His nose is as long as the second joint on my index finger.
His thumb is as long as the first joint on my thumb.
It looks like he’s going to have fairly stocky fingers, particularly his thumbs. Probably not a virtuoso piano player.
His toes look like mine, not Adam’s. At least that’s one thing he got from me. Oh, that and the long eyelashes.
His whiny-cry and his laugh can sometimes sound similar. His aunts and his nanny can’t always tell the difference. But his mommy always can.
When he first started eating solids he really favored holding food with his left hand, much to his daddy’s delight. Now he’s an equal opportunity grabber/stuffer. We’ll see what happens.
He has enough hair now that when I kiss the back of his neck now I’m kissing hair, instead of skin. And I can run my fingers through the hair on top of his head.
Sometimes I look at him and can imagine him at 3. Or 6. But more often I hold him and wish I could hold him, just like he is, forever.
One of the things that has plagued our house since day one is the trash in our yard. We’re on the corner so we have a lot of frontage, our side street (the longer stretch) is slightly downhill, and we’re also in, as dear readers know, a neighborhood where there, ahem, doesn’t seem to be a lot of neighborhood pride. (I’m trying to be nice here.)
So the net effect is that our yard, and especially the grass on either side of our (now three-year-old) sidewalk (outside of our decrepit fence), is constantly filled with trash. Adam insists it’s worse because we’re downhill and trash just blows down the street into our yard, but I’m not willing to give our neighbors that much credit. Sometimes it’s just a cigarette butt here and there, but more often it’s full-blown trash: potato chip bags, White Castle cartons (as most of you know, we live in the shadow of the White Castle….which will be the title of Adam’s memoir), gum wrappers, bottle tops, and cans. And lots and lots of dog poop. Yucch.
As this was an exceptionally beautiful weekend (finally), Adam and I got outside yesterday to try and start to tame some of the mess. Aaron came with us and sat in his stroller (sun shade up of course). We made fair progress on the back half of the yard and the area around the garage, but it will take another major effort to do the front part, which is worse because it’s weedier and on a more trafficked street.
Adam has been talking to fence installers and we’re hoping to have a new fence up soon, which may help somewhat since the decrepit fence is awkwardly standing against a hill of stone and grass sloping down from the backyard area, which is most often where trash gets trapped. So when we have the new fence installed we’ll have to either grade the hill down or add sod and grass to where the new fence will be. Yet another decision, yet another expense, yet another house story to be told.
It’s true, we haven’t been posting as much as we should– and facebook is taking its toll, as well as a certain bear to remain nameless. I’ve done my small part, but it gets hard to maintain a personal blog, or a home blog, because so much of what you are thinking about is embroiled in everyday life, and after you’ve solved those problems in real life, do you really want to relive them by writing them down?
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about.
People are always asking me “So how is it to be a dad?”
Overall, I’d have to say, it’s great. The fears I had of fatherhood, mostly irrational (not loving the baby, a large fear of poop, fear that I would abandon the family as my paternal grandfather did to my grandmother, my dad, and his two siblings in 1938) are no longer fears at all (although I’m not particularly fond of the poop mind you) I recognize those now as irrational. I have a whole new set of irrational fears, of course (which I’d prefer not to share at the present time)
One of the downsides is that I’m not nearly as productive as I’d like to be from a small business/clown/theatrical producer point of view, now that I’m a part-time stay at home dad. (Truth be told, I wasn’t all that efficient with my time when I didn’t have this 5-7 hours a day unpaid parenting gig– and it may be hard to imagine, but productivity has gone down! On the plus side, procrastination numbers have held steady!)
But as a number of people told me when I started on this journey– even though it’s hard and you’ll want to complain about it and it will drive you insane and nuts and wear you down more than it seems possible, it’s still something you won’t ever want to trade.
So I get less gigs, so be it.
He’s very funny, and has a great sense of humor, and sometimes I just laugh and smile for no reason when I see him.
I suppose there’s a reason, actually; he is my son, and I love him to pieces!
His laugh is really infectious– here he is laughing from being tickled– but sometimes he just laughs without being tickled. Sometimes it’s something I do (he loves the doubletake– and it’s amazing how much my clown stuff works even at his young age)
Sometimes he laughs for no reason whatsoever! And that is a also a real pleasure.
I’m thinking about adding his laugh as my ringtone….
It’s so embarrassing that we’ve been almost completely post-less since Aaron was born. I guess I didn’t realize that we actually have non-family reading the blog – it took a friend from our synagogue (yes, you!) to remind me that we actually did have blog readers, once upon a time, and that some of them actually checked it out without prompting…when there was new stuff to read, of course. And lately there’s been nothing.
I could say that we’ve been a bit busy, which would be dramatically understated and also totally lame. And I could say that we’ve both been sort of obsessed with both Twitter and Facebook of late, which leaves less time to blog, which is true but also lame.
So I’m going to make a real effort to blog more frequently. I won’t make any promises about how often, but I’m going to try. Really.
For now, here are a few recent pictures of our little bear. Because we know you all want to see him. Isn’t he delightful? We’re really enjoying him.
