At Lauren and Dan's wedding they had little vials of bubbles to blow at them as they exited the church so we snagged a couple of those to play with at Grandma & Grandpa's. Will thought they were great, but he was a little confused about why they would disappear when he tried to grab them out of the air. He also tried to taste them a few times.
I took these video clips during our week in Madison - it was during the vacation that Will really started to be able to move under his own power. You can't call it crawling because he doesn't get up on his knees, but 'scooting' is probably appropriate. He started out only able to push himself backward (as he does in this video), but eventually learned to pull himself forward as well. Several weeks later, he is much more mobile, and it only makes things that much more interesting. Basically if you set him down on the ground and turn around for a second you can assume he'll be moving across the room when you turn back around. This makes things much more interesting for the cats also, since they can no longer relax when they're just outside of his reach.
Week 2 of our vacation involved going to Madison to hang out with Grandma Brenda, Grandpa Paul, Aunt Sara, Uncle Jeff, and all our friends. There were a couple of weddings also - Will came with us to Lauren and Dan's wedding, sat like a big boy at the table and ate crackers while mom and dad goofed off. Also notice he's totally dressed up for the wedding, even wearing his monkey watch (...what time is it? Monkey time.).
The rest of the week was very nicely uneventful. It wasn't quite time to worry about preparing for the big GARAGE SALE so we had several lazy mornings where Erin and I slept in and Grandma got up to entertain Will. Will woke up very early a lot because we messed up his schedule a little bit with transitioning to Central Time and then having him spend a week sleeping on the porch of the lodge where the sun would wake him up around 5:30. Most mornings when I came downstairs Will already had a few hours of kitchen-floor playtime in, which included playing with these sweet toys, as well as a new game we call 'Open, Shut' (to be detailed in a future post).
We got to Madison on the 2nd of July so on the 4th we got to watch the annual Adams Street 4th of July parade. All the neighborhood kids dress up in costumes and decorate their bicycles then race around the block a few times. Will liked watching the parade, and he found several things to put in his mouth in the meantime.
Around this time we realized Will could consistently eat more solid foods like crackers and Cheerios without gagging, so we started giving him solid things to eat at every meal. Here he's trying a teething biscuit, since he STILL doesn't have any teeth. He liked this thing but he ended up probably making the biggest eating mess ever.
It was really hot that week and since Will had just come back from a daily routine of naked swimming, we decided to keep it up. We actually took him swimming in Lake Mendota with his life jacket on and he loved it - unfortunately forgot the camera for that trip. Anyway, he had a good time swimming in the backyard in his makeshift pool - a snow sled. That's some nice censoring, mom.
Check it out - I added another video to the clothesline blog entry. Click the link or scroll down 2 posts.
As I mentioned in the previous post, the video editing software allows me to turn these clips 90 degrees and put them together. The second video I put up is combined of the two best clips of Will and the clothesline, but before I could rotate them they weren't post-worthy.
...rotating the video clip 90 degrees adds about 30 pounds, apparently...
The first couple times we took Will swimming in the lake, we'd get him all decked out in his Spiderman swimming diapers under the dinosaur swim trunks. Erin got it right this time and got some manly swim diapers so he wouldn't have to wear the pink Dora's. But after we had to change some wet poopy diapers we decided it would be much easier to swim buck naked. As you can see, it was very popular. I'm not sure we'll have much luck getting him to wear swim trunks again at the city pool. Will had a good time slapping at the water and making splashes. He also tried to taste the water, as he does with anything interesting, and succeeded in the bottom right picture. Also, unfortunately we did not catch this on camera: he repeatedly peed on Erin and/or I pretty much right after taking him out of the water. One time he went swimming with me, then peed on me when I was drying him off. We went back in the lake to rinse off, then I handed him to Erin to be dried off, and then he peed on HER. It was hilarious.
Here's a short video montage of the naked swimming experience.
Note to Will's page readers: I just found out we had some video editing software in the lab so I put it on my computer and this is my first experience using it. So I can now splice videos together like this, cut out the stupid comments I make at the end of an otherwise perfect video of Will, and best of all, I can rotate the video 90 degrees to correct the videos where the cameraperson (Erin!) held the camera the wrong way. So you won't have to worry about turning your computer monitors 90 degrees anymore.
At the Lodge, without fail we could always get Will to laugh by taking him over to the clothesline and spinning the clothespins on it. Don't know why it was so funny, but he got a huge kick out of it, every time.
