A brief reflection from Dad: Our Jude is a quarter year old today! Unbelievable. In this time, Jude has transformed from a fragile mystery newborn, into our absolutely wonderful, totally one of a kind, miracle first-born son! I could spend hours staring at him. My heart beats with excitement when I am around him. I guess this is the honeymoon of parenthood. I hope it never ends.
Jude now has such a distinct personality. His temperament is so easy-going, curious, and happy. His body is strong. His voice is cute, really cute! (We explode in joyous laughter when he speaks with us) I would give the world for this boy, and absolutely cannot wait to spend the next 3 months with h and him.
From mum:
This has been such an adventure, and all the more the latest trip to see nonno and nonna. Jude has been absolutely adorable and very much enjoys his daily routine - which has taken a lot of work on mum’s part! He is such a happy baby, he smiles and laughs most of the time and this has not changed as we have taken him 9 hours away from home, to stay with different people, a different house, different smells and sights… He has taken the change in his stride.
He gets stronger all the time and I keep wondering what he’ll look like/be like when he grows up, but I also sometimes wish this stage of life would never end
I usually try to keep our Wordpress blog up-to-date with the latest fixes, as the massive team of volunteers has built one of the most remarkable pieces of free open source software in history and they are always brewing up new useful features. After upgrading to v2.6 i was confronted with two annoying issues. (NOTE: This post is mostly for me to remember what I did to solve the problems, in case a future upgrade causes more trouble)
1. I tried emailing in a post to our blog using my BlackBerry - in 2.5 it worked. In 2.6, it worked… kinda. The subject came up fine, but the post itself came up as random characters! Frustrating. I spent 2 hours searching the internet and finally came across a wordpress support post with an answer… We’ll see if it works. Well, we will see if it works, if it works, b/c if it doesn’t, we won’t see that I’ve written this post, will we!
*Update - it worked. We can see it. So now I’ll continue editing this post.
2. When I tried to edit a post, as I am now, IE would crash. Not good considering the amount of spelling mistakes I make! Luckily, Google found me this, and yes, after disabling Podpress, problem number 2 was solved!!! Call me anal, but now, if I could only get the “registered” icon [after "Sent from my BlackBerry"] to be decoded correctly at the end of my BlackBerry email to blog posts…
My boy and I enjoyed a nice walk around the house this morning, exploring the vegetation and colors. Harriet unfortunately didn’t sleep well last night, getting only a few hrs. Probably the change in environment coupled with the excitement of seeing her parents. Jude, on the other hand, loves sleeping (like his parents normally do!) and gets 10 hours a night when possible. This morning, after h fed him, Jude and I had about an hour of wake time together after which I changed his diaper and put him down for his morning nap. He was tired and wailed for about 6 seconds, and then, in one great climax, turned his head to the side, … and was silent! - totally out. Amazing! I love this child.
Its funny, but whenever we go to Orbetello (where Harriet’s parents live), I arrive with such a giddy expectation of having fun and relaxing. We have always been warmly welcomed, pampered, and spoiled by Nelusco and Maggie. I think I have always seen this place as my break from real life, where I can really shut down, and, I guess in some sense, be a bit selfish. Vacation is about that to some degree, isn’t it?
We arrived last night around 2:15am, an hour and fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, thanks to Harriet’s great dricving through the northern part of Italy up until Genova. This gave me time to rest my eyes and prepare for the final stretch of the journey, south from Genova, past Pisa and Grosetto, and finally a few kilometers past Orbetello to the Ancedonia exit. You might type in “Orbetello” on Google Maps to see where we are!
So far, Jude has really enjoyed Provinca. (The name of the neighborhood the Natali’s have their house.) He is very social around new people, and loves spending time with Nonno and Nonna (Nel and Mag). Last night, we all went for a walk on the laguna and grabbed an ice cream. Everyone was out in the old town, all the stores were open and it was generally a great relaxed atmosphere!
I had my first 40mns run today and got totally destroyed by the humidity. My body wasn’t built for it, so by the time I got home, I had well overheated! It’s now 6 hours later and besides lots of water, a cold shower and a healthy dinner, I still feel like I’m radiating the heat I picked up/produced from that run (!!) …and they say its going to start getting hot and muggy from tomorrow on! We’ll get some pictures up soon, I’m sure!
Without internet this past weekend, I was unable to post some of the wonderful pictures we took as a family. We shared so many great experiences. Jude is becoming more social, he is content most of time, giggles a lot and generally is a cool cat. We spent a good portion of Saturday together, the three of us, in between my IT work and sermon preparation. Jude experienced the vivid colors of sunlight shining through the large leaves of our magnolia tree. He and I took our first “big-boy bath” together as well. (No photos of that, I promise!) Anyhow, here are the pics.
Jude and Dad enjoying the sun on Saturday
Mom and Jude under the magnolia
beautiful eyes!
good looking Jude taking a sun bath with Dad
Mom taking Jude for a walk — he LOVES his Baby Bjorn sling
chilling on the couch
little Jude and Dad
H went trigger happy last week and shot a whole reel of film of Jude, who is of late in a super mood in the mornings. The photos were so cute that we decided to make a slide show out of it all!
So Sunday I had the privilege of peering into the life of a total loser, looking at what really took the cake and then telling everyone about it. Jonah, a prophet of Yaweh who lived circa 800 BC was my example. I had a lot of fun giving this talk. If you have 30mns, go take a look.
*Update (22/7) If the video doesn’t play, (you get a “Sorry, This video no longer exists” message) drag your mouse into the video screen, and then click on the icon “HD IS ON”. This will turn HD OFF. Apparently, Vimeo is having an issue with their hosting providor, Amazon S3.
One of my favorite South Park Episodes is called Over Logging, from season 12 of South Park. Although it’s a crude episode which I wouldn’t recommend for everyone, it is awesome as it looks at how South Park reacts to life without the Internet. This past Friday morning, I logged onto my computer ready for another packed day to find, just as in the episode that I had no internet. I worked with Swisscom tech ppl to no avail. This afternoon, some uber-geeks came over and explained that some piece of hardware had blown on one of their switches and they just replaced it. So, we are online again. Funny how much we make use of, dare I say, rely on, the Internet. Anyhow, gotta go upload a video, and post another blog entry!
H and I just got connected to RIM’s BlackBerry network. Before now, we have used our BBs as normal telephones, with data access. Thanks to Gmail for mobiles I’ve been able to kinda keep up with emails when out at clients’ offices. This technology upgrade is super cool, for me at any rate, as I can get all my emails pretty much instantly now, use Google Talk to keep in touch with gmail contacts and sync my calendar with Google Sync for mobiles (this page if you aren’t browsing on a BB) (which is then synced with Outlook btw for total sync of my day to day)
Dear loyal KIBBE Family Blog readers. Welcome to another update! We are super excited because there are some great pics of Jude, and little tid-bits of news as well!
Jude has been much more responsive this past week, following us with his eyes much better than before and generally a super happy baby. This week, he has started sleeping even longer at night and since Thursday, has slept between 9 and 10 hours! Harriet and I have started putting him to bed earlier and he has taken the transitions in stride. I love this child! We also finally applied for his British and US passports which put us back the good part of a Grand. Yes, a grand.
Harriet confidently passed her driving test which FINALLY gives her a valid Swiss driver’s license! It’s been a celebration at the Kibbe house all week because she has been battling for a license for over 8 years now. (I’ll let her post about how it got that out of hand…)
I’m getting more integrated into the preaching rota at ICF and am looking forward to this weekend when I will be looking at one of the Bible’s biggest losers, Jonah. Meanwhile, Harriet was the one on stage tonight, “MC-ing” for the first time. The master of ceremonies welcomes everyone, creates expectation for the evening, gives announcements, announces the collection and says goodbye. This is quite an important job because guests have a real person talking to them, not just a music group making music on stage or a preacher preaching. She did GREAT. Here are photos from the past week or so. LOVE us.
Jude has been talking to us a lot and we laugh together several times a day!
These are Jude’s passport pics. This photo cracks me up!! Thank God for a white couch! (It saved us 50 bucks at the photographers…)
Fun burping in mommy’s arms after a feed.
Uncle Dave with Jude at Oma Pfluger’s house for a bbq.
Mom playing with Jude tonight after he managed to wiggle himself around and almost off his mat!
It’s been an exciting end of week with the family. We applied for Jude’s two passports which set us back half a grand, but this was worth it — He will be able to travel with us this summer! (I was worried we’d have to leave him for two weeks while we went to Italy — that was a joke) Jude continues to woo us with his charm and seemingly uncapped loveability factor. He is speaking more and more, is holding his head up with impressive strength and is sleeping like a champ - Harriet had to wake him up after he slept from 11:45pm last night until 7:30am this morning!
The unbelievable weather has also given me the opportunity to mow the lawn with our new lawn mower! Yes, that’s right we have upgraded from a push-mower with missing screws which practically fell apart each time we used it, to a used electric mower which is almost as powerful as our entry level microwave. Despite the meager specs, this baby did a great job. It chopped through the toughest Swiss grass with ease. The one glaring weakness, though, was the undersized basket which captured the grass. After two “up and downs” of our lawn, I had to empty it. I think I broke my personal record for most grass empties in one mowing…
To finish off, a great video of our boy… he cracks us up constantly!
We have had such amazing moments with Jude, and I have just realised that although we have immortalised them in photographs, we have not yet begun a ‘baby book’ for him! How awful!
Having enjoyed over 30 degree weather for the past couple of weeks, not a drop of rain, I think that for once, I am looking forward to a good storm, but only if it passes over us at night, of course, and doesn’t linger for more than, say 4 hours. Then when you wake up in the morning it’s sunny again and the plants got watered! God doesn’t seem to have thought of this yet, I should let him know. It’s a perfect plan for winter as well, for a great ski season, isn’t it?
Last Saturday Cecile and I re-decorated our living room, and it looks fabulous! She has such flair for interior design so I trusted her completely, so on Friday afternoon we went to IKEA (perfect time to go as well, there was no one) got all our stuff, with Jude in tow, of course, had a coffee, and then came back with all the goodies. God is so good that he allows us to enjoy these little extras! I will publish a photo of the living room as soon as possible. It really is a pleasure to be in!
