Yesterday morning Grayson Matthew Robinson—the handsome little boy shown below—came into our lives:
The last time I managed to write about Emma’s birth within a few hours, but this time around I guess I’m a little late. Mark my words, someday when Grayson gets rebellious and I ask him, “Son, why did you drop out of school and get all those tattoos and start a Metallica cover band? I mean come on, no one liked Metallica songs even when Metallica performed them, and even before Lars Ulrich had that gender-reassignment surgery. The only people who ever liked Metallica are in their eighties now. It’s just a poor decision.” And he’ll reply “I did it because I wanted to be first. I always got second best, Dad! Look at the day I was born, you couldn’t even be bothered to write a blog post about it! Emma got a blog post. Emma got to pierce her nose. Emma got to go to Harvard.” Then I’ll tell him, “Son, the only reason you didn’t get a blog post that day was because I was so busy falling in love with you.” Then he’ll say “eww gay.” That’s just how teenagers talk.1
All kidding aside, I actually was somewhat concerned that I would never be able to love him as much as I love Emma. But I quickly learned that your love for your children isn’t meted out in discrete quantities from a finite supply. I already feel like I have just as much love for Grayson as I do for Emma. It is very surreal. It seems to be multiplied somehow when I see how much Emma loves her brother too. The video below shows just that, with Emma holding Grayson for the first time.
It has surprised me just how much I can already tell that Grayson has a different personality than Emma. For one thing, he loves being held much more than Emma did. Even as a baby, being held didn’t do much to console Emma. She’s never been much of a snuggler (except when she’s sick). Grayson, on the other hand, is very content to be held. He’s also generally quieter than Emma was at this point, though it remains to be seen if that trend will continue. Emma I’m sure was a little extra fussy because (as you may recall) she was born with a black eye.
In any case, I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Grayson into the world. You can find pictures from his first two hours of life on this very website. I’m sure more will be coming later, but probably not until after we are back home from the hospital.
1 Alternate ending: “Hey, I told people you were born on Facebook!” “What’s Facebook?” “It was this website that everyone sent all their personal information to. It ultimately turned out to be owned by a Russian spy.”
Written by Kip on Monday, March 29, 2010 at 11:20 pm (EDT) Tagged as: emmaphotos
It’s hard to believe it, but it has already been two years since Emma was born. I just posted a bunch of photos from her second birthday party, which we held on Saturday. Enjoy!
Written by Kip on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 5:16 pm (EST) Tagged as: emmaphotossnowvideos
For those of you who don’t follow us on Facebook, I have added two new photo albums. First are pictures from Christmas/New Year’s in Newton.
And second, we have pictures of me pushing Emma around in a sled in the three inches of snow that we got here in Concord last night. I also have a short video of me pushing Emma around in her sled. Enjoy!
Tonight Emma went trick-or-treating for the first time. (Technically this is her second Halloween, but last year she couldn’t even walk yet, so we didn’t dress her up.) She had a blast! You can see her duck costume here. She didn’t have any problem with wearing it, and even got lots of extra candy from everyone who thought she was so cute. She walked quite a long ways too, all the way down our street and back! And she was good about knocking on the door, saying “trick or treat!”, and saying “thank you” after they gave her candy.
Of course, these things don’t come naturally. We had to practice saying “trick or treat” first! The video below shows a little bit of that process. (We were practicing with toys instead of candy.)
It’s time again for some new pictures and videos of Emma. I added two new albums to the photos page. First, Emma’s second first-birthday party. That’s right, Emma got to celebrate her first birthday twice—once with family and then again with friends. And second, we have a set of photos from our recent trip to Myrtle Beach, which we took in the last week before I started my new job.
Beyond that, I have four new videos for you. Here is a video from a month and a half ago, showing Emma climbing the stairs. We happened to catch her descending the stairs properly for the first time while we were recording this video. Nowadays she can go all the way down the stairs with no problem.
Next, we have a series of scenes in which Stephanie and I try to get Emma to play the drums in Guitar Hero. We had some success, but I think Stephanie and me end up playing the drums more than Emma does!
Now we get to the afore-mentioned beach trip. Nothing particularly special about this video, it’s just Emma wandering around on the beach for fifty-nine seconds. Enjoy!
And to finish this off, we have another demonstration of Emma’s musical inclinations. We never taught her to dance, but we found that whenever fast music would come on during TV shows or video games, Emma would start dancing. So I tried to capture it on video, and I was mostly successful.
We woke up this morning to find our yard blanketed with an inch or two of snow! Of course, this meant we needed to take Emma out for her first sledding experience.
I’ve put up a new album of snow photos, which you should certainly check out. We also took some video of the experience, which I am posting below. Enjoy!
I also have three new videos to share with you. First, we have Emma trying to figure out how to use a sippy cup for the first time.
Next, we catch Emma on camera during a chatty moment. She has a lot of these, but she seems to get shy around other people and around the camera, so a lot of you haven’t been able to see this side of her.
Lastly, we have a video of Emma trying to eat an apple. While she has a few teeth that have broken through the gum line, she’s not quite up to the task of eating an apple. The other voice you hear in this one is Emma’s Aunt Heather.
She is actually even more chatty than the video shows. Especially in the car. She loves to talk to you while you are driving around. Then again, she does have a mirror in the back seat so she might think that she is talking to that little girl more than she is talking to you. She can say several different things too. Her most common phrases are “dadadadadada”, “mamamamamama”, and “bababababababa”. She does sometimes just say “mama” or “dada”, but not necessarily to the right people. She actually calls Punky “dada” sometimes, but I think she is really trying to call her doggy.
For those of you who like photos, I put a lot of them up last night. A hundred and twenty-four to be exact. I decided at the beginning of the month that I’d hold off putting up photos until the end of the month, rather than making lots of “heylookit new pictures!” posts every week.
There are pictures from our trip to Tampa, Florida to spend Independence Day with Stephanie’s sister and her family. We went to the beach and Emma was OK with getting in the water this time (unlike last time). There are also some pictures from my brother’s wedding, in which I was the best man. Then there are some professional photos of Emma that we had made last week. And finally, there are a bunch of Emma pictures from the last month that didn’t really go with any of the others.
Enjoy!
P.S. I changed a lot of code on my website, but you shouldn’t visibly see any changes. Let me know if something doesn’t seem to work like it used to.
Emma did not care for the ocean (compare and contrast her facial expressions before and after touching the water).
Emma’s second-cousin Clara, who is five and a half weeks her elder, was at the beach too. At one point, Kaylor (Clara’s mother, who is my cousin) was holding Clara, and Scott (my brother) was with them, while some Asian family with a screaming baby was nearby (they were at a restaurant at the time). Some moron—who must not have looked closely enough at Clara to realize Scott was definitely not the father—said to Kaylor, “That’s what this country needs: more good, white babies.” Of course, Clara is only half white. I think the guy just walked away after that (I wasn’t there). Like I’ve said before on this blog, I’m always surprised that there are still truly racist people out there who are under the age of seventy. I mean, if you were, let’s say, over 25 years old in 1960, maybe you were already set in your ways before we as a society figured out that racism is a Bad Thing, so you’ve at least got a bad excuse for your behavior. For anyone younger than that: really? seriously? there are still people that ignorant? (Also, I can assure this guy that white babies are quite capable of screaming very loudly.)
