Six Years

It's our six year anniversary today :)

Trippy Baby and REI Dividend

In the quest to find ways to soothe Finn we listen to a lot of music. Our tunes here play through the computer via iTunes. iTunes has this thing called the Visualizer. It gets seriously trippy. But, Finn loves to watch it. It moves along with the music, changing colors and patterns with the beat. Sometimes it's a bit overwhelming for me, but he just eats it up. I hope I'm not rotting his brain, I'll apologize to him now in case I am. Here are some screen shots in case you don't have iTunes at home so you can see what all the fuss is about...

And what did YOU spend YOUR REI dividend on this year?

Not much sun here but we're practicing for Colorado. Joking aside, sunglasses for babies and kids are a good idea. UV can damage to your eyes that can eventually cause macular degeneration (blindness) or cataracts. Protecting children's eyes is especially important. Places like Colorado where we get high exposure to UV we want to be especially careful with Finn's little eyes! This has affected our family so we're extra aware. If you're curious - http://preventblindness.org/eye_problems/sunFAQ.html

PS Finn wears his sunglasses like a champ :)

New online home

Whoa, we moved! (online)

Well, soon we're leaving Ireland, so we decided to get a new website, too. The 'eire' in the address seemed a little strange once we weren't going to be in Eire anymore. Plus the 'mt' didn't leave any room for Finn!

One of the reasons I liked mulitply was the nice photo albums I could post actually on the site. However there are a bunch of times I've been really frustrated with multiply, mostly when I'm trying to post and the site is moving at about the speed of cold molasses, so I poked around on a few other free places to see what I could see.

So now you'll have to navigate away to see photo albums but I hope you'll eventually come back. Since I've been better about blogging and updating on munchkin progress that part of the site has been getting more use anyway. I'm guessing a couple pictures here and there are more exciting for most then the massive albums of European architecture we were posting. Fun for us but you all really want to see the wee one, we know ;)

Hope this works for all of you, keep us bookmarked in your favorites and check back often.

Toe Balls and Pea Pods

As Travis' mom so aptly put it, we have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.

Finn is three months old! Whoo hoo! This is when he turns the corner, starts to figure out the world, and will STOP CRYING! Oh no, faithful readers, lady luck does not shine upon our wee one. It appears that he's probably starting to teethe. Towards the end of last week he started drooling everywhere. And rubbing his face. And I won't share the amazing things he's started to excrete... We were all excited because it looked like he was figuring out that he has hands, as he's starting to chew on them. But really he's just chewing on them when they accidentally get into range...and he needs to soothe his gums. Poor little guy.

I finally was able to get a finger in to rub his gums and they do seem a bit swollen to me. I give him some baby Tylenol when it seems to get really bad and have some homeopathic herbal gel stuff the pharmacist gave me to rub on his gums (pharmacists here have way more prescribing authority than ones in the US, you can avoid a lot of dr visits for little nuisances and just chat with your pharmacist instead). *sigh* someday we'll have one of those happy burbling babies...

So in the meantime we do lots of distracting play time. During some of this playtime I noticed Finn's little toes were totally round. And I mean round like bb's. It cracked me up! First I wondered if he had a blister or something, then decided he's got round toes because he doesn't put any pressure on them yet. Maybe all babies have perfectly round toes and I've just never noticed. I'll admit I've never gotten much chance to study other babies' toes much. We tried to take a picture of his 'toe balls' but it's a little out of focus. Seems the camera focused on his face. I posted it anyway, maybe I'll get another better picture of the toe balls later.

It's also gotten a lot cooler around here lately. No more crop pants and sandals, time for the scarves and heavier jackets. Still not super chilly, but feels like autumn. Finn's still a little furnace and cranks out heat like nothing else, but even I have to break down and put some warmer clothes on him when we go for walks. Today we walked with the baby carrier, and I used the 'winter' cover for the first time. It's made of wind stopper fleece with reflective piping. What a outdoorsy fellow this Finn already is. So here's Finn and I preparing to go for our walk. He looks like a little black and white pea pod or baby silk worm. We had to prop the camera up on the book shelf so it's sort of a weird angle on the picture, sorry.

Anyway, the crying stopped once we got going, Finn LOVES to look around. He'll really enjoy it when he's big enough to sit up in the big boy stroller but for now he'll have to be happy with occasional front facing jaunts in the carrier. Now, in Dublin once it gets cold the entire city puts away all clothing with any color in it. Everyone dresses in black, white, gray or if they're feeling really outrageous maybe some brown. So here are Finn and I going for our afternoon walk, me in a bright orange scarf (not in the picture) and Finn in his bright red hat. We made quite the picture. It was quite obvious we were not Irish.

Happy Advertising

So there's this ad on TV here now that just makes you feel good. I have no idea if it's actually selling the product or not, but I really enjoy it every time it comes on. Here's the link on youtube, it's worth taking the time to watch... enjoy and I hope it brings a smile to your face. Make sure you have sound :) I suppose this probably is especially appealing to those of us that are of an age that the music reminds us of fond childhood memories...