Howdy, y'all!

We Ropers are enjoying our new Texas home. Our apartment is large, nice, and bright. We have enjoyed exploring FW and have checked out some great museums, the old stockyards district, Ikea, the botanic gardens, the flea market, the Country Market grocery store (a destination in and of itself), and some restaurants and tortilla factories. We still need to visit the awesome zoo, but the heat has been a deterrent.

Dr. Gary's first rotation is surgery, and although busy, it is not as bad as he feared it would be. He's doing a great job, and he is convinced that Fort Worth is still the Wild West due to all of the gunshot and stabbing victims he sees every day.

Miles has developed a few new tricks recently.

1. He scoots all over. Not a crawl nor an army crawl, but his own unique mode of locomotion learned about four weeks ago.
2. Miles started eating baby food at about 5.5 months old (a month ago). He had been very interested in food for weeks so we decided to let him take the leap. Turns out he's a little omnivore. He hasn't turned anything down, and he is very calm and still when we feed him. It seems he doesn't want to interfere with the process; he wants his food as quickly and efficiently as possible!
3. He has a third tooth on the bottom as of last week. I am pleased with this development as I prefer odd numbers to even, and asymmetrical mouths are much funnier than symmetrical mouths.
4. On Monday, Miles decided that standing is way cooler than laying down or sitting so he started pulling himself up on the TV stand, grunting and puffing all the way up. He practices his new skill at every opportunity, which requires us to actually pay attention to the little bugger because he has no way down but to fall.
   
5. Miles squeals with delight when he sees pictures of himself on the computer screen.
6. Miles loves to read books.

We are quasi-settled in here. There remain numerous boxes full of mysterious contents of undetermined origin for which it is difficult to find places. The goal is to deal with those by the 16th because we will have been here one month and I'm afraid that if I don't set a hard deadline, our nice apartment will look like a refugee camp until we move out.