Christmas!

Christmas less than a month past, and here I am writing David’s next blog post! Yay me!

As one might imagine, the Christmas season is busy and eventful, and this year wasn’t much different. It was, however, David’s first year to really notice what’s going on. He’s a pretty social kid, so he LOVES being at gathering where he can make himself the center of attention. Now that I think about it, that was probably his favorite thing about Christmas - all of the people who doted on him for a month straight.

So anyway, we spent lots of time having Christmas at various places with various people:

First up was the Patin Christmas party at mom’s house with that side of my family. They are always hard to nail down and corral into one location at one time, so every year mom makes them come to her house a couple weeks before Christmas so that she can at least see everyone once. As would become a recurring theme, David was loved by all and David acquired toys. At this one, nobody was supposed to get him anything, but alas, such a demand fell on deaf ears. The standout present from this gathering was the toy Cars keys that he got with the car noise making keychain. He likes car noises, he definitely takes his boy-dom seriously.

For the next couple of days after that party, my dad was in town from Colorado. So David spent a lot of time hanging with Grandpa. Various Google baby clothes were procured along with a sweet bean bag chair that later came in the mail. Good times were had by all.

Next, 2 days before Christmas (if I recall correctly), was Christmas with Christy’s brother and sister-in-law who came to town for an afternoon from Vacherie. Among the items of import gained at this small gathering was David’s new John Deere steering wheel thingy. Since it is both a steering wheel and makes noise, he loves it. I don’t think we’ve been allowed to put that one in the rotation of living room toys yet, because he demands to have it out all the time.

Christmas day lunch brought us to Christy’s mom’s house for presents and food, and David was not disappointed with the gifts received. At this stop, he got what might very well be his favorite toy-based gift of the year - a fisher-price gear thingy. It is pretty cool, and I very much appreciate the accommodation of David’s inherent nerd character in giving him an engineering toy. This child has no chance.

After lunch, we went home for a nap, then it was off to my mom’s house for Christmas evening coffee, dessert, and more presenting with David. His primary acquisition at mom’s house was a David-sized chair with his name embroidered. The kids of the family that we stay with in Houston have these, and David loved them last time we were there, so we kinda figured he’d like one for himself. We have not been surprised at his enjoyment. He climbs on it, watches his baby can read videos from it, and uses it as a stepping stool to get on to the couch. Plus, it’s red. When you’re 18 months old, everything red is awesome.

Lastly was Christmas with my paternal grandma, aunt, and uncle. Christy made dinner (best meal of Christmas, btw) which we ate and then had dessert and more presents. David returned home with a tricycle from great-grandma. Which he loves. Luckily he gets most of his tricycling done with mom during the day. It was also my first experience putting together a toy for David. It was surprisingly not bad, hopefully future endeavors will be just as easy.

So David’s first “real” Christmas was a success. In the end we managed to have minimal incursions of excessive toys and lots of David attention. Which, of course, is really the most important thing.

Note on downloading pictures from the albums...

It came to my attention this morning, that with the integration of Google+ and Picasa, anyone not signed up for Google+ cannot download full size pictures from the permalinks on the side.  So, for anyone who wants to download pictures, you have 2 options:


1.  Sign up for Google+.
2.  When you go to the permalinks, right click on the link that you want, and select the option to copy the URL to the clipboard (in chrome it's "Copy Link Address", in Firefox it's "Copy Link Location", and in Internet Explorer it's "Copy Shortcut").  Then, go to the address bar at the top of the browser, delete whatever is there and paste that link into the address bar (either Ctrl-V or right click and select "Paste").  Immediately after that address, type "?noredirect=1", except without the quotes.  Now hit return or click go, and you should be brought to the old Picasa view of the album.  From Picasa, you should be able to download full size pictures.


This is all an apparent attempt by Google to lock people into using Google+ for everything, which is pretty crappy in my opinion.  I guess they've gotten rid of that whole "Don't be evil" thing.

Pre-christmas David's life roundup

Yes, it’s been a while.  In this instance, no news is pretty much good news.  We’ve just been having fun, living life, watching our little boy grow up, and trying not to miss anything in the process.  When I posted last, we had just gotten back from Pensacola.  We haven’t had any medical events since then (those always trigger a blog post), but I realized the other day that we HAVE had Halloween and Thanksgiving.  I will almost certainly have to write something for post-Christmas, and I would hate to soil that one with thanksgiving and Halloween stuff.  

If you’ve been keeping up with Christy’s continual picture and video posting on Picasa (see the links on the right side of this page), you will have noticed that my mother-in-law once again outdid herself with David dress-up.  Last year he was a banana.  The awesomest banana ever, to be sure.  This year, though, we decided to go with some moderately subtle humor.  David was the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz .  Some people (cough-mom-cough) didn’t think it was funny, but those people don’t have a very good sense of humor.  I tried teaching him to sing If I only had a heart, but he was unable to develop the requisite linguistic skills in an appropriate time frame.  Regardless, he quite enjoyed the costume.  It was quite shiny, and I think that David might be part magpie.  He was quite impressed with himself and his sparkly shoes.

Other than an awesome costume, Halloween was uneventful.  We generally avoid trick-or-treaters by going out to dinner (The Chimes, this year), then we went to my mom’s house so that David could show off his sparkly-ness.  He had some cuteness competition from his younger cousin who dressed up as a burrito (the cousin’s dad is a Mexican named Beau, so it’s funny, but not as funny as a heart defect kid dressed up as the Tin Man, in my professional opinion).  But in the end, David was still the cutest Halloween kid ever.  Hopefully we can dream up something next year to top this year, but it’s going to be tough.

