First Paparazzo gig

Sam had his first Paparazzo gig on Sunday afternoon. Monica and Bill had agreed to a session with Sophia to build Sam's portfolio.

Nathan and I tagged along to San Rafael and turned it into an afternoon out to Marin. We assisted Sam in his picture taking and then had dinner. It was also Nathan's first encounter with a dog, Maggie had the cutest effect on Nathan who started gigling when he first saw her. What a sight!

Nathan meets Maggie

A boy. A dog. Too cute not to post. Enjoy.

Spinach face

Nathan's first time eating spinach. You can see for yourself where most of it went... It was not a hit!

(Note: The hair on Nathan's head is partially mine ;-)

Paparazzo shoot of Nathan

Sam was on a shooting spree this weekend so he used his favorite model, Nathan. Here are some of the pictures.

Me and my buddy

Nathan and I hung out quite a while today after I gave him his bottle. He was extremely calm, and happy...

Calm enough for me to be able to get this shot of both us with my cr*ppy phone camera.

The bottle war is officially over!

After about a month of refusing bottles -- Nathan prefers to get his milk from the source... Milka, that is! -- he finally drank his first full bottle of pumped milk tonight. During that grueling month, we had at least narrowed down to what bottle he preferred: Playtex dropins, a.k.a. the most annoying bottle system there is. But he's the boss!


Aunt Betsy was in town for a visit so she graciously offered to try giving him a bottle.
Well, he took it and drank a whooping 9 oz.!

Needless to say that Nathan is now getting a bottle a day to keep up with this little victory. We are hoping that in a little while we will be able to switch bottles on him to a "more" practical one.

Mommy brain!

What else stupid could I possibly do after washing my cell phone? Well, don't you worry, I did find something else... locking myself out with Nathan in my arms!

Very simple to do when your keys are not where they are supposed to be (i.e. in the car instead of in my bag). I drove home, opened the garage door, parked the car, picked up Nathan and the diaper bag, closed the car, then the garage door by hitting the inside button. I get up the stairs, look for the house keys in the diaper bag, in my pockets... no where to be found. Crap!


I run over to the Garage Master people around the block, hoping they'd be able to open the garage door. Well, no. "Thankfully" the new systems are more secure so they can't just "grab" a frequency and open the door.


It's 4:00 pm, Sam's at work for yet another good couple of hours. No job, and al. can't have him just rescue me. Nathan was a good sport at first and thought hanging out outside was pretty fun. Last resort, called a locksmith who got me in with Nathan sleeping in my arms.


That leads me to likely cause -- I wish -- of this "forgetfulness": Nathan's sleep training. After a few though weeks of bad sleep and a few night of waking up every 2 hours, we felt it was time to sleep train Nathan. We are at Day 3 and it is going better. It is probably the hardest thing I had to do since he was born, but we feel committed to the process no matter how long it takes.

Safe sleeping

Well, the time of lowering Nathan's matress to the lowest level has finally arrived. Voila Sam doing the job!

No, wait there's another one!

That's right, we are talking about a 6th tooth! The right upper central incisor (F) had been hiding from me. But after lots of giggles, I was finally able to see it come through.

At this rate, Nathan may have all 20 teeths by his first birthday!

5th tooth and dental summary

Ok, now you are going to think I am making this up but no, really I saw another new tooth today. I also found a dental chart to visualize things better, as taking a picture of his mouth is just not feasible.

Recap: At 6 months and 1 week, Nathan has his lower central incisors (P, O), one upper central incisor (E) and both his upper lateral incisors (D, G) are now coming out. The least we can say is that Nathan's teeth are quite ahead of schedule!

The most important thing to mention is that he has been handling his teething pain like a champ -- just a little crankiness here and there but nothing major.

Sam's first day at MuleSource

As you may know from my earlier post, I recently accepted a job offer at a small startup with offices in San Francisco (much easier commute) called MuleSource. The company sells top-tier support and services to people who are using the open source "Mule" application integration APIs and corresponding enterprise service bus.

For those who have any idea what I do... My job responsibilities will be similar to the ones I had at my last company, Symphoniq, however I'm now also responsible for growing and managing our customer support teams as well.

Coinciding with my first week on the job were visits to Corp HQ from many on the MuleSource executive team (including the CTO and VP's of Sales and EMEA Operations) as well as from a support partner from Australia, so it was a very opportune time to come onboard.

So far I'm thrilled with the enthusiasm and energy of the people I'm working with, and am extremely excited about the opportunities we have in front of us.

First "big boy"'s bath

We finally upgraded Nathan to the "big" tub from the kitchen sink. An upgrade he seemed to enjoy very much.

iWon

The Apple iPhone came out on June 29 while we were in Asheville, so as soon as we came home Sam started monitoring the iPhone inventory at Apple stores around the Bay (www.apple.com/retail/iphone). Finally, after a long night online, Saturday morning we find that both the San Francisco and the Burlingame stores have some iPhones available. We voted to make a trip to Burlingame thinking there would be less of a rush and easier parking. A good opportunity for me to make a stop at the Baby Gap store too.
The store was opening at 10 am. Nathan shortened his morning nap so that we could leave early enough to make it, as if he could tell something important was going on. We arrived at the store at 10:20 and while I parked the car, Sam ran in and snagged the LAST iPhone!

Sam was on a cloud, and waited patiently while I shopped at Baby Gap and Janie and Jack, evne though he was eager to get home to start playing with his new "toy"... I mean "business tool".

Sunday morning, after a long night of playing with the iPhone, Sam tells me he's got bad news and good news: the bad news is that the iPhone is not suitable as a "business tool" and the good news is that he's giving it to me... if I liked it!

So... iWon!

PS: Sunday morning we went phone shopping for Sam and he got a new Blackberry.

One more tooth

Today, Nathan's 4th tooth peeked out on his upper gum. So... we are moving to solids at increased velocity ;-) His favorites so far are carrots, haricots verts (green beans) and apple. But he already had a taste of zucchini, sweet potato, avocado, peas, and pear.

Nathan, the Ham

While at Grandma's house, Nathan discovered his skills as an orator lend themselves equally well to lectures, or comedy.

Asheville, here we come

We left on June 29 to visit Sam's mom in Asheville, North Carolina. The trip to get there went really well, even though we had to get up at 4 in the morning.

We had a fantastic time eating, visiting Mary Margaret's friends, hanging out at the house and eating. Nathan spent a lot of time laughing with his Grandma, charming the ladies and swimming with Dad. It was his very first time in a swimming pool and the water was cold but it didn't seem to bother him... I couldn't get in! He would grab on to Sam really tightly, especially after Sam pulled him under water!

The big bummer of the trip was that Sam couldn't find an iPhone in Asheville. The AT&T stores there did not yet receive their shipment.

Under-age customers!

The most stupid thing happened to us today. I was supposed to go meet people from my company at O'Neil's Irish Pub by the ATT Arena to introduce them to Nathan. After one hour of packed public transportation -- that's what happens on baseball game days -- I arrived at the pub with Nathan in the Bjorn. I entered by the door closest to the tables occupied by my company and started greeting everyone.
About 5 minutes later, a security guy comes up to me and tells me I can't stay there "because of their policy about under-age drinking". I look at him puzzled: who was he calling under-age? He then pointed at Nathan, so jokingly I answered that Nathan was not going to drink... Well, he was not joking so I did have to go outside. They even felt compelled to close the back door, probably by fear of having me or Nathan crawl back in to have a drink!
Is it possible to be so stupid as to take rules so literally that it would obstruct common sense? The answer is yes, because everyone knows how drunk those little 6-month old babies get... on milk!

We now welcome the first upper tooth!

On Friday night, Nathan woke up every 4 hours which had not happened in a long, long time. Then, same on Saturday... We then suspected that he was teething again. Well, sure enough, we got confirmation today as his first upper tooth (on the right) peeked in. At not even 6 months yet (4 days away), Nathan has 3 teeth!


Can you see it? Not really, hein.


Well, here are the bottom ones then...

BBQ with Téa

Ana are Téa finally came back from Croatia, so to celebrate their return, we had them over for a BBQ.

Picnic at Paradise Beach Park

Today, we had our much anticipated picnic with the Day One group at Paradise Beach Park in Marin. The original purpose of this get-together was for the dads to meet and share their fatherhood experience -- what, we, mothers, get to do weekly.

From left to right: Sam, my friend Zozo, Simon, baby Philippa, Michelle,

me, baby Nathan, Greg, baby Quinten, Connie, Belinda, baby Eva, Steve,

Bill, baby Sophia, Monica, Scott, baby Max, Janice, and Connie's mom.

