Rutherford's First Book

A friend of Charlotte's sent us some fun soft books for R. This one is called "Peekabo Forest" and it has fun crunchy noises that he just loves. We read it a couple times a day, and now he's even begun reaching for the crinkly parts himself and playing with them, putting them in his mouth, etc. Very cute!

Longhorns :)

Our friends in Austin, Sato and Connie, sent Rutherford some AWESOME Texas onesies - here's our little guy and his papa modeling their burnt orange:
We watched Texas kick UCLA's butt and just hung out this weekend. On Sunday, my brother and sister in law came down and finally got to meet Rutherford! He gave them some good smiles and we all caught up. Ford has been doing well, I swear he gets cuter and cuter every day. I really love being with him and I'm so grateful I don't have to return to a nine-to-five job right now. I can't imagine being away from him all day. I really feel for moms who have to do that.
We're just a few weeks away from starting our deck renovation project! We're going to completely redo the decks with trex and glass panels. I am so stoked, I think it will really make a huge freakin difference. It will be a long project, a couple weeks, but sooo worth it. Hopefully we have a pretty fall so we can enjoy it - but San Diego is pretty awesome during this time of year so I forsee some sweet nights enjoying the sunset with the fam while hanging outside. :)

The Bouncie Turtle Seat

Ford is really moving around more - he loves swinging his arms and legs now, sometimes he goes nuts on the changing table. It's super cute! Another big milestone has been his ability to hold objects - although for just a short period of time, he has held his rattles and even shaken them a bit. I learned the hard way to only give him soft rattles right now... he bonked his head with a plastic one the other day and hurt himself :( I think it mainly scared him but lesson learned!
Here's a vid of him in his bouncie seat last night, we usually put him in here when we're having dinner. He really likes looking at the little turtle and froggie toys!

Tall Baby!

We took R in for his 2-month doctor appointment today. Everything is looking good and we got an update on his growth! He weighs 12 pounds, three ounces (!) and is 24 inches long. That places him in the 43rd percentile for weight and the 70th percentile for height - so maybe he'll be tall and slim! :) A couple things we have to work on is getting more info on his vaccines (we're not yet sure what we'll be giving him at what time, we'd like to space them our more so than the traditional schedule) and more tummy time. Time to get to work!

Rutherford & the Great Blackout of 2011

It was a week of firsts for little Ford. Earlier this week we had a freak rainstorm (rain in September? Crazy!) that marked his first rainy day. And then, yesterday, we went through a blackout - apparently the largest in SoCal's history and definitely on the list of largest power outages nationwide.

It's been wayyy hot the past few days - Ned's poor parents were sleeping out the stuffy guesthouse before they left - and Ned and I were sitting in our room around 3:30pm as the a/c only works upstairs and we had the room cool-ish plus TWO fans. I was nursing the baby and we were chatting about dinner. All of the sudden, the fans went off and everything got super quiet. When the power doesn't come back on within seconds, you know something is up!

I got on Facebook and quickly saw my friends scattered throughout the county were all in the same boat. I knew if it was countywide it could be bad. With hours left until the weather was predicted to cool off, I started to worry about the baby. We gathered all our stuff and hung out for a while in the coolest spot, which happened to be my office. We put R in his playpen and fanned him with magazines until he got hungry again - luckily by then the weather had cooled off some and we could open the windows - and the breeze was back which was awesome!

While the baby ate, Neddie did some emergency preparedness stuff - got the candles and flashlights together, collected our bottled water, etc. He made sure I had the cold water and even fanned us both while I was nursing - what a good papa! The light seemed to be fading fast so we headed up after R was done to make some sandwiches and get ready for the evening. By this time, Twitter and the online newspapers (we had charges on our iPhones so we could check the news online, thank you God for that!) were saying the outage could be into Saturday - and that it stretched from AZ to the OC and down to Mexico - insane!

We set R out on the deck in his diaper and in his bouncie seat while we had turkey sandwiches and ginger ale. Here he is dining al fresco with us:

As the sun went down, the view was weird - no lights anywhere except for SDSU and the freeways. Eerie. Kind of made me think the zombie apocalypse was upon us!

Fortunately no zombies came wandering down our street and Neddie and I fed the baby, got him to sleep and tried to get some rest. A little before 2am we both woke up - and three minutes later the power came back on! The fans and the Hello kitty humidifier jumped to life and we were on the grid again :) All in all, for the extent of the outage, I was surprised it was back on so quickly, so I was grateful for that. Also my breastmilk stash in the fridge stayed frozen so I was SUPER grateful for that - 40 oz!

Neddie's parents also avoided the mess, their plane took off just an hour or so before the outage. Lucky as everything was grounded at the airport! I learned that I definitely have to set up some better emergency supplies for us, though - you never know when the real zombie apocalypse will occur!

The Houston Grands

This week Neddie's parents are visiting from Houston! Rutherford finally gets to meet them, and vice versa. I must say they have taken to the whole grandparent thing very well :) Ford loves hanging out with them and he's been giving them lots and lots of smiles and some giggles, too.
It's been nice and lazy, we've mainly just been hanging out, going to a quick meal here and there and catching up. The first night we all went to Nicolosi's! It was Ford's first trip there and now he's truly a Hemus.
Rutherford has been more and more interactive - more responsive to talking, and he likes to carry on cooing conversations with people as well. Sometimes it makes him laugh which just melts my heart. I love that big gummy giggle.
He's also been sleeping pretty well! In the past few days we've had some seven- and eight-hour stretches. Kind of amazing, I wake up all refreshed which is a nice change :) Here's a happy sleeping baby pic:
Oops, I hear someone stirring, gotta go!