Hard to believe it was seven years ago. Who let those children get married?
I asked Shanna if she wanted to watch the whole hour long wedding movie on our anniversary. She said she couldn't handle that until our 10th.
I would just like to note that it is totally the rabbi's fault the glass shot out like a cannon. He didn't close the bag after he inspected it. Seriously, someone could lose an eye!
As an aside, the dvd with our wedding video seems to be flakey and it won't play anymore. Luckily I was able to find a way to extract the data off it and onto somewhere I can back it up. Let this be a lesson to you. Back up important stuff.
Hey kid, you're supposed to fasten your seatbelt! We're on our way to New Orleans. This was our longest and probably most difficult flight. Ezra only slept for about 45 minutes and he was upset for what seemed like an eternity (but was probably only like 15 minutes).
We spent our first day in New Orleans in the French Quarter. Once we got past Bourbon Street it was pretty interesting. We ate lunch at Napoleon House and met up with some old friends of mine from graduate school. Also, I should note, the weather was fantastic, the perfect temperature and not to humid.
We waited in line for beignets forever at the famous Cafe Dumont and ate them in the park right next to the river. The doughnuts were fantastic. If only Shanna would have let me eat more.
On the second day we went to the Audubon zoo which was fantastic. The exhibits were all done really well, especially the Louisiana swamp exhibit. No trip to the zoo is complete without a trip to the petting zoo. Ezra knows the routine.
The weather was perfect at the zoo and many of the animals were pretty active. We happened to be in the right place for giraffe feeding time. After the keeper got set up and let the giraffes go to the food some of them galloped toward us. Very cool! As an aside, Ezra can now say "Giraffe".
It's exhibits like this that made the Audobon zoo so cool (especially the Louisiana exhibit). I should also note that the food there was excellent. My only complaint about the zoo is that the signage for the individual animal exhibits was somewhat lacking, more information would have been nice. By the way, I think Ezra's favorite this time was the house mouse (which was done up like a pantry cabinet). I had to pry him away.
Ezra's first carousel ride started out well.
On the way to breakfast on Magazine street we stopped at Lafayette cemetery no. 1. As you can see, Ezra wasn't as creeped out as I was. A stop on the self guided walking tour of the garden district we were planning on doing later. Most of the graves are done in a Latin style above ground. We were told that this is not due to flooding, contrary to popular belief.
Ezra behaved about as well as could be expected on our self guided walking tour of the garden district. As usual, Shanna took the brunt of the abuse.
Overall, however, things have been going well. Ezra has been doing well in the new daycare room, all indications point to Shanna having a job next year, and we signed a contract for our much needed master bathroom remodel (goodbye 1970). We have a much better feeling about this than our disastrous kitchen remodel three years ago. Unfortunately, our homeowner's association won't let us do everything we want, but it will still look great.
Here are the pictures and videos since the last blog post:
Waiting for the women, Los Altos, CA.
Ezra at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco.
Quick take the picture, he's not moving!
Next to dirt, rocks are Ezra's favorite toys.
Ezra and Grandma find a puddle.
The little explorer's room at the California Academy of Sciences. Luckily this wasn't as crowded as the rest of the museum.
A rare family photo at the Noah's Ark exhibit at the Skirball center. It is probably designed with a 4-6 year old in mind. Ezra seems to enjoy this place more every time we visit.
We're having a great time with Shanna's folks for Thanksgiving. And by great time I mean we've dumped Ezra on them and are quietly reading in peace. Our trip up here did not go so well. Our plan was to leave when Ezra goes to sleep and make it up in five hours or so. Unfortunately, we got out the door late and were stuck in traffic for an hour trying to get out of LA. Ezra did eventually go to sleep, although he woke up a few times along the way. It was also raining, which we needed overall, but it slowed our travel time tremendously. We finally arrived at Shanna's parents home at 2:30 in the morning.
Last night was much better. We got to go out with some old friends and Ezra let us sleep in to 7 am! It doesn't get any better than this.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone, here's are the photos and videos since our last post:
Where's your nose? He's actually stopped doing this for whatever reason.
Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, CAEzra got to play with his old friend Amarie when she was visiting from Michigan. You've seen Amarie around our blog before.
The next stop on our Culver City Park tour
It has been an exciting week for Ezra. He's started transitioning from the infant room to the walking-to-two year old room. He's been the oldest kid in there for several weeks and we were concerned that he was getting bored in infant room. Not to mention that I was worried he would mow down one of the babies with one of his wrestling moves.
Today, when I picked him up he was calmly sitting at the top of the slide on their play structure. When I've picked him from day care in the past he has had kittens trying to tell me that he wants to leave. Today, he wasn't eager to leave at all, we even stuck around a few more minutes so I could talk to the teachers. I don't know which one of us was happier.
He had some good days and some bad days but overall it is going well. After Thanksgiving he'll be in there full time.
