Surprise!

Surprise. It isn't being surprised about something specific really. It is just that pretty much everything is surprising, Filled with wonder and awe. Asher studies faces and the pages of books, looking not for new knowledge, but for how they respond to him, what they have to give. Then, he crawls furiously to find the next challenge. Surprise isn't found in one place.

Asher's first visit to Nannie and Pop-Pop's

Asher loved the tile floor. Cars skid sideways across it. It feels cool to warm little feet. It is near the door. Simple tastes. Hope that lasts a while....

Asher's New Skill

Asher has a neck. He can control it. Like all things he can control, he uses it mostly for fun.

Our Little Mischief Maker: Right on Schedule

From Your 11-month-old's development:

Your baby probably thinks it's fun to push, throw, and knock everything down. She'll give you a toy as well as take one, and she likes games where she can put things in containers and dump them out again. This works well with blocks in buckets or boxes and with pots and pans, which she can nest inside one another. She'll thrill to the loud sounds of those pots and pans banging together, too.

Apple Bag

When he cut his first teeth, the best way to soothe him was to fill these teething bags with a cold apple chunk

He sucked on it.



He chomped on it



And he even offered me some.

A Smile

He's saying a word. Mostly. We haven't officially declared anything yet. But it sounds like, and looks like as well, that he says "Hi."

And then he smiles at people like this.



Taken with the Canon 50mm 1.8

An Ear

Perfect little ear.

Here's a Funny Story

But I'll let Mikaela tell it. Mik?



Hee hee.

Mikaela Writes:

It was one of my early visits to Chloe’s Closet, a kids’ consignment shop in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of SF. Bernal is one of the places we would live if we were going to be rooting here – filled with kids and conscious parents, but not precious and stroller-upping; hip, but not SO hipster; a main street boasting a great market, yoga studio, and a few good coffee shops. What I have learned to be the California essentials. Anyway, I was there on this morning a few months with Asher looking for a few new duds for him since the hand-me-down train had stopped coming to our door.

“I love my Moms.” I saw this shirt and it jumped out at me. I saw “Moms” as me. You know, like “Pops.” So wanting to bring a little more urban into our decidedly West Coast slowed down life. Moms. Pops. I didn’t think of Moms as two of them, two of them raising their son --- two women who become two mommies. Yes, I do live in San Francisco in the age of Prop 8 and somehow, that just didn’t occur to me. Ben and Lacy and everyone else who we have told (including you I would bet now) finds that hysterically funny. Ok, so it was.

So, in this photo you see Lacy, our nanny, who also worked on the No to Prop 8 campaign in California - before taking on the very different challenge of caring for two under-one year-olds (soon to be two over one-year olds!) Lacy took Asher and his mate Benji down to a Prop 8 rally in his “Moms” shirt with her friend Brenna who pretended to be her partner and Asher’s other mommy. Benji apparently played the role of his brother. As the story goes, several photojournalists snapped some shots. We have no idea if they ever ran.

Asher's First Drive

Thank you Eli for letting us take it for a spin.

In case you were curious, this is Ben as a baby

So the blonde hair does get a fair bit of questioning. This is a picture of Asher sucking on a mirror. Mikaela said it looks like he is holding a wig in his teeth, before she saw the mirror.



People ask, well more suggest hopefully, that the explanation might be that I too had blonde hair as a child.



Nope. Not so much. He is also significantly cuter than I was. Or am for that matter.

Attytood

Asher has been in Philadelphia and the heat and doting attention seems to be doing him a bit of god. I mean good. See Promethean referencing picture here :



The heat doesn't change everything if course viz this picture
by which I mean dinner time is often also screaming time



I think he looks a bit like Klaus Kinski in this.