spot. We decided to wait for them to finish. Their baby was throwing a screaming fit so we looked for something fun to do in the meantime.



This is a shot of Daddy and Sam playing. It's Daddy's mission in life to make Sam laugh. Sam loves it. Chris picked up Sam at day care one day last week. The next day one of the teachers told me she used to think Sam looked like me until she saw Chris, now forget about it.



As we are still waiting around for this "great spot," I realized that Sam probably hasn't ever really seen or noticed flowers, so I took him over to look at these mums. He thought they were very interesting. At first he was kinda just petting them. Then he started grabbing them. He was shaking all over; he was so excited. Then he started going crazy and petals started flying in all directions! If you look close in the picture below, you can see some of the petals flying.



Still waiting for this magical spot to free up ... I realize that I've been trying to either get Sam to sit up or stand up for all of the pictures. I thought we should take a picture of him laying down. That's the stage that he's at currently and he'll probably never want to take pictures like that again, so it only makes since, right? He ended up pulling out blades of grass - I don't think he'd ever really noticed grass before either.



We took 351 pictures total. I picked out 37 favorites for our iPhoto album, but only posted 11 here. I think we may have an obsession!

At this point, you may be wondering where is this photo with the two big pumpkins ... well, two things: 1) remember what Chris said about wanting a particular shot too much and 2) we got tired of waiting any way so we didn't really get to test that theory. It really made me mad because they weren't even using the scenery around them. They could have just as easily taken the shots that they were taking in their backyard. They had a black furry blanket laying on the walkway and had the baby laying on that. They had her in a Tootsie Roll outfit with said candy all around her. Then another shot of her in a cheerleader outfit with pom pons and a megaphone. I would guess she was about two months old. I don't think she stopped screaming the whole time either. Ok, that's off my chest, rant's over.

Sam was exhausted and slept all the way to the new Sushi restaurant near our house. We fed him when we got there. Then the waitresses offered to watch him while we ate. They had a blast and Sam loved the attention. I don't think they wanted him to leave. They said he was such a good baby, and we could bring him any time. Sam is starting to grab anything and everything in reach, so it was wonderful to be able to relax and sit back and enjoy the night. Oh yeah, the sushi was great, too!

We just had so much fun Saturday! It was the first weekend in about five or six weeks that we were all healthy and the weather was beautiful. I wish we could order up a few more of those. If you have a chance, check out the Dallas Arboretum's web page. They had a really neat tree house exhibit too. We would love to go back and spend more time checking out the tree houses.

-- Emily

Halloween Carnival

We went to the carnival at Sam's day care Friday night. Brad and Jennifer's son Jackson goes to the same day care so we met them at a new BBQ place and went to the carnival together. Sam went as a pumpkin and Jackson went as the Incredible Hulk. The carnival didn't start until 7pm so we were taking a risk with two little ones. We basically made a quick loop and said hello to all of their teachers before they both were ready to go to bed. If you look really close, you can see Sam's two bottom front teeth.





I took Sam to his follow-up doctor appointment on Friday afternoon. Dr. Smith gave him a clean bill of health. She was so happy to see that he was feeling better. Sam has been doing great this week. He's gone from waking up 4 to 5 times a night to only 2 times. Hopefully he'll go back to once a night, or maybe even sleep all night! His cold is gone, his diaper rash is gone, and his stomach is back to normal. We are all healthy now and very happy to be feeling better! Here is a picture of Sam "walking."



-- Emily

Birthdays

We just wanted to say "Happy Birthday" to a few family members ...

October 18th - Sam turned 5 months old!
October 19th - Happy Birthday, Grandpa Stanley!
October 20th - Welcome to the world, cousin Charlie Maxwell Parr!

We've had a really rough week. Sam cut two teeth last weekend. Daddy had a stomach bug. Then, Sam's cold got worse, his ear infection came back, and it looks like he picked up a little stomach bug too. So, needless to say, there's been a lot of sleepless nights in the Conner house lately. It's hard to say if Sam had a stomach virus on top of the cold, or if his little body didn't like all the medicine we were putting in it. There is the antibiotic Augmentin twice a day for the ear infection, Pulmicort which has to be inhaled through a nebulizer twice a day, Tylenol for the pain and fever, and Benadryl to try to dry up his runny nose. You might ask, why all the medicine for just a cold and an ear infection ... well, Sam's had a cold of one sort or another going on six weeks now. We're trying to knock it out. Of course, the antibiotics ended up giving him really bad diaper rash. We now know that Desitin has the highest concentration of zinc oxide as compared to all the rest. His little bum is still red, but at least it's not hurting him any more.



Sam woke up feeling better today. He was back to his smiling, laughing, squealing self. He spent a lot of the day sleeping though. He has a lot of that to catch up on. It was a beautiful day, so we decided to take a walk. Poor Cleo doesn't get many of those any more. It was a little chilly, so we put a hat and blanket on Sam. He enjoyed getting out, but he fell asleep about halfway home.

I finally got a chance to import the rest of the movie footage that we took last weekend. Hopefully we can take some more this week now that I have the hang of importing it and posting it. By the way, once you click on the first video (Bath1), you can just click "Next" at the top right of that page to go to the next video ... or you can launch each video from the links below.

Bath1
Bath2
HappyBaby
PlayMat
Daddy
Mommy

--Emily

More Balloons

We've had a few crappy days and nights with Sam being sick lately. This morning, we were up and Cleo noticed a hot air balloon in the distance. As I've mentioned before, these are a common sight in early Fall. Regardless, it cheered us up a bit. The first shot was taken from the doorstep.


This shot is from behind the house where the light was a bit better.


Of course Cleo doesn't care for the balloon. You'd think she'd get over this by now, but I always get a laugh out of her doing her angry dance around the pool, so I can't complain.

