We're back!

It has been an exciting and busy Sept & Oct, and there are so many things we would like to share...so I'll start off with highlights from our past week:

Camden is doing a great job sitting with some help! We had a great time capturing Camden sitting with his very first pumpkin. In addition to deep belly laughs, Camden's other new tricks include his ability to jam all his toes in his mouth, which he regularly does during diaper changes :) He is one squirmy guy. He loves other babies and putting everything in his mouth--we all got a laugh out of Camden giving Graham a big hug and attempt at a kiss at Nathan's birthday dinner last weekend.

Mark finished a two-week long application for an online teaching job with Ashford University. He hopes to add at least a few more classes to the online job he has in the Spring for UNC, and hopefully be able to dump the TA job and daily commute to campus. I would miss our time in the car together to/from campus and dropping Camden off at daycare, but would welcome the extra time that Mark would have at home. We'll see what happens!

This week has been busy for me, preparing to give a short talk about my research and actually getting a couple of experiments started in the lab. I feel like I accomplished something--infecting plants with a transgene of interest to us in the lab (too top secret to explain more, j/k sort of :) and preparing flowers for electron microscopy. We're using a new treatment that utilizes osmium tetraoxide, a highly toxic chemical that is reduced in aqueous solutions to black oxide and osmium metal, the most dense of all known elements. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous to be using the solution. If it works well, the pictures will make it into an upcoming paper.

The first from my class at UNC graduated this week, and I attended her defense on Friday. Congrats to Dr. Andrea O'Hara! Andrea is also 7 months pregnant and recently moved to Baltimore, so it was great to see her and JP down here for the defense. As a gift to little Miss O'Hara, Amanda and I pieced together a quilt from the squares sewn at Andrea's baby shower. I was quite impressed with our work (pictures soon!).

Also, as a nice surprise this weekend, our friends Lindsay and Ryan brought their newborn son Grayson up to Durham/CH for a visit today! We've already decided that Camden and Grayson are going to be best buds...without any planning, they were already wearing coordinating Polo jumpsuits today! Sofia (Travis & Joana's 5.5 month daughter) was decked out in the most adorable brown and pink dress--watch out boys!

The picture below was taken by Lauren this past week, and you can see even more pictures of Camden at daycare here. Looks like he was playing peek-a-boo with the silky scarf.