new words, new teeth, new stuff

It's been a busy month.....

For the grown-ups, this weekend saw both Kirstin's "girls' night out" group heading out to a local steakhouse to celebrate the 40th birthday of one of its members and my sister & brother-in-law coming up from Charlotte for the weekend (more shortly). Next weekend includes my regular game night, plus one of the three-times-a-year NC Games Days, in addition to Kirstin having a rehearsal and gig on Friday and Saturday nights. On top of that, I start 5 weeks of training with the Kaplan Teacher Development Program on Tuesday night. February looks like it will be fairly dead other part of the Kaplan training sessions. When March hits, we may spend a weekend in High Point, since I just remembered that one of my favorite authors -- Jim Butcher -- is the Writing Guest of Honor at a convention happening there.

(Blatant plug: The SciFi Channel has an original series based off of Jim Butchers books, called The Dresden Files, premiering this coming Sunday. Watch it; it's gonna be cool.)

We've caught a new addition to Leo's vocabulary this week, which took a little thinking about to figure out: "guck" is what he calls the dump truck that you've probably seen in the Flickr stream by now.

And then, on Wednesday night, we were doing some horsing around and suddenly caught what looked like bloody drool coming out of his mouth. Sure enough, he had a bleeding spot on one bottom gum. It wasn't until tonight that we caught the tip of a bicuspid coming out of the top jaw just over it. I guess that explains that.

The two main reasons that Cynthia and Alex came up were to deliver most of our Christmas presents and to help out with replacing boards on the attic floor that had to get torn up when we redid the kitchen. We'd flown to Michigan over the holiday, but they drove, in part because they also had to do a trip to Toronto as part of that same swing. So, most of our Christmas presents got loaded into their car and came from Lansing to Durham by way of Toronto and Charlotte. After Leo woke up from his nap yesterday, he went shopping with his mom and aunt (no, he doesn't need new shoes yet) while Alex and I set about puzzle-solving which boards needed to go where in the attic before nailing them back into place. Then we rebuilt the mechanism on the master bathroom toilet, which had gotten sediment-clogged. Busy day all around, including the adults watching the film version of The Da Vinci Code after Leo was in bed. (OK, but nowhere near as compelling as any of us remembered the book.)

This morning, he got to play with relatives more, and then after his nap Kirstin's friend Natalie came over to borrow maternity clothes. Add in a trip to the park and grocery shopping, and we ended with a pretty busy day.

Amusingly, the first picture isn't his "guck" and the big cube isn't something Cynthia and Alex brought down from Charlotte. But, we haven't had the camera out recently, just because he's had us so much on the go.