Here's the videos and photos we've posted since the last blog post.
As you can see, Ezra is a general in the lettuce army.
We're taking a tour of all the parks in Culver City. This is Culver City Park.
Ezra by the fountain in the rose garden in Exposition Park
Ezra learned a new song and the foundations of good dental hygiene.
Our alma mata was nice enough to send Ezra a T-shirt. The least I could do was post a picture.
I had a few more vacation footage I was going to post, but everything else that's good either shows my fat gut or will possibly get me disowned by my mother. Therefore, I'm all tapped out of vacation photos and videos.
For those of you who only see the posts here's what I've posted on Vimeo and Flickr since the last post.
It was a challenge finding a picture or video of Ezra in the pool without my gut in it. Somethings shouldn't be shown on the internet.
Ezra was very serious about his time in the pool.
Ezra LOVED the mini mock grocery store in the children's museum in Palm Desert. The name Ezra is related the Hebrew word for Help. As you can see he lives up to his namesake and tries to be helpful.
Wait, that's fake sheep, not a real goat. What are you trying to pull here!
Because it has been far too long since you've seen Ezra and a goat, here he is at the Living Desert Zoo in Palm Desert.
Ezra loved the drums at the Living Desert Zoo in Palm Desert
Ezra and Shanna halfway down the slide on vacation.
Ezra and Alex enjoying the park
We did a lot of jumping into action while on vacation
Alex and I chat with Mara.
Ezra and Alex enjoy the huge tub in Palm Desert
Bonus Halloween video. He has to start digging his dungeon sometime.
Beware of the dragon!
Happy Halloween everyone. As soon as I have a little more time I'll post a bunch of the cute stuff we took on our desert vacation, but I wanted to jump in with some Halloween footage.
Even dragons need milk
Over the past week Ezra developed a new skill. He can now go from sitting down to standing up without holding on to anything. Also, he's been enjoying walking while holding objects. Of course this means that we find things we thought were in the kitchen in other random places in the house.
If you missed our recent Flickr photo post, click here. For our recent Vimeo video post, click here.
You think you're tough, here have a toddler, Part III
1 comments Posted by Aaron at 10/25/2008 03:33:00 PM
Ezra's favorite activity these days is climbing. The Playa Vista playground delivered.
The last stop on our toddler tour last weekend was the playground at Playa Vista. Playa Vista is a moderately controversial housing development near our home. The playground is like the one at the zoo, but newer and better. In my opinion, the crowd at this one skewed younger. Ezra found a few friends to play with, including an Israeli who spoke to him in Hebrew (or rather her mommy spoke to him in Hebrew).
"More soccer"? There was also "more tennis" (but we didn't catch it on camera).
Somebody is too big for this playground
Although Ezra does his own stunts, no babies were harmed in the making of this video.
Site news note: You may have noticed that I made a few changes. The most recent photo and video can now be seen on the top of the live feed on the right. I'm not quite done with the "most recent video" or "most recent photo" widgets. For better quality on videos that don't appear in an actual blog post, click on the video in the live feed or the "videos" menu button on top. Also, it may take me some time to get the get the new blog design working in Internet Explorer. I can however, recommend using Firefox, most people think it is better anyway.
We're glad Ezra is learning how to share. Perhaps we need to work on him sharing a little less forcefully.
We've been working on some signs with Ezra. Right now he knows "all done" and "More". Both require some interpretation. For "all done" he shakes both his hands like in the video. For "more" he claps his hands together and says, "mo, mo". It's very cute. Even more importantly, it is really cool to actually be able to communicate! I've always been skeptical of baby sign language, but now I definitely see how it can be helpful. I think the trick is to tie them into motions the kid already does, like shaking his hands, or clapping them together. It isn't really important if the sign Ezra does is anything close to ASL, what matters is we have a better idea of what he's trying to tell us.
Sometimes we need to trick Ezra into doing the cute things we want him to do. For the time being, we're still smarter than he is.
We're still in recovery. Here's a video from our Oregon trip. I figured out how to post HD quality videos from our new camera (also how to watch them on the our tv).* To see the video, and all future videos in HD quality hover the mouse over the video while it is playing and click the HD button. This video is one of our first attempts at HD video. It seems that the trick is lots of light. Our indoor videos haven't turned out as well.
* I used iMovie HD on Shanna's mac to re-encode the videos in h.264. You can use Quicktime but you have to pay $30 for the pro version. Although it is probably possible to do, I couldn't get everything to work very well on the pc.
Ezra is fast on his way to becoming a toddler. I'm not sure Shanna and I are ready. Here is what happens when we leave Lila and Ezra to their own devices for about a minute.
Note: I'm hosting the videos on Vimeo now. The quality is better and in the future (like next week) we will have high definition resolution. Let me know if anyone has problems.
Ezra started doing this trick today. Previously his attempts at keeping up with this thing led to face-plants.