It’s the irony and somewhat curse of journaling that the events and periods most worthy of recording leave little time for the journal writing.

Carole will no doubt fill in the details (and photos) at length later, but so far this week, we took the kids for breakfast and to the Alliance Air Show, followed by a trip to a pumpkin patch sporting a hay bale maze and bounce houses (Saturday); took them to classmate Isha’s horse-themed birthday party at a local stables (Sunday morning); to their own birthday party at Jump It Up (Sunday afternoon); and then today Carole took them to the thrift store to buy a new season’s worth of clothes that actually fit.

On the Christina front, she’s sitting fully up on her own now, stabilizing herself with one hand for minutes at a time. She’s been doing that for a week. Same with sitting in her high chair in the kitchen. But she showed at the kids’ birthday Sunday that she’s good in most any high chair so long as she’s strapped in well. She sat in the red high chair at Jump It Up, at the head of the kids’ table, for almost half an hour. (She also tried pizza crust for the first time, loving it to a white pulp.)

Both have had us amazed at her seemingly instant growth, but I was downright taken aback and even slightly weirded out to hear her utter her first word tonight. She very clearly tries to say “da-da,” putting her tongue against the back of her gums to make the “d” sound. I’m certainly proud, and she’s as cute as can be when she’s doing it, but it was just so unexpected, both because of her age and because she’s still been making her normal unintelligible sounds. So having her suddenly pop out with such a consciously formed sound was only slightly less startling than having her say a perfectly clear, “Daddy.” It’s a little like watching one of the digitized talking babies in a TV commercial. She can’t be doing that yet. Baby can’t grow up that fast. I know the cliché about the blink of an eye, but I didn’t realize just how much of a reality it’s based on. New dads, if you care, be home. Be home as much as you can. It really does happen that fast.

Highlights:

* Angelina at the air show, on the ear-scraping loudness of the fighter jets flying over: “I’m gonna tell that guy he needs to keep it down.”
* Angelina riding six times at Isha’s party at the stables, at the expense even of a treasure hunt.
* Alexander taking at least as many hay rides at Isha’s party.
* Carole’s being approached at the kids’ party by a fellow Montessori Children’s House parent wondering if Carole’s happy with the direction of the school.
* My being invited by Mark Kaufman at the kids’ birthday party to tour the City of Allen’s video production department, as well as that the City will probably start using freelancers to supplement the video department.
* Being able this week to pay off both cars, both credit cards, and our second mortgage. Now it’s becoming real.

Finally, this is categorized as a blognote for a reason: I may be transferring the blog from WordPress to Movable Type. WP has some neat features, but I’m fairly certain Movable Type has them as well, but mainly I have to find out if MT has a better HTML-rendering engine. At the very least more control over the placement of photos. I’ve fought WP for the last time over how to place photos within a post and have the text flow correctly around it. WP ignores HTML code within posts. Ignores it almost completely. I’m tired of it. I want to be able to put photos where I want them to be in a post. Hopefully MT will. We’ll see, though it will probably be a while.

Now to write Jason back. So much for getting to bed on time.