Grandma Mary's Baby Clothes

We took these photos at home about a week ago. We just pulled our sheet up over the headboard and plopped Anika on the bed. Andrew is apparently quite the photographer when he wants to be...

Family Photos

Here are a few photos from Sunday's trip to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens with a former teaching mentor of mine (who photographs weddings and events when he's not teaching middle school).






We enlisted his help simply because we're watching Anika's babyhood rapidly disappearing, and figured we ought to get a few decent family photos in before it's gone.

Anika is demonstrably understanding many of our words, and is slowly adding gestures to her signing vocabulary. I noticed today that she is beginning to point a bit, rather than just reach for (or wave at) things she wants. Also, we're very impressed that we can get her to wave simply by verbally telling her to "say hi."

She's still not truly crawling, but is spending lots of time on her knees (or scooting backwards). She'd also very much like to pull herself to standing; however, she's stalled out on her knees in this respect as well. I suspect she'll untangle her feet and start progressing forwards here within the next week or two.

The Eight Month Update

Well, life is speeding up, and I don't particularly want to go into elaborate details, but here are some recent photo and a little commentary.


This is a picture of the place we're eyeballing in Boston. We all went up to Boston last week (some longer than others), and did some serious house hunting. If all goes as planned, we'll be buying the first floor here within the next month or so. This isn't something we'd anticipated being able to do, but we figured out recently that the housing market is such that it may actually be cheaper to pay on a mortgage than to pay rent.

Anyhow, we like this place. Benefits include: two bedrooms, a small study, a deck, a fenced yard, basement storage (these are all things we currently lack), children upstairs, and a playground (plus an enormous old cemetery) across the street. It's in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, which has a reputation for housing lots of artists, young families, Latinos and LGBTs. It seems like a pretty happy little community. Plus there are many green spaces, and we'll have easy access to the T. Andrew will be a 10-15 minute drive from the hospital, or a 30 minute bike or subway ride. Our offer has been accepted, and Andrew attended the house inspection today. Generally speaking, things seem to be falling into place. We're excited about it so, you know, fingers crossed!

And now for a slew of Anika photos:



We think this monkey could be "the one." Time will tell.


Anika is getting close to crawling finally. Just this weekend, she began getting up onto her knees and sort of rocking back and forth. Now it's mostly a matter of finding a way to propel herself forward.




Needless to say, this kid is not short on pride in one's accomplishments. She can't pull herself up yet, but she sure does love the view from up here.




Note the ridiculous Popeye arms.



And again: those arms!






Here she is in her bathing suit, getting ready for her first swim.


The pre-swim shower...
The pre-swim capping...


And finally, the swim. She didn't hate it, but wasn't thrilled either. It was very cold; I think we all would have enjoyed it more if we weren't freezing.