9 months old

Calista turned 9 months this past Tuesday. She has been doing lots of new things and is generally very happy these days. She is crawling around like crazy and exploring distant corners of the room. She has learned to clap, and gets very excited when she sees the cat. She's also eating quite a bit of "solid" food, and can manage to get cherios and other small items into her mouth. She can also pull herself up to standing using the couch, side of the crib, or the sliding glass door.

We enjoyed a rare day off from cross country yesterday, and took advantage of sunny, warm weather to go hiking. We went to Bull Run Mountain Preserve, an area just west from Manassas - the first line of mountains going west from DC in Virginia. There was a nice viewpoint at some rocks were we had lunch. Calista enjoyed riding in the backpack and checking out the sites and sounds.

I put some new pictures of the hike and Calista's recent exploits on Picasa. We still need to get a shot of her holding a "9 month" sign.

Fall colors are coming!

We spent the weekend in western Maryland, staying in a small rental house with a few friends. The colors were at their peak, and weather was perfect - blue skies and warm temps. I had a cross country meet on Saturday, so I headed out in the afternoon when the meet was finished, joining the others who had arrived on Friday. We hiked Sunday at Coopers Rock State Forest in West Virginia. Monday on the way home I did an 18 mile run along the route of the Tuscarora Trail near Hancock, MD. This particular section is mostly flat and along narrow country backroads and the C&O Canal towpath.


Calista had a great time exploring the cabin, and was having a good day in the backpack carrier when we went hiking. We have some pictures of the weekend in a new web album.

Calista in a box . . at 8 months

Calista is 8 months old today! It seems like she is bigger or doing something new every time we turn around. She started crawling last week, and is now zooming all around the downstairs . . we still need to do some serious "babyproofing" of the house, including getting gates. Today we finally got around to putting our china in the cabinets. We packaged it up last fall during the addition process, and were waiting to unpack it because we were considering getting a china cabinet or sideboard for near the table. It looks like that's not going to work well in terms of available space . . . anyway, while unpacking we put Calista in one of the empty boxes and she loved it.


We got some cute pictures of her and the cat last week too. She had crawled up to the glass door which leads to the porch, and the cat was on the other side (Keisha spends much of her time out there now). They were looking at each other through the glass. We put a few more pictures in the "7 months" album on Picasa.

Calista reaches the 7 month milestone

Wow, it's been over a month since I put up a new post. Things have been busy for the past 2 weeks. I started back to work on August 15th, and we promptly went camping for the weekend with my parents, staying at a National Forest campground in West Virginia near the iconic Seneca Rocks. Calista started with day care a little over 2 weeks ago, and we are very happy with how things are going. She enjoys playing with the 2 other children and her provider is really good.

Calista was 7 months old on August 28th. We have a variety of new pictures from the past month on our Picasa page.

North to Alaska

It would be fun to actually go to Alaska again! I have been working on "trip reports" from the big western trips that I took in the early part of the decade. These are in the spirit of my AT journal, but without the embedded images - too much work to put in all the pics and get the layout to work correctly. I added lots of links to pictures of the places I visited, mostly other people's pics, since I did not have a digital camera at the time. The pic shown here is mine though - the sign is at the southern end of the Cassiar Highway in British Columbia.

Links to my trip reports:

My main travel page

2000 trip - Rocky Mountain, Tetons, and Isle Royale

2001 trip - Glacier National Park and the White Mountains

2002 trip - Alaska

Calista is 6 months old!

Calista's 6-month birthday was yesterday, July 28th. She is getting very active, and it seems she will be ready to crawl soon. We went camping last weekend at Elizabeth Furnace, in the George Washington National Forest just west of Shenandoah. This was Calista's first 2-night camping trip. We camped with friends Christel and Nathaniel, and did some hiking and swimming. Calista enjoyed her first ride in the baby backpack, and even fell asleep in it.

We have some new pictures online. The 6-months shots have not been great so far, so I am trying to get some more today. For now: updates to Calista's July page and the new Elizabeth Furnace page.

First feeding

Calista had her first taste of "solid" food in her high chair yesterday. It was rice cereal mixed with milk, so it's not really all that solid. She was very funny about it -- seemed interested in the food and the taste, but insisted on grabbing the spoon and would not let go. We had been warned by a friend at church that if 10% of the food stayed in her mouth we would be doing well . . . and against that standard I think we fared quite well.

We have some more pics of the "feeding" as well as some 5-month shots and others from the past few weeks on our photo site.