Santa Longboarders

To start off the Christmas festivities, Ben and some friends joined a group online and went longboarding in Times Square, wearing Santa suits. Ben and friends went from our neighborhood, through Columbus Circle, through Times Square, down to the East Village, then came back up via Central Park. About twelve miles of longboarding, in a Santa suit. Needless to say, it was a highlight of our New York City experience for Ben.


Columbus Circle

That's Cameron on the left, Ben in the front center, and Jonathan on the back right in front of Radio City Music Hall

Times Square

The whole group gathered in Central Park. Some of them must have missed the memo re Santa suits.

Ben got back into his costume (with a plastic bag for a beard) to entertain the kids the next morning and tell them about it. Aaron was, for once, happy to sit on Santa's lap.

Elliot just wanted to rip his 'beard' off


Aaron wanted a demonstration and test drive

Some more old pictures

"Look how bored I am, mom."

Aaron and Elliot partying/watching a movie with Grandpa. Notice Elliot's hand on Grandpa's lap.

Elliot loves to "write." Especially when Aaron is working on a project, Elliot will sit down and write letters. He writes in binary-- either straight lines or small circles. He's actually getting pretty good at writing his name, since all of the letters consist of either straight lines or a circle. His name looks something like this when he writes it: | | | | O|

Home-made bow aand arrow (made out of train tracks and a rubber band).

Random Old Pictures

September 5th, Kami's birthday-- we gathered at Kami's new apartment to celebrate. (Aaron is hiding behind the couch.)

Snuggling brothers

Cousins little Tony and Elliot playing in Tony's crib

Muddy Puddle Incident

Fake Thanksgiving

My parents came out the first week in November, so we decided to have "Fake Thanksgiving" at our place for the east coasters. As a bonus, Karalee flew out from New Mexico to join us. Our battery died so we didn't get many pictures of the whole crew, but we did get some pictures of the turkey dance. Ever since I can remember, my dad dances the turkey on the table the morning of Thanksgiving. He has a repertoire of songs that he does every year, each time with a variation on the lyrics since he can never quite remember them. When we were kids we used to kiss the turkey for good luck but salmonella fears ended that tradition years ago.

Aaron had never seen the turkey dance (since we go to Los Angeles every year for Thanksgiving) so he was fascinated. Elliot was amused but mostly confused.

I'm hoping to post a video soon, but that requires editing it down a little bit so I doubt I'll get it done within these next two weeks.

November 4, 2008

This was by far the most exciting and memorable political day in my life. All day we felt this general buzz of excitement from the prospect that maybe, if all goes according to plan, Obama would be elected. It was one of those things, though, where we didn't want to get too excited (no matter what the polls said) because the let down would be too much if he lost. So we just sort of sat on the edge of our seats and did what little we could to help out. In the evening, though, we decided to go up to the intersection of Martin Luther King Blvd. and Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem to be with the masses as poll results came in. Aaron put on Elliot's "Barack the Vote" shirt for the occasion (by his own doing). From the moment we arrived, we were overwhelmed with the spirit of the moment. We stayed for a couple of hours, until just after Pennsylvania and a few other important states were announced. When he won PA, people went crazy. Everyone was hugging each other, yelling, chanting, or making any manner of excited noises. Yes, there was definitely a lot of group-think phenomena happening, but it was still fun to be part of the crowd. There were a lot of people there, likely all or almost all of them supported Obama, but doubtless for a variety of reasons. But we were all there, hoping for victory.

In the interest of getting Aaron in bed, we went home early but watched the results come in online. We fell asleep with smiles on our faces and have felt warm and tingly since every time we think about Obama's victory. Part of me can't believe he actually did it, and the other part thinks of course he did.

I normally stay away from highly political or religious references on the blog for the sake of being neutralish, but our record keeping wouldn't be complete without this moment.


The bulk of the crowd was Harlem residents and students.

Halloween

Aaron decided (several months before Halloween) that he would be "a hunter, with a curved sword." Elliot agreed that he would be the same. So we found some camoflauge outfits and we were good to go. Ben and I were going to be animals to hunt but we couldn't find anything good for Ben so he ended up being himself and I was a rabbit.


At a church party
One of these people is enjoying the moment more than the others...



Carefully camoflauging themselves

Ready to hunt

Sword fighting.

(Note: Most people thought that they were soliders, which is understandable. I looked for some orange jackets but Aaron wanted to be camoflauge because the kind of hunter he wants to be is a sneaky hunter.)

Elliot's 2nd Birthday!

