Thursday, May 29, 2008

Cute Pics

Here are a couple of pictures of Asher. He was excited to have shorts on. Unfortunately, "shorts weather" only lasted about 2 days.

Where Does the Time Go?

Before we had Asher, I remember always hearing parents talking about how busy they were, and how they never seem to have anytime for themselves. Although I believed them, I think part of me always wondered, "What could they be doing all day?"

Well, I definitely don't wonder anymore. These pictures show a tiny sliver of a typical day with Asher and where some of my time goes. I've learned that being a parent means getting things accomplished in baby steps, or often, with two steps forward and one step back. Meaning, in order to get dinner made, for instance, you have to be willing to let you child create a mess (that you will later have to clean up of course) so long as it keeps him occupied for a while.


Trouble in the Basement

A few weeks ago I went down to the basement to put a load of laundry in the dryer. I pushed the start button and nothing happened. The buttons were lit and I could hear the motor trying to spin, but nothing moved. I couldn't believe it. How could our barely year old dryer already be broken? After telling Jeff about it and cooling off, I called to have a repairman come look at it. Two days later, the repairman came to our house and I nervously showed him the dryer and explained to him the problem. I left the laundry room assuming that in a few minutes I would get the bad news- resulting in a large, several hundred dollar service fee, of course. Instead, the repairman showed me this.
Apparently, our dear son Asher had decided to somehow find a dirty sponge (that Jeff had used to clean our grill) and carefully insert it in the slot where the lint filter fits. The repairman tried to give Asher the benefit of the doubt by saying that maybe the sponge somehow accidentally got sucked into the lint trap, but I could tell that he himself didn't believe it. And since nothing was actually broken and the repairman hardly spent anytime at our house, he didn't even charge us a service fee!

The incident reminded me and Jeff of a couple of similar stories. Our nephew Matthew once put a grilled cheese sandwich in a VCR, and our friends' son Isaac put a tortilla in a DVD player. You gotta hand it to kids; they're curious, creative, and experimental, and as long as no one gets hurt, is there really any harm done?

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Snack Time

Contrary to what these pictures of Asher lounging might portray, things have actually been pretty busy around our house. I've been working on a project from home (helping another architect on a mountain vacation house) and so I'm back to having a nanny watch Asher once in a while, working on weekends, attempting to work in the evenings, etc.

We had a really nice, mellow Mother's Day (although we forgot to take pictures). Jeff and Asher surprised me with a jacket that I had tried on a couple of weeks before but refused to spend the money on. Thanks boys! Traditionally, I like to do something active and then go out for a nice meal on my special days (i.e. birthdays). But since the weather wasn't too great on Sunday, we were sort of at a loss of what to do. We ended up going to a park to attempt to fly the new kite we got for Asher. It was either lack of skill (definitely yes on my part) or lack of wind, but the darn thing would not stay up. I don't know if Asher enjoyed it, but Jeff and I had so much fun laughing and running around as the kite continuously crashed to the ground (and we also provided quite the entertainment for several onlookers). Later in the evening we went on a long walk and then had a nice dinner at home.

These pictures are of Asher eating one of his new favorite snacks- popcorn. He loves to sit out on our front porch when he eats it (I did it with him once and now he insists on doing it every time). Isn't he growing up so fast?
Just shooting the breeze.
Asher's sense of humor has been great lately. For instance, he loves to take songs that he knows and insert different words in them. Today he was singing, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star...Up above the world so high, like a mommy in the sky", or "Cookie dough in the sky", and then he just cracks up. Here he is making silly faces and sounds.

I still don't know where he got his eyes.