toby of the day, what's so wrong with a little green space?

In the outer sunset, it seems that the most popular landscaping style, aside from painting the concrete in front of the house green, is to surround indigenous shrubs and small plants with rocks. While I applaud this approach for its simplicity and water saving potential, it means that the 2 block walk from the train to the new daycare is like a trek through a minefield, except that instead of trying to avoid the mines, toby is collecting as many of them as he can press against his little chest and still walk. My newest strategy is to throw a rock ahead of us and convince him to race me to it. This usually works for at least a block or so to keep him on the sidewalk, and holding only a minimal quantity of rocks that he will add to our own growing rock garden at the entrance to our apartment. Then I can just carry him, albeit kicking and screaming, that last block. I guess this is why people use strollers, if nothing else it means you can transport larger rocks.

toby of the day, boys: don't cry, like trucks

The next day we continued to avoid contaminating people we know with hoof and horn disease and instead went to the beach. Ahh, what a lovely way to spend a spring afternoon you might say, probably as you imagine people in swimming trunks, warming themselves under the sun and romping in the surf. But that is not our beach. I would like to suggest that our beach is more like how you might imagine a beach in, say, Denmark. Except that I have been to a beach in Denmark, and it was hot and full of very athletic and scantily clad beach volleyball players. And again, that is not our beach. Our beach is one where I didn’t want to take off my shoes because my feet were already cold. Our beach is one where I was pretty sure the wind was going to blow off my wool hat. Sure sometimes it can be warm enough for the wearing of, say, a light sweater, when you make it there in the few hours after the sun has heated up the sand but before the fog arrives. But this was most certainly not one of those days. Consequently, Toby seemed somewhat nonplussed by our beachcombing, and was even becoming a little irritable about the wind burn on his face. That is, until we rounded a bend and snuck up on a digging truck. It turns out that Toby is boy and therefore in love with a wide range of construction vehicles, most of which he refers to as digging trucks. In this case it was a bulldozer and it was parked on one of the paths through the dunes leading off the beach. Toby tried to convince us to drive away in it, but we thought better of that suggestion, mostly because we figured it would not maneuver well in a high-speed chase. That, and we needed to get to the park chalet for a beer, and there isn’t much parking over there, especially not for a stolen bulldozer.

toby of the day, a cow says

A couple months ago we transitioned toby into his new daycare. As a special welcome, one of the children contracted hand, foot, and mouth disease which the interweb was quick to point out is in no way related to hoof and mouth disease, although we’ve had a difficult time not referring to it as that. In any case, hand foot and mouth is a pretty contagious virus similar to the chicken pox that results in small blisters on, yes you guessed it, the hands and feet, and inside the mouth of the kids that get it. The first case at the daycare was discovered on a Saturday and by midweek the following week kids were dropping like flies. Little blistered, feverish flies. Toby lasted most of the week, but by Friday, he too had a couple of blisters. Fortunately, his version never really amounted to much. Still, we tried to least avoid contaminating people that we know, so we spent Saturday morning busily infecting strangers at the farmers market. We had a close call when we ran into toby’s friend jonah and his family and I imagined having to explain myself as I slapped away jonah’s hand as he went to give toby a high five or something. But luckily toby decided to act shy, preferring to nuzzle his face into my chest, rather than run over and hug, drool on, or otherwise shower jonah with infection. Which meant we managed to escape after some brief chit-chat and quickly wandered away to wipe our hands on some heirloom lettuce.

toby of the day, that's not a lion

toby likes fruits. sure, he likes other foods too, he eats a reasonably balanced diet, full of meat, starch, tofu and the occasional vegetable. but he really likes fruits. really likes them. here we tried to capture what we mean by that. of course, as demonstration of the heisenberg uncertainty principle*, as soon as we pull out the camera, we destroy his momentum, turning him into a tame and principled fruit eater. However, by the second video, he's back on track, managing to stuff almost and entire mango into his little mouth. and just so we're clear, the place mat that he's naming animals on has been washed so many times it resembles the walls of a romanesque church in some unheard of spanish town, the kind where the murals on the wall could be paintings of saint christopher, or they could be paintings of a kangaroo wearing a tutu and a man about town hat, which admittedly has always been my preferred interpretation of those murals. in any case, it makes it all the more fun to watch toby try to decipher what's in the picture. Enjoy!

*I will point out that wikipedia tells me I should really call it the "observer effect", but that sounds lame and lacks the ironic grandiosity which I'm trying to convey, so I'm sticking with heisenberg, wikipedia be damned.

toby of the day, let's pretz!

Apparently it is traditional in japan to celebrate hanami or the arrival of spring, and the associated blooming of cherry trees, by drinking sake under those flowering trees until your necktie ends up around your head. This year we had our own hanami celebration, replete with blooming trees, sake, revelers, and even a necktie. The tie belonged to Jon and while it did not end up around his head, I believe that is only because at the end of the day he wasn’t really in any shape to figure out how to tie a tie around his head. So basically our hanami was a success. And as you can see by the video, toby also enjoyed the welcoming of spring, in particular the part where you can just stand around dancing while eating japanese snacks.