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Duncan’s second birthday has come and gone, and a spectacular time was had by all. Sabriena finally got around to doing some baking here, which was actually quite the traumatic event – as I’m led to believe any American forced to use the metric system for the first time in a trial-by-fire sort of task will experience. She really pulled out all the stops and did a fantastic job for Duncan’s cake, though I’m not entirely sure if it’s age appropriate for a 2 year old:

The kid absolutely adores chocolate, and his eyes pretty much lit up when he saw it. Basically it’s a chocolate cake, with chocolate frosting, chocolate chips on the side and chocolate Cadbury Creme Eggs on the top, with chocolate drizzled all over it. Yeah.

The cake itself turned out fantastic, which much to my surprise (and a little bit of relief) Duncan ate most of. It was so incredibly rich that I found myself in an eyes-bigger-than-stomach scenario pretty quickly.

Duncan got assorted presents throughout the day – mostly Cars related stuff, because that’s his new thing again, along with a couple funny tshirts and that sort of thing.

To my darling wife Sabriena, there are very few things more horrifying than a family reunion – her family is very tight-knight and almost don’t speak to any of her extended family for one reason or another. Due to requests though, Mum organized a “little” family get-together down in the teeny tiny town of Bayles (because it’s close to where my Grandmother lives).

All in all, I think about 40 people showed up and it was quite a surreal experience. A few of my cousins haven’t changed much from how I remember them – mostly the older ones, along with aunts and uncles and so on. It was quite mind-blowing to meet kids like “baby taylor“, who was about Duncan’s age when I left and is now a teenager.

Most of the kids spent the day bashing on the old upright piano that was in the hall we rented, which made conversation a little difficult depending on where you were standing (and one managed to get their hand stuck in the keyboard cover) but other than that and the sweltering humidity everything was great.

It took Duncan a bit, but he opened up quite well and was running around by the end of it all. We took the camera, but managed to leave it in the car all day which was a little bit silly, so there’s no photos of the occasion. It wasn’t as traumatic as we thought it’d be either.

I wasn’t aware it was an option when he was born, but thanks to Groogle pointing out that Duncan was a dual citizen by virtue of my citizenship. We filed the papers around the beginning of January, and as of the 24th Duncan is officially a citizen of both the United States and Australia.

We just received the papers in the mail yesterday, so today we tried to get him to pose with a photocopy of the certificate (because he’s almost 2, and putting an actual citizenship certificate in the hands of an almost-2-year-old just didn’t seem like a good idea), but we’ll have to wait and see how they turned out. Putting a piece of paper in his hands rekindled his apparent love of paper-scrunching, so I’m not sure if any of the pictures are going to be workable.

We took some other pictures of him too, with him messing around with 30 year old Lego blocks, an old pair of ski goggles, etc – but I’d really prefer it if the certificate picture came out nice.

After a long and gruelling trip, we’ve landed safely in Australia and are now staying at my parents’ house. The weather when we arrived was freakishly hot, I think here locally it hit about 108F at one point – but the lack of humidity is surprisingly nice… the heat didn’t really knock us around as I thought it would (if it hits 100F in Indiana, we’d pretty much just lay around and do nothing all day and I was still able to function despite being in 34F the previous day).

We blew through security at the Indy airport really quickly, and it was a surprisingly friendly experience. I’d heard horror stories, but apart from having to remove my shoes and my belt we went through completely without issue. We didn’t have to clear security again until after we’d arrived in Sydney, at which point we had to go through a secondary screening before boarding our transfer.

When we arrived in Tullamarine we had to declare things to customs, things like medication, large amounts of currency, gold bars, and food. Uh oh, food – we’d brought a whole bag of snacks and things to keep Duncan occupied during the flight. I didn’t think that all the pre-prepared snacks we’d brought would qualify as things they’d throw away, but I declared them anyway.

It’s probably just as well, as the detector dog they ran over our baggage hit on our snack bag, so we had to step out of line while they searched it. It turned out that nothing in there was of any consequence, and we skated right through the rest of the way and out to the car trip home.

It’s going to suck – he’s been eating, but really only these fruit squeezer things we figured out he loves. He’s started venturing to put more things into his mouth, but he gags most every time on things that aren’t breastmilk, water, or pureed fruit. I just know once they get him up on the exam table and start asking questions, we’re going to get an earful.

Sabriena’s done a little research and we think he still has an overactive gag reflex, and apparently the “early intervention” crap they’re going to start him on has a method to help deal with that… here’s hoping, because he’s growing up so quick in all other aspects and this not eating thing’s starting to bug us.

Let’s knock on some wood and hope it continues, but Duncan’s finally started eating solid foods. This morning he was actually excited!

This is a pretty stark contrast from a month ago, when our doctors (I still think they’re overreacting) were actually thinking about scheduling developmental tests for him because most kids are eating at least some kind of solid by 1 year. They don’t believe us that he knows what food is, and not to put it in his mouth: “1 year olds don’t know the difference between food and non-food” – bull shit.

He’s starting to do better with loud noises too – I don’t know how much of the loud noises is normal and how much is my fault. I accidentally broke a big piece of glass when he was really young which upset him no small amount, and because of that things like the vacuum cleaner were traumatic. He’s doing better with the vacuum cleaner, but seeing Trevor’s ATV come around the corner of the house full throttle is as terrifying as lipozene side effects to this kid still.

It sucks, because I was sort of toying with the idea of tootling around on it with him when he’s not scared of it anymore. I have reservations though, because it’s a manual clutch – and holding onto a tiny kid while trying to stop just doesn’t scream safe (not that any part of taking a baby on an ATV is remotely safe). We’ll probably hold off on things like that until he’s old enough to ride a bicycle first.

I was going to wait until Sabriena was done uploading the pictures, but by the time I do the event will have faded into irrelevance.

This past Saturday, we all took a trip up to Fort Wayne to check out the Children’s Zoo up there, and we had an absolute blast for the most part. The FWCZ is about the perfect size, in my humble opinion – it’s not so small (at least, with the release of the new African section) that you don’t walk around the entire thing and think “that’s it?”, and not so huge that you don’t get to see everything. We saw every section of it and my feet were killing me at the end, and Duncan finally passed out on my shoulder before I laid him down in the stroller for a quick nap before we headed home.

We took a huge amount of pictures, many of which will be up on our Flickr as soon as Sabs is done sorting them.

The best part was that MumbleDog completely cooperated the entire day – we didn’t have any tickets to answer until right before we got home, and that was a simple one at that. We’re also starting to get a bit of spam to our support ticket email address, which sucks. I was a bit disheartened to see we had a support ticket – but then relieved to find out it was just some kind of hydroxatone scam, but then disheartened again because I realized that this sort of thing would grow only more common.

Yup!

We made it an entire year without breaking him, dropping him on the floor, or leaving him someplace… hehehe.

We’re not having his party until this weekend, but we went ahead and gave him his main gift today. He doesn’t know any different, all he knows is that he got a sweet new toy today. Sabriena and I were both a little worried that we won’t have any birthday gifts for her to take photos of, but I figure we got some pictures of him enjoying his new car today and the date on the photos doesn’t really matter.

I can’t wait to take some shots of him smashing into his smash cake though!

Face-planting on laminate floors isn’t fun… but it’s a rite of passage if you’re going to learn to walk.

At least our office area, where Duncan spends most of his time, is carpeted so there’s a little cushion when he drops.

… and drops he does. Man that kid has fallen more in the past couple months than I think I did my entire teen years – and I was goofy as hell.