OK, truth be told we took this right before the Falcons game a couple of weeks ago, but the sentiment is the same today

The first update went fine. Everything was back up and running, including the previously broken apache, but having looked over what it took to get to a current version from where I had been, I figured I may as well take the time to get current now because the issue was only going to get worse as time passed. I proceeded to the next update.

The second upgrade also went fine, leaving me only 2 updates away from current, so on I went to the next one, which did not go smoothly. I ended up at the command line on reboot with a broken xwindows and no networking stack running, for reasons I never determined. Xwindows failing on update has happened periodically with linux distros and while I understand the whys of this, it’s still one of the most frustrating aspects of working with the OS for me. Anyway, after screwing around for an hour trying to repair things with no success I gave up and decided to do the last update to the current release, 11.10, using a CD rather than from the network. This turns out to have been my fatal mistake.

Everything appeared to go smoothly – I booted to CD, it correctly recognized the version of ubuntu currently installed on the machine and asked me if I wanted to update it, which I did, so off we went. During the install process there was a single error message which I had not seen before which was worrying, to the effect of ‘some packages cannot be upgraded and will need to be reinstalled.’ It did not enumerate them nor offer me any options, it just reported the problem. Everything else finished and I rebooted…to discover that the update had gone disastrously awry. A random sampling of the oddness:

• Apache was no longer installed, and there was no longer a /var/www directory where I had gigs of binary data (most of it pictures).
• Mysql was no longer installed and none of my table data was present any longer (!!!!)
• A huge swath of my previous software stack was gone, including the data that accompanied it.
• The usr directories of my wife and I were still present, but her account was not.
• the stuff I had installed into opt was still there, along with the data.

As you might imagine, I was furious. I still am. On the one hand, no doubt this is somehow my fault. I was rushing through this. I do not keep good backups beyond the wordpress tables that have my blog. I’m hardly the most clever linux user and my job has removed me from daily use and the good practices that helps enforce. On the other hand, I’ve been running linux at home since ~’97. I’ve had head crashes, disastrous red hat upgrades which pushed me to Ubuntu, a cpu cooler retaining clip breakage which caused one of my machines to bake itself to death, including its drive, yet despite all of that, never a loss of a whit of data. I’ve always managed to recover everything. But not this time. I won’t descend into details, but I’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out how to recover data from that drive, and as far as I can tell, short of paying through the nose those mysql tables are gone, and they’re really the critical missing piece. Everything else I can either recover from the drive, or I have partial or complete backups of, but the sql tables with all the structure to 12 years worth of images in my image gallery? They’re gone.

So…to hell with Ubuntu. I get this is my fault, but at the same time, I won’t run that distro again, and I might be done with linux at home. I should have had backups, but it never should have destroyed my data – that upgrade script to 11.10 was somehow disastrously broken.

Where does that leave things? I moved my hosting over to site5 for the time being, and my media server stuff over to a windows machine. I think I’m going to pick up a mac mini and move to that for some of this stuff, but maybe keep the web on a hosting provider and not in my house. I’m evaluating image gallery approaches now. I’m not going back to menalto’s gallery – they’re not keeping up with the times. I’m not sure what it will be, though Piwigo is looking promising so far. I want video support, mobile support, social networking sharing support, and effective, well-maintained wordpress integration. Suggestions welcome. As far as the old linux drive, I may still pay someone to try and get those sql tables off of there – they have the first year of my son’s life in pictures, with all the family comments on them. I have all the pictures, but that structure and the comments are the absolute worst loss out of this, and I want them back if I can get them without breaking the bank.

If I could do it over again I would have asked them to remove it last year, because when they removed it they discovered it had infiltrated the muscles under her arm and were not able to entirely excise it. Still, they took ~3 pounds and the overwhelming majority out. The hope now is that it won’t recur. The infiltration of the muscle works against this unfortunately, but the odds aren’t terrible (~40% is what google tells me) and even if it does, hopefully it will grow at a slower pace.

