One is good in the daytime, One is good at night

Yes, this is a daddy update. I'm here! After spending two weeks, minus the weekend in between, down at UC Santa Barbara, it is very nice to be back HOME. I was down there for two extrasolar planets research conferences.

The situation at home is pretty good. Finn has really started to be a bit more of a challenge, as he nears 2 1/2, compare to when he was closer to 2. He'd rather do what he wants to do, rather than listen to what his parents are telling him what he can and can't do. He's purposely messy at the dinner table. I wouldn't really call him a terror, but we can certainly tell he difference between now and two months ago.

He's been getting interested in plants and dirt, and he now has a spade (that he "shares" with Katie) and a little hand-held rake. We planted a flower in the front yard that my uncle Gregory gave to us. And here he is with his little tomato plant sprouts, which came up only a few days after we planted them. Somehow 5 seeds yielded 7 plants!

We're also working on Finn being able to put on his clothes and take them off. Being able to pull down your pants is an important aspect of being potty trained. Pants are really tough because of his big cloth diaper, but we're making some progress on shirts and sleeves. We'll keep you posted.

As Katie mentioned, we got an emu egg from the Mountain View farmer's market. It was mostly for me, because I wanted to eat it. We did that in Tucson with an ostrich egg (omelet party!) and I still have the intact egg shell in my office. Finn has a book on shelf where a green emu egg is quite important, so he needed to spend a lot of time holding my egg, after I got the white and yolk out. And of course eventually he dropped it and it got a little shattered. Sigh. I was a little surprised that I wasn't more upset. Maybe it was a sign that I don't need an eggs-of-large-flightless-birds collection....but really I do!

Graham is like a jolly and snuggly little squeezy robot who is powered by your smiles, and he wants to make you smile. He LOVES his momma, and must be in her arms when he is not eating or playing with toys, or watching Finn. But he needs to work on his sleeping. He is mostly great from 7:30 pm til 2 a.m., but then after that he can be kind of a mess. We're taking a different approach to his waking, compared to Finn as his age. We're letting him work it out on his own, a bit more. But he gets himself in trouble because he can flip over and get wedged against the bars, and he can't get unstuck to go back to sleep. (Katie informed me that he rolled over today, back to front, like it was nothing, but we'd never seen it before. We'd only seen him end up weird positions in his crib, which implied that he could do it!) He is actually doing much better at sleep than Finn was at his age, as I recall, but I'm ready for him to be as good as Finn is now: no peeps until 6 a.m.!

Graham is a big fan of all forms of solid food so far. He's a very loud and grunty eater, and gets mad if the food doesn't come fast enough. And I mean really fast. We call it the between-spoonful hungries. What a cutie!!!