First Blood!

So Riley finally broke the seal! I swear since he backwards crawled off the bed at Easter, he's been on a roll! Literally! He rolled off the area where we change him downstairs with Kelly earlier this week and bumped his noggin. Then last night he lunged mouth first into one of his favorite toys and made his lip bleed! I'm telling you...he's already all rough and tumble testosterone filled boy!

It reminds me of the Flintstones - now I understand where the concept of Bamm-Bamm came from! That's how Riley explores his world - bamm-bamming everything in site! Speaking of cartoons - Kelly and I always laugh about how the baby in the Simpson's that sucks the paci looks EXACTLY like a kid sucking a paci! Someone that has a kid definitely does that character!

So only the top part of his tooth is still peaking out...we're patiently waiting for it to break all the way through!

Kelly went to Kindermusik with us this morning, so he got to see how vocal Riley has become there. He LOVES it! It cracks me up though because every time it's "quiet" time where the parents step back and let the kids interact - that's when Riley starts screaming his head off! Today it was so sweet - a little girl Monica - brought Riley a toy to play with during that time! And he loved it! He was flipping it and banging it all around and screaming his head off! Kelly and I were cracking up! But he definitely doesn't know how to share yet! Jorge came over (I told Kelly to be on guard for the hair pulling manuver!), and I swear Riley grabbed the toy and pulled it closer so he didn't have to share. It is cool to sit back and watch them all interact when the parents step back.

We may switch to Water Babies instead of Kindermusik this summer then back again in the fall. I'm trying to make a conscious effort not to "over schedule" Riley with too many activities already! There's plenty of time for that when he's 5! ha! Seriously, I can't believe how much kids have going on these days! It wasn't like that when we were growing up! I got summers off excluding a couple of summer leagues, but we still had at least 6 weeks off from sports and activities in the summer! Not now! These kids go all summer and all Christmas break for Select sports! And my friends with older kids tell me that there's no way to make a high school team if you don't play select. There's no concept of the "off season" anymore. I don't know about that! That's why so many kids have overuse injuries these days and for what? When most of them will only play sports for fun post high school. That's going to be hard to swallow for me...of course, that's assuming Riley is into sports like Kelly and I were/are!

Grandma & Grandpa Sterne are coming to town this Wednesday-Tuesday. They haven't seen Riley since he was 6 weeks old - right after he got out of the hospital. Boy oh Boy are they in for a surprise! He's not a little baby anymore! It's amazing to watch how much he grows and changes everyday, I can't imagine how different he'll be to them in that amount of time! It'll be interesting to see how he interacts with them and how it evolves over the span of the week - this will be the longest he's around someone on a daily basis excluding the usual suspects of me, Kel, Emily & GiGi.

OMG! This is totally off topic, but something that made me sit back and think this week. We had a townhall meeting on Thursday - think corporate pep rally - with our CIO, and the message there was the reflect on how far we've come as an Information Technology organization and how we have "better problems" now than we did 10 years ago, etc. Well part of that presentation was taking a look at technology and how it's evolved since the 1960s. Then Friday I went to the Credit Union to open Riley his 1st savings account. Grandma & Grandpa Sterne sent him a piggy bank back in the fall, so we've be steadily filling it up. But we figured we should put it in a savings account since compound interest is our friend! :) Anyway, I also wanted to move some of our $ from our Bank of America savings to the credit union so we'd get a higher interest rate on it and dividends - anyway, I forgot to make the transfer from my BofA savings acct to my checking acct - so what did I do? I wrote the check for the amount, then got right on my phone logged into my BofA accounts and transferred the money from my savings to checking! I'm sorry! That's CrAzY, right?! Imagine how difficult a task that would have been 20 years ago! It would have required me driving to BofA to do the transfer, then driving to the Credit Union, etc, etc! I LOVE technology!! I'm all about it! That's how I pay Emily every Friday too! A transfer from my bank account to hers FROM MY PHONE! Like poor man's direct deposit! I'd love to be able to schedule it automatically, but they won't let you do that to another person's account yet!

Seriously though, sometimes we need to take a minute to reflect on how far we've REALLY come! Another amazing factoid they brought up at our Town Hall was the fact that PDAs are 40,000 times more powerful than the original mainframe computers! Isn't it amazing to think about having ALL that power in the palm of your hand - literally!!

Okay, I'm showing my geeky side here! Now you know why I do what I do and I love it! I love change! And that's one thing that is guaranteed in my line of work! Constant change and evolution! I can only imagine what life is going to be like for Riley!! And I can't wait to see it through his eyes as he experiences it first hand!