We gotta have grandparents over ALL THE TIME. Between my parents and Lydia's parents, Adam evidently got all played out!

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Adam Five Months with GPD and GMP and SWIMMING!

This weekend, Grandma Pat and Grandpa Dave came to visit. We had lots of fun... including something I've NEVER done before... we went SWIMMING!

Mom and Dad took me in this big pool thing at the YMCA. It was like a big bath with lots of people in it. It was cold, but I was brave! After I got used to it, it was lots of fun.

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P: Are you awake.
L: Yes.
P: Is he awake?
L: No.
P: Great. Now he's trained us to wake up in the middle of the night!

Isn't the parent supposed to train the son??

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After four and two-thirds months, we decided to see how Adam liked cereal. Bottom line, he does! I think he's watched Mom and Dad eat enough to understand how the process works.

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Dear Adam,

It's been an exciting month! You've been on your first overnight trip, you've been to your first birthday party, and you've grown to almost double your birth weight.

Every time we take you somewhere, everyone says the same thing... "he's so beautiful" and "he's different every time we see him" and "he's so good all the time." Little do they know, huh?

Actually, you are good all the time. It's just that sometimes when you're hungry or wet or tired, you feel like you need us to know about it. Now. Loudly. I can't say that we're used to it.

The good part of you learning to communicate is still the smiles. And the laughs. We found a new game this month, "patty cake." Granted, I'm doing most of the work when we play, but you're having at least half the fun.

Now that you've found your toes, it'll only be a matter of time before you're rolling... and rolling and rolling. Your Mom and I will cherish these few months when we can count on you staying put.

It was a real blessing to be home this Memorial Day weekend and to let the three of us spend time together and with our friends. Monday, you and I got to play a lot, and today when I went to work, I really missed you.

You still make me prouder and prouder every day to be your Dad.

Love,

Dad

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And now part of the main menu! Look to the far right column on this page and you'll find AdamTV

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Enjoy Adam at his new live internet site:


ustream was crashing my browser. :(

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Most Sundays, we have a leisurely afternoon to take pictures, naps, etc. This week, was busy busy busy... going to lunch with our friends, buying a wedding present, and glasses for Mom. So this is the sum total of pictures of Adam on his fourteen week birthday. We promise to do better... :D 

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First picnic
with friends on Friday

First girl birthday party, First encounter with bubbles
This afternoon at Paisley Goode's birthday party

First puppy encounter
With Rudy Jernigan at the Sunday School party

Picture evidence of all three:

Picnic, Paisley Party and Park

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Visit http://www.ustream.tv/channel/adamtv to see Adam playing on his Einstein mat!

Adam will be performing as long as he's happy...

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Adam,

I haven't got things together this month. I've been writing you a letter on your birthdays, and I don't want you to think I've forgotten. You still bring joy into our lives more and more.

Probably the best thing you've done for your Mom and I is your nighttime sleep consistency. We can be pretty confident that by about 9:00 p.m., you're going to be sacked out for a while. You even gave us an eight hour stretch a couple of times. Keep up the good work!

Interesting for us, you're still a car seat sleeper. Each night, we bundle you up in your favorite blanket and set you down for a good night's recline. I don't know whether it's the reflux or the security of being snuggled in, but the seat is where you're living these days... at night at least. We don't even have to go anywhere... if you're in the seat, that's it. If it makes for a happy baby and happy parents, we're going to keep it up. I just hope you're grown out of it by the time you go to college.

During the day, you're a great kid, eating and playing, but usually not napping. Mommy and you have gone to the YMCA several times recently, and you're meeting new friends and getting new experiences all the time. Maybe you just don't want to miss anything, and that's why you don't want to nap. We hope that in the future months you'll learn to enjoy naps. Maybe as you grow closer to thirteen pounds from your current 12.6, your tummy will be able to hold more food, and you won't be as hungry as often.

