toby of the day, 2.12.2008

we have no idea what toby is trying to tell us in this video. clearly something really funny. perhaps he’s mocking us for moving the TV into storage just as a new season of lost has begun and the writer's strike is ending. or maybe he's recounting a humorous incident involving the wimpy kid at daycare. Whatever it is, it must be really funny. I sure wish I knew, I could post it here on the blog and have all of you in stitches. instead, I'll have to resort to telling you a joke, once I can remember one. or maybe you should just watch the video.

toby of the day, 2.9.2008

Toby spends a lot of time on the floor, and consequently, we spend a lot of time of the floor. We rest there, play with toys, eat breakfast, dinner. All without proper back support. So today we went to Japantown and bought ourselves some “zaisu” or Japanese floor chairs. They may be ugly, but my back is very very happy. and so are the cats, apparently they were also sick of sitting on the floor.

After our purchase of floor chairs, we headed to the park chalet to enjoy the warm sun with Patty, Jason, Genki, Emma, Isaac, and Jessica. And there, to our surprise, we met a baby even larger than our Toby. She was 7 months and 23 lbs!!! And she looked it. Toby weighs in at a tiny 22 pounds, and he was clearly no match for gigantor. Her head was the size of his torso, and as we’ve mentioned before, he has quite a torso. We kept him close for fear she might swallow him whole.

As usual, we ended the day with a bath. When we first set up toby’s changing table, we placed a bet for how long we thought the decorative piece of paper that we posted above the table would last before it was ruined in a diaper related incident. We still have the poster, but toby has managed to spray a number of other things. Today, it was his father that he peed on. I laughed, I cried, it was better than cats.

toby of the day, 2.8.2008

This week toby is all new, new, new! Recently he has started making a new face (kind of a forced smile, though we’re not really sure why he’s needs to humor us, we know our stories can be boring) a new sound (denise, his daycaretaker, says it’s like he’s making raspberries, jon and I of course describe it as the prelude to making farting sounds), and he has new moves and motility --a surprising combination of downward dog, rolling, backing up, and sitting can get him across the room in a flash. Consequently we have a new childproof living room configuration, which has meant a new lifestyle for jon and I as we retired our television to the closet, at least for the time being. Also, Toby is eating new foods (so far bananas, pumpkin, and avocados are a hit, rice cereal and oatmeal not so much), and to top it all off, a new (and first!) tooth is coming in. it’s like we went to sleep with toby and woke up with an upgraded toby 2.0. Like any upgrade there are “improvements” that we could do without (the gasping sound he makes that sounds like he’s just jumped into a frozen lake is not our favorite) but unlike windows vista, it won’t be long at all before we get toby 2.0.1 or even 3.0.

toby of the day, 2.4.2008

This morning we put Toby in his sling and set out to our neighborhood coffee shop for breakfast. when riding in his sling, toby looks a bit like a hovering Buddha, though he feels a bit more like a sack of rocks. In any case, while standing in line, a middle-aged woman started staring at us. Toby gets lots of stares, which jon and I have become accustomed to. Generally, the people who stare have no interest in, and in fact sometimes barely notice, that toby is attached to a larger person, so we’ve adopted the strategy to just ignore them. Which is what we did this morning, we kept discussing what we wanted to order, the upcoming workday, etc. and just ignored her. But slowly we realized that she wasn’t smiling but instead harbored a look of concern and confusion. Which made sense when she suddenly exclaimed “Where are the legs?!?”. Then she poked toby below the belt. Jon was tempted to give a surly anatomical description, while I was tempted to tell her he didn’t have any legs, but we just smiled and pointed at toby’s legs through the sling, and whisked him away.

toby of the day, 2.3.2008

Today we went to watch the superbowl at patty and jason's house with a whole bunch of kids. toby was not especially excited by the superbowl, but he was excited about a crazy bouncing contraption that lets him bounce himself instead of relying on the sometimes fickle desire (or strength) of his mother and father to lift him up and down for hours on end. Jon and I have been watching way more football in the past couple of years than, well in my case, than ever. it's a bit of a slippery slope though, as watching more could lead to caring, and then when the patriots lost we might have been not merely empathetic for jon's brother who lives in massachusetts (and therefore lives for the patriots), but might have been upset ourselves. as it was, we got to enjoy an afternoon of beer, snacks, and hands free bouncing.

toby of the day, 1.22.2008

sadly, it seems our wonderful visit to Hawaii is ending as we head home today. I believe even toby will be disappointed because it turns out that he is crazy about his grandfather. He generally thinks I’m ok, he finds jon pretty funny, he likes his grandmother, but he absolutely loves his grandfather. Tsuyoshi can be across the room making tea or talking business on the phone, and toby will just watch, enthralled, waiting for him to make a funny face at which point he just starts laughing and laughing. If only we could bring him along on the plane to keep toby entertained, those 6 hours would just fly by.

for more pictures from our hawaiian adventure, see the link to the right.

toby of the day, 1.21.2008

Although Jon’s mom had an adventurous day, spending part of it in the emergency room getting stitches for an ikebana related injury, for us, today was just more of the same. A little tennis in the wind tunnel near the pool, a little swimming, mostly in the hot tub, dinner with aileen and toby’s grandparents and great grandmother. Vacation is awesome.