Amber

Ramping up

This year, we hosted a small party focusing on the little ones in Amber's life: a few of her friends from day care, and a friend from up the street.

The amazing cat cake

Lynn used the same carrot cake recipe as last year (nice and tasty!), but this year it came in the appearance of Amber's favourite animal.

She blew out the candle herself. Self! SELF!

Blowing out the candle was a huge success.

Cake distribution went smoothly

Very little cake was wasted in the making of this birthday. Most of the cake was consumed rather than applied to faces or clothes.

Daddy and Amber wound down with a book in the window on a rainy day

Thanks to everyone for their cards and calls and emails celebrating Amber's birthday!

Amazing. 365.25 days have flown past and Amber is now a walking one year old featuring approximately six teeth, fuzzy / curly hair, and an extremely expressive personality. We held a party for her on her birthday and were lucky to have family and friends visit and call to share their love for Amber. Here are a few pictures from yesterday's celebrations:

Lynn made this absolutely delicious carrot cake and pink icing from scratch.

Amber enjoyed the icing, but didn't eat too much cake... she didn't even smash it to bits or smear it all over her face. Crazy kid. I'm not sure how Lynn happened to end up making carrot cake, my personal favourite, when she usually isn't a big fan of it. I guess I'm just really, really lucky. This cake was so good, though, that Lynn liked it and would consider making it again -- YEAH!

Amber had the most fun rolling the purple ball around the floor.

The ball in Adam's hand comes from an amazing shape-sorting machine that features lights, sounds, music, and acts as a walker. It seems to have almost magnetic powers to attract the Amber unit. Big thanks to old man Uncle Mike, Christine, and Adam for getting something right up Amber's alley!

Lynn, Calev, Amber, and Deirdre all participated in the opening of presents.

The pink jeep in the foreground was originally Abby's -- thanks David and Karen! Calev is going to get to enjoy his first birthday in just a couple more months, so this was good practice for him. Calev lives up the street from us, and there's hope that maybe early contact with other children her age means that Amber won't grow up to be as curmudgeonly and anti-social as her dad...

So... thanks to everyone who sent cards, called, emailed, or dropped by to share in Amber's first birthday. We really appreciate it, and Amber certainly felt the love. She's very lucky to be growing up with so many people who care about her.

Update

Our baby is growing up so fast. Near the end of February she tottered a couple of tentative steps from me to Lynn.

Last weekend, she walked right across Jason and Kelly's kitchen floor. You can see for yourself if you don't believe me!

Update:

By popular demand, I've posted this video on Google Video. No more worries about codecs! Of course, Google owns me: my searches, my email, my programming projects, my RSS feeds, and now my videos. Curse them for being so competent!

Okay, okay... I've heard the complaints (which have been streaming in over the past couple of weeks). The general tone is something like this:

So I've been checking this site that is dedicated to celebrating all of the wonder that is Amber, and all I've seen is a bunch of beep blippity boop database beep doo bloop library bip blop open source blippity bleep which I couldn't care less about. I want to see some some pictures of Amber! Where are the pictures of Amber?

May I remind my gentle readers that, should they wish to defend their fragile eggshell minds from my ruminations on the techno-info-library-drivel that fills up my working days, that there is a link on the right hand side of the page which allows you to only see blog posts about Amber. You can bookmark that link and never read another word about Apache Derby, PHP, or MARC... unless, of course, Amber decides to follow in Daddy's footsteps. Which, given her interest in bashing at the keyboard, seems entirely possible.

I'm afraid I can't do too much about the (in)frequency of postings. My natural anti-social tendencies can only be suppressed so much. And, just to implicate Lynn, I have offered to show her how she can post entries to the blog multiple times now... for some reason she prefers to send the occasional email pretending to be making up for my own lack of effort in keeping family and friends up to date on Amber.

Err, umm... I love you honey!

Anyhoo, we do happen to have one or two photos of Amber from the last couple of months that you might be interested in.

A little too adorable, don't you think? (October 2006)

Amber and Daddy kick back and enjoy the Grey Cup. (November 2006)

Zombie Amber: "Brains! BRAINS!" (December 2006)

Possessed by the spirit of Santa. (December 2006)

No candy for Amber this year... just unbearable cuteness!

Her first tooth is poking through her gums, and it was a bit of a tough process for her, but she always has lots of giggles and smiles for us.

Amber watched her first film in a real theatre(1) this morning. She had slept straight through You, Me, and Dupree two weeks ago, but insisted on paying attention to today's showing of Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby. Maybe it was the NASCAR action, maybe it was the redneck hollering; maybe it was the unrelenting onslaught of product placements, or maybe it was simply Wil Ferrell's kind, gentle, and let's not kid ourselves, downright handsome face blown up to twenty-foot dimensions, but she was riveted to that screen.

I'm glad we're taking the time to expose her to these cultural influences early; so many people waste their children's crucial first formative months with mindless noise like Beethoven. When my darling baby girl grows up, she's going to be able to say with pride "My daddy done taken me to that there picture show when I was nothing but a squirt in a diaper -- soooo-EEEEE!".