By and large her recovery from the surgery has been messy and unpleasant for her but relatively smooth. She has staples along an incision that runs from her armpit to her navel, and she had two drains installed which protected her from too much fluid collecting in the void left by the excised tumor. I had to apply hot compresses twice a day to the region and keep her dressed in a tshirt to help corral the bleeding. Her first day she barely moved and was in obvious discomfort (and on painkillers to help with it) but by the second day she was starting to perk up and move about, and seemed even better on the third day. Unfortunately she had a relapse possibly caused by us letting her go for too long of a walk that began on the 4th day and had her bleeding fairly heavily at times and again becoming immobile with discomfort. This lasted a couple of days. She had her drains removed last night and seems to be doing well – she tried to roll around in the leaves this morning when I took her out, throughout it all her appetite has been strong, and she’s starting to show signs of her normal playfulness. I’m fairly optimistic at this point. She’s still leaking from the areas where the drains were, but the flow is significantly less.

So…could have been better, but could have been much much worse, so all things considered I’m thankful that it’s looking good, and she handled it well throughout. I’ll post a few pics to the gallery with the warning that a couple of them might be disturbing.

We happen to have coffee concentrate around anyway so this is pretty convenient for me. If you’re not familiar with it, concentrate is made using a cold filtering process. We have a cold filter concentrate maker already, but if you don’t have one around and want to experiment, it’s pretty easy to make. Here’s a sample recipe. It also makes fantastic coffee, and is a convenient way to have a single cup when you don’t want to brew a pot.

A word of warning about this recipe – for whatever reason, it causes the soda to fizz up more dramatically than if you make Dr Pete’s without the concentrate, so open the bottle carefully or you’ll end up with soda everywhere. Also make sure to leave a little room in the bottle when you make the seltzer – fill it just a bit below the regular fill line, or pour a little out after you mix it so there is room for the concentrate in the bottle.

Ain’t life wonderfully absurd? I’ll pile on by observing that this isn’t actually the first time someone’s tried to market a fragrance emitter for computers (!!!) Perhaps the fear of prankster nephews stank bombing their relatives has kept wary consumers away…that’s just speculation by me though.

The root problem was that we had significant wet snowfall before most of the trees had lost their leaves. This caused unbelievable tree damage. It was unlike what typically happens in nor’easters and hurricanes, where you get many trees coming down. Instead, seemingly every single tree lost one or more limbs, but few trees came completely down. It destroyed the electrical grid and blocked roads everywhere. There are two major routes from my house to my employer (Route 9 and Bay Road) and both were down to a single lane in multiple locations, with Bay Road completely blocked in one section that caused the town to route traffic through some poor person’s front yard. On both routes, the power lines were laying on the road in multiple locations, there were a number of places where huge limbs were suspended in the air on power lines, and a roughly equal number of places where telephone poles snapped under the weight of the tree limbs laying on their lines. On my own property we have around a dozen apple trees, and every single one of them was ‘capped’ (losing its topmost section) along with most of them losing at least a portion of their other major limbs. At least 3 of them are going to die from this, and several others are on the bubble as far as I can tell. Our maples and oaks also got whacked, including my favorite maple, which was an absolutely beautiful tree that is stunning in the fall. Now it looks like pacman took a bite out of it – it lost 2 of 4 of its major limbs. We also almost lost our barn. A nut tree in the back dropped a limb at least 12″ thick onto the roof, and the barn was only saved because the force of the fall was largely taken by an adjacent tree’s major limb. That tree’s probably a goner now.

