Posts from — December 2008

Archer,

First off, sorry about not posting for the 13^th month. Nothing superstitious about it or anything, just didn’t happen. And your 13^th was all about anticipation anyway: for Mexico, for surgery, for crawling… So we’re going to skip right to month 14.

And what a month it’s been. Mexico has to come first, just ’cause it was such a big deal. You proved yourself, at your ripe young age, to be a stellar traveler. Three flights and a long car ride to our destination (totaling around 16 hours) and you hardly cried at all — and then only towards the end when another tyke on the last flight started in. Otherwise you were smiling and playful and fun to travel with.

As for the Mexico itself, well, I think it’s safe to say you had a grand adventure there. You started and ended the journey by cutting teeth, and in between you swam in the ocean, spent copious hours nearly naked, touched a turtle, ate some sand, spent a ton of quality time with your adoring grandparents, charmed the socks (figuratively — it was too damn hot for socks) off everyone you met, and didn’t drive your folks too crazy when you wouldn’t go down for your naps. Good, good times, and we’ll have to do it again in the near future. Though next time you’ll get to taste more of the local cuisine, I promise.

You also acquired one of my favorite new vocal tricks while we were there, a little “va, va, va” (video to come soon) action where you pull your bottom lip into your mouth and make possibly the cutest face/noise combo ever. You’ve really stepped it up in the communication this month, signing “drink,” and “more,” along with “milk” — though you pretty much just grab for boobies instead of signing that one — and your own sign for “food,” which is just to pop your mouth open and shut until we get the idea. And the babbling, the wonderful neverending babbling… Oh, yeah, and I also taught you to signal for “touchdown,” which you do now whenever you see football on the TV!

Then when we got back, well, there wasn’t a lot of time to decompress before we had to go to the hospital for your surgery. Once again, you got through it perfectly — this time it was your mom and I who had the hard time. Watching a nurse walk away with you in her arms was pretty rough — though we knew it was highly unlikely, I think your mom and I both flashed just for a second on the thought that we might not see you again. And after having just finally started to get over the idea that you weren’t long for this world, which took me nearly your whole first year, it wasn’t fun having that pop back to the surface. And then to not know what was going on for about three hours… yikes. Your mom wisely distracted herself by addressing all our holiday cards while we waited for you to be done. And of course, you came out of surgery fully alive and intact, and maybe, just maybe, with eyes that are fixed! I really wish that I could pop into your head and see what you see — both before and after — so that I could KNOW if it helped. But I guess there’s a lesson there, too, in that we never really know what anybody else sees, huh? Sorry, Philosophy 101 popping up there.

Anyway, after a day of discomfort and scrambling to keep you from poking your eyes out, you were pretty much back to your normal fantastic self. Until we fed you some poison (okay, maybe not poison, but old and chemically preserved) prunes, at which point you got to experience the first — and second and third and fourth and fifth — puking of your life. Horrible purple and orange bunches of bile, most of which ended up on your mother. But once it was out, you were once again okay.

It’s been a long month, so I’m sure I’m missing some stuff — some of it intentionally, like Christmas and snow and such, ’cause those actually happened in the 15^th month, even though this will get posted on the last day of 2008 — but we’ll cram it all in here eventually.

Your mom and I are looking forward to spending this new year with you, budge. ‘Til next time…

Love,

your pops