Loot!

I've been meaning to post photos of Noah enjoying some of his birthday presents. Of course the real delay is in Mommy posting photos, not in Noah playing with them! And of course of course, I just tried pick some of the best photos, not the best gifts. No fair getting offended, anyone!

The Splash Pool is lots of fun, and our lawn is appreciating the runoff!


Noah likes to press the button over and over on the Little People Tractor until it gets to the longer song, and then he stops and listens and gets the biggest grin on his face. Sometimes he'll dance along.


Aunt Elaine had all kinds of suggestions on how to make the tunnel less scary to teach Noah to go through it, but he was pretty fearless! We just tossed one of his new toys into the middle, and he scurried right after it.


Noah really likes this Shape Sorter. Never heard of the brand (Battat), but I like it a lot. The pieces are easy to get back out, the sides are color-coded with the pieces to add another dimension to the matching (or simplify it, if babies can think that way), and one side has some bead sliders for before they're ready for matching. Plus, some of the shapes are letters and numbers. I'm so impressed. Noah figured out the circle very quickly.


Our neighbors are big baseball fans, and they're trying to get Noah started young with this baby teeball set. It's working. Noah likes to hit the ball off the tee with the bat, and push the buttons to make the little people say "You're SAFE!"


Mommy and Daddy got Noah this Radio Flyer Retro Rocket, and it was almost as big a hit with the older cousins at the party.


The Wii Fit was never intended to be a Noah present, but somebody forgot to tell him that. He loves doing his own version of step aerobics, and "helping" mom with her balance games.

Spoon, anyone?

For the last couple of mornings, Noah's been enjoying yogurt and cheerios for breakfast. In a bowl. With a spoon. It's quite messy!

It's been a while...

My lack of posting should be considered a sign that we've been very busy and happy. We've had a travel weekend, with a family reunion:



a 70th birthday:


two fun nights at the creekhouse:


and several new dogs to meet:


We had another fun weekend playing hostess for our friend Connie, who came to visit all the way from Connecticut. (I only dare post this pic because I warned her she was making a goofy face in order to get a smile out of Noah. When she complains, I might have to take it down.)


In between, there have been lots of swim lessons, lots of walking, and lots of jabbering in Noah-ese. In fact, we've been having so much fun, sometimes we even forget to break out the camera!

For the record,

For the record, peanut butter hair may look nastier than cottage cheese hair, but it smells better three hours later. For the record, I may be obligated to feed Noah at least three times a day, but I refuse to bathe him more than once a day on a regular basis, regardless of how his hair smells! Besides, that's what all this swimming is for, right?

For the record, Noah will still eat plain yogurt off a spoon. He will also eat banana covered in yogurt off a spoon. He will even eat meatball covered in yogurt off a spoon. And corn. This may open a whole new world of possibility.

For the record, how do I implement the three-day allergy wait between new food exposures if I can't get Noah to touch, much less ingest, scrambled eggs or strawberries? What does it take to qualify as exposure? He used to eagerly taste new stuff, at least once.

For the record, one of the best things about turning one is being free to eat/try all those foods that have been off-limits up till now. Maybe my fruit and cheese boy will finally find something else that's gobble-worthy.

And a question: Without getting too graphic (the moms out there know), is there any nutritional value to corn whatsoever if you don't chew the kernels before swallowing?

Cool...

It's 95 degrees outside, and I just got in from running errands with Noah. To take the edge off, I thought I'd share a photo from this weekend:

I Hate Customer Service...

Perhaps I should tag this post "Not about Noah" so that most of you can skip over it. I promise, it really does help me to be able to write stuff like this out, whether anyone reads it or not. That's my disclaimer. No complaining, you were forewarned...

Nothing gets under my skin these days like trying to communicate with customer service reps. I think somewhere in the past few years, they've forgotten what their title means. My latest issue is with Shutterfly, and I almost don't even have the energy to resolve it. But then, the dark pessimistic side of me knows that's what they're banking on, and that irks me to no end.