The majority of the region didn’t have power for days. Amherst College was closed due to power loss, something we think has never happened before. Our students had to bunk up with friends or sleep in the gym because several dorms had no power for a couple of days. Our daycare provider, along with a couple of other college buildings, had no power all week. My house had no power for a week, as did >90% of the town I live in. This was tough. We’re on well water and no power means no water.  The only thing that left us able to inhabit our house was the propane stove in the basement, where we lived, and the propane cooking stove we used to melt snow for water. I have a solar charger and a number of battery packs that we used to keep our phones and the ipad functioning. Susan and I alternated days off from work, with one of us working and one staying home with Brady. We lost hundreds of dollars in food (over a 100 in condiments alone!) because we couldn’t keep things refrigerated. Thankfully we had not yet finished filling our new chest freezer. Much of Brady’s home cooked baby food was lost. I bathed out of a basin using boiled snow water and felt like I had reverted to a lifestyle a century old. We fell asleep by 8:30 or 9. It was hard work and took its toll on us, with Susan and I bickering and occasionally sniping at each other from the stress by the end of the week.

At the same time, I’m a big fan of adventure and new experiences. This one was harder than most, but I suspect as time passes the negative aspects will fade and we’ll talk with pride of how we ‘roughed it’ for a week. Brady came through it like a champ despite having a cold. I think he loved the sleepover with Mom and Dad in the basement – most morning’s he’d wake before us and be happy as a clam to discover us right there next to him.

I wouldn’t say we’re recovered yet – our fridge looks barren despite spending $300 to restock it this weekend. Our yard looks like the set of a disaster film, with tree work in various stages of completion based on how dire things look, and based on the pace, months to go now that it’s dark when I get home from work. The worst limb is off the barn but there’s a tangle adjacent to it that threatens a dramatic collapse if we don’t deal with it (though we think/hope we’ve got it in a state where the barn is not threatened).

Still, by and large life has returned to its regular rhythms, and all things considered we came through this pretty cleanly, as did our friends in the region. A memory for life, in the final analysis, but not a life changer, is what this will amount to in the end, and I’m good with that

Since I last commented, the Giants have rattled off four wins and 1 loss. The loss was an awful game against Seattle, and one of the wins was an almost loss against Miami, but in the same timeframe they beat the Pats and the Bills, both of which are having decent seasons, and both of which I assumed the Giants would lose to.

Overall I’ll upgrade my perception of this year’s squad a bit. They’ve demonstrated that they’re capable, they’ve managed to succeed despite some critical injuries, and several young players are showing promise, particularly Victor Cruz and Jason Pierre Paul. They’ve also shown luck (that win against Buffalo was more down to luck than execution) and grit, with that scoring drive against the Pats at the end of the game.

So, that’s the good news, along with the fact that they’re still first in their division, with both the Skins and Eagles seemingly in collapse and Dallas looking like a mediocre team. On the downside, my read is they don’t match up well against the other NFC leaders – Green Bay and New Orleans both seem likely to crush the Giants, and we’ll see about San Francisco this weekend. Things look much better when compared to AFC teams, but none of that matters come playoff time. Here’s hoping Aaron Rodgers decides to retire

My updated picks, halfway through the season: Green Bay looks unstoppable, and barring injuries or an ‘any given sunday’ moment, they should take the NFC. The AFC is much more interesting, with the AFC North looking like the crucible that should forge a tough, battle tested AFC champ, with my money on Pittsburgh, but the Pats, Jets and Texans all with the potential to take it.

Three other remarks:

1) Do you think the league has finally figured out what the fans have known for at least 5 years? No one should start Rex Grossman.

2) What is going on with Phillip Rivers?

3) This season I’m discovering a grudging respect for Tom Coughlin. I’ve been hot and cold on him over the years, but he deserves credit for fielding a competitive squad year after year, and this year especially he’s managing to overcome a lot of injury problems. I reserve the right to blow cold on him again if the Giants have yet another mid-season collapse under his leadership.

I once proposed a line of perverse vegan aerosol meat substitutes like “I can’t believe it’s not organ meat” and “I can’t believe it’s not marrow bones” that would come as a soy spray in a mousse can whose nozzle mated with a dishwasher/microwave-safe mold (with plastic “bones” as appropriate) that you could nuke for a minute before ejecting the piping hot reformed slurry on a plate and popping the mold right into the dishwasher.

