Jan von Holleben's photos

I recently discovered a photographer who's work I am currently awed and enamoured with: Jan von Holleben. He does really cool things with forced prospective, eye tricks, and mirrors to produce quite interesting photos. These works have totally inspired me to make some cool photos with Tam during my next bought of "free-time", maybe some neat fall / October photos. I'm thinking about something with a jack-o-lantern maybe?

Here are a few of my favorite collections of his:
Dreams of Flying
Journey to Everywhere


The exception of this love is his belly-button project...as many of you may know, I am NOT a belly-button fan.

Tam's next milestone

For most of Tam's life (until this past month), he hadn't really realized he had knees or that they are amazing because they bend. His first week or two of crawling was mostly army crawls with his arms and feet combined with full-body rolling. This got him around the floor, but not very efficiently or too quickly. He would also stand with support and legs locked. If he toppled, it was a total crash to the left or right with no knee bends. It my mind, this was a bit odd, because he would jump like crazy in his jumping-contraptions but not use his knees at any other time. Cute and funny.

About 2 weeks ago, Tam figured out how to crawl with his belly off the ground. Then, he figured out how to crawl FAST. This was especially evident when he went after the cat. Knees are wonderful things! He now is very efficient at pulling himself to standing on anything. Even if that object of support has...wheels. Tam thinks wheels are great; he loves to spin them. However, using a wheeling chair or toy as a crutch to pull up on = recipe for failure. Yep. Down he goes. At least with the knee discovery, he now topples straight down and we have less full face plants into the carpet. With that fluffy diapered bum, he doesn't really get hurt and instead thinks it is hilarious :-) Maybe we have a stand-up comedian on our hands?

The newest trick in his arsenal is attempting to stand without support. This is usually occurring when he is standing next to one object (like the couch) and wants something that we are handing to him or wants to move to somewhere else in the room. Of course at this stage in the game his balance on two feet is virtually nil. And the attempt 99% of the time results in the toppling down.
But...about 1% of the time, he's standing on his own! Tam's current "hang time" is about 2 seconds before a downward crash. As a really proud mother, I will surely take this as a brief moment of glory for my son :-) Yeah!

He's growing up too fast. I know I heard this phrase so often while I was pregnant, and it is just now hitting me as to how true it is. I was just going through Tam's old clothes to give away and realizing how much he has grown in 10months. Was he ever so small he fit in the crook of one arm? He's added nearly a foot in length since birth! And now he's mobile. The whole rolling, creeping, crawling, standing phase has come about so quickly for us. It was just a matter of weeks to get this movement thing down for him. So fast!

I love him and I just can't wait to see what he'll do next :-)

Tam the super soaker

We said we would cloth diapers way back when because it made sense to us. Brian and I did not want to contribute to the increase in landfills. Plus, I was worried Tam might have sensitive skin (like me) and react badly to badly to the chemicals in disposable diapers. I dutifully learned as much as possible about the diapering world and we armed ourselves with an array of cloth diapers....some of which seemed way to cute to catch poop in.

Once Tam was born, we eventually got the hang of it. At the beginning, the pre-folds were a nightmare for us. We just couldn't get them not to leak with Tam. We moved up to fitteds which hugged Tam's curved and kept more of the goop inside the covers (less blow-outs). Now we have even tried all-in-ones that are just like disposal diapers. Most all have worked for us to various degrees.

And then we realized....

Tam is a Super Soaker!

Dude. When he lets loose, he Lets Loose. A diaper goes from dry to soaked and dripping in moments. Apparently, other babies go a little at a time, but not Tam. I was just on the receiving end of this stream tonight as I was getting him ready for bath time :-) At least Brian got a laugh out of it.

In the end, this means we double-stuff his diapers with extra padding. His bum is very fluffy! Now that he is practicing walking, I'm not worried about him falling because he has so much cushioning around his butt. Sigh.

I wonder how we'll feel about cloth as he gets older...potty-training can't come soon enough.

Weekend score at the Grand Rapids Moms Sale

This Saturday there was a huge mom garage sale at our local arena. This meant that all the tables were teeming with baby clothes and stuff for wee ones up through pre-school. Plus, there were sold by moms to moms, so the prices were excellent. The down-side was that I had to be at a research meeting an hour south of the city and couldn't make the shopping event. It was a day of presentations from undergraduate researchers, including my student from this past summer.

Family to the rescue!

Mom and Shelly came out on Friday with the intent of taking Tam and hitting the sales as soon as they opened. I rigged Shelly up in the back-pack carrier for the little guy because strollers weren't allow in the arena before noon. I guess the strollers would clog up the mom traffic in the aisles. We didn't think to snap any photos of Shelly in the harness...maybe next time. Oh, and Tam still loves the contraption but has begun to play with the hair of the person carrying him. I packed them a diaper bag, gave them a list of Tam's sizes, and sent them on their way while I went to listen to ecology research.

Oh what a haul they had at the end of the day! I came home to see a pile of gently used clothes for Tam, a few classic kids books, and several new cloth diapers. Score! Mom, Shelly, and Tam had a great day shopping around. Shelly loved getting compliments on her cute little "son" and neat purple carrier. Mom had a good time wading through the massive amount of girl clothes to choose outfits for our dude. Can't wait to get them in the wash and have Tam try some of them out. Brian really liked the little leg-warmers with pirate skulls on them. And I think some of the pajamas are just too cute. Thanks guys :-)