Baby Gear - Emmett's pick of the week

The Bumbo Seat!  Great for the little man who wants to see what's going on, but can't quite manage it on his own.  Also a great perch for fist munching.

Thanks to the California cousins for the hand-me-down!

Christmas Cheer

Our same lovely friends from New York also made Christmas cookies while they were visiting.  All of the traditional Christmas shapes were represented; holly, angels, sleighs, candy canes, and, of course, the traditional Christmas Slug.

  Here he is, trying to escape.

Ok, and here are the real cookies.

Aren't they pretty?  And they were tasty too!  Good job Cara and Heather!

tree hunting

Up here in the wilds of Vermont we like to hunt down our own Christmas tree, rather than buy one.  Luckily for us some friends from Brooklyn came up and helped us with this undertaking, since Emmett is no help, and neither am I since someone had to stay home and watch Emmett be no help.

We have this old Christmas tree plantation on our property, but it hasn't been maintained for years, so the trees have gone feral.  And grown BIG.  When the trees you see below were planted, they were intended to be Christmas trees.  And we refuse to give up on them, so what we've been doing for the past few years is cutting down one of these overgrown trees and only using the top.  This year was no different, except the only tree that had a somewhat symmetrical top was quite big indeed.

That's Tom and Brian at the bottom there.

And luckily they had the proper tools and woodsmen knowhow, as demonstrated by Brian here.  Both the saw and the hatchet turned out to be essential.

And here's the section that they dragged home.  And believe it or not they had to cut off about another 5 feet from that section to get it to fit in our house!  Trees look a lot smaller outside than in.  But in the end it's quite a nice tree.  It has character.  See?  It has some parts that might stick out funny, but don't we all?

We still need a topper for it.  Any suggestions?

Baby Gear - Emmett's pick of the week

Emmett is absolutely in love with this penguin mobile from Flensted designs.  He will stare at it and smile and laugh for a half an hour, which is like 2 years in grown up time!

It's made of paper penguins and very light thread and wire, and the penguins dance when you blow on them.  Our friend Doug got it for him at Acorn, a toy shop on atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn.  Here's a link.  They've got lots of great stuff! click here to go to the penguins on Acorn's web site

And here's a picture of Emmett enjoying his penguins this morning!

California 1 - Emmett visits the Pacific

Hi All!

So we made the big adventure to California with the wee one and it was great.  And given how the weather has turned around here, it was nice to see some bright sun.  We did lots of great things while we were out there, and Emmett got to meet his cousins.  Here's just a quick post of us at the beach in Moro Bay with TH's brother DH, and his girls.

As with most of the momentous occasions in his life, Emmett pretty much slept through the whole event.

TH and DH!  See the resemblance?

Moro Bay Beach

Looks just like Vermont, right?

Here's a cute sister picture of Tacey and Finley.  Way to persevere DH!

Stay tuned for more California Pics!

Winter Is Here

So it's really snowing now.  It's only 10am and it doesn't look like it's

going to let up anytime soon.

Editor's Note

The internet has been abuzz with speculation surrounding one of the images published under our "Winter Is Coming" post  We'd like to print a quick correction.  Well, it's not really a correction but we'd like to clear up the much mentioned "wave".  As much as we consider our child to be the world's most advanced super genius of a baby, the picture was a lucky catch mid-flail.  And yes, TH did write he was waving, maybe he got carried away, but can you really blame him?

Sunrise

Some nice pictures from the sunrise this morning.

Winter Is Coming

EVERYONE! It is snowing right now! Look above, SNOW! Most of us are excited. TH and the O have already been out 3 times.  RH is undecided and we can't tell what Emmett thinks.

Here's what it looked like when it started.  Another lovely shot of our barn, check out the windswept goodness.

and here's another from slightly later on

We also took Emmett out to document his first snow.  Here's evidence of that.  He's waving!

And TH's turn.

and TH with the family.

We fully realize that it's been a long time since the last update. We're working on some posts from the last month.  There's lots of exciting things like winter preparedness, Emmett's visit to the West Coast, the return of the turkeys, and we didn't catalog or present to you the change in seasons.  We'll have all that soon.