I'm going to Disneyland without Finn; he's complaining

This afternoon I'm going to Anaheim for an American Library Association conference, and I won't be back until TUESDAY NIGHT. It's the longest I've ever been away from Finn by far, and I'm a little nervous. I'm focusing on the chance to see Nina, Mom, and Teri, going to Disneyland, and some uninterrupted sleep (Finn went 10 hours between feedings last night, by the way - a new record). I'll definitely miss him a lot. Missing bedtime will be especially hard. My favorite part of every day is right before we put him down, right after reading stories, when I rock him and sing to him and he lays his little head on my shoulder. But I'll be back on Tuesday.

In the meantime, I was checking out some baggage guidelines online yesterday and happened across American's rules for checking racks of antlers. They must be "as free of residue as possible" and "the skull must be wrapped and tips protected." My cousin Mariah's coming to visit us after the 4th, and she's flying Northwest, so I thought I'd check their guidelines in case she wanted to bring some antlers. It turns out Northwest charges the same, but doesn't have as many rules about cleanliness and the like - something to keep in mind, I guess. And Northwest will accept pole vault poles as checked luggage, whereas American will not. This information has to be useful to somebody, right?

Grandma Mary got here on Tuesday (sans antlers) and will be here pretty much the whole time I'm gone, which makes things a lot easier. Finn's having a great time running around town with her, and I think he's keeping her pretty busy. He seems to think he's ready to crawl, but hasn't quite figured out the mechanics yet. He's always trying to get us to put him down so he can lurch off after something, but once he's there, he's stuck, and this seems to confuse him. Here's about a minute and a half of footage from last week of him down on the floor, thinking about getting mobile.



He also finally figured out he can combine consonants and vowels to make syllables ("da ya ji!") and is doing some honest to goodness babbling. I caught some at the park last week, and here's a clip. So far he'll mostly only do it if he's kind of annoyed and bored, so I had to sit off to the side and ignore him for a while to get him going. He's easily fixed, though, as you can see.