HAPPY BIRTHDAY LU!

may 28
lucas is one year old today, and i am getting ready for his party.. :) i just cant believe where the time has gone! he's walking quite a bit but hasnt decided to walk all the time yet. and he's becoming quite a little communicator... no actual words yet. he sounds out alot, attempting different consonants and word-sounding babbles & coos... for example, "BA!" is ball, "ba-ba" is papa, "Buh" is bath, "ba-buh ba ba-ba" is just 'i like to practice my ba words'.

but the other day he communicated with symbolic gestures - and he did it two days in a row! normally, his dinner is at 6, bath at 630, booby and bed by seven. (we are continuing with the bedtime boob for a while longer.. i dont wanna hear about it if you think i shouldnt do it longer than a year - i have my reasons)

so when he came out of his bath, we were sitting down to an early dinner, so we put him at the table with us playing with some toys, but by the end of our meal, he was showing signs of tiredness and ready for bed. instead of crying, or getting cross... he simply held out his pacifier and his sippy cup of milk together at arms length as if he was trying to hand them to me - and started tapping them together!!. this was his non-verbal communication that it was time for his booby! i am so proud of my little boy.. what a good communicator he is.. i have heard of baby sign language before, but never heard of babies doing this on their own without prompting from the parents. he must be brilliant (grin).

last night at about 10 pm, when i was just stretching out in bed i realized 8pm marked the one-year anniversary of my labor onset.. here it is 9am, and i was STILL in labor at this time last year - he wasnt born til 12:50pm - it seems like such a long time to be in labor!

well, i gotta go get started making the potato salad and the other munchy stuff. the party is at 4:30pm, but i dont wanna do any cookin' (read: laboring) in the hot of the afternoon ... HAPPY BIRTHDAY LU!

finland & france

finland won the eurovision song contest!! ph was super excited about this, despite being a eurovision skeptic. we didnt care for the song itself so much... but the costumes & concept were so over the top you had to laugh, and laugh we did.. personally i wanted lithuania or germany to win, but what can you do? france had an extraordinarily boring song, and held last place.

speaking of france, we just got some tickets to go visit the family there in the second half of june, we are looking forward to that. we also have a weekend trip planned to visit our friends olive oil farm in the western pelopponese (near kalamata) and lucas will take his first dip in the sea at a place called cow's belly.

but thats all in the future, this sunday we're having a first birthday party for lucas. lots of stuff to do before then.

on commence!

this morning lucas crawled over to one of our living room chairs to pull himself up... and because yesterday he deliberately led me walking with only one hand, i asked him if he wanted to try to walk over to me from the chair about 4 feet away. he turned left and right and left and right again, holding on to the cushion part of the chair.. like he was figuring out his best launch position.. and very slowly, one step at a time, he walked to me!!! he didnt even fall into my arms, it was so deliberate. so i put him back on the chair to see if he wanted to try again, and we played this game of him walking back and forth to the chair about 10 times before he felt like going to find his ball. i am just so proud and i think i almost cried..

random thoughts

lucas is almost one year old.. i think we;ll have a party.

i cut ph's hair again, and now have to fix it, again.. it always takes me two or three days to get it right.

what sound does a giraffe make anyway? when i show the farm animals popup book to lu, i always make the animal sounds.. but when i get to the giraffe, i say "...and this is a giraffe..." hehe..

when i chop vegetables i think of agnes de saint ceran.

kilian said my balcony feels like youre on some huge crazy ship, and i think about that alot.

lucas favorite new thing to do is to drop a plastic ball into the basket of his new push toy, and hear it go clickety clak clak clunk, until the ball magically reappears in the bottom tray.