Easter Weekend 2007
Easter weekend was generally pretty good. It was far colder than I had hoped, but at least there was no snow or rain.
hilhas1 and gonj came up and stayed with us this weekend, which is always fun. hilhas1, with only a few nuggets of information from helloheather and I, was able to make a number of tremendous discoveries regarding my family tree on both my mom and dad's side. It was quite amazing to see her work through census data and draw these connecting lines.
Saturday evening helloheather's dad and step-mom came over for dinner. Prior to that gonj and I and helloheather's dad tried out gonj's RC craft. It is designed to travel over the ground, fly, and go over water. It was rather difficult to control and we ended up hitting pretty much every tree or bush in the area. In other words, lots of fun.
Easter Sunday was spent at my aunt and uncle's near Rockford. We arrived over an hour late because Nathan was sleeping and we felt he needed the sleep more than he needed to be woken up and hauled around in the car. He might have gone back to sleep in the car, but we didn't want to chance it. As it turns out he was all full of energy for family when we arrived, so hurray for a good decision on our part.
Interestingly, for the first time (that I can remember) he cried because he didn't see either helloheather or I. When we arrived, everyone else was finishing eating, so my mom held Nathan while we load up our plates. But after losing sight of us for a bit (and I'm sure seeing all the unfamiliar faces), he became upset. It breaks my heart to see him sad, but I realized that this is another important step in his development. I'm amazed at how quickly he is growing up.
St. Patrick is the patron saint of crawling
This past weekend, helloheather, Nathan, and I headed to Indianapolis. I took Friday off in order to give us enough time to drive down with frequent (if necessary) stops for Nathan. We both would much rather travel during the day than at night...and it's never, ever fun to try and drive out of Chicago at 5pm on a Friday.
After arriving we headed down to somebodystrange and davesanngel's new house south of Indy for food and seeing both new puppies and everyone who traveled so far to be there. We drove into town with the light fading but it showed me that I would love to head back there in the evening with a camera and a tripod. I think the textures and forms would fit right into the minimalism that seems to be most prevalent in my photography.
Staying with hellohilary and gonj was good, as it always is. They have a really nice place. Gonj and I got in a few games of Project Gotham Racing 3 on the XBOX 360. I was hoping the weather would be a little warmer that I could take Nathan out in the stroller for a bit of a walk, but it remained cool. His napping schedule prevented us from being able to eat and drink at the Broad Ripple Brew Pub (oh scotch eggs how I miss thee) on Saturday, but everyone came over after lunch and visited.
Saturday night was another great St. Patrick's day party at Paul and Sue's. Child-wrangling (as helloheather pointed out in her entry) has certainly changed our parties. Had I not been sick I would have had at least a couple of beverages, but sadly this was not to be. Gone, I fear, are the days of drinking and smoking cigars until 3am on the back porch.
But the big news of the weekend was that Nathan learned how to crawl. He demonstrated it fully that evening when, attracted by St. Patrick's Day beads on a necklace, he scooted across the floor to grab them. Not just once, but many times. It was quite amazing to see and he was clearly happy to do it. I find it very fitting that, surrounded by our friends and our group tradition, Nathan transitioned to another stage in his life. And at the same time, it made me wish we all lived closer together, so that we could more often experience both important and mundane events.
Here, for the first time, we present a Dramatic Reenactment of that very first crawl:
Since then he's only gotten stronger, faster, better...he has the technology...
I just hope I have the energy!
Insert Clever Subject Here…
I had a decent subject line picked out but now I've forgotten it. Since the busy holidays are now behind us, it's time to take stock (in reverse chronological order)
New Years
The three of us rang in the new year with Aaron, Serena, and Charlotte in Wisconsin. Dual baby wrangling left us too tired to last much past midnight, much to the chagrin of Aaron who had just arrived home from work at 11:45pm... Sorry man, I wish I were a younger me. 
Watching Nathan and Charlotte interact this weekend was a joy. Getting a glimpse of what the future holds in terms of behavior and requirements for parenthood was sobering and at the same time exciting.
