Corinne

I remember when Cynde was pregnant and we didn’t know if we were having a boy or a girl several people said that all the clothes we got would be yellow and green. I would usually respond by saying something like “We will probably get mostly gender neutral clothes anyway. It’s not like if we have a girl we’re going to run out and buy a closet full of pink dresses.” Well it would be a lot easier to stick to that plan if she didn’t look sooooo cute in pink. See for yourself…

In this picture Corinne is showing off her green Bumgenius cloth diaper to celebrate Earth Day.

Sometimes when I try to burp Corinne after feeding her she gets a little fussy but a couple of nights ago she took her protest to a new level. I had Corinne propped up on my knee and leaning forward a bit and was doing the patting on the back burping thing. She was starting to fuss a bit and then she just stood up on her own. I had never seen her do this before so it surprised me quite a bit. Mostly I was surprised how tall she looked. I don’t have any pictures of this event so instead here is Corinne outside the Rodin Museum. I think the thinker is thinking, “Dang that baby is a cutie”. Or something along those lines anyway.

I think for the most part Cynde and me are both pretty unassuming so we don’t usually attract a lot of attention in public. But since we began toting around this cute little baby we have had to get used to people taking a great deal more notice. For instance, we were out for a walk last week and a woman actually stopped her car and pulled to the side of the road to look at the baby. On a different day when we had Corinne in her little bear suit (see previous posts for a picture) a woman passing us in the street said “aww Teddy Ruckspin”. Besides the attention Corinne gets from adults I was surprised how other children react. On a recent shopping trip to Target one little girl was just shouting “baby! baby!” and it took me a minute to realize she was talking about Corinne. Another little girl shouted “look at the baby, that’s my baby brother”. I guess it will be even more interesting when Corinne can respond back. Like in the last example she could have responded “watch it dingbat I’m a little girl”.

This week was the cherry blossom festival in Fairmount Park. We have visited the Japanese tea house in the park on a couple of occasions and there have never been more than a couple other people there so I didn’t expect that there would be much of a turnout for this event. As usual when I’m wrong I am really, really wrong. There was a traffic jam getting into the park and I overheard one of the event staff saying that they estimate that there were 15,000 people there. As we were walking around we ran into the cherry blossom queen of Japan and she let us take her picture with Corinne.

And here is a picture of the cherry blossom queen of America.

This is a picture of Cynde, Corinne, and Me in the tea house garden.

I think Corinne’s favorite part was the Taiko drummers. You can see the cherry blossoms in full bloom in the background.    

Corinne went to two parties this weekend. Saturday our next door neighbor had a surprise party for his wife’s 30^th birthday. They have a baby boy named Elijah who is about 2 months older than Corinne. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures but take my word for it he is a cutie.

On Sunday our friends Tim and Gina’s baby boy Cameron had his baptism and we attended the after party. We finally got a picture of the two of them together, both awake, and not crying. Corinne snuggled up pretty close and then Cameron executed the classic yawn, put your arm around the girl trick to perfection.  He looks pretty innocent in this picture but I’m gonna keep a close eye on this kid. 

It seems like just yesterday that we were talking about how old the baby was in terms of days and soon we will have to talk in terms of months. Several people told me after Corinne was born that before I knew it we would be planning her first birthday. Even though that is still a ways off, time really is flying by. We are doing our best to enjoy every minute though. For the last few weeks we have been taking walks around the neighborhood and other parts of the city pretty much every day. Corinne loves to look around and check out everything that’s going on or sometimes she just likes to stare at dad and show off her adorable smile.

I’m guessing that some people just look at this blog to see cute pictures and could care less about my corny babbling so here is a cute picture of Corinne and Cynde in the nursery and you don’t even have to read any witty anecdotes to get to the good stuff… Wait maybe you just did. I’ll try harder next time.

I think we may have watched one too many democratic debates during this primary election because I think Corinne is giving that thumb gesture that politicians sometimes use. I think Bill Clinton is most famous for this gesture and I actually find some websites that refer to this gesture as “Clinton thumb”.

For the first several weeks after she was born Corinne wasn’t really interested in using a pacifier. We would try and offer it to her from time to time when she was fussy but I’m not sure she really knew what to do with it. Sometimes when I tried to give her the pacifier she would actually just lick it. But over the last several weeks she has become more fond of the bink, especially when she is trying to fall asleep as pictured below.