Alden loves daddy!

Because Joe is so busy with school and work, he hardly gets to spend time with Alden. So whenever he has some free time, he likes to hang out with our cute baby boy. :D Alden enjoys the man-to-boy time with daddy.

Alden likes to grab and eat whatever he can get his hands on. The next two are pictures of him trying to eat the camera. :D

Look how he attacks the camera. Also notice how the lens gets blurry after he puts it in his mouth. Don't worry! We have a water-proof camera. :D

Blowing Raspberries

Alden's been blowing raspberries. It's very messy and slobbery, but he's so cute. :D

Today was his 6 month check up. He is 18 pounds and 26 inches long. His height and weight are average, but his head circumference is on the 80th percentile! Hopefully that'll mean that he'll be smart. lol. Now he can... play the piano (more like bang the keys), grab and shake a rattle, grab and eat whatever he can get his hands on, say a-da-da-da, squeal loudly and high-pitched (especially in sacrament), etc., etc. We love Alden! :D

Prodigy

Alden's been learning how to play the piano. :) He's actually quite good at it. lol. And he's been trying to learn how to type on the computer keyboard as well.

h m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m,,o v v ,; 8t tjmhn,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, n 6 ghbbbbbbbbb m 6 ㅠ 5ㅊ

Nice typing skills, eh?

Here's a video of his piano skills.

Eating habits

Alden has discovered that everytime the spoon goes in his mouth, he gets food. So now he will grab the spoon when I try to feed him and won't let go of it. He just keeps chewing and sucking on his spoon. And if I try to take it back to give him some more food, he will scream and cry.... So I gave up giving him food and just let him eat the spoon.

Today, I was trying to be clever, and I pulled out TWO spoons. I gave him one spoon and used the other one to feed him some rice porridge. Well, he used his free hand, grabbed the second spoon, and shoved both spoons in his mouth.

Oh, well...

Confused Daddy

So last night, I was reading late in bed after Joe had already gone to sleep. All of a sudden, I was surprised to find Joe, sitting up on the bed, glaring down at me. I thought maybe he was upset at me for reading so late at night. I timidly said,

"Hi."

He looked at me for another few seconds, and laid back down and closed his eyes. So thinking that he was really upset at me, I asked,

"Can I kiss you?"

His answer was,

"Mmm."

But his face was angled down so that I couldn't kiss his lips. So after giving him a kiss on his cheek, I asked again,

"Can I kiss your lips?"

"Mm.."

So I tried kissing his lips, but he wouldn't let me. He kept avoiding my lips. After a few failed attemps, I asked again.

"May I please, please kiss your lips?"

"Mmm."

"Well... I love you."

"Mmm."

So I finally gave up and started reading again. Several minutes later, I found Joe, again, glaring down at me with a scary face.

"Hi."

He laid back down and closed his eyes back up.

"Can I kiss you on the lips?"

"Mmm."

"Why?"

"Mmm."

So I tried a few more times with no avail. So I started to get so confused and upset.

"Why can't I kiss you on the lips?"

"Mmm."

"I love you."

"Mmm."

Well, I wasn't going to take this without an answer so I demanded him an explanation.

"Tell me why I can't kiss you on the lips."

Still half asleep, he muttered something like this,

"Because... You..... I.... You... Can't... Get sick..."

Finally I realized that this whole time, he was thinking that one of us was sick with the cold. (Whenever one of us gets sick, Joe doesn't let me kiss him on the lips.)

"Hey! But I'm not sick. You're not sick. None of us will get sick!"

"Wha... what? That soundns iffy..."

Keep in mind, he is still about 70, 80% asleeep.....

Anyway, so I gave up trying to kiss him and let him sleep.

After I had finished reading, I turned off the lights and cuddled up to Joe.

"Hey, I'm going to kiss you on the lips."

This time, he didn't give an answer so I just kissed him on the lips. Still very confused, he asked the final question that made me laugh, rolling on the bed.

"Why couldn't I earlier?"

Don't we all love Joseph Rigby... :D

Talking baby

Alden's been really really talkative lately. He's been saying Da da a lot. He doesn't know what it means but it sure makes Joe happy! :D Following is a video of Alden on the changing table with hiccups, trying to speak to me. At the end of the video, he finds the strap for the camera and gets occupied with it...

Sophie and Alden

Sophie and Alden are going to be best friends. :) Alden had a lot of fun this past weekend with Sophie. Here are some pictures.

This is a video of Sophie and Alden playing. It looks like, however, that Alden was holding on to Sophie's sleeve, ticked her off, and gets scared by her attempt to pay him back. You can hear him start to cry at the end of the video. lol

Photo restoration

Joe and I are really into photo restoration now. We even went to a class offerred by BYU on Wednesday and learned a few more tricks. Here are some examples of what could be done. I used Joe's dad's baby pictures as examples.

In the following picture, I erased gma's shadow on the lawn, erased the dry spot on the lawn, and improved the color of the picture.

Here's one more example.

