Alton November Pictures

The bad news is that I've been slacking on posts lately. The good news is that we have not been slacking in the picture-taking department, so here are some fun new pictures of the little man, and some with his mama.
Reading the childhood classic: Goodnight Moon.


It's not even Christmas and already he's into the wrapping paper.




Hanging out in the doorway with his BFF; today he totally looked at Minerva and said, "Umm-ma." If that's not his way of saying her name, I don't know what is. In the last picture in this set you can see his gorgeous brown eyes surrounded by a ring of blue; click on the picture to see it larger.





Climbing around like a monkey on our bed and generally reminding us why he sleeps in a crib now!







After his bib got smeared with banana, I took it off of him for the rest of his meal. We were just finishing up with a few Gerber puffs when I noticed that one of the puffs fell into the little front pocket of his overalls. I stuck my fingers in to fish it out and came up with...two Cheerios (from breakfast) and three pieces of ground turkey meat (from just prior to the puffs). Clearly Alton has grasped the concept of a "flavor save-r."

Art for Art's Sake

Last Monday Alton and I experienced a Mommy and Baby first: our first art class. Yes, a baby art class. We signed up through our local Parks and Rec Center, and for only $6 we prepared to unleash our collective creativity. We were going to finger-paint the town red. In a multi-purpose classroom next to the pool, a large sheet of plastic had been taped down to the linoleum floor in preparation for "Itty Bitty Messy Art." We arrived a couple of minutes late and saw that mommy and baby couples were sitting cross-legged at intervals across the plastic, alternated with Chinet paper plates filled with a rainbow of paint colors, some fat brushes, sponges, and assorted little plastic toys. We squeezed in next to our good buddy *B and her mama just as the sloppy chaos began, woohoo!

The class description had urged parents to dress their baby "in old clothes or just a diaper--things will get messy!" I wavered on Alton's choice of outfit, but in the end opted for old clothes because the morning air and car were chilly even if the classroom might not be, and I was very glad I did. The crawling babies without pants on soon started to slip and slide on the paint-covered plastic, falling into the puddles of paint, and their mommies had to wade into the colorful fray to rescue them. One diaper-clad baby was extremely upset when he wound up with navy color spread all down one side of his body--he looked like a tiny aspiring member of the Blue Man Group. All of the paints were non-toxic, child-safe paints that were probably just some kind of sugarless pudding recipe tinted in various hues. This was for good reason, of course, because Alton saw this not so much as an "art" class as "bowls of gloppy food on the floor that I should eat" class. In a matter of seconds he had paint on his hands and feet, then started grabbing handfuls of paint that fell in cold dollops onto his pants as he went to eat it off his hands. I tried deflecting by handing him a paintbrush, but he viewed the brush simply as a spoon with which to shovel the paint in his mouth.

Now, just to explain, it's really not that I was expecting Alton in any way to paint something during this class. But I was definitely curious to see if he was ready to grasp the concept that the paint was on the plate, the paint was a color, and then the colored paint could be touched with fingers, maybe even see the painty fingers touch the paper. Early on I dipped my own fingers in some paint to spread it on the paper in front of us to see if he noticed the color, but I ended up wiping my hands on Alton's shirt as I continually picked him up to keep him from bulldozing paper plates and other kids--he has become something of an off-road crawler.
So anyway, he certainly got the concept that the paint was to be touched with fingers and picked up, but for this first artistic experience the focus was definitely not on transferring color. To Alton, all the paint was his favorite color: shiny.
Soon his pants were saturated, his shirt was streaked, and he had a smear of yellowy-orange on his forehead. The green on his fingertips led to a little smear of a Charlie Chaplin-esque mustache on his upper lip. Then the red paint plate came our way and Alton (somewhat reverentially) lowered his entire face down to the plate, and I pulled him back upright to find a perfect application of "lipstick" on his mouth. I laughed so hard I cried.

Eventually all of the paint colors had smeared together onto Alton's face/hands/body to form a sludgy brown color and it was time to pack it in. I swiped off the worst of it with a damp washcloth, but the genius of my "wear clothes instead of just a diaper" idea was realized when I could just peel off his colorful, squishy garb rather than stand at the classroom sink trying to wrestle a slippery baby clean in lukewarm water. He donned his warm sweatsuit and was home and conked out asleep for his nap before I could even think about giving him a bath. Eating paint is hard work! It was Daddy's job that night during tub time to remove all the art class remains still daubed on Alton's body, including swabbing the inside of Alton's nose, where the residue from his red paint kiss had caked and crusted until it looked like he'd gotten a bloody nose in some kind of bar fight. Our construction papers that we were painting during the class were so saturated with non-toxic paint that they were basically regressing back to wood pulp, so our only souvenirs were the photos above, taken by *B's mom Elizabeth, who was so nice to snap these for us since I forgot our camera at home. A very successful and fun day!

This Week I'm Loving...

The yarn shop I found near the new kid-friendly cafe in Rock Creek. Something about 50-degree days makes me want to take up needles in hand and knit the cold away. Check out the little man's stylin' new hat. Good for swinging!

Break On Through to the Other Side

We have a first tooth! Right front tooth--we're all very excited. Here's the zoom shot and the happy little one-tooth wonder.

This Week I'm Loving...

The tray of mini pumpkin chocolate chip muffins in the kitchen. Gotta love fall for giving you a reason to have what is basically a cupcake for breakfast.

Sunday Fun

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Playtime!

