We’ve been back in California for a couple months since our trip to Nebraska, and we’ve finally recovered sufficiently from the unexpected detour to Denver to get another set of photos up on the site.

It’s been a pretty hectic couple months. The kids still had a few days off when we got back to California, so Julie took them down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for a day while I was stuck at work. Then, the very next weekend, they started on their winter athletic activities: basketball for Joe and swimming for Julia.

Julia has made great strides in the pool, and she finally passed the complete swimming test, so she can get a green wristband and swim unaccompanied. The hard part for her was convincing herself that she could tread water for a full minute. There wasn’t really any question in my mind whether she could do it, but she had persuaded herself that it was extremely difficult, and was reluctant to try as a result. Now that she’s passed, she is happy as a clam swimming on her own after her lessons while we watch Joe’s basketball games. Being able to swim outside in February is a definite advantage to living in California.

The big news of the last couple months is that William has started eating solid food. Julie noticed that he was keeping a watchful eye on us at mealtimes, so we introduced rice cereal mixed with breast milk the third week of January; he did well enough with that relatively tame starter food that he got to try squash a couple weeks later. In addition to cereal and squash, he’s had avocado, bananas, and carrots so far. Julie has been making her own baby food from fresh fruits and vegetables and freezing portions in ice cube trays, and William has been gobbling up everything we’ve tried. He’ll be ready for popcorn and pizza before we know it.

Rounding out the early part of the year, Julia turned in her first science fair project, an effort to learn which detergents did the best job cleaning oil from various animal hides, and Joe finally got to hang his glow-in-the-dark outer space decorations in his bedroom. He actually had the planets all wrong at first, but we finally convinced him to put them into a rough semblance of order, though the distances between the planets’ orbits still aren’t quite right. His ceiling is quite a sight to behold at bedtime; I actually bought a remote shutter cord for my camera to capture a few photos with really long exposures.

Coming soon: a video or two, William and his bouncer, a visit from my parents, and perhaps a flashback to 2010.

Gallery: William and the New Year