That Toddlin' Town

Pops here. I'm pleased to report that Ezra's speech has progressed to the point where he now has a couple of stock catch phrases. One of them is: "Hi." OK, I didn't say it was a great catch phrase, but neither is "Git 'er done!" and that guy's a millionaire. Anyway, Ezra loves to say hi to, oh, just about anyone, including the vagrants guzzling malt liquor in our alley. This turns out to be a handy ice breaker, since I'm never sure what to say to those guys. But they seem to appreciate Ezra taking an interest, as Ash says they enthusiastically wave back and say hi to him whenever they see him now. "Hi" has also been a big hit at the office.

His other catch phrase is "bih-dah." This loosely translates to "what's that?" Or, "gimme that," or, sometimes, "This chalk is delicious!" We're not sure where these particular syllables came from, but it works for him. In general, his babbling has gotten more sophisticated, and often has the tell-tale inflection of actual human speech. This makes it seem sometimes like he is really speaking, just in a foreign language (or perhaps that he's got the Holy Spirit). I'm including an audio sample of it below, along with a few recent pics.


His walking is coming along very nicely, too. He can string together 10 or 15 steps now, and seems undaunted by his regular tumbles. Though he still gives up pretty quickly and takes off crawling. Hard to blame him, since he crawls at blazing speed. The other day I was playing with him in the living room when Ash came home. As she walked in the front door, he was so excited that he shot off crawling at top speed across the room. But then, at full tilt, he hooked his shoulder on the leg of the coffee table, and his body torqued down into a face plant on the hardwood. Luckily, he recovered quickly. We've been delighting in his walking progress, bumpy though it is.


Ez is also getting a couple of new teeth on top, which makes for a sore mouth and some pretty cranky periods. Yet, his sleep has come a long way in the past couple of weeks (after another round of Ferber, which was not that fun). Last week he slept through the night 3 or 4 days, and his night wakings are a little less agonizing than they'd been before. We've managed to more or less phase out the last night nursing, and we're hoping this pattern stablizes.

Not a whole lot else to report at the moment. We didn't do much for High Holidays besides have Shabbos dinner and apples and honey. But it's wild to now be beginning the second round of all the yearly milestones with him -- his second Thanksgiving, second Hannukah/Christmas, etc. Travel season begins again soon, too: Ezra and Mama will head to New York in a few weeks to see the aunties, then to Ohio for turkey, then New Mexico for Christmas. We hope we can manage to keep up.

Happy New Year to all -- may it be sweet all around.

Much love,
Gabe, Ash and Ez

Walk This Way, Talk This Way

Wow, five steps in a row today! Ezra's been working on improving his balance, steadying himself when he wobbles instead of just collapsing onto his diaper-padded butt. And today he made great strides, literally. He walked across the dining room floor to me (mom), twice losing his balance and almost toppling over, but he paused and then kept moving forward. His smile took up half his face. Hooray, son of ours!

Grandpa Mickey (Gross) swooped in for an impromptu visit on Saturday. We decided to take a trip to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park - a place Gabe and I have been meaning to go to for a while. What an awesome place. We walked into their butterfly exhibit and felt transported to the tropics. Thousands (okay, maybe just hundreds) of butterflies zipped by us, landing on ripe pieces of watermelon or flowers for a quick meal. Ezra's eyes got big and he kept saying, "Bah-tuh", which basically has come to mean, "what the heck is that?"

I can't describe how much fun it is that he now notices everything and gets excited to find out more. I remember taking him to places like the zoo as a newborn and all he'd do was sleep. I kept

waiting for the chance to show stuff to him, and now that chance has arrived.

Speaking of showing him stuff - we stumbled upon a group from a local herpetological society

who had brought along their pet pythons, boa constrictors, iguanas and turtles. They let people pet and even hold their reptiles. Gabe was over the moon - he's been in reptile withdrawal ever since the untimely passing of his dear Mitka the snake. Grandpa Mickey and I were pretty fascinated, and Ezra... well, Ezra to be honest was way more excited to crawl in and out of the turtle enclosure than to look at or touch the reptiles. Go figure.

We also managed a quick trip to the beach, three blocks from our apartment. Ezra fulfilled his baby duty by shoving as much sand in his mouth as possible. Gabe took him for a quick dip in the (um, kinda polluted) lake, and we discovered the joy of making sand castles for our son and having him smash them. A lovely weekend, all in all.

Love,

Ash, Gabe and Ez