Napa!

Here are a few pics from our lovely daytrip to Napa this fall. It was beautiful up there, and we had fun doing yoga in the grass!

Habitot and More Random Stories

Mira and I took the boys to Habitot a month or two ago -- Ezra enjoyed pretending to be an astronaut and painting the planets on the wall. He's so into the solar system -- he can name all the planets, wishes he lived on Jupiter, and can name Jupiter's 4 biggest moons! (Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa, apparently, which I only learned through my son's new curiosity!) Arlo really enjoyed exploring the baby section with lots of mirrors and soft structures to sit on. He is really amazed by mirrors -- it's so cute! He also just discovered that one of Ezra's car's wheels spin and turn and make a loud noise when you pull the car backwards, and he cracks himself up each time he does it. It's so adorable watching him play and laugh and learn! Our other big news here has been that Ezra is finally pooping on the potty! No kids' blog would be complete w/out stories of pee and poop so here it is. Ezra basically has been terrified of pooping for a year. I think he had a few that hurt him once, and he's been holding it in ever since. He's been on Miralax for about 9 months and finally kind of got it under control so he wouldn't be so freaked out by it. Anyway, Noah was so patient trying to get him to go on the potty. He was terrified to do it though, and even promises of getting to watch a whole movie (Cars II!) wasn't enough to get him to overcome his fear. Somehow Noah got him to do it. He was still scared the second and third time, but after that -- boom! Now he's making himself poop 6 times a day so he can watch his 10 minutes of Cars movie reward. We'll have to wean him of the reward soon, but it's so amazing that after a year of fear and holding it in, his willpower has done a 180 degree reversal and we have a pooping pro. OK, that was probably too much about poop, but this is the stuff we're going to want to remember, right?

Delinquent blogger

Well, I was such a good blogger my whole maternity leave, and then the month before I went back to work just got so busy! Well, many changes this fall. My return to work, although I guess that was December, which is technically not the fall. And Mira came in early November! It's been so awesome having Mira as a part of our family. She takes such good care of the boys and has made the fact that both Noah and I work full-time and have careers and have kids totally manageable. We had a lot of fun in November -- we took Mira to Chinatown with the family and she bought Ezra a cool Angry Birds kite at a store there -- a few weeks later we finally flew the kites on a windy day, and sadly Ezra let go of Mira's kite and it flew up a tree! That was a crazy day -- she tried to scale a telephone pole to rescue the kite! Before I went back to work we hung out at the zoo, at Fairyland, at the children's museum in downtown Berkeley, Cal Academy of Science, had a fun day in Napa, and Mira got to know our family and the BayArea.
Now it's January, and I've been back at work for over a month. I miss getting to spend every day with my kids, but we all seem to be in the swing of things and adjusting well. We had a great time celebrating Hanukkah this year -- Ezra liked playing dreidel and lighting the candles every night. Arlo liked trying to eat the dreidels and we had to keep the small ones away from him! We celebrated Serbian Christmas on January 7, and Ezra found the coin in the Cesnica and I finally got to eat Gibanica. Arlo's doing so great -- I still can't believe how much he laughs and smiles -- he's just such a happy little guy. He's going to be crawling any day now -- he's ready to go! He's been sitting up for a month now too, which is great, because he and Ezra can now sit together and play with their cars together! They are really starting to interact more and more and it's awesome.