By the numbers

Zachary continues to love his numbers and letters. In the past few days, the number 2 in particular has been a favorite during the day, being carried around the house (he's got a 0-9 puzzle) with the occasional comment of "tah!" (two), and in some cases even out of the house on walks and to the grocery store. He and Meh started counting his toes earleir this week, and he was very excited to discover that he had ten of them. For bath time, he's got 0-9 magnets, and an orange five is consistently the favorite there. Even his alphabet and letter cookies will often double as toys once he's had his fill; yesterday, mima, papa, Meh, Zachary, and I went to the U-District Farmers Market, where he held onto a number 4 cookie for a good half hour. The market itself was fun if a bit small this weekend, with lots of fresh veg, yummy baked breads, farm-made cheeses, and flavored hummus and other bean dips (including a vegan bacon-flavored one?).

Back to the numbers, my favorite remains counting the 14 stairs in our house, which we count as walk down every morning. Usually if I speak quietly to him as we sneak past mommy's bedroom door, he'll count them in a whispering voice, which is extra cute.

Zachary's been having a blast with mima and papa during their visit, occasionally calling their names questioningly when they're not immediately visible to him. He's been particularly snuggly in the afternoons with mima on the couch - super cute!

A rooster says meow

Mima and papa came bearing many gifts (so many, in fact, that I think this was the reason they had to check their actual clothes suitcase -- which promptly missed their connection, though it thankfully arrived the following morning). One is a classic mobile (and by classic, I mean circa 1960s, and last used by Zachary's uncle J as a young child) of Snoopy and Woodstock on their flying dog house in an eternal circling aerial battle with the Red Baron. It's got real working propellers and little lights that are supposed to be the guns; we've all been gradually assembling it, and will hopefully hang it up in the guest room (soon to be Zachary's room). Zachary's favorite gift of the moment is a seriously sturdy diecast battery-operated Thomas. He's about ten times heavier than Zachary's previous wooden Thomas, but the battery operation makes him a hundred times more fun. Thomas has even pulled Thomas around the track a few times, in addition to freight, egg crates, and New York subway cars.

With a lovely turkey dinner behind us, we headed yesterday to the Bothell Country Village, a faux-frontiery/Santa's villagey group of buildings that host lots of stores relating to fabric, stamping, papercraft, antiques, confectioners, and even a few tea rooms. Oh, and apparently a large family of chickens and roosters live there as well; we caught a few snuggling for warmth outside of the toy store, and later, the roosters were strutting around crowing at each other. Zachary thought this was hilarious, and kept occasionally meowing back at them:



The village also has a 1/4 mile 'train' ride (several carts that get pulled around by a golf cart), which Zachary laughed and smiled at when it drove past, as well as a duck pond, where he quacked and smiled at all of the ducks swarming kids feeding them breadcrumbs. And they also have a park with some fun play objects -- a carousel-themed merry go round and a community created pirate ship. Zachary had a great time walking around in the sandy (and from the rain, a bit muddy) hold of the ship, and Meh enjoyed opening up the treasure chest "hidden" in the main deck. He probably had the most fun at the tea house though, where we warmed up with hot drinks while Zachary played with magnetic letters and numbers on a giant board as well a large (what else but) Thomas train track.

Guess who's coming to dinner

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and we'll be having a full table of family and friends joining us to enjoy turkey, stuffing, cranberries, potatoes, and of course the traditional Thanksgiving challah. Zachary's mima and papa arrived last night, and were happily surprised by some other secret guests who met them at the baggage claim: Meh's brother J and girlfriend S had flown up from Texas several hours earlier.

Zachary's been having a great time playing with family; even a few days before people arrived, he'd been bringing me our little flip photo album, and correctly identifying papa (a flawless "papa"), mima (which he pronounces "mama"), and Uncle Josh (uh-kah, or occasionally UH-kah-jah). Today we all went for lunch at one of Zachary's and our favorite eating establishments. Other than an ongoing demand for refills on his bottomless milk, he had a good time, and we all enjoyed a lovely meal together. Afterwards, Zachary got some wild running time at his favorite mall play area, and the adults got to do a brief bit of shopping while he took a post-play stroll.

Tonight the cooking has already begun (well, Meh had started even earlier than tonight), and tomorrow we're looking forward to celebrating with friends and family!

The Plush Menagerie

It's turned out that one of the gifts I ostensibly got for Meh in Japan, a plush Jiji cat from Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, has actually become one of Zachary's favorites. He'll snuggle with Jiji and meow, trading off the meowing with saying "ba" ('bear') to a teddy bear grandma brought from the UK, moo-ing for an all-American (that is, made in China) plush cow, and hissing at a sensory snake that friend S made for him -- yup, his very own stuffed menagerie.

