Aaron Quotes

"When I grow up, I want to be a dad. I don't want to be a firefighter or a construction worker or anything. I just want to be a dad. Like my daddy."

Aaron has been talking a lot about adjectives lately, usually in random contexts, such as "Don't give 341 adjectives to bad guys." When we ask him what an adjective is, he avoids answering. Today he used "adjective" in a sentence then said, "You know what adjectives are? They're people who don't eat other people."

The other day I was having a conversation with Aaron about listening to your body and paying attention to whether you're full or still hungry. I told him he should listen to what his body tells him. He responded with, "Well, except if your body tells you it wants a robot arm. Cause then you would need to go to a doctor to amputate your arm and get a robot arm. That wouldn't be very smart."

Adventures of Dinner

This is a month-old video of Elliot eating spaghetti and drinking milk from a cup. When he runs out, he signs for "help," then "more."

Ben went to Texas for a weekend and all he brought back was this picture and a picture of a dog. Well, at least the people he stayed with look nice.

Meanwhile, I was holding up the fort at home, with the kids and a few extras...

I came home late one night and found this on the table.


A homemade cookie especially for me!

A few pictures of Elliot


Elliot loves to read books by himself. If I all of a sudden realize that he's not in the room with me or I can't hear him playing with Aaron, nine times out of ten he is in the corner of our room surrounded by books, flipping each page, and occasionally making animal noises or saying, "Wow!" In fact, right now (at 9:48 p.m.) he is in bed with the lights completely off, flipping through books and occasionally saying, "mama?" I guess his three and a half hour nap today was a little much.

Sir Elliot

Another great hat from Grandma Marsha

Trying on Aunt Kami's shapka

During the week that Aaron didn't have school, I took Aaron, his friend Mara, and Elliot up to the Bronx Zoo. This is them on the train together.

The only thing we really saw was the tiger-feeding, which was well worth the trip.
The kids were pretty amazed at the tiger, but not nearly as excited as I was. I had to run about half a mile to get there on time, while pushing the stroller with Elliot in it and Mara and Aaron both standing on the back part. But we made it!
I have mixed feelings about zoos. The animals are not in their natural habitat, but at the same time they seem well taken care of, and best of all we get to see them! Compared to my experience at the Kiev Zoo, this place was a haven. The tigers each had lots of space to roam around in.

I thought Elliot would be really excited about the bug carousel but he was scared of actually sitting on one of the bugs. So he and I sat together on a nice bench (he's patting the seat next to him inviting me to sit down). You can kind of see Aaron and Mara behind Elliot, enjoying their ride.

And of course, no trip to a place with trees would be complete without collecting sticks and/or rocks along the way.