Happy Halloween

A special message from a special monkey...

Today Alex was a real monkey! He came to visit me at work this afternoon for our annual trick-or-treating tradition.

Now let's see... who has candy at their desks?

Ahh, Randy has some candy in his big orange bowl!

Then tonight we went trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. Alex didn't like the hood part of his costume very much, so he kept pulling it back. It was such a warm, pleasant evening!

Getting Ready for Halloween #2

It's been almost a month since my last update. I hope everyone is having a great autumn! Now to a few photos from a couple of weeks ago...

From a couple of weeks ago when Grandma Carla came to visit - Alex really started to get into his Richard Scarry book about cars and trucks and things that go. Alex and Grandma had a wonderful time, as usual. They have really bonded since their summer together in Seattle.

Alex likes to try on Mommy and Daddy's shoes

If Alex is a bad boy, he might go to baby jail. Our dining room buffet has cabinets on either end covered with wooden bars, and they're just barely big enough for Alex to fit into.

Getting Ready for Halloween

This past weekend Alex started getting ready for his second Halloween.

The first thing we had to do was acquire some pumpkins, and carve them out. We had a small pie pumpkin that Dana bought last week. Alex was curious about it, especially when he learned how to say "pom-keh". But he became even more interested once I drew a face on it with a Sharpie and made it talk to him.

Alex and the talking pie pumpkin

But imagine Alex's surprise when we got two HUGE pumpkins and proceeded to cut their heads open and scoop out their brains! I've never seen Alex so shocked in his life! He just stood there for a few minutes watching me butcher this poor, innocent squash. When I held out a handful of stringy orange goo for him to inspect, he backed away in horror.

In hindsight, who wouldn't be scared of Daddy right now?

After a few minutes of watching Mommy and Daddy go to town on a couple of gourds, though, Alex figured out the game, and had a great time helping to scoop out the pumpkin and telling us where to cut out the nose, eyes, and mouth.

The Corn Maze

To get in the spirit of Fall this past weekend, we decided to go to the Corn Maze and fall festival a few miles down the road from us. It was an achingly beautiful fall afternoon

Mommy and Alex in the maze. This is the non-haunted maze - we decided Alex wasn't ready for chainsaw-wielding zombies jumping out of the walls. Maybe next year?

Alex and Dana liked the alpacas. We also saw sheep, goats, rabbits, chickens and ducks.

Alex really liked feeding the ducks. Me too!

Trains seemed to be a consistent theme:

Alex enjoys the wooden train on the farm.

Mommy and Alex ride the bucket train

Here's a video of Alex and Daddy riding on the (extraordinarily uncomfortable) bucket train at the fall festival at Andersen Farms in Erie.

Alex and Dana...

Alex and Daddy go to the big Berthoud calendar fly-in!

A couple of weeks ago the Berthoud Historical Society had their annual calendar fly-in event. Every year they print calendars featuring historic photos of Berthoud, and they're delivered to a nearby farm by some amazing, beautiful historic biplanes.

Alex and the little yellow bi-plane (Note the relative scale - this was a tiny plane!)

You'll need to squint to see a little boy standing in the middle of a recently-harvested corn field. He had a good time running through the dirt and examining all of the rocks and dirt clods.

This was the biggest and best plane there - painstakingly restored and obviously very, very well cared for!

We also got quite a show as the planes all took off after an hour or so. They each motored down a startlingly short mown grass runway, and somehow magically pulled up at the very last minute to take to the sky.

Of course, before we left, Alex had to check out the ENORMOUS John Deere combine parked in the middle of the courtyard. It's identical to one in his Richard Scarry book!

Alex has been growing so fast lately. He seems to pick up new words every day. We are constantly amazed. He has started counting. We can say to him, "One... two... " and he will say "Fwreee!!" He seems to have a grasp of numbers from 1 to 10. Although I don't expect he could put them together on his own, he's able to follow along and I think he knows what they are for.

He can drink out of a regular cup, with supervision. Usually he spills a little on his shirt or pants, but hey, don't we all?

It's becoming less and less of a mystery what he's saying, what he wants. He can ask for specific items. He can tell us what's wrong (sometimes) if he's upset. He points out things he likes -- cars, trucks, big scooping excavators. (The town of Berthoud is completely rebuilding Mountain Avenue this fall, so there are a lot of bulldozers and excavators and road graders around to look at)

We've been singing and playing the guitar more (he calls it the "ghee-car") He is learning how to swim with Ryanne twice a week. When we take baths now, he practices kicking his legs and blowing bubbles. He's still not crazy about getting his head wet, so we use parts of his saxomaflute as a straw to blow bubbles through.

Alex has a delightful personality. He is a constant joy. I never thought kids would be this much fun, this engaging and entertaining. Every day he does something that makes me and Dana laugh. We laugh a lot. It's better than any TV show, any movie, anything I've ever experienced.

I'll close by asking you one small favor: Please go vote! It matters a lot who and what you vote for, and maybe you already know from reading this blog what our feelings are, but it's more important still to understand the issues and candidates and register your choice.

Trains and Monkeys

The last couple of weeks have been as hectic as any, and yet we don't seem to have much to show for it. We're getting ready for winter, I suppose, blowing out the sprinkler system, trimming some particularly threatening tree branches, listening to Cal give a sound drubbing to Colorado State (42-7) and then a more modest win over ASU (24-14). Oh thank heavens for live streaming KGO radio on the iPhone. It's almost as good as listening on an old fashioned transistor radio!

Alex has been enjoying his green ride-along train lately.



Sometimes he puts his feet up on the steering wheel and leans back against the back rest. It's startlingly casual.

It may have been the best $4 second-hand toy ever.

Now here is a picture of a little boy in a box:

For lack of time or energy to do much else in the evenings, I've been playing my guitar a bit more. Alex calls it the "gii-car" or "geet-car". I'm no better now than I ever was, and probably worse. But Alex doesn't seem to notice, especially when I let him strum and pluck the strings. Once last week he even pulled out his big green alligator xylophone and played along with me.


I'll be honest with you. We are exhausted most of the time. Money is really tight. We don't see all that much of each other, between work and school and commuting. The house is falling apart and is a perpetual disaster area of dirty dishes, baby toys, and paperwork. We have pieced toghether a patchwork web of small blessings, contingencies, and outs that get us by: Ryanne (the world's greatest nanny, fills-in-all-the-gaps, stays late, Alex's #1 fan), frozen meals (Bertouilli's frozen pasta skillets are a nice treat when they're on sale), walks around town, parks with swings and slides, kids videos from the library (Richard Scarry's Best Videos really are just that), and now we have a newly minted babysitter Priya who can watch Alex when she hasn't got too much homework.

So we get by. We're definitely not DINKs anymore. Let's not talk about 401(k)'s right now.

Auntie Ali sent Alex a ridiculously cute monkey costume for Halloween.
It even has a banana. Can you believe it?

Here's what makes it all worth while: