And so it begins...13 months and 1 day following Preston's birth, I have finally joined the blogging world, in attempt to document our adventures with some regularity, for the enjoyment of friends and family. I have several friends who have been successfully blogging about their children (since birth, mind you), who I must thank for motivating me to start this process. Hopefully you will get as much entertainment out of this blog as I have gotten from theirs.
So, without further ado, here is the latest and greatest from our film collection.

 I would bring everyone up to speed on Preston's current height/weight stats, however, as it turns out, I discovered earlier this week that we missed his 1 year appointment. I'm pretty sure this oversight excludes me from "Mother-of-the-Year." What ever happened to appointment-reminder calls?? I knew it was scheduled for a Tuesday or Thursday sometime in February, and for the last 3 weeks sat around waiting for the call. It never came. And then this past Thursday I decided to be pro-active and actually inquire with the office, and was informed the appointment had been February 2nd. Oops. Apparently they were not overly concerned that there was a vaccine-delinquent one-year-old running around the streets of Syracuse. So, we are rescheduled for March 15th. I wrote it down.
As far as developmental milestones, I can report that Preston is saying "Mumm" and "Dah" with great regularity, although I'm quite sure his first intentional word was "da," short for "dog." He is standing and cruising along whatever he can hold on to, and will enlist any object (laundry basket, hamper, etc) as a walker. His favorite activity by far is pulling various items out of the kitchen cupboards, which we still have yet to baby proof. I did, however, move any potentially eye-gouging items to drawers out of reach.
We just started the practice of laying Preston down in his crib at night BEFORE he is asleep (read: for the 1st 12 months of his life I rocked/nursed/bounced/sang him to sleep), and this has actually been a relatively easy and entertaining process. I had briefly attempted the "cry-it-out" method a few times during his first year, but with terrible results and overwhelming guilt. So I decided to wait until I felt like falling asleep on his own was a skill he should start to learn, which became expedited by the fact that he is just so freaking heavy now I can no longer physically hold him for the time it takes him to fall asleep. Needless to say, he has adjusted quite quickly to this new method, although I still have to sit next to his crib singing until he falls asleep. Which the past few nights has been about 15 minutes or less, which isn't too darn bad in my opinion.
So, there it is, a bit of an introduction, and I will try my best to keep things up to date with some degree of regularity.