Today was our three year anniversary! It’s been such a wonderful three years. Our marriage started out with the wedding of my dreams, and despite a few hiccups was followed by a honeymoon I could only have dreamed of.

I have to admit, we actually forgot today was our anniversary. Whoops! I got the mail and saw that we had a card from both my parents and Dave’s mom. My immediate thought was, “what holiday is in July?” As we opened the envelopes I was wracking my brain trying to think of why we would coincidentally get something from both of them on the same day. Duh.

My spaciness continued when I read our friends’ blog, friends who we met on our honeymoon, friends who were also on their honeymoon. I read their blog and thought, “wow, today’s their anniversary too? weird!” Double Duh.

We celebrated by going out to dinner just the three of us, which we think we haven’t done before. It was fun, and our food was fantastic. We went to a restaurant we’d been to once before, and the food was just as good as we remembered and the service improved greatly. Peyton ate all the pears out of my salad and was a perfect gentleman all through dinner.

We’ve spent the rest of the night drinking fancy champagne and watching Flipping Out and So You Think You Can Dance. Fun! For all you unmarried people, that’s the crazy kind of time you can look forward to on your leather anniversary.

My sister, Kristen, is in town this weekend. She gave me a lot of heat about not posting more, so despite having no particular subject matter in mind, I am posting. I hope you’re happy to subject all 4 of our readers to a fluff filled post, Kristen!

Okay, I’ll make an effort.

It’s been awhile now, but Peyton had a fun and action packed 4th of July. He had a record long morning nap, but we were still able to catch the tail end of the Alameda 4th of July Parade, which is the second longest Independence Day parade in the nation. He was a bit unsure at first, but we got there just in time to see the Boy and Girl Scouts go by on bikes. Peyton is a big fan of kids between the ages of 4 and 10, and even more so if they’re doing something cool like running, skateboarding, or biking. Then a pony came right up to see us and he really got into the parade spirit. He waved and clapped at the firetruck and a local softball team and then it was time to head back home.

We grabbed a quick lunch and headed out to the pool where the HOA was holding a BBQ. Peyton enjoyed waving his flags and throwing a beach ball back and forth with one of our neighbors.

Peyton managed to squeeze in another nap and then we headed off to Jessy’s house for her birthday/4th BBQ.

When we got home our friends Jake and Chrissy were over for more BBQ and Peyton stayed up late to play with them. It was a fun day!

Kristen has a very cool waterproof camera!

Peyton is getting to be a pretty good swimmer. He kicks up a storm, and doesn’t suck in water when we dunk him. He looks a little surprised when he comes up, but he doesn’t do a lot of coughing and no complaining so I think he’s getting used to it. He also squeezes his eyes shut when we count to three, so he knows it’s coming!

Today we went to Peyton’s friend Maddie’s first birthday party, the third of a slew of birthdays we’ll be attending in the next month or so. It was fun, and featured bubbles!

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Note: I wanted to make this a flipbook, like in this post, but I don’t know how. I made a flipbook in my photo editor, and saved it as a .gif, but when I put it in here it’s just a picture. Does anyone know how to do this?

Tomorrow we’re going to Peyton’s first baseball game! The A’s are playing the Angels, and Kristen brought plenty of baby Angels gear to replace the ones he outgrew so I guess Peyton is not going to be rooting for the home team. She’s a big Angels fan.

On a side note, our friend Matt just placed 144 out of 6844 in the main event of the World Series of Poker! Congratulations, Matt! Dave has some more details on his poker blog if you’re interested.

Peyton has been spending a ton of time in the pool lately. We have a small pool that is only for the people in our group of houses. There are only 42 houses in that group and most of the people who live in them are in their 50’s and 60’s with no kids. As a result the pool is almost always totally empty. Also it’s heated so even if the air temperature drops into the low 70’s or 60’s the water temperature is still in the 80’s.

We mostly ignored the pool during the first few years that we lived here, but in the past two months or so we’ve had Peyton in the pool about twice a week on average. He loves splashing and kicking and if you lift him up all the way out of the water and quickly splash him back in he giggles every time.

The other Moms in Jen’s Moms group have been bringing their kids over every other week or so and the pool has been a big hit. All of the kids seem to love the water and the parents have started accumulating an ever expanding set of pool toys. It’s really cute to see 5 or 6 babies splashing around in the water.

In other news Peyton has started regularly pulling himself up to a standing position. Of course he is still a little wobly and can’t yet stand without support. In fact a few days ago he pulled himself up to grab a big ball on the couch, picked up the ball with 2 hands and then started to turn around to show it to Jen. Luckily she grabbed him before he toppled like a freshly cut tree.

