Christmas was super fun - we got heaps of presents from generous family and spent many hours skyping with the grandparents (complete with many dizzying grabs at the webcam). Ben loved crawling through his tunnel.

Finger foods! Aunt Robyn introduced Ben to Cheerios at our party on Christmas Eve and there was no turning back. Ben spent 45 minutes sitting in his throne picking apart rice cakes (most of the peices ended up on the floor).

Some of Ben's Favorite things these days:

Aquariums (either real or his toy one)
The elephant watering can in the bath tub
Grandpa Bigcheese's song over Skype
Anything that has to do with water - bath, faucets, fountains, etc.
His Ochopuss during car rides

Tonight, after a long day of aquarium fish watching and contining to recover from his first ear infection, Ben made up his first game. He was sitting in his kick n' play (which is almost too small) and moved his dangling toy aside so that he could see his Daddy's face - at which point he giggled histerically. Repeat! And repeat! Ben's first baby-intiated peek-a-boo.

Ben has also mastered turning on the faucet in the bathroom (by lunging off his changing pad on the counter) and today crawled over to his sand bucket and removed all the toys inside.

Ben is now, in the words of his Dad, a crawling machine. Today he crawled all the way from the bathroom into the kitchen to find me. We are quickly realizing it's time to buy some of those babyproofing supplies. Sometime in the last day Ben has mastered the crawling to sitting up transition - effortless!

He's also got a few jokes now: his favorite is sucking on his Dad's or Mom's nose and giggling hysterically. His other new joke is pulling on mom's hair (followed by much giggling). By the way, peek-a-boo rocks!

Ben is locomoting. He's been working on crawling for a couple of weeks, and as of yesterday, Jeff and I officially declare him mobile. We went to a party and he quickly made his way 5 feet across the center of the room to both corner the dogs (he's fascinated) and play with the other tike's toys.

Ben officially has seperation anxiety. When Jeff & I got home tonight, he cried when we turned our backs to wash our hands. The tragic lip is out in full force!

Saturday's a rugby day! We celebrated the 100th anniversary of Stanford men's rugby and the 30th anniversary of the women's program with a weekend filled with touch rugby, banquet dinner, and watching the alumni match. This, of course, is where it all began - Ben particularly enjoyed playing with his mini rugby ball and playing on that strange substance called grass.