1. A local cinema offers a bi-weekly screening of a popular film in a baby-friendly environment. They turn down the volume, leave the lights on dim, provide changing tables and diapers, and nobody minds if the babies cry or if moms are breastfeeding during the flick. It's pretty cool. If the gods are kind, maybe Beerfest will be up for viewing in a month or two...

Dear Amber:

Little girl, you have a lot of people interested in seeing you; there is no doubt that you are well-loved by friends and family.

Great-grandpa, a.k.a. Dennis

Your great grandpa travelled all the way from St. Catharines to see just how poorly you're being treated here. You two had a lovely time together, and you saved one of your best morning moods to curl up in his arms in this photo.

No, Amber's neck is not broken!

Then there's Auntie Jama (on the left there, with you and Lynn): she drove up from Barrie one morning just to visit with you for a couple of hours, then drove all the way back that afternoon! That's love (well, love, and a hectic schedule with work and buying a new home where you are absolutely going to be thrilled to visit in a couple of years--I can already predict the tears that will flow every time we have to leave Jama and Terry's place out in the country).

Yeah, they're a little too photogenic, if you ask me...

Oh, and how about your Uncle Jason and Aunt Kelly? They were willing to leave their beloved puppy Hanna behind for a weekend to spend some quality time with you. Kelly pushed you in the stroller all the way to Nepahwin beach and back, and we all did a lot of sight-seeing in the Sudbury area (including the obligatory shot of the Big Nickel).

"Uh, I think we're going to need a bigger binder to collect this here nickel."

She loves the Peppa Sloppy... a lot.

So how about just a simple shot of you to appease those who haven't been able to make the trip (or who have, but haven't made it up for a while?) The papparazzi are swarming, you might as well give in to the pressure. Let's see if we can find some good killer cuteness shots... Thank you, Colleen, for sending the killer cool environmentally friendly fair trade Peppa Sloppy our way. Amber loves to have it tucked under her arm as she naps, and she naps a lot.

Targeting... targeting...

At almost three months, she's also impressively strong. Amber has been able to lift her head since day one, and is constantly threatening to do damage to our lips, chin, nose, or other soft squishy parts of our body when she throws it around. In this shot, she's demonstrating her ability to lie on her belly and check out the world around her. Tummy time is no longer an automatic descent into frustration and tears. On the whole strength thing: she has massive thighs, and can support a good chunk of her weight on her legs. This leads us to the fear that she may learn to walk before she can crawl, resulting in a mad dash to baby-proof our house.

Speaking of which, I rushed to install a baby gate at the top of our stairs this weekend because Ian and Christine were visiting with Emma (their 4 year old) and Maria (their 2 year old). Mental note for my future self: even if it's late at night, you're tired, and there is no good light in the area that you are working, use the level to ensure that the latch side of the gate is level. And do it twice. Fortunately (well, relatively fortunately), this installation was a temporary measure anyways as the top of the stairs only has drywall on the wall side. So I'm going to have to cut out the drywall to expose the studs, install some two-by-fours between the studs as braces, and run another two-by-four vertically between those horizontal braces to have a nice solid place to mount the baby gate.

But I have to wonder: the previous owners had a couple of daughters. Were securely mounted gates at the top of stairs optional accessories in the eighties? I wonder if they also had one of those crazy walkers-on-wheels that were banned after the drug haze of the seventies cleared up and people realized that those devices were a spectacularly bad idea...

Well, after living in Sudbury for five months we had had no visitors... then Amber came along, and--surprise surprise--visitors galore! It's been great seeing so many of our friends and family again, even though my hosting abilities have been put sorely to the test (purely as a result of my antisocial geek nature, you understand). To be honest, at times it has felt like I've been so focused on keeping our guests comfortable that I've ended up spending very little time with Amber, myself, and that just ain't right. But I know all too well that the flood of houseguests will subside and in a few months we'll be wondering what everybody is doing and where they have gone. Ah well... on to the photos.

She's all about the fashion. Shades? Good. Bonnets? Bad... but sun? Worse.

Well, it's been over two weeks, surely it's time for more Amber photos! Read on below...

Amber Colleen was born on May 6, 2006, just 54 minutes past midnight. Due to overwhelming demand, here are some photos of our beautiful little girl:

Recuperating from a very long day.

Ah yeah, a little malformed quote from The Guess Who for you there.

The baby watch continues; we had a little flurry of activity last night, but things tapered off with the morning sun, strongly suggesting a baby of vampiric origin. Given my looks, I'm thinking Nosferatu, but Toreador or Ventrue would be more to our liking.

Because I had already called in to work to tell them I was taking the day off, Lynn and I decided to see V for Vendetta at the afternoon matinee. Given that Alan Moore has had his name removed from the movie credits (and, in fact, retroactively from any of the work that he did for DC Comics in the past), the movie was better than I expected. Hugo Weaving did a great job with his voice and body to make up for the frozen face; but the deviations from the original story were pretty typical Hollywood meddling, unfortunately. Worth a rental, maybe, but even more worthwhile, buy and read the original V for Vendetta (graphic novel).

Side note: holy crap! I just noticed how much the original issues of V for Vendetta are selling for these days... I have 8 of the 10 original issues stashed away. Comic book guy was on to something...