Another month+ has gone by…dang, time has been flying. All of us are just getting over our respective colds. Holly and Ben have gotten over theirs, but I think I’m about half-way through mine, which really sucks.

Benji has been adding some new skills to his bag of tricks this past month. He now rolls over with ease and seems to like to be on his stomach for more than a minute. He’s continuing eating “solid” foods (rice cereal mixed with either banana or peaches) and has started drinking juice from a bottle. In turn, he keeps getting bigger (20 lbs now). He’s working on pushing some teeth out, too. He has 2 bottom teeth that are looking to pop at any moment. Benji’s also been working on his speech (“Da” and “ba”). He does say “da da,” but he doesn’t always say it when I’m around, so I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know the meaning quite yet. I will continue to coach him in hopes of “da da” to be his first word. We switched his infant car carrier over to a convertible-style baby car seat. We went with the Recaro Signo. It got a lot of really good reviews and was comparable to the Britax seats, which have a very good reputation. The build quality of this seat is really impressive and well-thought out. We felt some of the other convertible seats in Target and they seemed like they were rock hard compared to the Recaro, which is rather plush. Benji went on his first play-date a few weeks ago (2/21) with our friend’s Emily and Tim’s daughter, Reese. She was born 4 days after Ben was, so it was his first interaction with another baby so close to his age. They were very cute together and Holly joked that they were going to get married. Here is the link to the photo set. Holly recieved a call to have him participate in a study yesterday (3/13) that measured eye movement in 6 month-old babies. The first part was a video that showed moving shapes and a clip of a woman saying “ba” and “da” over and over again. They had a camera that was watching where he was looking. Their computer crashed mid-way through this part of the test (go figure…it was a PC, not a MAC!) and Benji started to fuss once the second time around…so no data for that one. He settled down enough to do the second part of the study. He had to sit in front of a special monitor that had infared sensors on the bottom that measured where his eyes were focusing and where he was tracking. Since I was holding him, I had to close my eyes or the data would have been skewed. It was pretty interesting. I think he would have cooperated better if it would have been a little earlier in the day. Here are some photos I took of Benji over the past month and a half. Here’s a link to the full Picasa gallery.

In other exciting news, Holly and I have been shopping around for houses for the past few months and have made a decision. We’ll be closing on a house in Christiansburg on April 3rd. We had an inside track on this one since it is currently owned by our landlord’s Lance and Julie. It’s a split-foyer style that was built in 1972. 2400 sq. ft., .4 acre lot, brick exterior, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1 bath roughed-in, and a 2-car garage. Eventhough this will be my 7th move in the past 5 years, we are extatic to say the least. We started packing boxes a few weeks ago, but I’m expecting this move to be the least amount of trouble, seeing that it is less than 10 miles away from our current rented house. We are very fortunate to have plenty of friends and family that have volunteered to help us with the move. I’m extra excited since I’ll finally have a place to set up my press again.

Speaking of the press (and the business), I have been thinking about a plan for the upcoming show season. I think what I’ll end up doing is selling off my current stock of shirts, retiring most of them, and come up with all new designs to replace the old ones. I’ll most likely go to the four shows that I normally have gone to in the past. Volksfest in PA, Waterfest in NJ, VAGfair in PA, and H2O in MD. There are plenty others that I could go to, but the distance to travel and the size of the shows doesn’t always make sense to make the trip. I have also been slowly working on the redesign of my shedpress website. I’m just going to have to make time to get it done. Afterall, it’s not going to magically build itself no matter how I wish it would.

Well, I’m going to wrap this post up. I’m on Benji-man duty and he looks like he could use a nap. Until next time…

Categories: Baby, Screen Printing, Uncategorized, house
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