Let me go on record as someone who would buy such a product for the gag gift/social commentary value alone. My dog might even eat the output. Someone get a kickstarter going!

I’ve been working to teach Brady how to play catch, and the video shows the first time he sat still and played. The video captures the tail end of him playing with me.

There were two immediate problems. The first was that we often park the car at his daycare provider and walk since it’s about 1/2 mile or so to work and is a good opportunity for some exercise most days. The second is that I also had Soolin. This meant I had to walk a half mile with the boy while wrangling to dog and carrying my briefcase and  Brady’s diaper bag. Brady’s been getting heavier and it’s not easy carrying him that far anymore – when Susan and I do it we trade off now as we each tire, or I put him on my shoulders, which I couldn’t do with the dog and the bags. Still, it wasn’t impossible, plus the good news was, he hadn’t been throwing up since Susan picked him up.

Things went more or less ok for half the walk. Soolin did her occasional ‘Squirrel!! Pull, pounce!’ action (the campus is overrun with squirrels) but I’m used to it. What I wasn’t used to was managing his weight for this long, and I soon began to tire. Plus both bags were constantly slipping off my shoulders. I felt like I was doing a slow motion juggle. The problems really started though when Soolin decided she had to poop. We’re responsible dog owners and always pick up after her, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with Brady while I cleaned up. I finally settled on plopping him down on the sidewalk while taking care of Soolin’s business. Several things, none good, suddenly happened at once. Brady set off towards Soolins poop as soon as I put him down. Soolin saw a cat or squirrel and decided to bolt. I saw happening in slow motion, paralyzed. I settled on grabbing Brady, and watched in horror as Soolin’s lead dragged through her poop, completely fouling it.

aigh! Picture me now very angry, trying hard not to show it to Brady, while attempting to get Soolin under verbal control. She’s usually a well behaved dog, but she was irrepressible – every time I got her in a down, as soon as I turned away, up she would pop, dragging her foul lead around. She took a fair bit of verbal abuse from me while I finished cleaning up her mess. I then took a dog poop bag and wore it as a glove, grabbed her lead with this, and tried to continue on to the car. Of course Brady spied the bag as glove and went all ‘ooh, what do you have there Dad, I really want that!!!’, wriggling and bouncing and exclaiming and complaining as I wriggled myself to keep it from his grasp, all while still trying to keep the two bags (briefcase and diaper) from sliding off my shoulder into the poop lead, and trying to keep Soolin from pulling towards whatever it was she had spotted.

Thus went the rest of my walk to the car. It *sucked*. The only good news is that Brady never managed to grab anything, and amazingly I managed to keep the pooplead from touching anything.

(except for Susan. Later that night when she came home, she came in holding the poop lead, and asked ‘why was this hanging outside?’ She wasn’t too pleased that I hadn’t warned her).

I cannot imagine a better picture of Brady and Susan than this one.

It’s too early to make predictions I have confidence in, and there’s the whole on any given sunday thing, but barring a string of injuries the Packers look even better than they did last season and an easy pick for NFC champs. I haven’t seen enough AFC games to have an informed opinion, but I’ll go with the Pats  and their explosive offense in the AFC.

Developmentally, he’s increasingly alert. He knows his name and will turn to you if you say it. More generally, if he hears things, he will try to turn to see them. He continues to play around with vocalizations, though nothing like words yet. His only ability to really communicate verbally is ‘sad groans’,’ happy giggles,’ and ‘I love you man’ cooing and eye contact.  In terms of understanding me, he usually recognizes if I say ‘UP!” which I’ve been doing whenever I pick him up, and that’s it so far beyond his name.