A few weeks later was Thanksgiving.  It was, well, Thanksgiving.  I’ve never been a big Thanksgiving fan - turkey is about the most boring food ever - so writing about this feels a lot like I’m just writing about any other dinner that we eat.  There was food.  It was good.  My wife and mother-in-law are wonderful cooks.  There’s really not much else to say.  David played with his grandparents and great-grandparents, but again, this is nothing out of the ordinary.  There was no adorable costume (although his onesie did say “mommy’s little turkey”), there were no funny David stories.  So nothing really to see here, but I figured I should mention it anyway since other people might want to know for certain that nothing interesting happened.

So now we’re 6 days away from David’s second Christmas.  We’re also about 2 weeks past the first anniversary of the Glenn surgery, so that’s something to be excited about.  Christy and I were reminiscing this weekend about being in the hospital at this time last year.  We only managed to make it back to BR a couple days before Christmas of 2010, so it’s been nice this year to sorta experience the whole season.  In a sense, it’s David’s first Christmas season even though he’s already technically been through one.  He is learning to not mess with the presents under the tree, and getting excited every morning when I ask him if he’s ready to turn on the tree lights.  He happens to be a little under the weather right now, but on the mend - just seems to be normal baby winter upper respiratory stuff.  I’m quite sure he’ll be feeling better in time to have a wonderful Christmas day.

David's First Vacation.

About 9 months ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to one of these daily deal sites that was offering 3 nights at the beach in Pensacola for like $150.  I’m not a big beach guy (I don’t like the ubiquitous sand and salt, plus I tend to spontaneously combust if I’m left out in the sun too long), but I figured David and Christy would enjoy it, and more importantly, it would be a good dry run vacation for future Disney trips.  Christy and I have become big fans of vacationing in the off-season, and work has been slow-ish, so on Thursday of the week before last, we decided to leave for Pensacola on the following Monday.
So on Monday morning, we woke up, packed up the car and headed out.  The car ride was pretty uneventful.  We left right about the time that David was ready for his first nap of the day, so he slept through about the middle of Mississippi.  We stopped at the Alabama welcome center, had some lunch (Golden Potstickers FTW), then drove for another couple of hours and arrived in Pensacola around 3 in the afternoon.  

As one might expect, we immediately got beach-ready and headed to the ocean.  David has a sandbox at home that he loves, so he was pretty excited about all of the sand on the beach.  I think he’d have been happy to just sit there and dig for 4 days.  He wasn’t quite as certain about the ocean, but once we’d walked in the edge of the surf a little bit, he was ready to go out with mom.  Christy carried him out to 3 or 4 feet of depth, and he had a great time kicking his legs in the water until a wave inundated him, then he was ready to go play in the sand some more.  And that was basically how the whole trip went, with lunch and dinner mixed in.  We did have a small accident on the last evening we were there - Christy was playing chase with David on the boardwalk while we were waiting for dinner, and he tripped and did a face-plant on the concrete.  He got a little bit of a bloody nose, but all in all, not that bad.  He didn’t like it very much, though.  

Obviously this wasn’t our first short road trip with David, but I’m happy to say that the travelling experience is getting better every time.  This one didn’t really have any fussing or crying until about 30 minutes outside of Pensacola.  So, basically 4 hours of happy toddler.  We turned his car seat around before we left, so he is now facing the windshield.  I think he likes it a lot better.  I certainly do - now when he whines or makes noise, I can see that nothing is wrong and just ignore him.  And the hotel-room-with-a-baby experience wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected either.  By the time we got settled and ready for bed at night, David was so tired that he probably would have slept on the floor, so my worries about him having issues with a foreign sleeping environment were unfounded.  Anyway, I have high hopes that another 12 months or so will find us with a 2 year old that is ready for 12 hours in the car to Orlando.

Follow me, America!

15 month cardiology checkup

Well I’m a slacker.  I know that this is already widely known, but I figured I’d state it for the record.

David had his 15 month cardiology checkup on the 6th of October.  There was literally nothing to report, so I haven’t felt particularly compelled to write this.  But since the whole point of this blog is to help people keep up-to-date with David and how he’s doing, I figure I’d be a terrible person if I just never wrote a checkup post at all.

So here’s the update:  nothing.  In fact, our normal doctor was tending to an emergency at another hospital in town, so we saw the guy that I think they just hired as their 4th doctor.  He listened to david’s heart, looked at his blood pressure and oxygen saturation, and basically said, “yup, looks good to me!”  He increased David’s Enalapril dose a little bit in order to keep up with his growth (note to people with emergency info sheets - I will be sending you a new one), scheduled the 18 month checkup, and that was it.  The truth is, we really only get checked once every 6 months.  The ones in between that are just growth checks, just to let the doctor put his eyeballs on David and make sure he still looks fine.  And thus far, he still does.

In other news, David is now walking like he invented it.  The only time he crawls anymore is to traverse steps and to hide.  He has gained an affinity for being chased around the house, so we do a lot of that.  He still loves water, so he spends lots of time outside looking for puddles or other random collections of water in which he can splash.  And since the weather is getting cooler and nicer, mommy and daddy are okay with this.

Pirate Face