Taking pictures of a baby is hard. Ahead of Wyatt’s first birthday, let’s take a moment to relive the best moments we didn’t capture over the last year.

(Click on a picture to open the slideshow.)

Boo crappy phone camera. Hooray Wyatt!

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The date stares me in the face every time I look at this blog: October 4th.  It’s been over three months since I updated. Quarterly updates on a baby blog are not going to cut it, man.

Here’s the truth: I’m bad at updating blogs.  Any of them. Anywhere.

Unless You Have Somehow Installed Creepy Hidden Cameras In Our House, Here Are Things You Probably Missed And We’re Sorry

• You’ve missed Wyatt learning to speed crawl towards you, excitedly panting that you’re going to pick him up. It’s adorable, man. You should visit more often.
• You probably missed Wyatt learning to curse DADADADADA for all of his ills. Curse that DADADADA! CURSE HIM!
• You might have missed Wyatt learning how to stand, several tough falls, one black eye, one fall out of the crib, and, all things considered, a lot of good standing around.
• Dancing! He dances! It’s enough to make you cry when you learn his dad can’t dance at all. The joy he’s missed!
• You missed Christmas, but you know how it is. You’ve got family, man. I forgive you. Wyatt got some sweet noise-making things. We even shot a video and then promptly never cared about it again.
• Somewhere in there, you missed a baby turning into a boy. It couldn’t have been 10 minutes after he learned to roll over that he was crawling, then standing, and I’m fairly sure when he wakes up tomorrow, he’ll be 17. It’s the most incredible, tremendous thing, to see a person growing up before your eyes. That smile of recognition when he hears your voice, that excited panting as he crawls towards you. To know this person you created has learned to love you unconditionally. And to know that you’ve got another 8 minutes or so before he grows up and moves away. You should really stop by sometime soon.
• You also missed him eating applesauce last night. It was hilarious. He had no idea what to do with his tongue.

Since — let’s face it — that kid is way too cute to update once every three month, I promise I’ll try to post more often.  Videos, even. Videos!

Not today, of course. Don’t get greedy.

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Wyatt is teething. Here is a video.

Watch this video on YouTube.

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How quickly it all speeds by.

Somewhere in the rush, the noise, the hubub, Wyatt started to make this transition from helpless blob to small person. None of it happened instantaneously, of course.  I doubt any part of it will.

Last night, as we chilled in the living room as a family, I kept looking up from my laptop to find Wyatt staring at me, like I was the only thing in the entire world. In that moment, in that moment of bittersweet epiphany, I figured it was time to make a new video.

After all, there aren’t that many firsts in life, and they’re mostly crammed into a short amount of time at the beginning. And while this movie isn’t full of firsts, it’s full of almost firsts, which are pretty awesome on their own.

So here’s a new video, cinematic proof that Wyatt is somehow almost sitting, almost talking, almost standing, almost crawling. Not bad for a one-minute video.

Watch this video on YouTube.

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Wyatt is almost five months old and has starred in only a single bizarre video.  It’s time to remedy this.

So let’s Electric Boogaloo this introduction thing. Here’s the Wyatt video you never knew you wanted to watch repeatedly…

Watch this video on YouTube.

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I’m not sure if it’s my mumbling or if YouTube just hears the world like @horse_ebooks writes, but the closed captioning on “The One Where We Fill Out A Baby Book” is a thing of sublime beauty. (The fact that it absolutely nails Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s name is the cherry on top of this delicious sundae.)

Here are our favorite screen captures…

Welcome to u reaped terry nine

Electrode

Shilo Haley Barbour

You live in a time of plant

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

People watching something else...especially fatty foods

Farms

Assistant teacher

We vampire di hoc aids they goober actually got things assam bs this is

It's a lot of Hitler's we have learned to that's twenty twelve

Finally that makes any sense burn one more visual display data show against I

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So…I totally never posted this to the blog.

In the final days before young Wyatt arrived, we realized in a panic that we had completely avoided doing anything cloying or ridiculously sentimental like good expectant parents are supposed to (or something).

The solution? Fill out the baby book! Someday, Wyatt will marvel at how much a gallon of milk used to cost as he reads his baby book from his crudely constructed post-apocalyptic bunker in the radioactive wastes. “What is milk,” he’ll ask. “And is this amount fair? I literally have no concept of money. My currency is based on bottlecaps.”  And he’ll thank us for thinking of him!

We threw the resulting video on Facebook, but it turns out that when you have a baby four days later, you forget all kinds of things (the joy of sleep, posting videos to your blog, et al). So for the first time ever on our own blog, behold “The One Where We Fill Out A Baby Book.”

Watch this video on YouTube.

P.S. Like the new look?

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I never fully intended to make this the official “Introduction to Wyatt,” but, y’know, get over it.

Here’s the first-ever video of young Wyatt Chase Johnson, in which he was kind enough to look as out of it as humanly possible for as long as humanly possible.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Music is “Ancient Chinese Secret Blues” by Clem Snide, which was actually playing in the background the entire time. (Toward the end of the video, I actually cut back on the soundtrack so you could hear it playing tinnily from my iPod.)

Share your pick for “sleepy baby soundtrack” in the comments below. And stay tuned for an official welcome video for young Wyatt, complete with cuts and a snappy soundtrack and even a roughly-sketched plot, coming soon to a blog near you!

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Surprise! We had a baby four months ago. Crazily enough, babies are tiring and time consuming and tiny. Who knew?

Now that we’ve started to adjust to the idea that we actually made a child, let this be your notice that regular updates — and, yes, videos — shall start again.

Not today, of course. Don’t get greedy.

(Also, something something about redoing the site design.)

What they don’t tell you — what nobody tells you — is just how much waiting goes on.

Having a baby (from my perspective, anyway) is a monumentally slow process. There are fantastic moments of excitement and anticipation and nostalgic reflection and stroller shopping-induced rage. But then you finish shopping and you finish the nursery and you finish getting ready and you finish cleaning…

And then you wait. And then you clean the house again. And then you wait.

Ad nauseum.

We’re at the end of the 39th week, and while we’d like to think we’re ready to have a baby any second now, our last checkup ended with our doctor telling us “he sounds comfortable in there.” So we wait some more.

So if you’ve been frustrated by the lack of posts, it’s because we’ve been frustrated by a lack of things to post about. Which is why I’m engaging in some scope creep.

Starting today, we’re including cooking posts.

After all, cooking — and the eating of said cooking — are a major part of our lives. We spend whole weekends in the kitchen together, especially when we’re entertaining friends and family.  We have a homemade sous-vide setup, rigged together with a rice cooker and a Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller.  We built our own smoker.  And we’re pressure cooking pork belly upstairs right now.

So it doesn’t seem to me that much of a stretch to include cooking posts.  I cannot wait to start making baby food.  I absolutely cannot wait until I can teach my son how to cook.  Heck, I’m just psyched to cook a runny-yolk egg for Terri again in a few weeks.

To kick off this welcome scope creep, your next post will be tomorrow’s Easter lunch:

• Cider-Braised Pork Belly in the Pressure Cooker
• Brown Butter & Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes
• Brown Butter Sweet & Savory Apples

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