Phoebe tries out her baby chair the morning before camping.

Mom, I'll just climb in here and make sure it's a good space for our food.

The first weekend in May, we took Friday off work and went camping with our friends the Brinkmans. We’d been eager to try out our new tent somewhere besides the front yard, and the weather was going to be perfect for camping. Dave and Greg had softball on Thursday night. (The game ended in the mercy rule, so the Marauders’ season can only go uphill!) We left about 10:00 a.m. on Friday morning after stopping for breakfast and to get some more fuel for the camp stove. It’s remarkable how much stuff we need to be away (and comfortable) for two nights. I felt like we’d packed half the house into Luna! Dave did his usual expert packing job, so we could see out the back window.

We were headed to a campground called Ruby Ridge, near Buena Vista, which is where poor Taco broke down while we were camping with the Johnsons last year. This time we had no car trouble!

Our two Subarus at the campground.

It’s only about 2.5 hours to Buena Vista, so we arrived at lunchtime. The Brinkmans beat us by a few minutes and had already set up their tent.

Thomas in the rocks.

Phoebe HATES wearing hats. Luckily, this borrowed one has a chin strap!

Dave set to work putting up the Nemo while Phoebe and I ate lunch.

Our new tent in action!

After lunch, we played in the rocks and looked at the river.

The view of the river right behind our campsites.

Phoebe tests out the river water.

Hey, this water is freezing!

Emily and Thomas.

The Brinkman family are all fisherpeople, so they were eager to follow some old man from the fly shop’s instructions to walk to a good fishing spot near the campground. We put the babies in backpacks, with some question about whether John (who’s 3) was going to walk or ride. He insisted on riding. so Emily wrapped Thomas up in the Moby, and we were off. We hiked around the edge of some private property and found a footpath off the main road. We hiked up, and up, and up the path. John kept saying “we’re at the top!” We could see a trailer park, but no river. We found a dry wash, but it didn’t seem to be leading us to the river. After hiking for a while, we decided that maybe the old man was far more spry than we were…he’d apparently made it sound like a short walk. We ended up heading back to the campground—up, up, up, and then down. When we got back, the babies played in the rocks for a while before it was time to start the fire for dinner.

Playing with the jumbo shape sorter.

We had a delicious dinner of hamburgers, hot dogs, and chips, and then we got to make s’mores! John was so excited. Emily found a really cool marshmallow stick with points that curve backward for safety, so John was able to toast some of his own marshmallows. (Did I say “toast”? I meant “burn up.”) Phoebe tried her first toasted marshmallow too.

Phoebe's first marshmallow.

At 8:00 p.m., we put Phoebe to bed in the new tent. She wore fleece footy pajamas and a snowsuit, and we covered her with a fleece blanket. When she got up in the morning, she made sparks! The grownups hung out around the fire until about 11:00 p.m. Dave and I were excited to sleep in our new tent, but we’d only been asleep a short time when I woke up, not feeling very well. Although our tent has two doors, Phoebe was sleeping next to one, and I was in the middle, so I had to crawl past Dave to get outside, where I promptly threw up. I threw up three more times during the night, and Dave threw up once. We think we might have poisoned ourselves with our water jug, since the Brinkmans all felt fine and we all ate the same food.

Dave usually cooks breakfast while we’re camping, but he couldn’t get out of bed. Whatever bug we’d picked up had worked through my system already, so I cooked eggs and bacon and we all ate. The Brinkmans wanted to do some fishing, and there was a big hatch nearby on the Arkansas that day, so they debated about going toward the crowds or going somewhere less busy. We followed them in the car, heading into Salida to get a drink and relax. Phoebe flirted with everyone at Bongo Billy’s while Dave and I tried to recover. Our stomachs still weren’t in perfect condition. When we got back to camp, a guy standing by the boat launch that was right near the Brinkmans’ tent showed us a three-foot snake going by. Pretty exciting! We were feeling a little better, and we managed to eat some dinner. The second night in the tent went a lot more smoothly.

Can you see the snake at the base of the trees? Now look back up at the left-hand side of the photo of our tent.

