Sania Walks!

Sania Walks on Vimeo

Sania has been doing a lot of tentative standing lately, taking her hands off the various things she leans on and marveling at the fact she hasn't fallen. Today at daycare, apparently, she began letting go and taking steps. Tonight, we caught the whole thing on tape, as you can see.

Tomorrow, if you're keeping track, marks Sania's 10th month. Look out!

Closing out the Week

Well, it would appear, as long as things don't go disastrously off-course tomorrow morning, that we have survived K's brief sojourn in the Middle East. She is already on a plane winging her way homeward, have departed at 5 AM local time, which was something like 10 PM here.

Sania and Reid have slept each night throughout without waking. Sania started the week having only drank mother's milk and water; now she drinks baby formula. Reid tried a new cereal yesterday. Big things were afoot. But we never lost sight of our goal: survive.

Tonight, as each night, the kids were in pretty nice form. Sania was amazingly active all night, climbing and yelling her special diction ("aaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAhh!") and trying to vault her tiny self into Reid's bathtub fully-clothed. Reid has definitely seemed a little run-down lately, but he was still good, and he was perfectly understanding about two delayed meals in a row (pizza or pork tenderloin, it seems I can't get everything on the table on time).

This weekend we should take it easy. Maybe I'll let mom take him to a library and I'll hang out with Sania for a while.

That'll be nice and relaxing.

Ode to a Tardy Pizza-Man

When K was getting ready to go on her trip, we talked about dinners and bed-time and things like that. Offhandedly, one of us mentioned that we could do pizza one night as a little treat for Reid because it usually means we get to take in a mind-expanding episode of "The Backyardigans" while we eat our dinner.

I'm only commuting into the office three days this week, so I picked one of those days for pizza-night. Reid was excited, of course.

Both kids were playing as I ordered the pizza and started clearing some room amid the family-room rubble for us to eat in there. I started feeding Sania (bananas and apples and chicken and green beans and everything everywhere!) which helped time pass. All was going well. But the pizza-man never came.

I called the pizza place, and they called the delivery man, but he never answered. An hour passed. I made Reid a sandwich. I called the pizza place again. No news. It was like my pizza had fallen into a black hole.

I was about to make myself a sandwich as well, as bedtime was only minutes away. Then I heard the sheepish rapping on the door. Pizza man, holding an alarmingly cold pie.

The day started strangely, too. That snow I reported on kept falling. We had a two-hour delay by morning, and that sent a confusing bundle of messages to Reid, who spends the first few minutes of most days determining whether he has to go to school today. Yet there was no rushing around, and he was suspicious while playing with abandon for the found hours at home. It was good, though, because single-parenting this week has sharpened my focus on his need to spend some time with a parent focusing only on him. While he has responded marvelously to Sania in so many ways, I know he has lost the undivided attention of his favorite playmates, mom and dad. So we played, and chatted, and visited a coffeeshop on our way to school. And he told me, "you're a good dad." I sure hope so, son.

Shut-In Humor; Snow?

Ms. Sania was showing off her standing up talents today, in a great mood and crawling all over to find new things against which to prepare a vertical ascent. Especially lethal is her kung fu-like immobilizing move known as "the climber." She crawls up to you while you're doing some perilous, like handling raw pork or a hot skillet, and then traps you wherever you are standing by tenuously and gently pulling herself up on your pant-leg.

Reid found a rope. Reid also appears to have deeply internalized lessons from previous K trips abroad and now runs from me like the camera shoots acid. I got about twenty pictures of Sania looking cute as a bug, and four of Reid. Two were blurry, one was this, and one is just a tiny tuft of hair sticking out from behind the couch, where he was hiding.

Like I said, Sania was in good shape today. For breakfast, she had her first ever bottle of formula. We realized when K was preparing for the trip that we were going to have to go to formula while she was gone. It would have happened either way, as our once-fabled stockpile of human milk had dwindled as Sania's consumption increased. But today was the day. I looked in the bag of frozen breastmilk and there was nothing but a lone, sad three ounce brick.

Sania took to the formula as she has to almost all ingestible things she has encountered in her short life, by eating it all without blinking an eye. Also, she is eating half a chicken breast with her evening dinner of two four-ounce baby food jars. She's a machine.

It started snowing some time after all the kids went to bed tonight. It's really pretty. It was forecast but I was still surprised when I let Dixie out for her last visit to the yard. It reminded me that I caught Dixie snoozing and looking cute and vulnerable like she did when she was a much younger dog. I snapped a picture.

Random Photos

K's on travel again, which is something that makes us sad here at Rizkerson central. However, it is always cause for jubilation among the legions of Rizkerson fans, because it means the return of the RPOD.

The RPOD (ar-pod), of course, stands for Reid Photo of the Day, and was born during some of K's international globe-trotting. Well, I'm not ready to retire the acronym (especially since RSPOD, pronounced ars-pod, sounds terrible), so without further ado, the first RPODs of 2007!

We were just hanging out at the house tonight, and I was frantically pressing buttons on the camera and re-taking photographs in an attempt to make the house look less orangish in photography. As you can see, we moved the red couch into the living room and with the yellow walls, it's like the saffron temple in some of these shots. You can see the photo above, I mashed some button that 1) revealed Reid's pale mid-winter skin tone and 2) looks better than the mood-lit Sania picture below.

Reid is such a little man now. He found this hat and immediately put it backwards on his head, like a Patriots fan. Ugh. Meanwhile, Sania is a machine meant to do one thing: pull herself into a standing position and stare wild-eyed at the nearest adult hoping to be walked around the house practice-walking. I do this all but fifteen minutes of the evening.