erik's working hard this month

playing is erik's work, and he's been very busy with it so far this month! i've been having lots of fun snapping pictures of him with my new camera. here are a few of my favorites of him hard at work in march 2009:



i got a little tired of working on my presentation for research in progress, so i made a mosaic of my "erik each month" photoset which has a picture of erik every month from january 2007 - january 2009. i can't believe how much he's grown! he never ceases to amaze me. he knows so many words and speaks largely in complete sentences. he can count to 10 and almost to 20 and is getting better at counting objects. he recognizes letters and numbers and can say his ABCs. his memory is amazing too! we have been checking out a lot of books for him from the library and he's memorizing parts of them after only hearing them once! he can also recite most of "hop on pop" pretty accurately from memory ... without even looking at the book! of course i am terribly biased, but i think he's a really smart little guy. look how much he's changed over the past two years:



i know i've been posting a lot of sunset photos lately, but this month has been absolutely spectacular for them. we've had some of the best i've ever seen over the past couple of weeks. it won't be long before the sun sets directly behind the city from our perspective, and then i'll be sure to get some amazing shots! here is one last mosaic for the day:

spectacular sunset

it's getting late and i'm not up for a full-blown blog, but we had one of the most beautiful sunsets i have seen since we've lived here. and no, i was NOT teasing the dog! i was taking pictures, i swear ...

wanderlust

i've been going through old photos and uploading them to my flickr page as a way of archiving/sharing them. it's a long process since i have so many photos to go through, but it's been a lot of fun seeing all of the places we have gone and things we have done. for the past few nights i have been processing and uploading the photos we took during our alaskan cruise in july 2005. it was an amazing trip, probably in my top two or three vacations ever. seeing these pictures has made me want to go back (with a better eye and a better camera!) to see it all (and more) over again. despite my lack of maturity as a photographer and my lack of decent equipment, i still managed to capture some of the absolutely gorgeous landscapes we saw.

tracy arm fjord:


you can take the girl to alaska, but you can't take the goofball out of the girl!


train in the yukon:


glacier-ific:


wishing i was there with you:

loving the warm(er) weather!

we got kind of a late start this morning. erik and i still have this stupid cold, so i decided to let him sleep as long as he needed to, and he was in a much better mood when he woke today than yesterday. last weekend peter checked out a book about making paper airplanes from the library and made this little round airplane that looks like a pope's hat. he put it on erik's stuffed brobee's head, and when erik saw it this morning, it really tickled him. he went on and on about brobee's "hat" and laughed about it for a good five minutes. it was really cute. we had meetings/seminars scheduled all day at the lab today so it distracted me from the disaster that was my rt-pcr yesterday, and that was a good thing. and i really enjoyed the walk from the bst down to cellomics afterward since the weather was so nice and i had my lost podcast to listen to.

it was close to 60 degrees this afternoon and peter and i took erik to our favorite AWESOME playground in schenley park. it seems like it's been forever since we've been able to go there, and all throughout the winter whenever we'd drive past it, erik would look longingly and say sadly "playground wet" or "cold outside." it was so nice this evening and there were quite a few parents with their kids at the park. erik was loving the slides and the merry-go-round and all of the other great stuff they have to play on there, and i loved the fresh air and getting to play and take more pictures and videos with my new camera.

i think erik's favorite play area is the castle, which has a really cool steep slide, a little "jail," and walls/platforms to climb on. here's a short video of him climbing up the stairs and going down the slide:



and a few cute pics of erik having a great time:






we were treated to another beautiful sunset tonight, and even though it's such a cliche, i had to take a few pictures. the cloud patterns were really interesting and gorgeous.




when it started to get just a little too cool and a little too dark, we decided it was time to go, and went down the street to panera for dinner. we've gone there with erik a few times and it's always been great. we all like the food, the atmosphere and music is nice, and most of all, erik seems to always behave really well when we go there! he's a big bread fan to begin with, plus we always sit by the window so he can watch the cars drive past, and we get him one of those yogurt tubes that kids seem to love, and when erik is happy, peter and i are happy. we had a very relaxed and yummy dinner, then came home and spent the rest of the evening reading books with erik before it was his bedtime. today was a good day.

today

i had a bad start to my day today ... my experiments didn't turn out well at all, i'm still feeling sick (it's been over a week - enough already!), and erik was particularly ornery this morning (he's still sick too). by the time i left the lab to pick up erik, i was in a really foul mood. but seeing my little guy really raised my spirits, and it was warm enough this afternoon that the three of us walked to the little playground down the street and erik had so much fun going down the big winding slide over and over and over again. it was pretty chilly, still in the 40s, but it had been months since he's played at the playground so we stayed awhile and let him enjoy it. one of the nice things about peter's new schedule is that we can do these kinds of things in the afternoons now. it's great having a little extra "family time."

here are some pictures from our walk this afternoon.

running for the playground


my two favorite guys


on the swing!


down the slide!