[addendum for the 9th month: he recognizes more now. He knows what his hands are, or at least will respond when I ask him to give me his hands, which we do a lot as we help him learn to walk by holding his hands while he prances around. He also generally knows who 'Mom' is, and sometimes gets really excited playing the 'where's mom!' game, which we often do after his breakfast. More generally, he seems to be picking up on intent a lot, recognizing what's about to happen and what it will mean for him. For example, when I get him out of his crib, I used to have to take his pacifier out of his mouth, and as I did that I would say, 'can I have that?' Now, as often as not he knows he's going to lose it, and spits it out as I reach for it.]

Physically, he can now sit up reliably and stably, though he still topples over a fair amount. He can’t yet get into a sitting position on his own. His hand dexterity increases almost daily. He’s still a klutz, but he can pick things up, pass them from hand to hand, rotate them, and most importantly draw them towards his mouth. Everything goes in his mouth. His legs are strong and he loves when I hold his hands so he can stand and bounce up and down on his legs. He often gets very excited when we do this. He also can ‘walk’ when I do this, though he prefers the bouncing. He can’t yet crawl. He pushes his butt in the air and every now and then he gets up on all fours, but he hasn’t worked out how to move himself forward.

[addendum for the 9th month. He can crawl now. He's still clumsy and slow and gets frustrated, but he literally went from 'butt in air, but at best backwards progress' to 'I totally know how to crawl, I just am not very good yet,' in the course of about 5 days in late September. We helped in this process, by plopping him in his play area and building towers of wooden blocks - he likes toppling them over, so we started building towers in different parts of the play area, which seem more than anything to have served as his motivation to learn to crawl.

He's also become totally squirmy, almost never willing to sit quietly cradled in our arms. Instead he's a wriggling bouncy mass of 'I'm mobile, let me explore!' energy.

Food wise, the last two months have seen him eat meat (fish and chicken so far - he loves the fish but at best only tolerates the chicken), a ton of new fruits and veggies, including citrus (kiwi, which he liked), many different kinds of squashes and beans, potatoes, carrots, some grains and cereals, and probably a bunch of other things I've forgotten already. He's also started drinking a lot of water, though somehow we failed to teach him to use his spillproof sippy cup so far, so drinking is either supervised or really messy.

He had his first significant illnesses since his difficult first couple of weeks. First he got a lesion about the size of a pencil eraser from a diaper rash, which had us putting antibiotic ointment on him for about 2 weeks. Then, he got a fever of 103 that lead to a bad cough, gallons of mucus, and no sleep for anyone. This was at first diagnosed as RSV, a common virus that most people get before the age of 2. It's usually not dangerous, but in any case it turns out that's not what he had - what it was we'll never know, but it took 2 weeks for him to recover, during which he was pretty miserable - exhausted from lack of sleep, temperamental as a result, and prone to occasional shrieking fits of unhappiness. We had not seen anything like this from him before. The good news is things seem to be returning to normal - yesterday he was in most all respects back to his even-keeled, eager to smile, curious little self, hanging out with Dad watching the Giants beat the hated Eagles.

He had a number of firsts across these two months, including going to his first baseball game (Seadogs in Portland Maine - I love going to games in that park), taking his first shower (with Dad, as we tried to help him get the mucus out of his system - he totally loves the shower),' swimming' with the family at a local lake, which truth be told he didn't like too much, we think he didn't like being strapped into the life preserver, and hiking with him Mom and Soolin in the woods, which he liked.

As usual Susan's been good about getting photos posted, though she's been busy too so we are a little behind, but here's a sample from this month. Click the image to head over to the gallery:

Brady checking out his first baseball game

I wanted to try the new free-to-play RTS Age of Empires Online. I had been following a ‘No more games that use Games for Windows Live’ policy ever since a set of really awful experiences with Bioshock 2 a year or so ago, but a free game from a studio whose games I’ve really enjoyed in the past convinced me to give GFWL another chance.

I downloaded and installed the game, but when I tried to login to GFWL, which I have to do in order to play, it wouldn’t let me. Tried on the GFWL website and was informed someone has been trying to login to my account with the wrong password so many times my password is invalid.

I reset password, a reasonably straightforward process, hurrah! I am pleasantly surprised.

Try again to login. I’m informed I must provide product key and am unable to login. wth? It’s a free game, and anyway, why should that block me from logging in? Confusion.

Examine email looking for product key. Find none

Examine spam folder looking for email with product key. Find none. Grossed out by contents of spam folder.

Examine Age of Empire Online FAQ and message boards looking for someone with the same problem. Find nothing.

Google this problem. Find nothing.

GFWL lets you specify a backup email address. Look there and in that account’s spam folder for an email with a product key. Find nothing. More hot spam folder grossout action.

Ponder. Wth? With these things you can always find someone with a similar problem via google, and eventually arrive at a solution. I can’t so…what does that mean? It’s unique to me? Seems inconceivable? What out of all the parameters in play would be unique to me? My password. I check. I’ve made a typo. Try to login using the correct password. Eureka! I’m in.

Why the FUCK did GFWL send me off on a 30 minute goose chase looking for a product key when its issue was I had an invalid password?

Because it’s Game For Windows Live, a product seemingly designed to put anyone who tries it off of gaming on windows.

Age of Empires Online is ok – it’s definitely worth a look if you’re into RTS. Pluses include fantastic art direction and a ton of content. Cons are incredibly bad unit pathing issues and a brain dead AI. Message me if you’re playing and want to connect. Meantime, I’m back on my ‘will not buy products which require the use of GFWL’ policy. Developers and publishers, please: spare your customers the agony of this entirely shitty product. There’s no money hat large enough to make this worth the bad mouthing your product will get. Look into steamworks or anything, anything at all*, besides GFWL. It’s shit.

*(Except the stuff Ubisoft is doing, and, err, EA’s Origin stuff…jesus. Software publishing is going to the dogs! Just fucking use Steamworks, they appear to be the only company that recognizes customer experience should be primary).

Image via Wikipedia

Their website does a terrible job if helping you understand why you might consider donating and what they’ll do with the money, but I still gave $20 to the Gary Gygax Memorial Fund this week. Gygax is one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, originally a set of miniatures supplements he wrote with his friends that grew into a global brand. He also founded one of the earliest gaming magazines (Dragon Magazine), launched what became and remains the US’s largest gaming convention (Gencon), produced a hit animated television series (Dungeons and Dragons), and more. Gygax’s games and company played a huge role in my middle childhood, and I still have a stack of his books and supplements tucked into my basement rec room’s game cabinet. The intent is to build a statue commemorating his life on parkland in downtown Lake Geneva, WI, where he lived and worked for most of his life. He deserves the recognition.

The memorial is going to be in downtown Lake Geneva, in this park.

Related articles

• Help Memorialize Gygax at Gen Con Starting Tomorrow (tor.com)
• Be forever grateful to D&D’s creators (psychologytoday.com)
• Sculptor for Gygax Memorial Named (wired.com)
• Gary Gygax memorial in the offing (boingboing.net)

• Rice cereal, often mixed with fruit (he likes most of these concoctions)
• Peaches (he thought they were just ok)
• Melon mango yoghurt soup (he hated it)
• A couple of different squashes (which aside from the summer squash he had already tried, he seems to like)
• Water – he got his first sippy cup. He hasn’t figured out it’s for water, mostly he thinks it’s a chew toy, but he does like to play with it and it’s spill proof. The actual act of drinking water he is fine with, but we have to do it for him.

