Geek Habitat

Sara had her first taste of solid food today (pureed bananas) and she did great. She only wanted about four “bites” of the stuff, but considering she hadn’t met a spoon or solid food prior to this evening, that’s pretty darned good. Our pediatrician OK’d her for solid foods back at her 4-month checkup, but we saw no sense in rushing it until she showed some signs of being ready.

She’s been paying a lot of attention to us when we eat lately, and she had been a hungry hippo all day today, so it seemed perfect timing — a little bit of solid food, a 4 oz. bottle of expressed breastmilk, and nursing on and off every hour or so this evening. Yes, every hour… another growth spurt!

Dear Sara,

Welcome to your fifth month here on Planet Earth! You still have more than four months to go before you’ll have been living on the outside longer than you lived inside my tummy before you were born.

You are still quite young, but you are growing up a little bit every single day.

You now love to “talk”, squeal and shout. You carry on elaborate, highly entertaining conversations with your dad and I, as well as with our cats and your favorite stuffed animals or mobiles.

I’m a little late in noting this (Hello, infant in the house!) but better-late-than-never:

Our 2006 Ford Escape Hybrid has ticked over its first 10,000 miles. Specifically, as of midday on August 9, 2007, she had logged 10,813 miles on the odometer with a lifetime miles per gallon (LMPG) 32.6 MPG, logged over 28 tanks of gasoline.

That’s not quite the EPA estimate, but I tend not to be as tender-footed a driver as the “hypermiler” breed of hybrid owners. It’s still slightly better fuel economy than I got in my 1992 Toyota Corolla sedan, which was nothing to sneeze at (30 MPG), for its generation of vehicle. And, of course, this is an SUV.

I’ve just spent the better portion of the past 12 hours learning how to create my first-ever Wikipedia.org entry — namely, an entry for my late-grandfather, Thomas Wakefield Blackburn II (Tom W. Blackburn). He is notable as both a Western writer and the man responsible for the still-memorable lyrics to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett“.

I’ve made minor edits to various wiki entries in the past, but this is my first-ever creation from scratch. I even had to learn how to upload an image/photo, which I admit is a little intimidating with all the copyright and usage guidelines. (We have a much better photo we’d like to use in the entry, but I’m unclear on if we’d be in the clear to use the image, so it’s in a holding pattern for now.)

You might think the title of this entry is in error; after all, Sara is not yet five months old. On this day, one year ago, I found out I was pregnant. It would still be months before I knew “Sprout’s” gender, but from that moment, I started imagining what life would be like with this new being.

This is a photo of a mother and baby that made it unscathed from the collapse of the I-35W and Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis yesterday evening –

The mom pictured were in the red car, shown in the photo, at the time of the bridge collapse. Edited to Add: The baby was actually not in the car at the time of the collapse, per subsequent news reports.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/02/bridge.witnesses.ap/index.html