Our little girl is just growing up so quickly! We just celebrated Siobhán’s First Birthday. Here are some pictures from her birthday party:

Here are her stats from her 1 year checkup at the doctor. She is 22 pounds and 8 ounces, 18 inch head circumference and is 31 inches long! That puts her near the 75th percentile for weight and head and close to the 95th percentile for height! She is very long!

You can see all of the pictures here, or view a slideshow here.

Siobhán is just growing up so big, so quickly!  At 9 months old her weight is 19 pounds, she is 28 inches long and her head is measuring 17 1/2 inches.

She starting crawling on July 3rd when we were down the shore at my cousin Bob’s house.  She was crawling a bit backwards before this… but this was the first time she made any forward progress.  I was on the floor playing with her, when she started to move towards some keys (she loves keys, cell phones, laptops, jewelry… pretty much anything expensive!).  So when I moved the keys further away from her (bad daddy), she kept going for them.  Without thinking about it, she moved over 4 feet.

Now there is no stopping her, she moves to whereever she wants to go like lighting.  She is also pulling herself up and standing very well whenever she has something to hold onto.  She can even walk a bit if she’s holding on to something to help her.

She also now has her 2 top teeth in, to give her 4 now.  And she is a very good eater!  There actually isn’t much she doesn’t like.  She is also babbling pretty well now, so we are looking for her to start using words pretty soon.

Yesterday I was in a meeting about 4p or so, my last of the day and right before it was time to head off to the hotel for the shuttle to the airport, when it started getting really dark outside.  I was looking at the weather radar on my iPhone, and saw a very nasty storm moving in.

Scott, my coworker, was asking if there were tornado warnings issued, and at that time there weren’t, just some flooding and severe weather warnings.  We went back to our desks on the other side of the building and started to hear the tornado warning sirens… they sound just like air raid sirens, and it was very eerie.  Everyone was standing up in their cubes looking around and on the phone calling loved ones to check in and tell them to find shelter.

Everyone had live weather radar and streaming from the local Television stations up on their computers.  There were at least 2 tornadoes that were being tracked by the local TV stations and on radar when I left work.  One was near downtown Memphis headed north, and there was another heading south around the airport on its way to the suburbs.  Both of them were within a couple of miles of my office.  Within minutes, they started having everyone at work go into the stairwells to take shelter.  A number of other people decided to head on out to get home.

I got a ride down the street with a co worker and went back to the hotel because I needed to take the shuttle to the airport… The manager there had them call me a cab, he didn’t want them to have to go out and drive me.  The cab driver was good, and he didn’t seem to mind much, although the rain was coming down so hard at times he only had 20 or 30 feet viability in front of him.  I was a little surprised to see the highways were packed just like any typical rush hour… lots of people trying to get home to family I guess.

On the entire ride you could continuously hear the sirens no matter where you were.  When we finally got to the airport, there were no planes taking off or landing of course.  They also had sirens on as well, along with all kinds of special blue emergency lights flashing all over the air fields.  When I got inside, they weren’t letting anyone in through security.  I found out later that airport personal were evacuated into an underground shelter for about 10-15 minutes shortly before I got there.

Overall it was an experience!  I think that’s the closest I’ve ever been to a tornado before.  At least I was able to get to the airport, and my flight was only slightly delayed.

Here are some links to the news coverage:

WREG Tornado Damage Update
WREG Tornado Damage
Local Pictures
USA Today Coverage
Eyewitness News Updated story

I attended a diversity event at work today and was shocked and saddened that PA is one of 30 states that still allows employers to fire someone because of their sexual orientation. Boo! Check out pflag.org (parents and friends of lesbians and gays) for info on how to contact your representative if this shocks and saddens you also.

My lovely, thoughtful and talented wife took the following pictures of Siobhán and put them into a 3 picture frame for my first Father’s Day present:

These are all pictures that Bridget took with her new camera that I got her for Mother’s Day

She went out and bought the letters (and was smart enough to know she just needed a single “D”!), dressed up Siobhán in a cute dress my mom got for her, and then patiently took a few hundred pictures in order to get the ones above!

She then downloaded all of the pictures into Adobe Lightroom (which I was very impressed she was able to figure out), and then printed the 3 above ones and put them into a photo frame for me for Father’s Day!

It was such a wonderful present!

Here are some more pictures of Siobhán now at 8 months old. She is just growing up way too quickly! She is drinking and eating on her own now, it just makes me so sad when I think about just a little while back holding her and feed her bottles.

Here are some of the pictures that I took:

You can see all of the pictures here, or view a slideshow here.

We took Siobhán to the Brandywine Strawberry Festival with my mom for some fun.

Here are some of the pictures that I took:

You can see all of the pictures here, or view a slideshow here.

We took Siobhán to the Jersey Shore for the first time over the Memorial Day weekend, and stayed with my cousin Bob at his place in North Wildwood. We took Siobhán up on the boardwalk and on some of the rides, which she really enjoyed. We also took a trip up to Avalon to see Bridget’s Uncle Paul and Aunt Ann, and went down to Cape May for the day as well.

Here are some of the pictures that I took:

You can see all of the pictures here, or view a slideshow here.

Bridget, her mom, Siobhán and I were honored to be invited this year to Father Charlie’s dinner for my cousin Bob.

Here are some of the pictures that I took:

You can see all of the pictures here, or view a slideshow here.

We took Siobhán to Sugartown Day along with Vanessa, Madeline and Ben. Sugartown is an interesting historic crossroads village, and they had all kinds of events for the day.

Here are some of the pictures that I took:

You can see all of the pictures here, or view a slideshow here.