Dave relaxing.

Phoebe in the tree.

Eating breakfast.

Cows crossing the river.

A very dirty, very angry baby.

The Brinkman family.

Phoebe was a little cold in the morning, so she crawled into my sleeping bag. Dave got up to cook more eggs and bacon. There’s nothing like a breakfast burrito with Cholula when you’re out camping!

Shoes in the morning.

Still sleeping.

Dave cooking breakfast.

John and Phoebe in their jammies.

Pajamas and tennis shoes.

Dave and I had brought our bikes, so the Brinkmans offered to watch Phoebe while we went out for a ride. We rode up a dirt road and never made it to any cool singletrack, but man, was it fun to go out together without having to worry about whether Phoebe was getting bounced around too much! We all put the finishing touches on packing the cars and then headed into Buena Vista for lunch at the Eddyline Brewpub. Greg still wanted to do some fishing, so we went down to the river, but there wasn’t a good spot available, so we said our goodbyes and headed home. A great first camping trip for 2011!

This amazing living room is all made of metal and tile. It's on the pedestrian path by the river in Salida.

May 1

Phoebe’s feet were chilly on Sunday morning before church, so we put on her fuzzy pink slippers. Pretty cute!

Holding her duck from Beth and Chris.

Messing with the stove (which she's not allowed to do). Take the photo first, then scold!

Hmm...look at the tread on these things!

After church, we came home to play.

Playing with the fridge farm.

Another goofy shot of Phoebe's two front teeth.

Here’s a video of Phoebe climbing around on her train. She’s getting pretty brave and agile!

May 2

May 8

We went camping and Phoebe discovered that she likes to climb around on the inside of the car more than she likes to play in the woods.

May 14

To raise money for the Rainbow Childcare scholarship fund, we auctioned off time with Phoebe. We spent some time with Jan and John Meadows at their beautiful home in Loveland.

Gribbles and Meadows

May 15

Walking back to church with Daddy.

Phoebe, where's your belly button?

May 18

I’ve asked before, and I’m sure I will again: Is there anything cuter than a naked baby?

Strategically placed bucket. Just call her Eve.

May 19

Hi again! Here are a few photos and videos from Easter evening and this past week.

Our Easter eggs.

This is Phoebe eating her first peep. If she’s like most grownups, she won’t like these much past childhood.

Here she is opening her Easter basket from Grammie and Pappy.

And playing with Zoe, a Sesame Street puppet.

There are many ways to play with a basket! Things out first, then things in.

Here’s a video of Phoebe wreaking havoc in the kitchen towel drawer. She’s so cute! And destructive.

This morning (Saturday, April 30), Phoebe woke up with pinkeye. It was very apparent in her left eye in the morning, and her right eye was all gooped up by evening. We still have some eyedrops from the last time she had pinkeye (and gave it to Mommy), so we’ve been torturing her with eyedrops all day today. Plus washing our hands a lot!

Phoebe this morning with her left eye swollen half shut by pinkeye.

Even when you have pinkeye, you can still have a little bit of fun.

Phoebe’s top middle teeth are coming in, and she has a delightful Lauren Hutton gap! I captured this pretty good photo of her mouth this afternoon.

Now I've got four teeth!

Editorial Note: This is a rather old (Last September) unfinished post that I thought I should finally complete.

The Acer Aspire 1410 in red; this is not my laptop, but is in every way identical.

In order to keep up the blogging and everything else that requires a computer,  I ordered a replacement for the poor Dell laptop, which is now well into its death throes. It’s a small Acer Aspire 1410 with a full-sized keyboard and decent screen resolution (11.5″ diagonal and 1366 x 768). It’s definitely in the ultra-portable category, but it’s slightly larger and more powerful than the popular netbooks everyone is carrying around these days. In fact, it’s about an inch bigger than Jess’s Asus Eee PC, but with a much better screen. The only real downside with Jess’s little Asus is the pathetic 1024 x 600 screen resolution. Rumor has it that Microsoft was requiring such limited resolution from netbooks in order for manufacturers to continue selling Windows XP in place of Vista throughout most of 2009. I can’t confirm or deny that rumor, but it really is the only significant downside of the little netbook with the Intel Atom processor.