my happy boy


going home


the sunset was really pretty again tonight so i decided to take some pictures with my new camera from erik's window which has the best view of the west/downtown (the photos above are also from my new powershot ... i love it so far!). unfortunately it's also the window that overlooks our asshole neighbor's back yard with their stupid dog that is always barking and annoying us/waking me up. i have complained (aka yelled loudly from the window) to my neighbor on numerous occasions about the freaking dog who will bark and bark and bark while the neighbors just go about their business without paying any attention to him. (it's a big dog, a chocolate lab, so it has a LOUD bark.) anyway, when i opened the window to take pictures tonight, the dog was out there barking and the stupid neighbor lady had the nerve to yell at me and tell me that if i wouldn't stand there teasing the dog it wouldn't be barking! that really pissed me off! why would i be encouraging the dog to bark when the sound of his bark fills me with murderous rage? grrrr! regardless, i still appreciated the beauty of the sunset, and here are the damn pictures to prove it!

end of winter blahs

hear that mother nature? END of winter! don't make me come out there ...

my resolution to do better at keeping up with my blog has gone the way of most of my resolutions. still i am at least making an attempt to post semi-regularly, primarily because it's one of the few ways that i can actually remember what's going on in my life. i don't know if it's motherhood or being a graduate student, but lately my brain has been mush. maybe i can blame it on the 30 colds i've had since winter started! so yes, i have ANOTHER freakin' cold. poor erik does too. somehow peter has managed to skirt this one so far, but he bore the full brunt of the last one.

the east coast got hit by a pretty bad storm last night, but luckily here in pittsburgh we didn't see so much as a flurry. in fact we really haven't had much snow at all this winter, maybe only one or two significant accumulations, and nothing more than 4 or 5 inches at a time. lately i have been going through my old digital photos (i had planned on starting with even older prints but discovered our scanner doesn't work ... garr), and came across these from a big snow storm we had in 2003 when we were living in green township in nj. we had so much snow the fence in our front yard was almost completely buried.



peter rose to the challenge! (i helped too).







i was very happy not to have to shovel snow this morning, but it sure is cold out there! luckily peter is letting me sleep with my flannel sheets and humidifier, which has been a little bit of heaven on earth while i am sick! is it springtime yet?

just a quickie

i am such a dork. when we sat down at red lobster on sunday for pop pop's belated birthday dinner, i was so excited to be sitting across from an open window because the light falling on erik was perfect for pictures. i took a few, but this is my favorite. it's beautiful in color (you can see his gorgeous blue eyes) but i like it in black and white too.

erik-isms

erik certainly has a unique point of view. last week we had our first "taco night" in ages, probably the first since he's been having dinner with us. he seemed to really like it too! a day or two later, we asked him if he enjoyed taco night, and his reply was "sour cream!" this kid has a thing for condiments, especially mustard (the coarse grain kind) and sour cream, and will eat them by the handful and ask for more. so i guess for erik taco night is just an excuse to eat lots of sour cream. i think he gets this from his opa!

this evening at dinner i was asking him some questions and he kept answering "yes" to everything. so i asked him if he could answer a question with something other than yes, and he said "applesauce!" silly erik.

for at least a couple of weeks now, erik has been saying something that peter and i could never understand. we guessed about everything under the sun, but just couldn't figure it out. erik was getting frustrated, but couldn't explain to us what he was saying. usually i can understand 99% of what he says in context, but he was saying this randomly and in many different places. it sounded like "super motorcycle" or "silver motorcycle" or something like that. finally yesterday he was watching yo gabba gabba and the segment "super martian robot girl" came on (one of my favorites!) and he shouted "super martian girl!" at long last we knew what he was saying! i guess erik's a fan of super martian robot girl too.



we had a really great weekend, including a trip to the carnegie science center, a birthday dinner at red lobster with pop pop, and i got to have a girls night out at dave & busters on saturday night. i reckon i'll get around to blogging about it and posting some photos sooner or later. i have been really distracted/busy lately with TAing microbiology lab for med students. it's actually kind of fun. the group of students we have are very entertaining, especially because today's lab dealt with syphilis and gonorrhea. they kept saying things like "where's the bacteria? oh, sean has gonorrhea!" and "i should be ok as long as i don't rub this petri dish on my genitals, right?"

a few photos from the science center that i have already uploaded ...

here are adam, maggie, morgan, and erik coloring papers which they made into airplanes and attached to balloon rockets to launch:


here is me missing luna at the model railroad:


here is erik pushing maggie's stroller:


maggie and erik playing in the water:


cool sea thing:

last night's sunset

it was pretty. here are a few photos from erik's window.

erik attacking the paparazzi

i frequently try to take pictures and videos of erik on the sly since he's increasingly irritated by my stalking him with the camera. i can't help it - he's just too freaking cute! in this video you see a few precious seconds of erik playing with his cars, followed by him telling me "no pictures!" then knocking me over and finally declaring that "mommy's ok!"



i guess i should be careful, or one day he may end up like this: