storytime

We read books with Will and Hallie every night, though lately Hallie has been too wiggly to read to so instead we let her mostly get a few wiggles out and then put her to bed a bit earlier than Will. Sometimes we try to read her some of her own books before putting her to bed (Baby Colors is a good one), and she likes to pull (all the) books off the shelf and show them to us. But rarely does she tolerate reading the same books Will likes anymore. This particular night, however, Hallie saw how Will was sitting on mom's lap and decided she wanted to sit on a lap. So she crawled right under the book and parked herself on her big brother's lap. How sweet. Then I guess she sat still for a lot of the book as all three read together.

Trike-a-thon

A few weeks ago I mentioned the Trike-a-thon. This was a charity event organized by Will's teachers at school, and almost all if not all the kids in his preschool class (as well as a few from the toddler and infant rooms) participated. Will was very excited about this for weeks leading up to the event. He even got to get a new helmet (Lightning McQueen helmet, to match his Lightning bike and Lightning sunglasses), and happily wore it whenever he rode his bike prior to the event.

Erin took both kids to the event and took lots of pictures, which mostly tell the story here. After learning all about bike-riding-in-the-street rules and strapping on their helmets, all the excited kids mounted their bikes.

And they're off! Even though it wasn't a race, I'm sure Will treated it as one.

Hallie was a happy spectator and was at first content to watch all the other kids, but eventually she wanted to get in on the fun. So her brother gave her a ride.

Here's Will racing around the turn, he's so fast!

Hallie's bath pictures: 13 months

This is the 500th post on Will & Hallie's Page! Appropriately, it's a bath picture update. It also is the debut of our new camera. We haven't quite figured it all out yet, but I think the functions on the camera will make it fun and useful. I have mixed feelings about the picture quality (the pictures seem to be less sharp than those taken with our old camera), but hopefully once we have it all figured out they'll look good enough.

Anyway, here's Hallie!

Erin likes to quote a statistic about how women use so many more words than men per day - I don't remember the exact numbers and a quick websearch gives a number of different answers (here's one that says women: 20,000; men: 7,000). Well, this sounds about right, because Hallie is a CHATTERBOX. Just comparing her to Will at this age, she easily babbles/speaks baby language for twice as long as he did. In fact, she probably says more than I do in a given day. The cutest thing is that she will look you right in the eyes and blabber on nonsensically for half a minute like she's trying to relate every detail of her thoughts. She usually does this when we go and get her after a nap/in the morning, and she excitedly tells me all about her day in this way when I get home from work. Seriously if I could capture a moment in time to replay whenever I need cheering up it might be getting home from work and having Hallie crawl excitedly over, yelling "dada", and then telling me all about her day in baby jibberish when I pick her up. We ought to get that on video, it's incredibly sweet.

Big news: Hallie has recently converted to bipedalism. As I recently discussed, we've been trying hard to get her to walk for months, apparently the trick was to stop trying and ignore her. Yesterday we were out with friends at Guy Hollerin's - a favorite casual happy hour gathering. We had an entire section of the restaurant to ourselves so Hallie was crawling around and exploring. She pulled herself up on a booth near Erin and I, did a basketball pivot, and before I knew what was going on, she took 3 consecutive stuttering steps toward me. I was not expecting it so it was a very fun surprise. I got Erin's attention and she saw the steps as well. Then everyone there made a big fuss over her, it was very fun. We've gotten her to do a few more steps since then too, so more fun is on the way.

Walking was one of the last requirements Hallie needed to pass before she could switch from the infant room to the toddler room at school, and the toddler room teachers (who were Will's teachers when he started) are very excited that she'll soon be joining them (beginning next month). I'm not sure they know what they're in for. Hallie rules the infant room - she's very bossy and has experience from being rowdy with her brother that she may use take over the toddler room. And she's not afraid to pop you if you get in her space. Look how serious she is.

I'm kidding of course - I think she'll fit in very nicely with the kids in the toddler room. It helps that she's such a good sharer: always willing to share her food and other things she gets into. She's at least getting better at sharing her toys with Will. Below you can see how she decided to share her facewash with me when she was done chewing on it. Thanks sweetheart.

Visits to W&H page as of this post: 25067

twizzle? fo shizzle.

We had a family picnic a few weeks ago on the floor of the living room, where we arrived after being rained out of our planned picnic at the park. After we finished eating, Erin and I began picking up, and while we weren't closely watching them, Hallie and Will found my bag of Twizzlers. While Hallie was primarily interested in removing each piece of licorice from the bag (reminding me of this behavior), Will took the opportunity to take single bites out of as many whole pieces as he could get away with - a good strategy, I must admit, since those pieces were then set aside for him.

baby steps

Since we are between cameras, we will have to postpone Hallie's bath pictures, which would normally have been taken last night. But we do have some milestone news which we might as well report: last night Hallie sort of took her first unsupported step. I don't think it quite counts as her first steps - it was more of a falling pivot from hanging on mom to catch herself on our living room footrest. But she did it, and we will take it as a good sign that she will be toddling all around the house very soon! This video shows some of our hard work to get her to this point and near-success.

muskashes

Will is very interested in mustaches - probably because Mario has one. Unfortunately neither he nor I can grow a very good one. To compensate, pretty much any sticker he's playing with eventually becomes a 'skash. A few weeks ago Erin made some really great Mario mustaches - Will wore his enthusiastically, but Hallie was not too happy. The picture on the right shows her protesting as Erin had to hold her hands down long enough to get the shot before she pulled off her 'skash.

Celebrating Unky Grant and the death of a camera

Last weekend we traveled to Denver to see Uncle Grant's Senior Recital and celebrate his upcoming graduation from the U of Denver. All the Ferrises were there, and also Great-Grandparents Aloise, Carol, and Keith. What fun we had. One of the nights we were there, we had dinner at a very nice bar/restaurant and celebrated together in the awesome shirts Uncle Adam made for this event ("Wiener" being Uncle Grant's derogatory nickname growing up, haha).

We struggled with the 2-hour difference between Eastern and Mountain time, but with careful nap management we were able to get the kids to stay up much later than they were used to without melting down too much. It helped we had grandparents and uncles and aunts to keep them entertained.

At some point in the evening, someone gave this guy the camera.

A portrait of the artist, with football mustache.

So we got a lot of pictures that look like this. Actually, I tried to include a picture of everyone who was there in this post, but every single picture of Grandma Susie looked like this, sorry Grandma.

I have to admit, the "three feet from the ground" perspective is interesting. Somewhat artistic.

Will's favorite subject of the evening was his sister. He quickly discovered the fun of trying to get Hallie to look at the camera for a picture.

Shortly before dinner, our camera was unceremoniously retired. Will was getting a closeup shot of Hallie, this happened, the camera hit the ground and wouldn't work anymore. Here is the very last picture from that camera:

Lookin' good Gramps.

Don't worry, we were due for a new camera and I already ordered a sweet new one which should be delivered in a week or so. The new camera includes two features which should be very useful for pictures of the kids: a "Smart Portrait System" which uses facial recognition software and delays taking the picture until the subject in the picture smiles; and a "Sports Continuous Scene Mode" which allows taking 10 pictures per second for a couple seconds (this will be very useful for bath pictures which are always a fraction of a second's worth of movement away from perfection). In the meantime, I have quite a collection of pics that Aunt Jenna took on her camera and lots from the last month or so to post yet.