That said, he's also a big fan of the JAL toy airplane I got for him. Today I finally broke down and installed some batteries to see what that 'on/off' switch was all about, and Zachary was mightily entertained:


On Friday, Meh and Zachary met me for lunch at the local chain diner. Zachary hadn't been there in a long time, and he was more than beside himself with glee ("Ga-ka! Ga-ka!") at the fact that they run model trains throughout the restaurant along ceiling-suspended tracks. His children's menu/placemat also came with a pair of those blue and red polarized "3D" glasses. I put them on (mildly amused by the blurry images that only sort of popped off his menu), and then gave them to him. He actually imitated me and put them on himself, and thought it was really funny to look at daddy through the red filter, then the blue one. The glasses and trains made for a very happy meal indeed; his favorite ceiling fan establishment may have serious competition.

Splitting hairs

The time had arrived once more where Zachary's hair was getting unweildly and tangled, so this afternoon we hiked over to the salon with the fun truck-shaped barber chair. Alas, our streak of pseudo-happy haircuts ends at two; his reception was more like how Meh had described some of his early haircuts, with unhappiness, standing up in his seat, and lots of "all done". In the end, he ended up sitting on my lap for the cut, with me trying to stay out of the way of the scissors and clippers, and with each of us wearing a smock and yet still somehow getting hair everywhere. Still, you can't argue with the results; he's got a smart new little haircut now, and I've got yet another excuse to throw out my old wool jacket -- the stylist was very nice and lint-rolled it for a good five minutes, but I'm not sure if she was grabbing more lint or just pilly wool bits.

Good Morning America

From 8 hours ahead of Seattle time to 7 hours behind (well, technically 17 hours ahead) in four days - yikes! I'm almost done with my Tokyo trip, and will head back later this afternoon.

London was hectic enough (and the time zones didn't really align) that I didn't really get to chat with Meh and Zachary; we just left e-mail messages for each other. But from here in Japan, we were able to get a video chat session going yesterday. Little man kept smiling at my image on the screen and saying "dah-dee!", and Meh and I got to catch up a bit during his mealtime as well.

I'm actually at the airport right now, having picked up some surprises for both Meh and Zachary. Hint: cute papercraft (Meh), stuffed animals (Meh), and airplane-themed items (Zachary) are involved. Looking forward to seeing them in a few hopefully brief hours, where I'll arrive at like 6 am this morning -- gotta love backwards time travel due to the international date line. Yup, it's going to be another long day!

The longest day

Long distance trips continue to be challenging with a two year old at home - well, I suspect quite a bit more challenging for Meh with me gone, but still, I miss my family and want to be back home as soon as possible! So when I had business trips this and next week to London and Tokyo, I found myself diverging from coworkers, who mostly were doing one continuous trip, and instead booked some mildly abrupt itineraries to minimize the time away. Today was the tail end of trip number one, where I ended up spending less than 48 hours in London. Somehow this involved being booked on the very first flight of the day out of Heathrow terminal 4, which meant a 4 am GMT wakeup and a 4:20 am cab ride for a 6:20 am flight. On the plus side, I got home by early afternoon. On the minus side, I won't be home from teaching my class tonight until after 10 pm PST, which means 26 hours of being awake. And Zachary will likely be up at his usual 5:30 am tomorrow, so no recovery time in the forecast. Next week onward to Japan for a nearly-as-hectic repeat performance - eek!

We've been experimenting with "timeouts" for Zachary, mostly when he gets frustrated (or overly tired) and starts swinging his amrs in our direction and "hitting" us. The timeout generally just means sitting in a chair for a few minutes, talking to him about how we don't hit people, and then redirecting him to another activity. I'm not sure if this is a good sign or not, but Meh reported that in the midst of a mild tantrum yesterday, she asked him if he wanted a timeout, and he pulled out the chair and sat in it all by himself! Here's the tail end of his self-timeout:

Stowaways

I've arrived safe and sound in the United Kingdom for a very brief business trip, where I went directly from the airport to a meeting, then travelled onward to my hotel and a few more meetings, and somehow still managed to find the energy to grab the taxi-to-train-to-subway back into Central London to have a tasty dinner with friends N & S. It was so good to catch up with them; I'm now back on the train back to the countryside where my hotel is, mildly dreading the early wakeup tomorrow for more meetings. And Thursday I'm on a super early flight back home -- fun times!

A quick story to share - as I unpacked my bag this afternoon, a tiny little sock tumbled out of one of my folded shirts. I chuckled at the reminder of Zachary, and then proceed to find two more tiny socks hiding in some boxers. Silly little man socks!

Speaking of the little man, before I left, we grabbed this video -- he continues to enjoy feeding us foods that he's not interested in. Every so often he'll actually start to give us the food and then psyche us out and take a bite himself, but not on this particular occasion: