Clucking Blossom

First outdoor music festival. We mostly went for a walk and met the
dogs.

Margarita Time

Keet and Linda

Linda and the blueberry hat

This is just the perfect example of how charming Keet is, and how
generous and talented our friends are. Linda Harriger here KNIT this
hat for Keet, and in less than a week. It even has a little leaf off
the stem.

Swinging at the park

Fit for a King

Well, it's the biggest purchase I've made for little man yet, but boy
is it cool! THE CHAROIT is the ultimate jogging stroller, which can
also be used for bikes or skis. we grabbed it off craigs' list and
took it to the trails directly after. Keet can cruise in style;
shaded, mosquito neted, or hermetically sealed in all kinds of
Alaskan weather. It's an investment, but we'll hopefully get years of
use out of it.

7am, already?

Spoke too soon

Well, today Keet figured out how to pull himself up to standing. I
watched him do it. Twice. Can he pull himself over the edge at this
height?! A while new set of worries begins.

Attempts at crawling

Keet moves around, but he's still figuring out the crawl. He'll do downdog, then plank, then poop out into cobra. Now I know the true origin of sun salutations. They weren't to greet the day, but to reenact our discovery of movement itself, of new possibilities, of wonder.
He'll wake himself up rolling over and pushing himself up into sitting. That's new this week. The first time he pushed himself up to sitting he did it in his sleep. Now he does it all the time.

I put him in his crib and had him hold on to the edge (he hasn't figured out how to pull himself up in the crib yet). He craned his neck back to watch the mobile spin.

Keet's 6 Month Check-up

Keet kissing his buddy, Oscar Misel (8 months old).



On Thursday, 5/21/09, Da-ka and I took Keet in for his 6 month check up with Joanne Spears. She's a nurse at the Public Health Clinic, and the appointments there are awesome. She spent a good hour with us, testing all of Keet's developmental skills as well as the weighing and measuring. He had to have a series of vaccinations too, but as she is a lactation consultant, there was no problem breast-feeding while she administered the shots (unlike at the Peditrican's office where he was restrained while the nurse put a needle in each leg. That was brutal for Mom to watch, much less for a 2 month-old infant!).

Keet is doing great. We knew that. He's way ahead developmentally (hooray 2 weeks late to be born!). He's already pulling himself up to standing, and is able to pick up small objects with his thumb and forefinger (though I don't let him practice that often enough - no teeth! )

He weighed: 17#12oz. (up 10#11oz. from birth!)
Height: 26.75 inches
Head: 43.8 cm (notice he has a metric brain, humm....)

He's totally in the 50th percentile for everything regarding his metrics, but ahead on his developmental skills.

So, there you go! Growing fast, but perfectly average.

Here's Keet with our neighbor, Logan. They have the same haircut. Logan has taken a shine to Keet and comes by every day now to visit him.

Orange Hoodies

Taken at our friends Dragos, Carrie and Calin's house

Summer

6 months on Mother's Day

Keet is Six Months old today, and on Mother's Day! We've had a nice day so far. It's been raining, and this morning it was even snowing a little. Spring has been slow to arrive, and although all the snow is melted, the leaves are just now opening on the birch trees. Last weekend was beautiful, but this weekend it is cold again.
Keet in our Backyard. May 3, 2009.

School is over, but work is never done. We are trying to fill two positions in the Theatre department, and have been bringing up candidates for the jobs (director and costume designer) all week. It's not over yet. Plus, there's much to do assuming we'll have a new Film Major in the fall. The screenings of Chronic Town went very well, as did the show opening for Da-ka. We both got lots of press coverage for our events, and there was a great spread about Da-ka in the Juneau papers.

Speaking of candidates, Da-ka officially got his job as Assistant Professor of Native Arts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Tenure track! I'm so proud of him. Of course they couldn't have picked a better candidate. This means that we are staying in Fairbanks for the long forseeable future. We thought we were, but its good to know that for a fact.

While Da-ka was out of town last week, and I was doing the Chronic Town screenings, I was pumping milk as much as possible, and sort of got tapped out! I had no choice but to start the boy on more solids. Here's a video of his first real spoon experience. It's the silver spoon mom gave him and the bowl Denny apparently made upwards of 30 years ago. It was mailed to Da-ka from Mary, Denny's first wife who had it, found out that Da-ka got the assistant professorship on Facebook, and mailed him the bowl. Now Keet gets to eat out of it.






Here's a photo of Keet's first day at the playground. May 8, 2009. There must have been 15 kids on the merry-go-round!

Keet has been practicing gateando, crawling. He'll move from sitting, to folding forward onto his belly, to rolling onto his back. He's a bid mor cautious on the hard floor than the bed (smart baby), but can scoot around on the floor quite a ways while he chases after his slippery toys.