Goodbye Jolly

Today was a very, very sad day. Ciaran has been in physical therapy since he came home from the hospital. Westchester County has an exceptional early intervention program and as a preemie Ciaran got on the fast track for services. Out of an amazing program we managed to get the most premier, excellent, wonderful physical therapist of the whole bunch.

Her name is Anjali, but Beckett always called her Jolly. It was very fitting. She was always so encouraging and happy and helpful. She knew just how hard to push Ciaran to make him work, but not make him break down. She always brought an extra toy for Beckett to play with during therapy so he didn't feel left out. He will miss those bowling animals. She did a great job explaining to me what I needed to be doing at home to help Ciaran achieve his physical goals. She was the first person I called when he finally rolled from his back to his tummy. (Sorry Chris.) Unfortunately for our family she is moving far away and today was our last session together. I am beside myself. We will miss her so much.

Beckett actually took this picture for us. It's a little blurry, but not bad.

Highland Games

Today we went to the Highland Games in Norwalk, CT. This is the 87th year it has been in existence. It's the third oldest games in the US. It was as fun as anything with two small children can be.

We made our way through all the clan tents learning about them and getting stamps in our passports. We learned their war cries and made up our own. Mommy's war cry is, "Those are my rules!" Daddy's war cry is "Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooolaso, aso aso!" Beckett's war cry varies greatly. The latest incarnation was, "I see a red rose!" (Which if you're going to go all Lancastrian or something is a pretty good war cry. Or I guess it would be more York since they wanted to kill the red roses....I digress.) Personally I liked, "I like to play Smash Brothers!"

One clan tent with a very good reference book and nice chart did manage to find our poor little, defunct Somerville Clan. Our beast is a dragon shooting fire out of BOTH ends. Well done Lord Somerville for slaying that "worm".

(Another not so helpful clan guy told me it didn't matter if we were StUArts or StEWarts they were all the same. I'm not so sure my ancestors would agree.)

Chris inadvertently wore Clan Macpherson shorts. We're not so sure which clan Beckett inadvertently wore.

We watched some dancing...a fling or a reel or something. It kind of involved swords so that was neat.

We also spent a good amount of time watching a couple of the "heavy" events. I will steal from Wikipedia and explain. (Our hot, crying children forced us to leave before the caber toss. Sad.)

Scottish hammer throw: This event is similar to the hammer throw as seen in modern-day track and field competitions, though with some differences. In the Scottish event, a round metal ball (weighing 16 or 22 lb for men or 12 or 16 lb for women) is attached to the end of a shaft about 4 feet in length and made out of wood, bamboo, rattan, or plastic. With the feet in a fixed position, the hammer is whirled about one's head and thrown for distance over the shoulder. Hammer throwers sometimes employ specially designed footwear with flat blades to dig into the turf to maintain their balance and resist the centrifugal forces of the implement as it is whirled about the head. This substantially increases the distance attainable in the throw.

We almost get an up kilt shot.

Chris got this great video of a hammer toss in action.

Weight over the bar, also known as weight for height. The athletes attempt to toss a 56 pound (4 stone) weight with an attached handle over a horizontal bar using only one hand. Each athlete is allowed three attempts at each height. Successful clearance of the height allows the athlete to advance into the next round at a greater height. The competition is determined by the highest successful toss with fewest misses being used to break tie scores.

The sound of pipe bands and their piping competition filled the background constantly, but I don't think we got any videos of it. We ate scotch eggs and shrimp and chips (for some reason I wanted shrimp not fish). I didn't go for the Irn Bru because it was $3 for a little bottle and that made my penny pinching Scots blood boil. Beckett golfed and won 2 prizes and cheated at the ring toss, but they still let him have 3 prizes for that and fishing. He is in love with his dragon necklace and I think is going to fight to wear it to church tomorrow.

And here are some random "flavor" shots.

Beckett Pulls Ciaran in a Wagon

The one year check up

As you can see Ciaran is 18 lb 5oz. Unfortunately this is still not on the charts but it is really close.

If you peek at the bottom right of the picture you can see he's also 27.5 inches tall. This is also not on the charts but it's like right below the line. So close to touching.

His head is 18 inches in circumference which is on the charts. It's the 25%. Ah, my big head kids.

He's still growing well and following his own growth curve. Hopefully by his 15 month appointment all of him will be on the charts.

Ciaran is ONE!

Our tiny little Ciaran is a giant, grande one year old. I can't wait for his one year appointment on June 18. I don't know how big he is, but it's a whole lot bigger than this:

Quite a contrast to this active little guy
(Okay this is Beckett's crown, but poor Ciaran is really getting the raw end of the second child stick with about zero birthday preparations on our part, so I put the crown on him for festive purposes.)

And Chris and I continue to prove that we are inhuman monsters and the worst parents alive as we allow our second child to have demon sugar.

(And that monkey on my back was delicious. Red velvet cake from Juniors.)

In developmentally appropriate fashion Ciaran attempts to eat his presents open. Thank you Grandma.

Mommy and Ciaran.

Daddy and Ciaran.

Singing Happy Birthday, which thanks to Beckett we did about 7 times.

And yes, Beckett is running around in only underwear. Potty training is tough.

And finally, we attempt to get Ciaran to say "Da, da" which he normally does rather well, but we can't stop him making satisfied, "Mmm, cake" noises.

You must read

My brother-in-law wrote a very beautiful piece on his blog today. I can't explain how wonderful and faith and life affirming it is. He and my sister have had many struggles due to his vision problems but they always soldier on. He had a little miracle and it was wonderful. Please go to his blog and read in his own words. I'm so proud of him and my sister. We're very lucky to have them in our family.

Beckett By a Creek

We went to our friends' house this afternoon for a bbq. They have a really nice backyard that has a small creek running past. Beckett loved to throw rocks into the water. Later, there was a duck couple that came up from the water and we were able to feed them some crackers. I took a couple of pictures of Beckett in this idyllic setting that turned out pretty nice, even though it was just with my cracked iPhone's camera. I guess we can thank Beckett for that, since he's looking pretty awesome in his church shirts, which he refused to take off after church.

How is this news?

http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/05/23/baby-beckett-tastes-pop-rocks/

Somehow our 2 year old video of Beckett eating poprocks has gone viral. It has over 131,000 views. Several major websites have randomly featured it and we've had requests from others like Cheezburger to feature it still more. Youtube told us we could monetize it somehow and G4 TV's Web Soup Show asked us if they could feature it. We said no. Well, actually we said nothing, which when you need a release, is a no. For the most part people are positive, but there are people who think we should have our children taken away from us for the horrible child abuse we perpetrated on defenseless Beckett. And evidently my off the cuff, "In the name of experimental parenting" has had way too much read into it. So we have removed all our videos from Youtube, except the poprocks video because quite frankly we are now a little interested to see how many hits it will get before it inevitably goes back into the faceless anonymity of cyberspace where we meant for it to stay. This means that if you look at old videos on our blog that are Youtube videos they will no longer be there. We are one step away from a private blog...

Beckett on a bike

It's warm enough now that we can finally get some good use out of the bike Beckett got for Christmas.

He loves his bike. You can tell from his crazy love eyes.


As long as someone is pushing him that is.

He's not a fan of that whole pedaling thing.

About 4 minutes into our idyllic, Norman Rockwell, teach your child to ride a bike, wholesome family evening he said, "How about we play basketball."

New Blog Launch

Instead of taking up precious child adoration space with my worthless achievements ;-) I've decided to start a new blog. I am working my way through my knitting library. If you're interested check out the new

knitmylibrary.blogspot.com