On October 21st, Elliot turned two! We have been saying that he is "almost two" for so long that it seems natural for him to finally be two now.


Elliot wanted a lion on his cake, and Aaron suggested a binky since he seems to love them so much.

Chowing down

Aaron and our friend Ava eating b-day cake

Elliot playing with a few bday presents: animals from mom and dad and a Halloween glow thing from Grandma Marsha.

A Conversation

Overheard between Aaron and his cousin Rex...

Rex: Aaron, name your friends.

After a few moments of silence, Aaron: I don't understand.

Rex: Name your friends.

After an even longer period of silence, Aaron: But they're already named.

It's a... girl?

Well, we got our ultrasound and it looks like this baby is a girl. Maybe. They got several between-the-legs shots and never saw evidence of a boy but also couldn't get a good enough picture of the bone structure to confirm it's a girl. The doctor said she is 88% sure it's a girl, but not to get our hopes up. We don't really have "hopes" of gender one way or the other-- either one is really fine for us, but I would like to know which one it is, for planning purposes. I'd love to purge our closet of boy clothes, for example, but we'll just have to wait for that I guess. As my sister Kerrylin put it, "Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence."

Regardless of gender, we have a healthy baby who is very cute, and looks distinguishably different from both our boys.

You can see her little hand sticking up in front of her face. So cute. (Yes, we have decided to settle on feminine pronouns.)

Apple Picking!

This weekend we went up to CT and drove with my sister Kori and her family to go apple picking upstate. It was really great to get some fresh air. The kids were in heaven.

On the train ride to CT, Aaron asked me, "How come in Connecticut they have big animals like deer and antelope and in New York we only have rats and squirrels and pigeons, but Connecticut isn't very far away from New York?"

Well, we didn't see any deer or antelope but we did see lots and lots of green.


We ate almost as many as we picked. Aaron was so excited by the idea that when we were hungry, we could just pick an apple off the tree and eat it. He kept saying things like, "I think I want to have a second lunch again" then go find a "red, juicy, fresh-picked apple" and munch at it. We need to have a garden someday.

Baby Tony had his share of freshly picked apples, too.

Elliot insisted on holding his bag this way

A particularly difficult apple-picking operation

Apple loving brothers

Elliot found a large stick and decided he wanted to go apple fishing.

Aaron, Elliot, Tony

Aaron loves to take care of anyone littler than he

After we had our fill of apples, we let the kids each choose a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch. Here's Elliot jealous of Aaron's choice.

And here's Elliot, happy with his find.

The View

Drawing

The last few months, Aaron has been really into drawing, and more particularly into writing. He often sits down and writes something important to him, usually related to hunting. It's so cute to hear him sounding out words in the next room, exploding consonants very slowly. Several months ago he was frustrated with the whole idea of writing and sounding out words so we told him to forget about vowels-- just concentrate on the important sounds that are clear. So, most of his words are without vowels, which is fine with us for now. He is, lately, starting to incorporate vowels and learn the correct ways to spell things. Here are a few pictures of Aaron creations.


Aaron drew this back in June. It's a picture of a van he designed. He had been brainstorming about a way to get to North Carolina and after several weeks of trying to build a boat, he decided a van would be better. So he drew up the plans. The camel humps on the back are for people to sit on. Then of course there is lots of room for luggage.

"Will I be able to hunt deer all by myself?" This was one of Aaron's very first notes to us, written around July.

Most recently his most common activity is writing lists. Here is one that he wrote the night before taking a trip to CT to see my sister and her family.
"Make dinner, pack, go to bed. Next day go to school, train?, go to Koki's, hunt deer, hunt fish."

Spanish

Since Aaron is in a Spanish-English Dual Language Kindergarten, my sister Kami asked him the other day if he can speak Spanish yet. He replied, "Well, only when I'm at school and everybody is speaking Spanish. Then my brain is full of Spanish."

I feel the same way.

Days off School!

Aaron had a couple of days off last week for Rosh Hashannah. He, of course, wanted to go hunting during one of those days but due to the lack of huntable animals (and parental desire) here in NYC, he settled for the Bronx Zoo and Chinatown.

Here's Aaron with friends Lillian and Madeline on the Bug Carousel

Elliot with friend Naomi

Elliot and Aaron popping out of the tree climbing apparatus in the children's section of the zoo

Aaron was in charge of the camera for a bit and took this picture of a pond full of fish (which he of course wanted to hunt).

Madeline and Ashley, taken by Aaron



And, of course, on his second day off, Aaron enjoyed himself immensely at Chinatown, admiring the many variety of exotic meats...
Munching on dried octopus