The other special event of that day was that my friend Alex was in San Francisco for a business trip so she courageously joined us for the picnic. I say courageously because it can't be that fun to join a bunch of new parents and their babies, when you are single! Hopefully, it wasn't too scary.

Well, Nathan wasn't the happiest camper, which is pretty out of character. First, he didn't like to have to stop playing to pose for the baby spinwheel.

Then, he ended up swaddled in a new way and had to give up his "swaddle buster" title. And, finally, had to fend off pirate Eva who kept trying to jump into his Bjorn. So, it was a very busy day for little Nathan!

It was overall a great day and we hope we will get to do this again soon.

Roger Waters with Roger Horwitz

A good friend of mine from work was able to get us a pair of amazing seats for us to the Roger Waters concert in Oakland. I took the BART over from the city (ask me how f*cked up the ticket purchasing process is for both the BART and MUNI is if you want to get me riled up) and met Roger at the arena.

When I got there I was thirsty, and thought I'd be drinking warm beer but it turns out that right next to the beer guy was a fully stocked bar guy. So instead of an $8 crappy beer, I ordered an $8 mediocre scotch and made my way down to our seats.

The show was amazing. The first half they played early hits and a few of Waters' solo songs.

Just before the intermission I received an email on my blackberry. Now normally I wouldn't have been checking my blackberry during a concert, but I was waiting to hear back from a recruiter which I had been working with who was trying to secure me an employement offer from a startup that I was really interested in working at. The email indicated that an offer letter was attached, and that they were willing to accomodate the requests I had made in order to accept the position.

I was on cloud nine!

I went an ordered another scotch, and then enjoyed the remainder of the show -- the full DSOTM album, as well as a few songs from the Wall and again a few solo works from Waters' later career.

All in all a FANTASTIC evening. It was of course tinged with a bit of sadness as I knew that Roger Horwitz and I soon would not be working together any more...

Sam and Steve's excellent first Father's day adventure!

Lila, Deborah and Steve Hartog joined us for a barbecue in our backyard so Steve and I could celebrate our first fathers' day in style! The weather in the Sunset on Saturday was awful so we were very worried about trying to be outside on Sunday -- but luck was on our side and we had FANTASTIC weather. Nathan and Lila both had a nice time, and Steve and Sam appreciated the "it's father's day" clause when diapers needed to be changed.

Blackie's Pasture Walk

Last Friday's walk was in Marin, near Tiburon. It was a gorgeous day -- my shoulders and my back are still feeling the heat!

We walked all the way from Blackie's Pasture to a bit past downtown Belvedère, for a total of maybe 2-2 1/2 hours.

From left to right: Lauren with baby Shea, Monica with baby Sophia, me with baby Nathan, Belinda with baby Eva and taking the picture, Janice with baby Max.


We got to look at the gorgeous houses overlooking the water (3 BR/2 Baths selling for $2.75 M) and finished our first half of the walk at Poncho's something (a Mexican place I didn't know) to restore before walking back to our cars.



What did the babies do during all this time? Except for sleeping, crying and looking around, baby Shea kept loosing his socks, baby Sophia didn't like her stroller too much and preferred the Bjorn, babies Eva and Max were just dandy, and baby Nathan was all smiles for me...

Janice and Max / Belinda and Eva

Poil de carotte

What is so special about today, you may ask.

No, not the grand finale of the Sopranos on HBO tonight -- although very important to some -- but rather that Nathan had his very FIRST teaspoon full of carrot and loved it!

He liked the spoon and was already trying to grab it to put it in his mouth, apparently I was not going fast enough.

Here's the close up of our new mangeur de carottes!

Don't look for strollers!

Although very committed to our little ones, it was finally time for us -- new moms -- to get just one night for ourselves. So, Nicole graciously organized a dinner at Marnee Thai on 9th Avenue for our FIRST Mom's Night Out.

I am insisting on the fact that it was our first because it will not be our last! It was fun and refreshing.

Meanwhile, Dads/Partners were having a lovely time with our bundles of joy. Well, I hope most did... because Nathan ended up feeling colicky that night and Sam spent the most part of the evening trying to console him :-(

(For the grand-parents reading this, Nathan is totally fine now and Sam survived!)

From left to right: Monica, me, Raina, Abby, Nicole, Michelle and Janice.