Bed time

Part of Parker's bedtime routine is jammies and a bottle with Daddy.

Recently, Parker's learned to hold the bottle himself, occasionally with the assistance of his feet.

Yogurt

Parker loves yogurt, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to find plain, whole milk, organic yogurt anywhere.  The other day I spent 10 minutes in the yogurt aisle at Central Market trying to find the one tub they had.  They really truly only had one tub and it was hiding behind the honey yogurt (apparently no one eats anything but non-fat yogurt these days, of course, what's the point of eating non-fat if you're going to add corn syrup to it...but I digress).

So, seeing how easy it is to find organic whole milk, I thought I'd try my hand at making it myself.

I pulled out the Good Eats recipe and gave it a try.

It was a little on the messy side (probably more my issue than the recipe's), and it was much more difficult to keep the proper temperature than it looked on TV, but it turned out okay.

It's not quite as tangy as the store bought stuff, but I think that could be fixed if I let it sit longer.  It's also more watery, I don't know that there's much I can do about that, but not too bad for a first try.

I've since read that you can use the crock pot to keep it on the right temperature, I might try that method next time.  But all-in-all, a fairly successful first try, and about half the price of buying yogurt.

10 Months!

Parker is 10 months old!  We're getting closer & closer to the one-year mark!

Parker continues to be such a joy to be around.  He is almost always smiling & laughing, and we still have random strangers telling us how much they love his hair.

Parker is sleeping like a champ, still taking 2 (or sometimes three) naps in a day, and barely able to stay awake until bedtime.

Parker currently has only one tooth, but I'm convinced that we have one (or more) that are just about to erupt. 

He loves food, and is totally proficient at feeding himself (although I wouldn't be surprised if Darcy has gained a little weight in the past month as well).

Parker is still this close to crawling, but for the moment, he seems content to scoot wherever he wants.  It seems like a lot of work (not to mention very dirty) to drag his tummy across the carpet, but it seems to be working for him.  He's also learning to hold onto furniture & stand up.  He's pulled himself up to standing once or twice, but it's not a frequent occurrence yet.

Parker has become a huge talker in the past few weeks.  When he's awake, he's almost always babbling about something, his current favorite words are: Dadadada, Bwahwahwah, and Gagaga (he also has a fairly impressive ear-piercing shriek).  Keith is convinced that he learned Dada just in-time for Father's Day.

He still loves to put anything & everything into his mouth.

Like many parents, we've been trying to teach Parker a little sign language, so we can have some idea of what is going on in his little brain.  So far, he really only has two signs that he uses (neither of which are actual signs).  His first one is holding his arms out & rotating his hands, if we ever figure out what this one means, life will be much easier for everyone involved.  So far, all we know is that it means "I want something", but that something seems to vary with his mood (food, no food, more, all-done, who knows?).

This is his second sign, and we do know that it means: "I'm done, pick me up...now."

Happy Birthday Sarah!

After our Anniversary Breakfast at the Salish Lodge, we headed over to Sarah's 1st Birthday party.

Sarah is my cousin Cathee's daughter, which makes her something like Parker's Second-cousin-once-removed.  But we're just calling it "cousin", actually, we're just calling everyone "cousin".

Keith & I were still stuffed from breakfast, but we did find room for carrot cake.

Parker's actual cousin, Fiona was there too, so the cousins got a little time to play (& steal binkies).

Five years!

Keith & I celebrated our 5-year anniversary on Thursday.

I don't think that either of us came into marriage with a ton of expectations of what marriage would be like, but I do know that it has been way better than anything we could have imagined.

To celebrate, on Saturday, we went to the Salish Lodge for their Country Breakfast.

It is an AMAZING meal, with a beautiful location...and their coffee service includes chocolate shavings and whipped cream.  It doesn't get better than that!

This is where we got engaged!  Except that they've "remodeled", so the structure is gone now, but this is the general area, at least.

Here's to many more fun years together.

Poor Darcy

Several years ago, Darcy started losing his hair.  It was mostly along his back & at the base of his tail.  We tried a thyroid pill, which helped a little, but for the most part we chose to not worry about it (he is really just a dog, and it's just fur).

 

Several months ago, his fur started falling out in clumps (except that his hair is so curly, it wasn't falling out, just matting up). It had thinned so much that I was afraid to brush him for fear that it would all brush out and he'd be bald.

About a month ago, due to some digestive "issues" that were keeping Darcy (and thereby the entire family) up at all hours of the night, we changed Darcy's food to one of the expensive all-natural dog foods.

Like magic, Darcy almost instantly started sleeping through the night again.  A few weeks later, we noticed that Darcy's fur was actually growing back also.  Who knew, we'd been poisoning our dog all along?

No longer fearing a bald doggie, I finally brushed all the dead hair out of Darcy, which was great, except that the fur along his legs & head hadn't fallen out, so he looked like an exceptionally-ridiculous looking court jester.

So, today, I went after him with the clippers.  It says a lot for how awful he looked that I clipped off 50% of his fur and he now looks 100% better:

Although Darcy dealt with it surprisingly well (this is a dog who refuses to be brushed ever), by the end of it we both needed a bath.

Trains

We finally set-up the train table we got from Dianne.  Ever since, Keith's been building all sorts of railways & structures.

...and Parker's been destroying them just as fast.

It's true...I'm a genius.

Last summer, Keith built me a wonderful clothes line along the back of the our yard.  I'm super excited to start using it again as the sun is starting to show up on occasion.  The only part I don't like is all the bending over & running back & forth to get laundry & clothes pins out of the basket on the ground.  I've been mentally sketching several ideas for some sort of cart Keith could make me to hold my basket & pins.  Then, today, I came up with this brilliant idea:

It works great!  Parker's pretty much outgrown this stroller (mentally, if not actually physically), so it's a great use for it.

Unfortunately, about 10 minutes after taking this photo, our neighbor decided to start weeding his back yard with a backhoe*, so I had to take down the clean laundry & dry it in the dryer before it became un-clean again.  But, now I know that Parker's stroller has a capacity of 2-loads of not-dry laundry.

*Okay, I'm exaggerating, it wasn't a backhoe, it was one of these thingies:

Happy Father's Day Keith!

I think Keith has been looking forward to his first Father's Day since we found out I was pregnant with Parker.  To celebrate, we went to the Washington Brewer's Festival in Kenmore Sunday afternoon.

We met up with Keith's folks & Keith & Gary tried out several different local brews.  Joanne & I checked out the Root beer garden.

We had a great time, so great that I never pulled out the camera, so all I have to immortalize the day are a few photos from the parking lot as we waited for the shuttle.

That's okay, we know we had a good time.  Parker had a blast with Daddy & he got to see Grandma, that makes for a pretty great day.