Grandma Mears is up from New Jersey for two weeks to help out with Noah and let Donna catch up on her studies for the PE exam. Mike is taking advantage of this by camping out at the lab to get work done.

Noah turned one year old on Wednesday, and we celebrated quietly with some cake. He had fun with Mom and Grandma visiting the zoo, and especially liked the goat at the petting zoo. In fact, Junior made the doggie sign (sticking out his tongue and breathing "heh heh heh"). Pretty cool, that means that his little mind is making the generalization from just "dog" (in fact, Sheida) to "animals". His first "word" - can't really pronounce it yet, but he gets the "Da" part - was "dog", naturally. "Ma ma ma ma ma" is usually a plea for mommy. Daddy is standing by to be recognized. Lots of connections are being made in there.

Daddy's been playing a face game with baby at most diaper changes since he was tiny, and now he's starting to respont. When we ask "Where is your nose?", he'll often point to his nose, and then grab ours too! Especially cool, today, was when he responded to "Where is your ear?",spoken from across the room, by grabbing his earlobe (just like Daddy does) and yanking and twisting for a minute. That's a first too!

Donna was pleased to watch him carefully remove all the blocks from his block box, then climb up into the box, sit and be happy, get back out, and then put the blocks back into the box. He can walk for a few steps, when he wants to, and then usually falls down.

Early signs of genuis, we like to think.

He's got a great tray-less high chair that pulls right up to the table at elbow level, so that he gets to eat with us. So far, he's been eating plenty of foods and he's rejected the only jar baby food that anyone has tried to offer him (good boy). Avocado, potato, sweet potato, rice, pickle, lemon, whole apples (small Alaska ones are perfect size for baby hands), homemade applesauce, corn on the cob (mostly gnawing), a raw bell pepper he held in the grocery, chunks of fresh carrot, peas... happy eating boy. Lately we've tried feeding him a vegetable soup and he really liked it. It's nice that he is able to eat many of the foods we have at the table.

Our babyproof area is essential as he's getting into everything these days. Daddy's favorite ficus tree as survived since college (1989) and hopefully it will continue to survive grabby-hands Noah.

In fact, we're using the same old table that his Daddy used to eat from when he was little.