b e n j a m i n f a l k e n b e r g

Just experimenting with another way to keep up with the latest Benjamin news…

Lots of people have the Google Toolbar installed in their browser these days. I’ve created a very simple button that lives on that toolbar that you can use to keep current on the latest happenings; it updates itself automatically, in fact…you don’t need to do anything. If you don’t have Google’s Toolbar installed, consider it; it’s pretty darn handy for a lot of things.

[Note: This only works with Internet Explorer.... Sorry Firefox and Opera, etc. users.]

If you’re interested, click here:

Add the benjaminfalkenberg.com Google Toolbar button!

The icon that ends up sitting in the toolbar is a small picture of Benjamin, too… Bonus! ;)

Again, this toolbar button is made to work with Google’s Toolbar, so you need to have that for this button to work…

Of course, the regular RSS/feed link–found at the bottom of the pretty much every page on this site–continues to exist for those of you with RSS/feed readers… Enjoy! :)

I’m making a few changes here and there to the layout and attempting to spruce up the site a little bit. The most obvious thing right now is the new banner graphic at the top of the page. Quite a few of the enhancements you shouldn’t notice… And yes, this should mean pictures at some point…

As usual, let us know if you find anything looking or acting strangely, so we can fix it. Your feedback is always appreciated! :)

Mom was quite impressed by Benjamin tonight.

They were both on the living room floor. She said something to him, and he crawled over to her, climbed up so he could reach her face with his own, kneeling, and gave her a big sloppy kiss.

I didn’t see it, but it was apparently very, very cute and heart-warming. Typical Benjamin, really. ;) He’s given both of us kisses before, of course… but they’re getting more and more deliberate and communicative. Very cool stuff.

HUGE thank-you to Vicki, Stacey’s mom, who watched Benjamin for us so we could go out on a date (we went to a local university theater production of Tommy).

It was only for a couple of hours, but it felt nice to have some time alone with each other.

Previously, we had Ashley (our fabulous babysitter this past summer) watch Benjamin while we went out for dinner (for a surprise for my birthday), back in September.

That makes a total of two ‘just us’ dates we’ve had since he was born (now seven months ago, yikes!). As much as we love Benjamin, we’ve been craving some time alone together… He was still in our heads constantly throughout the evening, of course… no escaping that! ;)

We were told he behaved really well; we’re really glad it worked out, because we’d certainly like to do it again! :)

Benjamin’s had a few more good and interesting things happen to him over the last several days. They always seem to happen in clusters!

So… our apologies for not posting in a while; he’s been a little under the weather, and we’ve been a little more busy than normal.

Without further ado:

10 Sept 2006

• His second tooth (right side of the lower middle two) finally poked through. We’re up to two now! His first one is pretty noticeable now, although he really doesn’t enjoy people trying to pull his mouth open to look at things…which means we don’t have any pictures of his new teeth yet at all!

12 Sept 2006

• His first cold! (and other than the bout of diarrhea he had a while back, his first time being noticeably sick!) He’s still recovering from his cold, and combined with the teething, this last week was fun-fun-fun!

14 Sept 2006

• Climbed his first stair (the first flat platform stair at the base of a set of stairs)!

15 Sept  2006

• Climbed to the second stair before his mother stopped him… He might have kept going, for all we know. He really wanted the reach the short stack of paperwork Mom left there to take upstairs to the office later…

He’s also doing some cruising now! He’s been doing a little bumbling around by the step, walking along the base of the stairs, holding on, for about 3 feet or so, back and forth. Today, however, he got up, held the coffee table, and very smoothly walked the length of it!

He’s not supposed to be doing this yet! Yikes! Stacey says it’s a roughly 11-months-along thing. The walking can’t be that far off…

He’s also spending a lot more time standing up and experimenting with letting go…free-standing! He falls pretty reliably on his butt, luckily, but we’ve seen him take one step so far (before falling)… He’s definitely testing his balance as much as he can, and you can see the gears turning in his head as he works out his stance and his next move/steps. It’s really fun and interesting to watch him.

He wasn’t talking to me, exactly, so I don’t know much more than that…but it sure seemed like he was working on something that was going to happen soon!