Trip to TN to visit the Grandparents!

Well, I had a birthday this past week. I hit the big 35. Seems like a nice round number. Maybe it means I'm all grown up.... Naw, couldn't possibly. Well, for my birthday, my parents bought us round trip tickets to TN. So we loaded up the duffel bag with an impossible amount of crap and jumped on the 2 hour flight to Nashville. From there is was a 2 hour drive to the mountain. Much better than a 10 hour drive from Naptown. Jamie was a little angel for the flight and not too bad on the car ride.

One of the points of our visit was to get a four generation photograph with Jamie, Dad, Grandpa and great Grandpa, so on Friday we went to Sears to get our pictures taken. Jamie thought the photographer lady was crazy. She kept making obnoxious silly faces and loud noises, none of which Jamie much appreciated.





Yeah, that was about the best we could do. Pretty sad, huh?

Back home, Jamie was all smiles.

Here he is in his "Sunday, go to church" kilt:




with Ma's horses Cherokee "Cheeky" and Cino






Saturday, Christine and I did a nice long hike at Frozen Head State Park. No pictures, but here's a map:



Sunday Shawn came up for a visit and we hiked to the top of the mountain and descended via a new oil pipeline right of way. It was quite steep.

2 More Rides

Well, we've been putting the bike trailer to good use. We took two nice long rides on consecutive weekends. Both rides were roughly 25 miles long.

The first weekend we went to the Eastern Shore and road from Easton, MD to Oxford, MD, took a ferry from Oxford to Bellevue and then headed back to Easton. The ferry passage was authorized in 1683 and has been operating on and off since then. It is believed to be the oldest continually operating ferry service in the United States.


View Larger Map

A few pictures:

Jamie's Copassenger:


Taking a break in Oxford:


Leaves are tasty!


Daddy tired. Pulling trailer against bay breeze hard work.


Waiting for the next ferry to arrive:


The Ferry Departs!


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This past weekend we went to the C&O canal towpath and rode from Sharpsburg, MD, famous of course, for the battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day of battle in the Civil War, to Harper's Ferry, WV famous for the John Brown's rebellion against slavery. A lesser known fact is that Harper's Ferry served as the supply depot for the Lewis & Clark expedition. Meriwether Lewis is of course Jamie's namesake and long lost cousin.

We made it!


Gnats were prevalent.


Gotta crawl after being strapped in the trailer!


Visiting long-lost relatives:


Future hiker:


Back at the truck!

A few pictures from Grandma and Grandpa's recent visit

During the visit we went out to Thomas Point and caught a glimpse of the Thomas Point Light House.



For some reason Grandpa, started calling Jamie "Captain Marshmallow". From there were worked up a whole s'mores theme. Here's the Captain with Graham.



And here's Captain Marshmallow and his whole S'mores gang, Graham and Hershey Bar.

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?

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!

Go Boy Go!

Could little Jamie be a future tour champion? Here he is doing a little stationary cycling. I think he needs to work a little on his cadence but other than that, good form all around (well except for that terrible posture).



He was actually sweating up a storm after his "workout".

3 Months Old

Jamie turned three months old this last Thursday. I think we can officially ditch saying "He's X weeks old" now that he has a significant number of months under his belt. It always bugs me when people say that...

Here's a few pictures for you:

Yeah, the weather's been crazy. It's still pretty cold here. Here's Jamie all bundled up and ready to go:


Time for the Springtime Mama shearing. Christine decided that she was tired of Jamie spitting up in her hair so she cut it all off. So here she is all shorn.


She had about 1 foot of hair which she was kind enough to donate to "Locks of Love" for children with cancer.


Jamie still hasn't found thumb, but likes his fingers, meanwhile plots many things we don't know about yet.

New Pictures at Last!

Well we finally took some new pictures of the boy. So here they are!

Jamie loves his little piggy Leon. Last night Jamie was upset for some reason so I gave him Leon. He grabbed Leon up and sort of cuddled him and calmed right back down. Sweetest thing ever.



Yes, Jamie's hair really is falling out. It's all perfectly normal. Oddly enough he's really starting to look a lot more like his father now. I guess it just took some male pattern baldness for us to figure out who he looks like!

The Nursery!

Well, Momma's little tax break didn't quite materialize as we had hoped. We were shooting for December 29th. That's my Dad's birthday and parents' wedding anniversary. Wednesday night we were thinking maybe "things" were happening but it turned out to be a false alarm. Oh well. We did still manage to put a baby in the cradle. Actually he put himself there.



The cats fight over who gets to sleep in the cradle. The baby better learn to fend for itself or it's going to end up sleeping on the floor. Speaking of the nursery, here's a quick shot. It's a little crowded but you get the picture. The changing table is actually a nice kitchen cart that Natalie and Michael brought us on their last visit. Natalie gave us a some vinyl to cover it with. I thought that was quite enough. So I sacrificed one of my backpacking sleeping pads which was the perfect width. I just trimmed the end off, stretched the vinyl over the top of the table and nailed it down with some upholstery tacks. Works great. Can't wait to use it. (yes actually I can wait, ewwwww!)



Shady likes to get in on the action too!