Nation Celebrates Rohan's 1/2 Year Birthday...AKA July 4th

Yep, the little guy is 6 months old already! It's amazing how he's changed in such a short time. He's much more aware of the world around him, which is good, unless you are trying to feed an easily distracted baby.

This last week Mara finished up her orientation classes, and this coming week she FINALLY starts in the clinic. She's super excited to start seeing patients and learning to apply all her knowledge she has stored on her hard drive. Rohan is looking forward to some quality "Dad Time". So far it been fun watching him and the dogs interact, as well as him demonstrate why he's the "Smartest Baby Ever" (see videos).

We had an awesome weekend this week. Friday we went over to Greg & Nico's to grill out, hang out at the pool, and relax with a couple of friends of Greg & Nico's. They were really fun, and brought their 7 month old and 4 year old. The 4 year old had so much energy, I can only imagine what that will be like with Rohan! We played cornhole under the lights and towards the end of the night it rained pretty hard for about 30 minutes! It was a really cold rain, but it felt good after the 108°F we had that day.

Saturday was a long, but fun day. I started out by meeting Greg & Brian at the golf course. We played the course that Arizona State uses as their home course, called Karsten Golf Course. It was a really good design (by architect Pete Dye). I started out 3 over through the first 6 holes with 4 pars and a birdie. That's some of the best golf I've played. I couldn't maintain that pace, but it still felt really good to play, even with the soaring temperatures! It took us about 3.5 hours to play and it was over 100°F the whole time. Afterwards we went to Sasha's and grilled out, hung out at her pool, and made plans for fireworks.

We went to Tempe's fireworks, which were down by the ASU campus, along the AZ canal. There was a HUGE crowd, but somehow we hooked up with Sasha and Jake. It was pretty warm, but we're getting used to it. It was probably around 100°F at 9:30 when the show started. We were not sure how Rohan would do with the loud noises. It turns out he LOVED IT! He was absolutely enthralled with the display, and barely flinched at the noise, although a few of the reports startled him. He even started to nod off during the finale (see video). The show lasted about 45 minutes, and had 5-6 rounds of fireworks that we all thought were the finale. The real finale was awesome! There were even fireworks that I hadn't seen before, which made it cool for us as well.

The ride home was interesting...to say the least. We had parked at a mall where shuttles were running to the fireworks park. After the show we walked back to the bus stop we were dropped of at and hopped on a bus. Turns out it's not the shuttle we originally got on. Sasha realized we were going the opposite direction of the mall. We thought about getting out and figuring out the way back, but we were in a pretty bad neighborhood. Luckily Jake has seen the bus route number on the outside (nice attention to detail!) and I looked up the route on my phone. By some blind frickin' luck the bus happened to go right by Sasha's apartment! WOW! We stopped there and she gave us a ride back to our cars. Overall about an hour detour, but a fun story to share...:)

Today was a nice day of watching Tiger Woods duel Anthony Kim in golf and watching the Brewers at Buffalo Wild Wings. Even though the Brewers lost, it was still fun. Rohan did pretty well considering we were there for almost 4 hours. I was pretty lazy and just watched sports, while Mara was working on writing up a case study they had for homework. Rohan, being more aware of his surroundings, decided to attack the sunshade on his car seat. It was pretty comical watching him attack it...:)

Tonight Mara and I took Rohan to the pool to cool off a little. He took a little nap, then at 8:00 we decided to try running outside. Since it's gotten so warm recently, we've been running inside (not our favorite). Since we hadn't run in this kind of heat (still 100+°F at 8:00) we made sure to bring lots of fitness water and took several breaks to assess how we were feeling. We made it 3.5 miles and still felt good, but stopped so we didn't overdo our first run in this heat. Rohan slept through most of it. Mara made the comment that Rohan has been running his whole life, including inside and outside the womb. I thought that we pretty cool...:)
Enjoy the pics & vids...There are a lot of them!:


Rohan's First 4th Of July:


Smartest Baby Ever!:


Rohan & Schroeder:


Rohan Attacks His Car Seat: