Watching a child's development brings mixed feelings. As Anderson first started making sounds of "Da Da" (which he says to me, Natalie and the cats ... I feel special.) I was initially pretty excited. Then I realized that with talking comes the inevitable "Why?" questions to everything and eventually, "Dad, I want the car keys."
Mixed blessings.
Yesterday gave another such realization. Here's the evidence.
Striving to read the latest edition of MIT's magazine
Getting closer. He "reads" these daily ... one could say that likes reading so much that he eats up all of the literature he can get his hands on.
Success!
So as you can see, Anderson's now crawling. He's pretty terrible at it and tends to run into things, but he's made that monumental developmental step. I realized this as I set down the phone - which was on speaker phone for about 20 minutes because there don't appear to be people that actually work at Air France - and Anderson started crawling toward it. I suspect he wanted to give them a piece of his mind for taking away the assigned seat he had from Paris to Prague. A long process, but he eventually made it to the phone and started eating it. Natalie was at work when this happened so I excitedly called her. The conversation went something like this:
"Honey! Are you sitting down? Ready? Anderson is crawling! He's moving all over the place! He's in his room all by himself scooting all over the place! Uh ... all by himself ... uh ... honey, let me call you back!"
So I ran back and made sure he hadn't gotten caught his neck in a cord, placed a plastic bag over his head, stuck a fork in an outlet or gotten hit by a plane. He was okay, but with mobility comes additional worry. Still, exciting nonetheless.
All is well for us here otherwise. I'm going to be buying a new car soon (A Prius to save on gas prices and because it has effective air conditioning, which my 9 year old Chevrolet Prism does not have.) We're also making decisions on how to improve our house, which has a carport without a garage and desperately needs a sunroom.
Here are some additional shots of our trip to Europe ...
Anderson with his Great Grandmother.
Anderson and me with his Natalie's uncle. Note the goats in the background. We forgot to mention when going through customs that we had been near livestock. Oops.
I think every zoo has something like this. If there were another spot, I wanted to be the bear that was chewing on a chunk of plastic.
Inside of the gardens of the Museum Rodin ... my favorite place to go in Paris. 2 euro (about $745 US dollars) gets you into the garden, where you can bring a 5 euro (about $1856) bottle of wine and 3 euros (about $1163) of cheese and have a picnic on the lawn.
Anderson at "The Gates of Hell", which was clearly sculpted before the Newark Airport was constructed. Anderson is thrilled.
"The Thinker" ... Rodin's most famous work. Anderson ponders this while I try to keep him from plummeting to the ground.