He’s exhibited a number of new behaviors, including:

• The first signs of free will. He often refuses to allow you to put his pacifier into his mouth, preferring instead to take it from you and plop it in himself.
• Vocalizations with meaning. He doesn’t know any words, but he has sound patterns he uses to let you know he’s unhappy and wants change, which start with grunts and plaintive groans. He’ll make eye contact with you and make those noises, clearly saying ‘whatever I’m doing right now is not pleasing me. Make it change pops!’ If you ignore him he escalates to whimpering and then tears and wails. Recovering from wails can be hard, so generally we try and get involved when he starts complaining.
• He’s realized he has legs. He can bend at the waist, and pulls his legs up till he’s in an L shape. He also discovered he has feet, and the first week or so that he first realized this you could constantly find him bending himself in half staring at his feet, touching them, and even putting them in his mouth.
• Progress on the locomotion front. He can’t yet crawl, but he can move, most amusingly when he sticks his butt in the air and slides forward on his face, but he also scrunches around. He doesn’t have great control over direction yet – if you put a toy in front of him where he can see it when he’s on his playmat, he’ll often try desperately to get to it, moving around but not necessarily towards it. This can sometimes escalate frustration to the point where he starts wailing, but mostly he just grunts in frustration.
• Something to do with neurological development that has him simultaneously rotating his wrists and ankles on their axis while also flexing his leg and arm muscles. He looks like he’s trying to do the wave or conduct an orchestra while dancing. It’s very peculiar. Presumably it has to do with reflex and musculature development. I don’t recall any of my siblings doing it though. There’s a link to a quicktime video of this below:

brady_movement_video

This was also a month of many transitions:

• Susan’s Mom Linda stopped coming every week. She had been coming to care for him 2 days a week. He’s too young to notice of course, though his face brightens when he sees her. She was a fantastic help to us and allowed us to keep him out of daycare several extra months, and we’re grateful for it. At the same time, I’m happy to have my house back to myself
• He started daycare. His first day perfectly captures how this has gone for him. I brought him into the baby room and he looked around, saw several new adults and toddlers, and busted out with a huge grin. We get daily reports from the daycare center and with 2 exceptions they have always characterized his mood as ‘happy.’ We’re blessed with a seemingly happy and adaptable kid. We’re also fortunate to be able to drop him off and pick him up together most days, and it’s a beautiful thing to walk into the toddler room to pick him up in the afternoon and get a beaming grin of recognition when he sees me.
• Stopped sleeping in a swaddle. Early in the month we stopped swaddling him, and now he sleeps as he pleases, sometimes even on his stomach. He’s also able to recover from the loss of his pacifier sometimes, rolling around till he can grasp it and plopping it back in himself. We need to get a good picture of his sleeping posture though as it’s pretty cute – he lays completely splayed out, the picture of exhaustion.
• Went on his first camping trip, and his second. The first one was for the annual Kids Camping Weekend with my college and NY friends. This was at a resort campground in PA (running water, electricity, and cable tv at every campsite?!?). He had a blast and was the center of attention with all the kids, often surrounded by 6-8 children all vying to get his attention and pleading for a chance to hold him. Mostly he handled this fairly well though it was occasionally overwhelming for him. His second trip is with Susan to her annual Falcon Ridge Music Festival expedition, which he’s at right now. It’ s brutally hot, though Mom reports all is well.

To sum up, things are going great. He’s a happy kid, seems to be developing comfortably, and has accepted the transitions he’s gone through this month easily and with little trouble. The only negative thing that I can think of from this month was him developing a fever and a case of the crankypants after he saw the doctor for some vaccinations.