As for the Acer, it comes standard with 2 GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron Core 2 Solo processor. The RAM can be upgraded to 4 GB, and the access is a breeze through the bottom of the laptop, but unfortunately the memory configuration is standard as a 2 x 1 GB 667 MHz DDR3. That means an upgrade will require wastefully replacing both DIMMs. As for the Celeron processor, it’s supposed to be a great deal more powerful than the Atoms, with similar active power consumption. The big difference is in the passive power consumption. Apparently the Celeron’s transistors are a bit more leaky than those of the Atom processors—requiring more power draw. The end result is a very healthy battery life of about 6 hours.

The keyboard on the Acer is a bit more resilient than Jess’s Eee PC, but the buttons are a bit less defined than the “chicklet” style keys chosen by Asus and made popular by the Macbooks. The end result is a full-sized keyboard that is a little harder to type on than the slightly undersized keyboard on the Asus, yet far more comfortable for typing than the much larger Dell. Bigger isn’t always better. The Acer offers both VGA and HDMI options for the video output along with 3 USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet connection, audio in and out via mini phono jacks, and an SD card reader slot. Sadly, the SD card reader doesn’t fully recess when a card is present the way is does on Jess’s Asus, but that’s a pretty minor complaint.

Aside from a few non-ideal aspects, the little laptop is quite impressive. Although Acer preloads the laptop with a ridiculous number of useless software titles, collectively they were pretty easy to remove. To date I’ve found the computer more than capable of streaming high-def video from the web, composing and playing multi-stave music with Finale, editing digital images with the Gimp, and of course blogging. I’ve found that stitching images together using Hugin (see an upcoming blog post for a rave review (Note: Already available) is faster than it was on the old Dell, but I’m a bit disappointed with the speed at which Nikon Raw images are batch processed using Nikon’s proprietary software. I’ll be doing a timed speed test with the laptop and a far more powerful desktop in the future in order to see if it’s a system issue or a software issue (I still haven’t done this and may never).

Regardless, everything else performs quite admirably for such a portable platform. It weights next to nothing and fits easily into a little Osprey shoulder bag I won as a raffle prize at the Boulder Bike Shorts film festival a couple of years ago. Despite the increased size and weight, I was seriously considering buying one of the new MacBooks. If they incorporated FireWire in the smaller format, I’d probably have spent the additional money; however, you have to step all the way up to the massive MacBook Pro series to get FireWire, and I wanted something lighter and more portable. In the end, I’m glad I saved both bulk and money by choosing the Acer.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

It’s 10:45 and the Gribble family has already been to church. We’re at home, where Phoebe is napping and Dave and I are raiding our Easter baskets. Phoebe got a fancy Longaberger Easter basket from Grammie with a bunch of cool stuff. (No candy for babies, although I thought I’d let her try a marshmallow peep.) She hasn’t opened her basket yet, but she’ll do that when she gets up from her nap. I bought her a couple of books for Easter.

Here’s a photo of our Easter baskets and decorations.

And here’s our family outside church.

Hey, we clean up okay.

Might as well tell you about yesterday while we’re here. We went to the coffee shop, of course, and then walked over to the WOW museum for an hour. It’s so nice to have a kid’s museum within walking distance!

Reading King Lear (upside down).

Cute striped sweater!

Hey, Mommy, you're tickling me!

See my belly button?

Dressing up as a lion at the Wow museum.

Your eyes aren't deceiving you...there are two lions! (And a baby who's fed up with wearing a lion suit.)

Phoebe learned from the other kids at school to show us her belly button.

She loves to sit on a seat or step that’s her size!

Lest you think she’s this adorable all the time, here she is melting down at the Wow museum. Of course, I might melt down if somebody were trying to force me to say “roar” over and over.

Phoebe and I colored Easter eggs yesterday afternoon. She did a good job putting stickers on one, but she mostly watched me do the dyeing. I was afraid she was going to throw my Browns glasses on the floor.