-- Chris

First Teeth and First "Solid" Food

Sam cut his two front bottom teeth this week: the left one on Thursday and the right one on Saturday. We had a few restless nights as they were coming in. Hopefully he'll feel better now. It will be a while before they'll be sticking up far enough to get a picture of them. Sam isn't very keen on us trying to look at them either. He loves to bite things now: his toys, his burp cloths, his blankets, Mommy, Daddy, Cleo ... anything is fair game.

He'll be five months old this week and he's still eating every three hours, so we thought we'd give rice cereal a try. They call it solid food, but I wouldn't go that far. He didn't really know what to do with it. We'd put a spoonful in his mouth and he'd just push it out with his tongue. He thought it was a pretty fun game though. He didn't think it was so much fun when we tried it again the next morning. I guess we'll wait a week and try again. I think we fed him for about 30 minutes and only got him to swallow about one tablespoon total. We took video of it, which you can see here: video1, video2, video3, video4, video5. Sam was a little camera shy because he hadn't really seen the video camera before.

Sam is starting to "talk" a lot more now. He's added a delightful squeal to his vocabulary. I think the goal is to see just how loud and high-pitched he can go. He always smiles after he squeals as if to say, "that was a good one!"









-- Emily

Commodore History

I picked up this book about the history of Commodore, the computer company that made the Commodore 64, VIC 20, etc. The VIC 20 was the first computer my father got me and my brother. We were you and primarily used it for computer games.

When we got a little older, Dad got us a Commodore 64, the 1541 floppy disk drive, and a MPS 801 dot-matrix printer. I know -- I'm going off into geek speak here, but I remember using that setup for a long time. I had a word processor and my brother and I did a lot of our school work on this system. We learned a little BASIC, and played quite a few games on the C64.

While my brother and I hacked on the C64 in the house, my dad took the VIC-20 to his ham shack and interfaced it to his radio. I remember running radio teletype (RTTY) on the VIC-20. Follow the link and you'll hear what I spent many hours doing in my dad's ham shack.

The book is an interesting read so far. Commodore was way ahead of Apple and other companies at the beginning of the personal computer industry. It would have been interesting to see what could have happened if they had better funding and better management.

-- Chris

Aunt Melly Visit

Aunt Melly came to visit last weekend while she was on Fall break from Mississippi State University. It was wonderful to see her. Sam had a great time -- Aunt Melly played with him all day. She gave him his bottles and changed his diaper all day too, so it was like a vacation for Chris and me. Here is a picture of Melanie and Sam in his MSU onsie.



We've all been sick over the past month! I got a cold then Sam caught it. Then I got better, but Sam caught a different cold when he started day care. I of course caught that cold from him. Then Chris and I got what we thought was food poisoning, but it must have been a stomach virus because Melanie caught it while she was out here -- poor Melly. Now Sam has an ear infection and Chris has a cold. We think Chris and Sam are almost well now though.

We got Sam an exersaucer. It's great! He loves to stand up, so he gets to do that while surrounded by toys. The seat spins around 360 degrees, so he can play with something for a few minutes and then move on to the next thing. The whole thing can bounce up and down and tilt too.





Sam is finally old enough to go in the swimming pool (now that it's getting colder, ha!). The doctor wanted us to wait until he was four months old. It was in the 90's while Melanie was here, so we heated the hot tub up to 95 and took Sam for a dip. The swimming pool was only about 80 degrees which would be too cold for him. Our heater really can't heat the pool efficiently. It can only raise the temperature 1 or 2 degrees in an hour. Sam had fun floating around. He didn't really splash around or anything. He just took it all in quietly. We turned on the air blower in the hot tub and he liked the bubbles. I bought his swim suit before he was born. I actually bought two of them -- not really sure what I was thinking there.




Speaking of Sam being four months old (he's actually almost 5 months old now) ... we finally went for his four month checkup last week. He hadn't been able to go yet either because he was sick or we were sick. The doctor said everthing is great (except of course for the ear infection). He's ahead of the curve developmentally. He's up to 14 lbs (20%) and 25 inches tall (40%). He got four shots. He did very well. He cried when he got them, but not for long. He didn't get a fever or get cranky afterwards either. It's very odd that he had an ear infection though. I mean, it's kinda expected since he's had a cold for so long, but he was laughing and playing with Chris and he didn't have a fever. The doctor was very surprised. He's on antibiotics now, and we'll go back for a checkup on Tuesday. The only clue for the ear infection would be his poor sleeping habits lately, but we thought that was because he's teething.



Here's a picture of our big boy holding his own bottle. It was the first time that he's really tried to hold it himself. He's trying it more often now though. We went out to dinner with Brad and Jennifer on Friday. Sam woke up from a nap and was ready to eat. Chris was trying to put his bib on him and apparently wasn't moving fast enough for Sam. So, Sam grabbed the bottle off the table and tried to put it in his mouth. He actually almost made it. It was soooo funny. I don't think I'll ever forget that.


Here's a picture of me holding Sam. I'd undressed him to get him ready for his bath. I love his little bum!


Here's another picture of Sam with Aunt Melly. He was laughing at her splashing her feet in the pool.

-- Emily

Air Space Violations

Just after I posted about the balloons yesterday we received a few visitors. Cleo was being the lazy dog she is and was in Melanie's lap when she noticed a hot air balloon in her "air space". She scared us all as her hair stood on end and she took off for the back yard growling.



We went outside and saw what all the fuss was about. While Cleo did laps around the pool expressing her displeasure, we got to see three hot air balloons go overhead.




I think this balloon is named "Red Again". I'm guessing that they stayed after the festival was over.

I got a shot of the burner going off in this picture.


Cleo ran laps and growled the whole time the balloons were overhead.

-- Chris