There was that one time... you slept in your crib for a nap. But, even if you don't get the napping thing down, we'll still love you, because that's what we do. You can't make us love you less, because you're ours. We're your Mom and Dad, and we want you to grow up to be strong and wise and pure.

Love,

Us

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One of my favorite times to see my son is first thing in the morning, before he wakes up, with the new daylight streaming in the window. He's so quiet and serene... just a wonderful reminder of the miracle of God's creative Spirit.

Adam in the Morning

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The only thing is, I wish he would have let me know four hours ago... when I woke up at 1:30... and I thought, "surely Adam is about to wake up."

For the past four hours, I've been surfing the Internet, watching TV and checking in on him. He appears to have had a bad dream or two, letting out a pretty good cry, but then getting right back to sleep.

Now only if I had. :-\ Ah, well... hazards of being a new parent. Today's schedule isn't unrelenting, so I think I'll make it with minimal assistance.

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I have a feeling that in a few years, this is what all of Adam's toys will look like. Not that he's going to turn into a Sid or anything... just that he'll be as curious as his Dad was.

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Adam turned eleven weeks old today!

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Ever since I was about four, I have had this fascination with the idea of "doing it yourself." As soon as I could read, I was picking up Dad's Reader's Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual and discovering what a "sump pump" was, what the most common dimensions were for dimensional lumber, and reading the step-by-step plans for building everything from a deck to a racecar bed. As a result, my first instinct is to do it myself. The frugal part of me thinks that by affording no outlay of capital for labor expenses, I can end up ahead.

So, last week when Lydia's side of the closet fell down, my "yourself" kicked into gear. Insipired by Jason's long-term projects, I even installed SketchUp and attempted to draft a concept for a built-in replacement closet for Lydia, designed exactly to match the clothes she wanted to put there and last until the house comes down. I was all ready to go with this plan until this morning.

I woke up at 4:30 as usual, but incredibly, Adam was still asleep, so I hopped on to the Lowe's site to start my shopping list for the day. I had even planned out how I was going to ask them to cut the plywood so I could fit it into the trunk of the car. And then, "just for inspiration," I thought, I checked out the Home Organization section.

Well, it turns out that the fine folks at ClosetMaid have come up with a few shortcuts for rebuilding your collapsed closet. To make a quickly-becoming-arduous story short, when Adam woke up about 5:30, we had a bottle and diaper changed, and then the two of us went to pick out what is now in our closet. (Side note: if you bring an almost-eleven week-old to Lowes at six in the morning saying, "we're going to fix up mommy's closet," you get an extremely high "awwwwwwwwww" response.)

I bet at this point in the story, Jason is screaming at his computer Mac, "you sellout! have you no integrity!? you even learned a level of CAD to do this!"

In any do-it-yourself project, you have several factors going...

• money
• quality
• pride
• time

I'm sure there are more. Here's my take on how plan A (hardcore build it yourself) stacked up against plan B (what I ended up doing.)

	Plan A	Plan B
money	Although the material cost for Plan A was less than plan B, I didn't have the right tools to get the job done. One of the reasons that anything is manufactured in a factory is economy of effort - they have the tools to get the job done and the materials to do it with.
quality	I think I had a good plan for the closet on my own, but it was untested. And, as stated before, the tools I had at my disposal may not have made it the quality that I would have hoped for.	I'm very pleased with the result, and while the workmanship of the product may not have the quality desired, the usefulness of the end result is high quality.
pride	Had I done plan A, I'm sure the pride factor would have been humongous... as long as everything worked out.	Doing it this way still gives me pride in the accomplishment, if not the product.
time	There's no way I would have been able to measure, cut, sand, paint, fit, attach, test, finish and refill the closet in a day.	I was done with construction at 9:45 this morning, and when the touch-up paint finished drying at 11:00 a.m., it was ready to move in.

The navel-gazing takeaway of the whole experience is that as of ten weeks and six days ago, my hierarchy of needs has shifted. The last item on the list was the trump card, having the chance to spend 80% of my day being available for Lydia and Adam instead of measuring twice and cutting once.

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