Egg n Keg

Our next door neighbors hosted their 12th annual Egg n Keg Easter party yesterday. The last several years the party has had lots of couples with kids so we finally fit in a little better this year with LT.

I got to meet LT's little friend Isaac. I've been hearing a lot about Isaac for some time now but just got to meet him at the party.

LT was showing off his baby fro and his pretend beer.

Riley made it out too!

LT crawled down a step for the first time in his life (with mom there for safety). He actually did it twice - the first time was very successful but the second attempt resulted in a crash and a little crying.

LT had a quick dinner after the party so he could get to sleep. Another great shot of his baby fro!

Temporary exile

We had to be out of the house from 11-3 yesterday while our open house was going on. We loaded the whole team into the car and set out on a family adventure. The picture at left doesn't really do it justice - the car is pretty full with Kari and I, two big dogs, a baby and stuff to keep us alive and entertained for several hours.

We went to the gym and Kar and LT played while I got to work out (Kar had already gone for a nine mile run in the morning).

Landon especially enjoyed watching some racquetball ball though the big glass wall.

After the gym we went and had lunch with Steve and Mad and then went on a long walk with the *whole* crew including their dog Lilly (luckily little Lilly gets along well with our crazy dogs).

This old house

Our first (and with any luck, last) open house is today. Both Kar and I have gotten a little sad and nostalgic about leaving our first house. I think the move will be right thing for us in the end but it is kind of sad to leave the cute and wonderful house where we started our lives together.


There's a pretty good chance that more blog books will be made in the coming years so I thought I'd post some of the professional pictures of the house so they might make it into a future book. It seems kind of silly now but I think it'll be fun, many years from now, to be able to look back at pictures of our first house. Heck, my family still sometimes talks about the house where I spent the first 2 1/2 years of my life.

Kari painted the upstairs bathroom (left) purple and her mom painted the downstairs bathroom (right) in yellow and blue.









Our kitchen (with a number of my coffee making devices put away to tidy up).

Our living room. I love the green color! Come to think of it we (ok mostly Kar and her mom) have added a lot of color to the house.


The cute little park just one house away.

The guest room / office. This was our bedroom for a while but we moved upstairs to be closer to LT's room.

LT's room! Formerly known as the office.


The upstairs bedroom which is where we sleep now the LT is with us. His room is just across the hall.

The dinning room. I love the red and think it looks great but was a *huge* pain to apply. We did a primer and it still took five coats of the red to get it to look decent. I declared my retirement from painting several times during the process.

Our front room / entry room / reading room. Damn dogs (Bo in particular) love to sleep on these chairs when they think no one is looking.

blog -> baby book

On our way to Moab a few weeks ago we broke up the drive by spending a night in Silverthorne. This gave us the chance to finally give my parents their belated Christmas gift. I took the first six months of this blog and turned it into a book using a service offered by blurb.com. In general I was happy with the service and the end quality of the books was really impressive. However, it was a ridiculous amount of work to do the layout and formating (I knew it would be but the marketing folks at blurb try and make it sound simple). The big problem was that something happened to the books in shipping and we didn't get them in time for Christmas. I don't know if this was blurb's fault or UPS's but once they were notified of the problem blurb was very responsive - they reprinted the books and expressed shipped them to us.

LT seemed to like reading about himself (you can kind of make out me and E-Faz in that picture in the book - probably from this old post).

How many nine month olds have their picture on a book cover? OK, so these days there are probably a lot but such a thing would have been unheard of when I was a kid so I think it's pretty darn cool.

Below is the preface/intro I wrote for the book (with a few typo's and spelling errors corrected but I'm sure there are still some in there!)


Preface

A few months before Landon was born I decided to start a blog for him. I figured it would be an easy way to share pictures with Family. I thought maybe I'd use it for the birth announcement. Beyond that, I didn't have any plans to make much use of it.

We'd picked the name 'Landon Tanner Campbell' early in Kari's pregnancy but wanted to keep the name a secret (to avoid hearing people's opinions on the name - no one will tell you they don't like a name after a baby is born but for some reason there's no hesitation before). So we saddled him with the nickname of 'LT' and told everyone it stood for 'little tyke' until he was born and we revealed that LT had been his actual initials all along. The name of the blog then was, "LT's Blog" which now is also the title of this book. The nickname LT hasn't caught on as I'd expected (though recently gaining some traction) so I thought I should give a little background on it just in case it disappears in the coming years.

On June 5th of 2007 LT came into this world. I did post the birth announcement on the blog along with a few pictures. Then I posted a few more pictures. Then I started to write a little bit with the pictures. The blog starting building up a momentum all its own and before long people I never would have expected were telling me they enjoyed reading it. So I kept at it and even Kari contributed a few posts. In early October I added online advertising to the blog site and, to date, have earned almost four whole dollars towards LT's college fund (hey, it's a start, right?).

The blog has become a sort of modern day baby book (I'm sure by the time LT is old enough to read and appreciate the blog that statement will seem humorously out of date). I'm using a free service - www.blogger.com - to host the site and who knows what will happen to it in the future (Google owns it so it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere anytime soon but that too will probably seem funny and ridiculously dated some day). So we wanted to convert the blog into a tried and true medium - a good old hard cover book. Kari found some web site that promised to automatically 'slurp' up the content of your blog, lay it out into a book and print it in bookstore quality. The service did do the automatic content download and did lay it all out for me but it's taken me untold hours to redo the layout and formatting into something that actually looks half decent (interestingly enough I just turned down a job offer to work for a company that deals with a very similar issue of converting online content into nicely formatted print content complete with targeted advertising. So I have some insight into the difficulty of the problem and wasn't too surprised that it took a lot more work than advertised to get the book formatted properly). At the time of writing I don't yet know about their 'bookstore quality' printing but I'm hopeful (particularly after all this work!) that the end result will be nice.

For the most part the content of this book is true to the original content of the blog which at the time of writing can be found at http://landon-t-c.blogspot.com/. Some links to other web sits have been removed (just doesn't work as well in hardcopy) and links back to previous blog entries have been replaced with page number references. A few pictures have been added and a few removed in the occasional attempt to improve the layout. Largely, however, what follows in the pages of this book were taken verbatim from the 167 entries to LT's blog made during his first six months of life.

Brian David Campbell
(now better known as LT's dad)
December 8, 2007

Dog Dogs

LT is showing more and more interest in the dogs. He likes to play with their tags and pet or hit them. We're still working on the hitting thing.

Hailie is not happy with LT's new crawling skills - now he will crawl across the room to try and get her and she'll have to relocate to avoid him messing with her paws or something similar. She's still much faster than he is so she can get away but she's clearly annoyed. Bowen, on the other hand, doesn't mind at all. In fact, the other day he lifted his paw so Landon could rub his belly.

Baby Z

Shawn and Z are traveling for the next 10 days. With the mobility of the inchwormer, it has become a challenge to do simple tasks such as pack or clean. LT and I went over to watch Z so that Shawn could get some things done (although I have to admit, I was not much of a help!) While there, LT enjoyed sitting on Z's new octopus, playing with the Brightlese and having some apple snacks (but mostly playing with the wrapper of the apple snacks.)

More exploring

Landon has continued his exploring of our house. Here are the most recent discoveries.

The mirror...
The baby gate (yes we have ONE last one we are procrastinating taking down!). It is a huge hit with LT. He might be mobile, but I know if I put him next to the gate, he will stay put, opening and closing it as long as I let him.

The legs of a bedside table... Hailie looks confused as to why LT is so interested in the legs of the table. I am sure there will be many more discoveries in the coming days and weeks.

Isn't it ironic?

We've had baby gates up for a while (months even) now but our Realtor told us that we needed to take them down to prepare to sell the house almost exactly the same time that LT started crawling. Below are some pictures of LT exploring previously uncharted territory in the house.

So it's official, our house goes on the market tomorrow and we are having an open house on Saturday from 12-3. If your in the market for a 3bdrm/2bath in Northwest Denver, come take a look. Even if you are not looking to buy - stop by if your are in the neighborhood and just want take a look (and make it look like we have tons of perspective buyers!). Tell our Realtor that your agent Landon sent you and she will spare you the hard sell.


We've been in this house nearly five years and it's been wonderful for us (not to mention how much we love the neighborhood). It's a little sad to think about leaving but at the same time I'm very excited about our new place which is less than a mile away.

Baby's first Easter

We didn't do anything special for Easter (other than trying to get the house ready to put on the market) but Steve and Mad came over for dinner and brought a little Easter basket for LT. The fake grass was a big hit with Landon.

Crawling is as crawling does

LT's crawling is getting faster by the day. He's taken on a whole new dimension now that he can get around on his own. Of all the milestones we've past so far, crawling has captivated and awed his parents more than anything.

A few months ago I would have predicted that LT would not do a traditional crawl (I never did) but I was wrong. The winner of the most creative baby mobility method, however, has to be Z - check out his inchworm skills. I'd been trying for days to capture just how cool his moves are but wasn't able to. Lucky his mom got some good footage of it. The scary thing is that video is a couple weeks old now and Z is easily twice as fast now!

All day daddy daycare II 1/2

Shawn got some good coverage of swimming last Saturday!

A few weeks ago at Chez J-Faz

I had a few extra cute pictures from our trip over to the east side of Denver a few weeks ago.

J-Faz showing off her skills.

Playing 'nice' together.

LT has recently started crawling but he wasn't yet on this day. Joss apparently wanted to make sure he knew that she was more mobile than him.

I can't remember what actually happened here but it looks like J-Faz is about to smack LT and Sarah, her mom, looks concerned about it.

Grabbing faces and mouths is the cool thing to do these days.

Just cute.

It's just been recently that the little ones have really started to interact with one another. From a new parent's perspective, it's pretty cool to see.

All day daddy daycare III

All day daddy daycare ended up only being part of the day. Baba came over to visit in the early afternoon.

LT was very entertained by his Baba.

And also by her shoe.

Mom got home not much later and our daycare day was over! LT and I survived all the mom work days for this year!

All day daddy daycare II

LT ate 1/2 a bottle and eventually I got him down for his first nap.

Luckily nap #1 was only 30 minutes because he got up in time to go to swimming. Swim class is usually on Mondays and I don't get to go because I'm in the office that day. But sometimes, like today, there are make up classes on Saturdays and I get to go.

When we got home LT was practicing brushing his teeth with the little stuffed toothbrush that's attached to his "Bedtime for Puppy" book.

He ate a whole bottle and is down for nap #2 right now. It's been a good day so far...

All day daddy daycare

Kari is working again today so me and LT are on our own for the day. Lucky for us this is her last work day for the year.

Kar got us started with breakfast for the little man. Teddy Puffs and sweet potato was on the menu. Bowen got his share of Teddy Puffs - LT hasn't figured out how to put them in his own mouth yet but he sure knows how to feed them to Bowen.

Now we're just doing some playing. So far so good...