I’ve been meaning to put up some videos for a while, and now I’ve finally done so.  Sorry there are so many, in the future I’ll make them less six-at-a-time.  Anyway, this should give those of you who haven’t seen her much (and those of you who have but can’t get enough) a chance to see her in movement.

Note: I’ve tested this video player with IE 6, IE 7, FF3, Safari (Windows Beta), Chrome Beta, and Opera 9.  Please let me know if it does not work for you.

First video (below) is from last July (at just under four months old).  Here you’ll see and hear Emma’s shrieking laugh as I kinda growl into her belly.

Next is a video from the same day, wherein you can see Emma paying with her Elerat before dinner.

The next video is also from July.  Here I try to show you Emma’s reaction to Punky.  Also, I hate the way my recorded voice sounds (so does everyone I guess).

Here we have a video of Emma’s first time eating food.  I had forgotten how much better at eating food she has gotten since then.

Next is a video from just last week of Emma sitting up (with some help from a pillow) and playing with a moose (she thinks she’s the next Sarah Palin1).

And to finish off this videostravaganza, we have a video of Emma showing off her rolling skills.  The final roll seems to defy accepted laws of physics.  It reminds me of a wheel that has been weighted at the top so that it will roll uphill.  Also, Punky walks by and says hi.

OK, that’s all for now.

Lots has been going on in our lives lately, but I’ll start this post by discussing one that many of you already have heard about.  My company is closing down their Charlotte office in six months.  A few people have been offered relocation to other offices in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and France, but not many.  A lot of people will be let go in two or three months.  And a few of us are fortunate enough to be offered jobs through the entire “transition period.”  I am in that last group, which means that if I stay through the end of March I will get a pretty substantial severance package (if I leave before then, the severance payment is much smaller).  I’m not sure what we will be doing from here, but I’ll try to keep everyone updated.

In more pleasant news, I thought I’d give some updates on Emma’s development.  She has turned into quite a giggler.  There are a few things that consistently trigger this giggling.  First and foremost, holding her in front of a mirror (especially while moving her forward and backward in front of it) will always make her stop crying and start smiling and laughing.  Another way of making her laugh it so simply let her see Punky.  It doesn’t matter what Punky is doing, she can even be sleeping.  When Emma sees her, she starts laughing.

A few days ago I spent most of the morning working from home, and I got to see Emma watch her Baby Galileo DVD.  This was very interesting.  Basically, random stuff comes by while classical music plays, and occasionally they show babies playing, or they’ll have a young kid say a word like “sun” or “moon”.  It reminded me a lot of A Clockwork Orange, when they brainwashed the guy by forcing him to vidie the ultraviolence while they played Ludwig Von.  I’m not sure if Baby Galileo is trying to brainwash viewers or not, but I had a strong urge to assassinate public officials after viewing it.

In other news, Emma learned to make the “d” sound about a week and a half ago.  This means that occasionally she sits there and says “da da da da da da da da!”  I’m trying to teach her that “da da” references me, by responding to her whenever she says the phrase.  I’m not sure how well its working, because she also says “da da da da da da” when she’s looking at Punky.  We’ll see.

As far as locomotive skills, Emma’s still not able to crawl and certainly not walk yet, but she has mastered rolling over.  She’s close to being able to sit up on her own, although she’ll tilt over to one side or the other after a minute or so.  She is also very aware, in that she’ll follow people around the room, and she can figure out where people’s voices are coming from.

I guess that’s enough updates for one post.  Until next time, keep on.. doing whatever it is that you do.. !

I haven’t made a blog post in a while.. I guess I’ve been busy at work and I haven’t really been inspired to write anything.  To help keep something fresh on the site, I’ll share some interesting canine survival instincts I have noticed when taking our dog out:

1.  When she is sniffing around exploring, and sticks her head up to sniff the air (as opposed to following a scent on the ground), she will always face directly into the wind.  This makes sense, as that is where she’d be most likely to find a scent of something to hunt (or avoid).

2.  When she is pooping, she always faces downwind.  I’m guessing this instinct allows her to see any predators that might have been alerted to her presence by the new scent.  In addition, she often (but not always) sniffs into the wind (see observation #1) first, which means she has to do a 180 just before pooping.

True story:  A few weeks ago I took Punky out for a walk, and I saw an Asian lady walking her dog without a leash.  Once her dog saw Punky, it began barking wildly (as is the custom among dogs).  The lady then proceeded to yell something at her dog in Chinese.  The first thought that popped into my head: “that’s silly, your dog’s not going to understand you if you’re speaking Chinese.”

Yesterday Stephanie and I got a black 2006 Toyota Camry Solara!  We love it so much.  It’s a used car, but not very used at all—only 1210 miles on it.  We got it from CarMax, and I’d highly recommend anyone looking to buy a used car go there.  They have “no haggle” pricing, which is good for me because I think I’d be pretty lousy at haggling (I think Saturn dealerships also do no-haggle pricing.. I’ve never been to one so I’m not sure).  They’re not paid on commission either, so they aren’t super pushy.  Our salesman was an Irish guy, which was kinda neat.  The whole process was about as easy as we could’ve asked for.