Mentally Peyton is making great strides. It seems like everyday he’s learning a new word. If you say “Peyton, where is the….” and then ask him about a word he knows he’ll look for it and point right to it. I’d guess that right now he knows about 25 words including but not limited to: ball (which can be split into big ball, little ball, purple ball and orange ball), Daddy, Mama, foot, eye, nose, mouth, cat, frog, giraffe, elephant, monkey, train, truck, car and block.

Today Jen asked him “Peyton, where is your hand?” Since he didn’t know the word hand he looked around in a full circle hoping to find something that he thought of as hand. When he couldn’t find anything he gave up and looked at Jen. At that point she touched his hand and said “hand, hand, hand.” I’m guessing by tomorrow he’ll be able to show you his hand if you were to ask him where it is.

Also these days if Peyton wants something he’ll point at it. When we’re out an about it can be a real point fest, but it’s nice when we’re at home not to have to guess what he wants. Of course now that he’s mobile if he wants something he usually just crawls right over to it.

In addition to pointing, Peyton has also started clapping. His clapping is always accompanied by a big smile and is ususally an expression of delight. When he’s eating something that he thinks is super tasty he’ll clap between bites. It’s really adorable.

Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile. I’ve been busy sweeping. No one ever told me that once you have a child who can move around at full speed and has also mastered both the pincer grab and hand to mouth movements that you will spend all your waking moments sweeping your floors. Today, despite three different floor cleaning sessions, I thwarted Peyton’s attempts at eating carpet fuzz, cat food, and a 3 hour old floor grape. Peyton says, “Finger foods are where it’s at!”

Peyton has chosen the army crawl as his transportation mode of choice. He’ll start off up on his knees, but then he decides that’s too slow, flops down on his belly, and scuttles off at record speeds.

He’s everywhere these days. The two steps separating the living room and dining room are no barrier to him. He goes up them like nothing, and most of the time can go down them pretty well too.

Peyton has become very vocal. The past few days he’s been “Ba ba ba”ing all day long. He has a pretty good vocabulary, too. He can distinguish between his basketball and his “big” ball. I’m the only one who’s seen it, but he does know where his foot is. He opens his mouth if I ask if he “wants more”. He definitely knows his name. If I ask where the cat is he scans the ground until he finds a cat, and if I ask where Daddy is he looks at the staircase where Daddy usually comes down from. (or he looks at Daddy if he’s in the room).

Last Saturday we went to the first of many first birthday parties of the summer. It was a ton of fun, and featured swimming and a live band! The band was Paolo’s Mom and Dad, and they were very good. Stephanie wrote and sang a very cool hard rock 1st birthday song. I wish I could remember all the lyrics, but all I can remember is the screamed chorus of, “I used to be zero, but now I am one, yeah!”

I know after such a long hiatus I should have more to say, but this post took me way too long to write because I was engrossed in watching 30 Days. Now I have to go to bed!

Yesterday I got home from a 9 day trip to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. All in all I’d give the trip a C or a C- as far as poker success and an A for fun. Jen managed to make it out for Friday and Saturday night (she dropped Peyton off with her parents before heading to Vegas) and we spent two super duper fun nights dining, drinking and gambling with our good friends Jake, Chrissy, E.B. and Jean as well as Chrissy’s brother James. James is 22, hasn’t done much traveling and had never been to Vegas. The rest of us are all nothing short of Vegas veterans and I think we succeeded in totally blowing his mind.

Of course the toughest part of the trip was being away from Peyton for so long. Until this trip I’d never been away from him for more than 30 hours or so and while it was easy to stay distracted when I had plenty of familiar faces around me, during the times that I was there alone I was missing him desperately. Vegas is a very lonely place to be by yourself and by the end of my trip I was more than ready to come home and be with my family.

While I was playing poker I did have a few occasions to brag about Peyton. I kept a small picture of Jen and Peyton sitting behind my chips (to remind me to stay focused and not do anything stupid) and a few people asked about them. Whenever things weren’t going well it was nice to be reminded of the wonderful family I had waiting for me at home.

Before I left I made Peyton a 10 minute video that he watched everyday while I was gone. Jen said that he really enjoyed watching it, but I still think he may have forgotten about me a little bit. He was asleep in the car when Jen picked me up from the airport and when he woke up and saw me for the first time (I was riding in the back seat with him) he looked confused for about 60 seconds and then started to cry. But once we got home and started to play he was all smiles.

It’s great to be home!

While it seems forever that we’ve had Peyton in our lives it seems like we just had his 100 days party. Now he’s 300 days old! Amazing. We’ve been major blog slackers, but hopefully this long post will make up for it.

