Happy Birthday Bobby!
It's been almost a month since our last post. No doubt we've lost much of our audience so let me start by saying that I make a darned fine cup of coffee. And for those of you who are paying attention, I'm happy to share my secret.

So, last post was right after grandpa's 76th birthday. Since then we flew to Lewisburg for Christmas and met, well, pretty much everyone in town, who as near as I can figure lined up down the street for their scheduled 10 minute visits. It was very orderly; I suspect Grammy had a hand in the publishing of his arrival, and the scheduling of visitors. Bobby, who was just thinking about stranger anxiety, was bullied out of that corner by about the thirtieth visitor and ultimately met one of his Great Uncle Jacks at the door with arms outstretched waiting to be picked up. We've created a monster, not the Frankenbaby alluded to earlier, but a social monster. The one who looks up every once in a while and notices that even though he's in the center of a circle of people, they're not looking at him NOW, and so shouts and grins until he gets the attention he deserves. It's been a little hard on the parents, who are now forced to play audience all day long.

Some very good news is that Bobby's learned to play with the animals, so there's plenty of chasing, petting, and fetching of balls, punctuated by an occasional theft of a little-people toy cleverly concealed in Homer's giant slobbering maw.

A note on Christmas. You may remember that Denver Airport was snowed in shortly before Christmas. We were flying from Seattle to Chicago on United so figured we were mostly safe. Alas, our plane was delayed in Seattle and it looked like we were going to miss our connection. Dad (that's me) hopped on the phone to Pop-Pop and asked him to reserve a hotel room in Chicago for us. When we arrived in Chicago I darted off the plane and went to look at the board - it was 9:05 and our flight had been scheduled to leave at 9:00. Low and behold, it was delayed to 9:20, so I called Katy, who was waiting at the arrival gate with Bobby for our checked stroller, and said I'd run across the airport and see if I could talk them into waiting for us. One shuttle ride, and a sprint later, I handed my tickets to the gate agent and said that my wife was beind me. She checked us in, and THEN I confessed that my wife was...maybe still in terminal C...and she was waiting for our stroller. "So there's a baby too?" Well, I need to break in here and say the folks at United could not have been nicer. It may be that they were still dealing with a lot of people from Denver, or maybe it was Christmas spirit, but since this was the last flight out to Harrisburg, and they knew that no one on our flight had connections they held the plane for a good 20 minutes for us. I went back and helped Katy sprint through the airport - which Bobby, remember Bobby, this is a blog about Bobby, thought was the funniest thing he'd ever seen. Most amazing of all was that United managed to get three of our four checked bags onto the plane with us. Kudos to United! Sadly, by the time we travelled home, the United staff were back to their surly selves.

Birthday at the Zoo.


Bobby's first birthday ever was Friday, January 5, 2007. Technically it was his second, but his first anniversary of a birthday. All of Seattle was in the grips of a nasty cold virus so we opted for a low-key trip to the Zoo with cousins Cameron and Hayden. I could tell you about the primates, the elephants, the penguins, and the presents - but perhaps instead I'll say that Bobby enjoyed watching the other children run around, the adults looking at him adoringly, and the wonderfully colorful paper that came with some other stuff that Aunt Polly and Uncle Andy gave him.