My 1995 Camry was starting to have a few things go wrong with it lately (which is to be expected for a car with 180,000 miles on it).  Most of them were pretty minor issues, but we decided we were approaching the point where it’d be more economical for us in the long run to buy another car than to keep putting money into this one (an economist might call that an effect of the Law of Diminishing Returns).  The latest thing was that the car was leaking engine coolant, which meant I had to put antifreeze in it every morning before work for the last two weeks, and by the next morning it’d be almost all gone.  It could have turned out to be a simple thing to fix, or it could have been expensive.  We decided we’d start looking for a new car and see what kind of trade-in value we could get.  Since we now have another source of income (and we’ve been capable of living off of just mine), we figured out how much money we could afford to spend on a car.  CarMax ended up giving more than Kelley Blue Book valued our car at, so we took it.  Although I have to say that it was kind of sad to see my old car sitting on the back lot to be cleaned up.  I mean, we were leaving it for a younger and sexier car, and it didn’t even put up a fight. :)

So far, we are really happy with the car (of course it’s been less than twenty-four hours).  We both love driving it, and it still has that new car smell.  The ride is incredibly smooth and quiet.  We’ve been taking turns driving it, which is different from normal (where neither one of us would want to drive).

I took some pictures of the car, be sure to check them out!

I realize that my last post was about our new puppy, but she does all these cute and/or annoying things that I feel I must share with the rest of you.

Punky, we believe, must have been a descendent of some cat-dog union.  She seems to love climbing up onto the back of our couch, and going to sleep on the skinny ledge that it creates.  She also loves to play with my yarn that I sometimes leave out after I’ve finished knitting for a moment.  I came into the living room the other day to find an entire skane of purple yarn strewn all over the floor.  I then had to rewind the entire thing (I had barely started using it on a project I have had to put on hold).  Last night I started another project with the very same yarn.  This morning when Kip came into the living room, he found punky with my project and the ball of yarn on the floor.  Her doggy tendencies resurfaced in that my wooden knitting needle had been chewed on the end so that I can no longer use it.  Kip had to rewind the yarn and I had to buy new needles today.  She also likes to claw at things, like cardboard boxes.

Despite all the annoying things she does to destruct all the nice things I have around the apartment, I still love her very much, and I’m so thankful to have her in my life.  She is so cute when she curls up in my lap or beside me on the couch to take a nap.  She is so much fun to play fetch with.  I love my puppy!!!

As Stephanie said in her post yesterday, we got a new puppy named Punky.  We got her last Tuesday, and now I’ve got several pictures of her up.

She’s very cute, but for the first couple of days I wasn’t sure how well it would work out.  She just made us both think about how much we missed August, and it seemed a little too soon.  But then we grew to love her very quickly. :)

A word about her name- we didn’t pick it, but it’s what she already answered to so we kept it..  And to the Havens, if you are reading this, I don’t mean that to put down your choice of name.. it’s just not what we would have picked. :)  And we also give our dogs middle names or nick names, following the tradition of my parents who have Grace “Goose” and “Big Head” Ted.  August was August Louise Robinson (I’m not sure why, it just kinda seemed to fit), and now Punky is Punky Pants for some reason.

Anyway, you can see the new pictures here.

Tuesday evening, Kip and I drove back to Newton to pick up the newest addition to the Robinson Family.  We are happy to welcome Miss Punky “Pants” Robinson, a 6-month-old wire haired terrier mix, to our loving family.  I would like to tell those of you out there, that she and I are very good buddies right now, but it did not start out as such a good relationship.  The first night Punky spent with Kip and me, she didn’t want to go to bed when it was time.  We crated her for the night, and for those of you that don’t have dogs, that means that we put her in her crate and closed the gate on her so that she couldn’t get out.  Well she didn’t like that, and after about twenty minutes of whining and scratching from the crate, we decided to see if she would be ok with just being penned up in the kitchen.  We learned all too quickly that she could jump or climb over any kind of blockade we could create to keep her in the kitchen.  We had to put her back in her crate in hopes that she would eventually calm down and go to sleep.  By 12:30 am she had finally calmed down some, but I couldn’t sleep.  I stayed up playing solitaire and reading in the room.  I finally thought that I might be able to go to sleep around 1:30 am, but as soon as my head hit the pillow and I rolled over, she was whining again.  It didn’t last long, but it kept me from sleeping for the next two hours.  To top it off, Kip started talking loudly in his sleep, so loudly in fact that I was afraid he would wake Punky up and she would start barking and whining again.  Anyway, after that first night, we realized that Punky needs to be in a more closed off place to sleep at night.  Wednesday night we tried out keeping her crate in the pantry room, and we didn’t hear her at all.  Since then, everything has been going quite smoothly.

This weekend we are spending in Newton for a family reunion.  It was quite exciting when Punky first arrived at Kip’s parents’ house.  The last time we had a puppy here, August chased Ted and Grace around the house.  They were both terrified of her.  This time around, Punky is big enough to take on Grace.  But Ted keeps growling and barking at her.  Grace and Punky are still trying to get to know one another, and their playing scares me a little.  I’m always worried one of them is going to get hurt.  But I’m told that is how they get to know one another.

Pictures of Punky will be coming soon.  Keep an eye on Kip’s posts for when they are online.