For those of you eagerly awaiting an update regarding our Maryland trip I have a short summary for you! First of all Peyton was great on the flight out. We had to stop (but not change planes) in Denver and he slept most of the way of that first leg. Then we faced some major turbulence coming into Denver which made me sick. So while I was puking in a bag Peyton was smiling at everyone who would look at him. Peyton is clearly a better air traveler than I am.

Upon arriving at my Mom’s house Peyton was thrilled to see my Mom’s cat Caesar. Unlike our cats who always stay at arms length Caesar walked right up to Peyton and didn’t mind getting roughly pet at all. Peyton thought he was hilarious.

We spent the week seeing a miraid of both my and Peyton’s aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and even two of Peyton’s great grandmothers. It was a busy, busy week, but it was great getting to show Peyton off and happily he seems to love everyone and everyone loves him.

Of course the genesis of the trip was my good friends Brian and Andrea Ridgeway’s wedding which happened at the end of our week in MD. Everything went perfectly. They had a rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding with about 45 people and I got a chance to catch up with a few of my high school friends and meet their wives and fiances. We were all commenting that it was like an unoffical 10 year high school reunion.

The next day was the wedding and I managed to marry them without screwing up any of my thoroughly rehearsed lines. For those of you who don’t know this was my second wedding. Thanks to the Internet in addition to being a professional poker player I’m also Reverend Dave! I don’t have any super powers - unless you count being really, really, really, ridiculously good looking.

That night Jen and I left Peyton with my Mom so we spend the night at Turf Valley where the wedding was held. We took advantage of the open bar and after a while I broke out a few of my patented poorly executed dance moves. It wasn’t pretty, but it was fun.

The next morning when we got back to my Mom’s house Peyton seemed very happy to see us. In fact a few minutes after we got home Jen left the room and he immediately started crying. The same thing happened a few more times, but luckily it seemed to be an isolated set of feelings.

In fact we actually left him for another night recently! The aforementioned Brian and Andrea went to Hawaii on their honeymoon and on the way back they spent two nights in Napa. We joined them for one of those nights and as per usual had a fabulous time.

They came straight from the airport to our house, we had breakfast, played with Peyton a little and then it was off to go wine tasting. For those of you who are familiar with Napa wineries we stopped at Cosentino, Peju, Sterling, Castello di Amorosa, Clos Pegase and Cuvasion. That night we had dinner at Cole’s Steak and Chop house which is one of my favorite restaurants anywhere (I think I’ve had dinner there on every trip to Napa except one). We stayed the night at Beazley House which is apparently the oldest bed and breakfast in Napa and a place that we had stayed before (I’d highly recommend it). The next day we got up late and made a few quick stops at Alpha Omega, Franciscan, and Grgich hills before leaving the Ridgeways behind to fend for themselves. It was another of many great Napa trips.

In other Peyton news he is now crawling. While he’s still not really up on his hands and knees he’s doing the army crawl and can move at a top speed of about a foot every 2-3 seconds. It’s not lighting fast, be he can get where he wants to go. He’s up to 7 teeth now - four on the bottom and three on the top. He bit Jen on the face recently and left a mark that was there for a few hours! We’re still adding new foods to his diet regularly, but it’s pretty much just more fruits and vegetables although he does usually get chicken mixed in with his dinner and he will eat egg yolk and cheese.

In other outing news I’m leaving for Vegas tomorrow to play five tournaments at the World Series of Poker (I’m going to be posting daily updates on my poker blog www.davehuff.blogspot.com if you want to keep up to date on my results). I’ll be gone for 8 days and I’m a little worried about being away from Peyton for so long. I know I’m going to miss him a ton and I’m hoping he doesn’t miss me too much. A few days after I leave Jen is going to fly down to her parents house, leave Peyton there and then drive out to Vegas for two nights. This will be the longest stretch that he’s gone without either of us around, but Jen’s Mom has had a good amount of practice taking care of him so I’m hoping he’ll be fine.

I think that’s all the news for now!

This is not the promised post updating you on our past month, because I just don’t feel like doing that right now. It’s been a great month, but today has been a rough day, so I don’t want to taint my writing with my current mood. I’ll just keep stringing you along claiming I’ll write more tomorrow.

During our trip to Maryland it came to our attention that we had not yet made the exciting announcement that our good friends Jean and EB will be having a baby! Yay! Their little boy is due October 19. We’re really excited to have another baby in our circle of friends. You can look at their blog here.

