1st Barley Biscuit

Jamie is very interested in food. He wants everything we eat and drink. We try to have family meals together, so now that he realizes what we are doing, we sit him at the table with us and give him some of his food. He still has a very small menu, which includes only 4 starter foods, but we wanted to have a leisurely weekend breakfast recently, so we thought we'd him his first barley biscuit, a teething biscuit made of barley. He loved it so much he got a trance-like expression, but we ended up gagging on our pancakes! You can see why. No more barley biscuits while we are trying to eat, too!


Hmmmm, what's this?



Hey, this is pretty good!



Oh yeah, that's good biscuit!



When can I have another one?

Camping + Racing

We finally got around to camping Father's Day weekend (and I'm finally getting around to posting the pictures two weeks later). We drove across Maryland to Deep Creek Lake and set up camp at Swallow Falls State Park. Swallow Falls is a small park with a few water falls nearby. We've been there once before in the dead of winter. It looks quite different without a foot of snow covering everything.

We got there Friday evening and set up camp. Then we headed to the Wisp Ski resort to practice for the mountain bike race I was going to race in the next day. The Racer's Edge had set up a real nice dual slalom course. I got in a few practice runs while Christine pushed Jamie up the mountain in his stroller then we headed back to camp, made dinner, and attempted to go to bed.

It seemed traffic on interstate 70 and Jamie had other plans. We heard rumors that traffic had jammed up on I-70. This meant that people who had planned on coming to the mountains were delayed greatly. (We left really early and missed all the traffic). People were coming in to the camp site all night long and unfortunately tents do not provide much shelter from noise or car headlights. It was also significantly colder than we had anticipated (upper 40's). Jamie did not approve and had fits of screaming at various intervals all through out the night. It was pretty miserable, for him, for us, and for the entire campground!

As is usually the case he was in perfectly good spirits again by morning. Here he is cuddling up to Dad the day before Father's Day:



Saturday it was back to the race course. I didn't do so well in my race but I still had a blast. It's funny. I felt like I had a great qualifying run as was really pumped but then when they posted the times, I was 12th out of 14, just behind the fat kid and the guy who wrecked. I was pretty bummed. I guess I should just be happy at least I felt like I had a good run. During my race run, I beat the guy out of the gate and through the first 2 turns and then he passed me. I was doing pretty good keeping up but then I came into the 4 pack too hot and with my wrong foot forward and that was the end of that. I think he came across the line 4 or 5 lengths ahead of me. Then it was time for beers.

I didn't get to ride to much else. I concentrated on practicing for the dual. I did ride the Saturday DH course once. It seemed really easy to ride, but maybe not really easy to ride fast. The high speed grassy section at the bottom was just plain fun. I thought the jump line at the top was really slow. I heard that the Sunday course was much more technical. I probably should have gotten over to check it out but I just ran out of time and energy. It took a lot of work to push the bike up the dual course over and over.

Here's a random shot of me coming over the finish line hip during my race run:



Sunday was Father's day. Jamie's present to me was to only wake up once in the night with little or no screaming! Yea! Rest, what more could a Dad ask for? We had a nice leisurely morning in camp, got everything packed up and then went out for pizza. After lunch, we went back to the park and took a hike. We tried out the backpack again after having put it away for a month or two. In an earlier post, I reported that Jamie was too small for the pack and didn't like it. Now he loves it. He laughs and giggles when I put him in and pick him up! He likes being up high and playing with the back of my head and pulling at my ears.



Well that's all from the big camping trip. Can't wait to do it again!

One more shot from our little attention monger:



More Race Pictures

Cousins

Ian is a nice cousin. He likes to hold Jamie and rock Jamie in the cradle. Ian wants to make sure Jamie has his "bank" in. "Bank" is southern for "binkie", or pacifier. He was a little obsessed making sure it was in Jamie's mouth, and if he'd had a hammer, he would have hammered it in! Ian also shares a lot with his cousin. He shared toys temporarily this past weekend, but he shares clothes and even let Jamie borrow his crib.

Tub Time!

Yea! It's bath time! Last time we took Jamie to the Dr. we found out (as we had already suspected) that he is a rather long boy. At four month's he was already over 27", 3" shy of our friends 18 month old little girl. Wow! Anyway, he's wearing 9-12 month old clothes, and well, he's out grown his little infant bath tub. Can't sit up yet, and our knees are too bad to squat down and wash him in the big people tub. Whatever are we to do? I had a spare storage bucket I got at Target so I figured why not? Well, it works great. It's big enough for him and a few toys and plenty of water to splash around in.

Here he is enjoying bath time:




Note: the use of his prehensile upper lip:

Tent time.

So a couple of weeks ago I was telling Christine that I really needed to get up at the crack of dawn and go hunt yard sales for a big family tent and a 2 burner camp stove. You may remember that we posted some pictures of Jamie in my backpacking tent. Well, that's much too small for all of us to camp out it comfortably. And my backpacking stove, well, it's good for boiling a pot of water but not much else. No sooner had I said it, I checked the classifieds and there I saw "Large tent $70, camp stove $20. Call XXX-XXXX". So I called and went right out and picked it up. I ended up getting both for $80.

When I got home I set it up in the yard. Well, as advertised it is a LARGE tent! Not quite yurt sized but probably the next best thing. We ended up leaving it in the yard for about a week. The weather was still cool and it was a great place to hang out.

Outside in the yard:



Inside the tent, room for lawn chairs, plenty of toys and plenty of sleeping pads:



Jamie at Play:


Jamie at Work:


False perspective makes Jamie's head look huge:


Why do I put up with you people?


Okay, I guess you are pretty funny after all!

1 Month

Wow. I haven't updated in a while. It's been almost exactly a month since I had my big wreck. Things are mostly back to normal. All the pretty colors have faded away. I've started back doing road riding and swimming to get myself back into some semblance of physical shape. A month off really does exact a toll on your conditioning. It's really only been in the last week or so that I have been able to do anything strenuous. I hope to do an actual trail ride this week. Hopefully everything will be in good working order by Father's Day weekend, two weeks from now. I'd really like to race in the MD State Championship downhill race at Wisp. There was a race this weekend, but common sense (common sense being Christine for the most part) told me to take another couple of weeks to get back into the swing of things.

Lot's of new pictures of the boy to post, but I'll give them their own entries.