A few weeks ago, Shutterfly sent me an offer for a free 8x8" photo book with any qualifying purchase. This really appealed to me, since it's a $29.99 value, and something I'd been interested in anyway. This is actually Customer Service Issue #4 related to this order.

Issue #1 was almost a non-issue, but it did require an email to customer service. After spending time and money on a "qualifying order" to get the free photo book, they sent me an email for some other promo, and I had to write and tell them that if they weren't going to give me my photobook, they could refund my "qualifying order" because that was the only reason I'd placed it in the first place. In reality, the photobook promo was still in my account, it was just invisible until you placed a photobook into your shopping cart. Thanks for telling me.

Issue #2: After I spent literally dozens (plural) of hours building the pages of my 20-page book in Photoshop, I couldn't get the covers to upload properly because the Shutterfly program kept cropping them funny. I had to write them to get a link to the bleed-and-crop guideline template thingy. Turns out my image needed an extra inch or so on three sides for wrapping around the cover. This template was easy enough to use, except that in the process I found out I needed to go back and resize all 20 of my regular pages so that their edges didn't get cropped off. No biggie. At least this could be resolved with an email, and better to find out earlier than after it was printed.

Issue #3: A handful of hours of cropping and resizing later, I finally put the finished book in my shopping cart and go to checkout, and I can't get the promo code to work. After an hour of online chat and half an hour on the telephone, they explain that when you choose the "digital scrapbook" theme (as opposed to graduation or new baby or father's day, for example) the book gets a different SKU number and hence is ineligible for the promo. Of course, nowhere in the terms and conditions does it tell you this, and nowhere in the digital scrapbook theme does it mention it's a different category of book. But no matter, some supervisor of a supervisor was willing to manually edit my promo code so that it would work "just this one time."

Issue #4: The book arrives in the mail. The inside is as beautiful as I imagined it could be. The cover and back and spine look sharp except for one thing... the background colors of the three panels don't match. The cover is lighter blue, the spine is darker blue, and the back is grey -- not blue at all. They definitely were EXACTLY the same in my original Photoshop and .jpg images. An email to customer service doesn't help. They respond that the book is a faithful reproduction of the images in my project file, and if I look closely the colors do differ in my uploaded images. So they are half right... the three background blues DO differ in my uploaded images, but don't ask me how or why because the originals definitely don't differ. How can uploading an image file change the background color without changing the photo hues? And how do I stop it from happening so that I can fix my cover? BUT the part about a "faithful reproduction"? How does he know? He's not looking at the book. In fact, the color differences in the uploaded files are opposite of the color differences on the actual book. The uploaded spine image is lightest while the actual front cover is lightest, and the uploaded back image is definitely a dark BLUE, not gray. Their solution is for me to send the book back for refund/credit, fix the project files on my end, and re-order it. Never mind that this book was FREE, so the whole refund/re-order isn't going to work in my favor. Never mind that I can't get the colors to remain consistent during the upload process (I tried again today). And above all, never mind that when you go to preview your finished photobook, Shutterfly thinks that showing facing pages in slightly different shades makes it look more 3D-realistic on the computer screen (as evidenced by all my 20 inside pages that were the same shade in Photoshop and in the actual book, but looked different on the Shutterfly screen). Sigh. I just want to hire someone and say "fix this." Isn't that what CUSTOMER SERVICE is for?

Swimming Pretzel

The second night at swim lessons was even more fun.
Yes, that's a noodle tied around his belly.
Yes, the idea came directly from the swim instructor.
Look at him kick like a frog!

Swim Lessons

Noah had his first swim lesson last night at the YMCA. We had a great time despite a poor first impression of the lessons. The regular instructor was out with a family/hospital emergency, so we had a sub. But the sub missed the first 15 minutes of the 30-minute lesson for her own "emergency in the parking lot." The aide that filled in admitted that she knew nothing about babies, so the first half of the lesson consisted of 2 minutes worth of The Wheels on the Bus, and 13 minutes of "swish the baby around and get them used to the water." Pretty lame, but we had fun nonetheless:




Looking at these photos, I think Noah needs another haircut already! What a scraggly kid! But cute... always cute!