Leaps and Bounds

I think Gavin has decided to grow up all at once. He just got it in his head to start doing everything. He's going to kill one of us. Either he's going to jump out of his crib or get some disease from chewing on the dogs toys, or he's going to give me a heart attack. I'll start with Friday night. I've been letting him "cry it out" finally to go to sleep. Friday night he fell asleep in my arms, so I know he was tired. I put him in his crib and of course he woke up the instant I put him down. So I let him cry. And he cried for 2 hours. I went in later to check on him and see how he fell asleep and I could hear him breathing but I couldn't see him in the crib. I freaked out, where did he go? It was dark in there so I couldn't see as well, but there was a bump in the bed. He pulled the sheet back somehow and was stuck under the sheet. His little face was down on the mattress, trying to breath. My biggest fear is that he is going to put his face down and not be able to breath, so I course I freaked out more. I got him out of there and made sure he was still breathing ok and thanked God that he was ok. So I don't let him cry for that long anymore and I always check on him to see how he's sleeping. Oddly enough though, he hasn't cried like that anymore. He cries for about 5-10 minutes and goes to sleep. Although Sunday night I went into his room when he was crying and he was on his knees holding onto his aquarium, looking over it to see out the door. And Monday morning he pulled himself to his knees on the side of the crib. So today I'm lowering the crib mattress. I was really hoping that I wouldn't have to do it until I moved, but last night he pulled himself to standing on me with no help, so to save myself some fear I'm lowering the mattress. He started crawling forward really well on the 13th, he learned to sit himself up on the 14th, and the 16th he learned to pull to a stand. He also has learned to get the finger foods in his mouth this past week. I'm expecting him to walk next week maybe.

Tristan wants to build an obstacle course out of wood all over post. He was telling me his big ideas yesterday while we were driving and one of the obstacle course things is to jump off the water tower. I said "you can't jump off the water tower, you'd get hurt and die." He said "no, with a parachute, you jump off and the parachute opens and you land." Oh that's better. I really think he would jump out of a plane or base jump if you gave him the chance. Gavin will probably follow him.

Ice, Ice, Baby

What else can I write about, but the ice storm. I even saw Louisville on Good Morning America. We got a couple inches of ice Jan 27 and boy did it do some damage. It coated the trees and brought down so many power lines. Our power here went off and on thru the night and finally went off at 5 am. Luckily, mine came back on at 5 pm that day. But some people are still without power around here. Louisville had like 180,000 people without power. What makes it so bad is the cold. It only got down to 65 in my house. I had closed the blinds and curtains to keep the heat in and put a big pot of water on the stove to boil all day just to put heat into the air. It worked. We still have ice on the ground now, it's just a sheet of ice in the yard because it'll heat up enough during the day to melt a little and freeze at night. But starting tomorrow we will be in the 50's and 60's. So we trade ice for mud. It looks like a tornado went through here though. There are just so many limbs down, it's amazing. And anyone with a fireplace could have as much firewood as they want from here. It's all piled up on every street. Here's a few of the pictures.