Surprise trip to the ER

YES! It was scary! We had just gotten home from my mom's house and were getting Alden ready for bed. I found these mosquito bite looking things on his legs. We had seen them before, and we thought they were bug bites (he would only get one at a time). But this time, there were quite a few of them. We gave him a bath first and started getting him ready for bed but I kept finding more and more by minutes! We figured it was an allergic reaction to something, but we didn't have any benadryl. Some of the spots were getting bigger and bigger, and he was starting to get the swelling everywhere. Joe and I drove to the nearest grocery store with Alden, and gave him some benadryl right there in the aisle even before paying for it. By then, he had developed swelling around his neck, and it was getting worse. Because of the benadryl, he started being drowsy, and I had to make sure he was breathing because he wasn't crying. The swelling in the neck was getting worse, and we headed to the Emergency Room. Fortunately, by the time we got there, he was already getting better. Even though he was still puffed up, the swelling around his neck was going down, and his vitals were all normal. The nurses checked him in the triage. Even before we properly had the chance to see a doctor or get a room or anything, the nurses were talking suspicious amongst themselves, and we overheard (because we were in the triage room, not the waiting room) that there had been a lockdown in the waiting area. Apparently, somebody walked in the waiting room with an unknown substance, and everytime that happens, the protocol is to lock down the area until they figure out what that is. The nurses kept saying that the "unknown substance" was airborn but we shouldn't be worried.... (?) Anyway, we had to wait about half an hour for the situation to be resolved, and by then, Alden was doing much, much better. So we decided to just come home. I watched him until 3am to make sure that he was okay, and by then, he was completely normal. It was so scary because he had never been sick before.

A picture of first "bug bite" we found. We took a picture to show his pediatrician later, but we kept finding more and more, and these became really big...

Picture taken after we got back home. I was going to take some pictures at the hospital but I forgot the camera at home after taking those initial pictures. (We were in a hurry) You can kind of still see his swollen ear, and his lower half of face is swollen, too.

How his body looked like after we got home. Notice the thigh, and how red it is. It was like that all over his body, red everywhere.

So until we go see his pediatrician, we won't know what he is allergic to. He's been eating rice, broccoli, potatoes, bread, cheerios, some tofu, etc., but I'm not giving him anything besides rice until we find out what caused this reaction. Our prime suspect is almonds. Yes, we haven't really fed him almonds, but my mom gave him cheerios that night from her cereal jar, and there may have been almond bits left in the jar from previous cereal (honey bunches of oat). We'll keep everyone posted on how things turn out.

Baby model

Joe and I are very conceded parents, and we think Alden is the cuttest baby boy in the world (and Sophie's the cuttest baby girl). I keep trying to take professional quality baby pictures, but it diesn't always work out well. The other day, however, I got the perfect model pose out if him.... Lol.

Oops, but he started falling over soon.

Yep, he's done taking pictures....

Kisses from mommy makes him happy. Sometimes...

Whenever Alden's being fussy or is screaming, I open my mouth wide like this, and he stops screaming for a moment. I don't know why.... I think he just gets distracted. My sister Yearim says it's because my bad breath paralyzes him.... Hm...

When Joe and I try to kiss him on the lips, he always tries to eat our lips. lol. Joe likes to make Alden try to eat his nose. :P

I bought this jumperoo on craigslist from a lady in West Valley. Because I bought it second hand, it only costed us $20! And Alden LOVES it. :) We don't have room at our apartment so we keep this at my moms.

Catching up

Wow.. I have a lot of catching up to do! I've been busy and lazy this past week. On Tuesday, I got to go up to Bountiful! I actually think the pictures below are from the trip before that one, but oh well... A couple of friends were taking an English proficiency exam in Salt Lake, so I dropped them off in SLC and drove up to Bountiful with my sister Yearim. Joe and I've been scanning all of our grandparents' old slides, so I wanted to have their input on labeling all of the pictures. We had fun looking at old family pictures. It brought back a lot of good memories (not mine, because I wasn't there, but Grandma, Grandpa, and dad had a lot of fun).

Alden's been doing really well with the nightly routine. Joe and I haven't been though. We are really bad at putting him to sleep at the same time everyday so we always mess up his sleep schedule... He was down to only crying for less than 5 minutes before falling asleep but after a few late nights, now he's back up to 10 minutes or more... Bad parents!

Joe has been a lot of help in watching Alden lately because of my wrist injury. It hurts to lift the baby up so he's taken over the bath time. :) It's a nice bonding time with daddy, I think. Joe does a really great job.

After my friends' exam on Tuesday, we went to gateway mall. There was a new shop called Urban Outfitters. It was an interesting clothing store. They had a couch there so people could try on the shoes, I wanted to take some pictures of Alden.

We kept taking pictures after another so he started getting fussy. lol.

Turtle Eater

Alden really likes turtles..... You can see it yourself in the next few pictures. :D

He especially likes to eat them!!! I should make some turtle soup for him. Ha ha.

So... I have de Quervain's tendonitis! It's a special type of tendonitis in the wrist that new mothers often get from lifting the baby up. Ha ha. It's mostly in the base of the thumb, and if I twist my wrist or use my thumb in certain way, my thumb likes to get dislocated! And I have to pop it back in... Very painful. It's all thanks to our "healthy" baby Al! So Joe's been helping a lot lately, especially with the bedtime routine (giving bath, rubbing him down, etc.).

These are pictures of Al right out of bath. He doesn't usually look this calm or happy.. lol.


Bonus picture! I was holding Al in my arms, waiting for Joe to finish up an interview (for the internship this summer), and Alden got too heavy for me, so I put him down in the stroller. He's standing up. :D