As per usual Susan’s done a great job posting tons of photos. Here’s this month’s gallery, and here’s one of my favorite shots from this month:

The family sans Soolin just before leaving Kids Camping Weekend 2011

and another of my favorites, just because it so well captures his personality:

Brady's most common facial expression

In terms of eating, he continues to get new food types from us as we expand his palette. So far he’s much like me – willing to try and eat most anything and enjoying most of it. There were no home runs in terms of preferences this month, though he does seem to enjoy the mango the most of the new stuff. He also tried avocado again and liked it this time (we’ll chalk the initial rejection up to me not blending it well enough), and similarly now enjoys summer squash after we tried mixing a tiny bit of applesauce into it. He didn’t like the apricots Susan tried this week, at a guess because they were too sour. He also likes the sweet pea mash made from peas we grew in our garden. Brown rice gruel is also going over well. Susan’s been mixing it with a bit of fruit and he seems to love it. He continues to enjoy apples, pears, bananas, and sweet potatoes. So far Susan has been making all of his food from scratch, and as our vegetables in the garden mature an increasing portion of his diet will also come from food we’ve grown ourselves.

Behavior wise, he continues to experiment with vocalizations, moving from the quiet little chirps and coos to loud, explosive shouts, sometimes for prolonged periods. I can still get him into ‘conversation,’ though he’s less easily engaged with that now. Mostly this seems to be because he’s much more dexterous now – his head’s now on a swivel and he’s constantly twisting and turning, staring intently at everything and curious about anything new that is introduced into his field of view. His hand and arm dexterity is also much improved. He can reach for and grasp objects with a reasonable degree of success now, and anything he can draw to his mouth, he does, including appendages, hair, Soolin, anything he can get a hold of. He’s often more interested in checking out his environment and the new stuff than he is in chatting with me. Sometimes his curiosity extends to me though, and now that he can sort of use his hands, he will occasionally reach out to touch our faces – lips, cheeks and mouth especially.

I think he’s starting to connect words to things, mostly because I have occasionally noticed if I say Soolin or Nana, he’ll look at them. The same trick doesn’t yet work with Mom and Dad. I’ve been experimenting now with words to see how I can help. I’ve started with ‘Up’ which I repeat endlessly when he’s lying down or in his chair or stroller and I’m going to pick him up. I always try and end with a big exuberant smiling ‘UP!’ when I’m done as I drape him onto my shoulder. I think he’s already recognizing it because even when he is crying a smile sometimes crosses his lips the first time I say it. We’ll see where this gets us by the end of his 7th month.

He’s still not mobile. He can almost keep himself steady while sitting, but his arm strength isn’t to the point where he can keep his chest off the ground for long periods. He’s funny to watch though – his legs are strong, so he’ll squirm around trying to move, with his little butt poking high up in the air and his face and chest planted in his blankets. Mostly he can turn in circles and occasionally push himself slowly along, but he hasn’t yet figured out how to pull all these pieces together into concerted locomotion. He can also roll himself over, though not yet consistently, which occasionally leads to crying and frustration because he gives up and concludes he’s stuck, then starts wailing. He also doesn’t like to sit most of the time, and actually prefers standing in our laps with us providing the balance.

He’s pretty consistently slept through the night all month. He’s to bed by 7PM or so, and often wakes up around 4AM but can be coaxed back to sleep until 6AM. We’ve moved him out of his co-sleeper and into his own crib in his room, and so far that’s gone pretty well. We feel especially blessed in this department. We don’t get as much sleep as regular folks, but compared to what some of our friends have gone through we have it really easy.

Susan continues to post images to our gallery. The gallery of photos taken during Brady’s 6th month is here, and here’s a sample from one of his new experiences, swimming in the Lords awesome new swimming pool:

Susan and Brady as Brady tries a swimming pool for the first time

I didn’t know her well. I’d seen her over the last several years at the holidays and Kimball family gatherings. She was friendly, outgoing, and quick to laugh and share a joke. I liked her. My most poignant memory of her is the eulogy she delivered at her Mother’s funeral last year. Norma and Susan’s Mother Linda each delivered a eulogy at the ceremony. Linda’s was the more polished, thoughtful eulogy, which given her career as a minister should surprise no one, but I was more moved by Norma’s deeply personal outpouring of affection and loss.

We were fortunate to have a chance to introduce Brady to her before her passing. I’ve posted a picture of that below.

Brady, Norma and Susan last month