Well, that post title pretty much sums it up. I uploaded a whole bunch of photos to Month 9, started Month 10, and added a whole album for our recent Maryland trip.

Also, we have plenty of things to blog about from the past month. I can’t believe we haven’t posted in that long! Sorry! I’ll put up a post Monday or Tuesday night updating you on all of Peyton’s new developments. If you’re lucky! Ha!

Last week Peyton was besieged by his first real cold. It started out fairly mild, with a runny nose, but after a couple days the snot really started flowing. He was having a hard time nursing because he couldn’t breathe and he lost interest in solid foods for whatever reason. I know when I’m sick my taste buds deaden, so maybe that was it. I tried clearing his nose with the nasal aspirator before nursing him, but he hates that thing. I didn’t want to push it too much for fear of giving him a complex about things touching his nose. One night he started coughing pretty badly, so the next day I took him to see Dr. Amy. After listening to his chest, checking his ears, and looking down his throat she deemed him clear of pneumonia or infections and said the cough was probably just phlegm running down his throat when he laid down. So we toughed it out, and while he still occasionally sneezes snot all over his face he seems pretty much back to normal now.

Thank goodness for that, because all that coughing and sniffling was really getting in the way of Peyton’s sleeping. I probably shouldn’t get too excited about things turning around just yet, but for 2 weeks straight he did not sleep longer than 2 hours in any stretch. It was difficult to say the least. We’ve moved up to sleeping for 3 to sometimes 4 hours at a time now, which feels very luxurious. That’s a sign to me that I really need to buckle down and actually sleep train this kid. I’m hesitant because I always have some excuse as to the reason he’s not sleeping. He napped too much/not enough, he didn’t eat enough today, he had too much/not enough activity, he’s sick, he keeps rolling over and getting stuck on his stomach, etc. etc. The bottom line is that Peyton is pretty much incapable of putting himself to sleep without nursing. I’m reluctant to let him cry it out when he initially goes to sleep, because I worry he’s still hungry. I am willing to let him cry at night, but I want to wait until he’s completely healthy to start.

All of a sudden Peyton has places to go, but he doesn’t have a clear concept on how to get there. His main plan of attack is to get onto his stomach and flail all his limbs wildly. This, by the way, is another sleep problem because he tends to do this in his sleep. It’s tough to sleep through, apparently. This method results in a very gradual inching backwards, and sometimes rotating in place. I’m sure one of these days his toes are going to hit the ground, he’ll lurch forward, and it will be like a light bulb going off in his head. So I have a few days to baby proof our house which is currently a mine field of electrical cords, corkscrews, loose change, and twist ties. Peyton loves being pulled up to a standing position. He’ll grab my hands and tense all his muscles in preparation for being lifted up and then he’ll just stand there with a goofy grin. It’s very cute.

Tomorrow we’re going to our first class of “Musical Friends.” Our Music Together classes ended a few weeks ago and rather than signing up for the next semester we’ll be joining seven other babies/Mamas and making our own class! The name is a work in progress. We figured that at this age, the kids just liked hearing music and we didn’t really need to pay $17 a week for the professional direction. We’ll see how it goes. One of the mom’s is learning a few songs on guitar, another on piano, and I’m busting out my clarinet from my high school marching band days. It should be fun!

Here is his first attempt at getting onto his hands a knees:

Today our Friend Matt came over for a few hours to do some poker reltated stuff. It had been about a month since he’d seen Peyton last, and when he came into the room where Peyton was playing something strange happened. Peyton went from happy to serious to concerned as he looked warily at Matt. Then he started to cry. Not just little grunts, but a full on, eyes closed, mouth open cry. We figured he was just tired since he didn’t nap well and didn’t think much of it.

Matt was here for a few hours away from Peyton the whole time. Then as he was leaving he walked past Peyton again. Actually I approached Peyton first and did my usual goofy Dad act which always produces a smile or a giggle. Then Matt came up behind me and again Peyton looked at him like he was 150 pound spider for about 10 seconds, made a few grunts and then started to cry again. It seems like Peyton is afraid of Matt!

This makes little or no sense. We were just in Tahoe with 8 people who he’d either never met or hadn’t seen in months and he thought they were all great. We handed him right off to them to hold and he was just fine. Furthermore in that case there was tons of noise and comotion and we were in a new place.  On the other hand, Matt didn’t come within five feet of him, it was quiet and we were at home! It was all very strange.

In other news Peyton has a cold. We’ve been VERY, VERY fortunate that Peyton has never really been sick until now. He’s had a runny nose for a few days and has a little bit of a cough. Happily he’s a tough guy and is still in good spirits despite leaking copius amounts of snot.