Such a big help around the house!

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Judah's sudden insistence on sitting in his own chair and eating his cereal by himself. Well, his desire to do things that the big people do seems only to be growing. For a while he's been very interested in observing the various chores we do around the house and lately he's been trying to do them himself. So he's been quite busy doing all kinds of things, like mopping the floor...

making coffee (which actually means disassembling the coffee maker)...

Making french toast...

putting candles in the candle holders...

And sweeping...

I think we need to work on his technique a little, but I'm delighted that he's almost ready to earn his keep around here!!

Trip to the zoo

A couple of weekends ago we went to the zoo with my work friends Wendy and Jeff and Jeff's girlfriend Julie. Jeff is a really wonderful photographer (as if being a great lawyer isn't enough), so we were lucky enough to get some especially great pictures.






Judah had a really good time and my friends were very tolerant of the inevitable challenges of hanging out with a toddler (i.e., "Judah, don't you want to go see the animals?" "No, I'd rather splash in this puddle"). It's funny - Judah did his usual thing of saying "bye bye" to each of them when they tried to say hello and kept his interactions to a minimum, and yet ever since this trip to the zoo he's been mentioning each of them at random times and saying how fun and nice they are. It's so hard to know what goes on in that little brain sometimes.

By the way, you can check out Jeff's photo gallery at http://jeffschwarz.smugmug.com/. He's really quite talented.

Judah's first real snow!

We finally had a snow storm in which Judah could see the snow actually falling from the sky (as opposed to just seeing it on the ground like he did at the retreat a couple of weeks ago). He was very excited to go outside and "walk snow," but when we got outside he just kind of froze. He was mesmerized and just stood there, not wanting to take a step.

One of the greatest things about Judah finally getting to see snow is that now all those pictures of snow in his books make so much more sense! The first time we read the book about the giant panda after the snow storm he looked at me with great excitement when we got to the snow page, as if to say, "Oh! NOW I get it!! Snow!!" I love those "ah-ha" moments, where you see it all come together.