Happy Halloween from Alton

Alton's first Halloween was definitely a low-key affair. We had a few playdates earlier in the week with occasion to dress up, and on Friday he donned his costume yet again for the ceremonial first Halloween. For children under the age of two, there is only one costume available: pumpkin. So rather than buy a pumpkin costume, we toyed briefly with the idea of making costumes for the family (Wizard of Oz was our idea: Katie as Dorothy, Andy as Tin Man, Alton as Scarecrow and Minerva, of course, as Cowardly Lion) and realized that rather than spend any money, we already had an adorable, comfortable costume to hand. During KC's stint in Japan, he was sweet enough to hunt down a little kimono/shorts ensemble for his nephew-to-be and bring it back as a gift. The navy blue outfit was covered with characters listing the names of Japanese shogun. Alton looked very regal and very...om.
We had our friends Chris and Elizabeth over for dinner with their daughter *B, one of Alton's playdate buddies, and took turns answering the door for trick-or-treaters, watching the babies, and wolfing down dinner and dessert. This year is the first year I have answered the door to trick-or-treaters in a loooong, long time. In high school I must have been out being cool, doing fun things with my friends (although right now I can't remember anything...Jamie, can you help me out with your steel trap memory?), in college I always lived in dorms so ix-nay on the trick-or-treaters. In the early days of marriage Andy and I lived in an apartment complex in Vallejo--people say that apartment complexes on Halloween can be like shooting fish in a barrel: the doors are all close together so you get maximum output for much less effort, but not so with the place we lived. Let's just say that it wasn't so much a cozy community of families with school-age kids as it was a transient cluster of one-bedroom-inhabiting miscreants with some kind of religious preclusion to picking up their dog doody. Okay, it wasn't that bad. We only called the cops on the guy below us twice. Or maybe three times. At any rate, no trick-or-treaters. In Oakland we lived in a condo building two doors away from a cemetary. 'Nuff said.
So now, firmly ensconced in Oregonian suburbia, we realized that we had better get ready for kids in costume. So as I hastily tore through Safeway Friday afternoon grabbing groceries and dinner ingredients before Alton's afternoon nap, I snatched up a bag of Tootsie Pops (for trick-or-treaters) and one of mini Reese's cups (to put out in a bowl on our table as a pre-dinner snack...mmm). Got home, baby down for nap, cleaning up kitchen, defrosting turkey for turkey burgers, slicing tomato/onion/cheese/lettuce for burger toppings, placemats, tater tots, vacuum aaaaaand Tootsie Pops in bowl, voila! Except once they were in the bowl they looked kinda...sparse. Nutritional label estimated about 22 servings in bag, but an eyeball of the paltry collection of sticks yielded probably less than 20. A few rings of the doorbell and the two daddies of our dinner party were dispatched back to Safeway for more candy, this time returning (but not before we had to give away most of the mini Reese's, harrrumph) with mini Whoppers and a bag of mini Skittles/Starburst that promised 90 pieces! We risked our front trees being toilet-papered by giving only one piece of candy to each kid so as to further stretch our pathetic little stash, all the while cursing ourselves for not snagging ginormous bags of candy at Costco when they were still stocked up.
Admittedly, I was a tad distracted during most of our "doorbell ringing" visits (I put "doorbell ringing" in quotation marks because Andy actually de-wired our doorbell to prevent latecomers from waking up Alton, so all the trick-or-treaters had to knock) because of watching the baby, getting dinner ready, pulling Alton out of Minerva's water dish, etc. However, the few times that I answered the door I have to say I was sadly disappointed by those I encountered. Where was the friendly doorway costume banter of yore? You know, "Oooh, you're a scary witch!" "I'm not a witch, I'm a Sith Lord from Star Wars." "Oh really? Can you make the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs?" "...(blink)...." Wasn't that half the fun of dressing up, to get to explain your costume and be admired by all the neighbors? Last night I repeatedly opened the door to zombie-eyed grade schoolers alternated with sugar-twitchy tweens, all jonesin' for what I had the bowl and not giving a crap about my repartee (or my Shrek ears, which I thought was an adorable costume). Most of them barely paused at the doorway long enough to open their pillowcases for the goods, a few eager beavers tried to dart their hand into bowl as I was doling out their rations, and a few oblivious youngsters were so focused on the dazzling bowl of S-U-G-A-R that they completely missed my hand delivering one puny little Starburst two-pack into their bag and gave me the hairy eyeball when I told them, "Honey, I just gave you the candy." Forget the fact that they were only muttering the faintest of "trick or treat"s as we opened the door. What irked me was when they departed with just a monosyllabic grunt of gratitude! For the smallest ones there was usually a parent hovering several yards away, indulgently calling out, "Say thank youuuuuuu" at every house their kids visited, but there were plenty of upper-graders who seriously just cut and RAN after I added to their stash. Of course, you'd want to give them the benefit of the doubt, since some of them may have been running to get away from the mongol hordes of kids jostling each other as they trampled across our front lawn in an effort to get to the front door before it closed. And we found that in Oregon the old "turn the front light off when you are out of candy" routine does not work. We were dodging blows from plastic wands and pitchforks and getting spat at in the face from The Little Mermaid while Andy was at the computer feverishly printing a sign that read "Sorry, all out of candy" before we were able to turn off all the lights and hide for good. You can see the consternation on *B's face as she realized that she and her parents would have to brave the front porch in order to get out to their car to go home.
Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit and the be-costumed revelers were not that bad. Halloween taught me a few lessons to put on file for years to come: we teach Alton to look people in the eye, say thank you, mean it, and for goodness' sake we go out early in the evening before people run out of candy.