A Week of Christmas
Christmas gatherings of family occurred on:
Saturday, December 29th
Tuesday, December 26th
Monday (evening) December 25th
Monday (afternoon) December 25th
Monday (morning) December 25th
Sunday December 24th
Saturday December 23rd
And at each event, Nathan was a joy. He was happy to see everyone (and there were a lot of everyones to see) and rarely fussed. It was amazing. He learned that wrapping paper is possibly the Best. Toy. Ever. and that each has its own unique taste. And with three sets of grandparents, there was a /ton/ of wrapping paper to go around
helloheather and I hosted our first Christmas event this year, with my parents, my sister, and my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather coming for an afternoon meal. All in all it went very well.
In the mean time...
Between this all we visitied tinyprayers for dinner on the 28th, had 2 motor mounts repaired and new brakes put on helloheather's car, visited helloheather's paternal grandmother, tried to get some sort of grocery shopping done (it never goes well when I try to do the shopping and this was no exception), cleaned the house, ran about a zillion errands, and spent some time at the donut shop.
What I didn't get done was processing of all the photography (at least we got it sorted and started to cull a bit) and a couple in-house projects I was hoping to finally complete.
Being on vacation from the 21st until today was very nice. The holidays took up more time than I had realized they would, but being able to spend so much time with Nathan and helloheather was wonderful. I miss them both dearly and I wish I could spend time home like this more often.
Illumination
The December Solstice is upon us. I look upon the now lengthening days with joy and happiness. Whether you celebrate with a feast, a flame, or simply by noting the length of the day remember: while the cold of winter may just be settling in, the sun is returning little by little.
Happy Solstice!
Thanksgiving Joy
Grandpa Swanson and Nathan share a laugh
As always, click the image for a larger view.
St. Pat’s by way of Indy
We headed to Indianapolis this past weekend.
Highlights:
1) I only flooded one bathroom with toilet water.
2) I picked Ketel One over Christiana in the vodka tasting.
3) Scotch Eggs at the Broad Ripple Brew Pub.
4) Our A80 rolled over the 20,000 exposures mark.
I miscalculated due to the fact that Canon cameras roll over at 9900 not 9999. As this will be our second roll over, I forgot that I need to subtract by 200 and not 100. Our current image count is 162 making the total number of photos so far: 19,962)
5) helloheather's car rolled over 75,000 miles.
6) Babies!
7) A Singapore Air 747 only a couple hundred feet above us as it took off from ORD. (Hey, it was neat and loud.)
Lots of friends.
9) Listening to my Best of SXSW - 2005 mp3 CD during the drive.
a bevy of photos
I finally got around to posting photos from various events so far this season and year:
The week of Christmas 2005:
http://www.bernhard.us/photos/christmas2005 (6 small sub-albums)
New Years weekend with our friends Aaron and Serena (and their baby Charlotte) and Hilary and Chris:
http://www.bernhard.us/photos/newyears0506
Heather's birthday weekend:
http://www.bernhard.us/photos/heather-birthday-2006
Enjoy!
Hole-in-the-foot
My 2006 resolution to be more active with my blog has started off like gangbusters... I had a "Looking into 2006" post written last week, but I forgot to save before closing my browser and lost it to the great bitbucket in the sky. Wordpress has been upgrade to version 2.0 but sadly doesn't include an automagic draft-save like Gmail. Nor does it have any decent spell checking support. Maybe there are plug-in for those features...
Holidays Recap: Much fun was had. Christmas was a blur of family. New Years was a relaxing time with friends and a 7-week-old. (This might be hard to believe, except Charlotte is so non-fussy it's amazing.). Photos to be uploaded this weekend, if all goes well.
Speaking of photos, I took down my Wordpress install over at cetan.org. Wordpress is just not the right solution for a photoblog. I've installed PixelPress in its place but haven't uploaded anything (which should be rather obvious). cetan.org may just sit idle for a while.
I have a bit of an identity crisis online. Information is scattered across a number of domains and websites, some of which are not being updated properly. Projects have been started and put on hold far too often. I started to consolidate under bernhard.us, except everyone knows my email address under cetan.com. A seriously minor problem in the grand scheme of things, but one that keeps turning over and over in my brain.
This past Monday we had about an hour of lightening and thunder with the rain. January in Chicago hasn't been this weird (weather-wise) in a long time.
A number of other thoughts were supposed to go here, but my brain has hidden them away for a bit. I'll dig through the trash to see what turns up.
All the Whos down in Whoville.
helloheather getting ready for Christmas Eve. She's too darn cute