Alton's Crawling

First Mother's Day and Current Favorites

We went camping with friends for Mother's Day in a redwood forest about an hour south of San Francisco. It was cold and fun and beautiful. This was Alton's first camping experience, and he had a great time.





I was afraid Alton would freeze to death sleeping outside. But he slept better than I did, and I slept pretty well.

There was a goat farm in the nearby town of Pescadero. On our way home, we stopped to pet goats and taste goat cheese. The goats were cute, the cheese delicious. Then we stopped by a pizzeria/general store. They had a yard with live music where we ate.



All these pictures are a little smudged because of fingerprints. Alton's, I think. I guess I learned if you are going to let a kid play with your camera, you should clean the lens when you get it back.

New Family Favorites

Alton's favorite solid food: Sweet Potatoes. If you try to disguise broccoli by hiding it in sweet potatoes, Alton will not be fooled.



My favorite new hobby: Container Gardening. I am growing peas, squash, basil & other herbs, a bunch of lettuces, cherry tomatoes, and potatoes. I thought I killed my little lemon tree when I pruned it back a lot. But it's sprouting back.



My new favorite wine: Old Moon Zinfandel. I picked it up for $10 and really liked it. Then I found it at Trader Joe's for $4.99.

Alton's favorite method of locomotion: pushing on his stomach backwards. "Maybe he's stuck in reverse." My grandma says.

Current family favorite TV show: The Wire. We're on season three. Why are there only two episodes on these DVDs? We only get one movie at a time from Netflix, so it's taking a long time to watch them.

Alton's favorite toy: Dad's glasses.

I'm Strong to the Finish Cause I Eats Me Spinach

A Little Children's Story

While I was looking at a bunch of photos I shot in March, a little story emerged. I call it Alton Wrestles the Alligator. Maybe thisisntjimmy would want to illustrate it for me and together we can get it published and make a million dollars each. We could be the next Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle... or not.

Anyway, it's sort of silly but the pictures are cute. I hope you enjoy....

ALTON WRESTLES THE ALLIGATOR

One day a boy named Alton went out to play with his friend the Blue Elephant.



Alton and the Blue Elephant loved to play together. Today they were having so much fun that they didn't notice the Striped Alligator sneaking up behind them.

Alton and the Blue Elephant kept right on playing and the Striped Alligator snuck right up next to them.



Suddenly, the Striped Alligator pounced on Alton and knocked him to the ground




Alton was surprised but he fought back.



They rolled this way and that way.

They pulled each other's legs.



They climbed each others backs and pinned each other to the ground.




In the end Alton wore the Striped Alligator out. The Striped Alligator was too tired to fight back anymore.

To show the Striped Alligator that the fight was over, Alton took a big bite out of Striped Alligator's straw hat. (In the illustration the alligator would be wearing a straw hat the whole time.)




"This happens every time, Alligator." Alton said, "You surprise-tackle me, we wrestle, and then you get too tired to play anymore."

Alton was a good sport, so he invited the Striped Alligator to stay and play awhile with him and the Blue Elephant.

The Striped Alligator did stay and play, and the three of them had a very nice time.




THE END

A Supposed BBC Reading List

I saw this list on a friend's facebook page and thought I'd do it too. Evidently, the BBC figures that most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books (or series) listed. So you are supposed to go through the list and mark which books you've read. I don't know where the list came from or why they picked these books or why Hamlet is listed by itself while the rest of the Shakespeare is lumped together under "Complete Works."

I put an (x) next to books that I have read and a (-) next to books that I read way more than half of but never finished, or books that I know I read all of but don't remember at all so I really shouldn't claim to have read them.

At the end there are some pictures of Alton, so if that's the only reason you check this blog, I've got you covered.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (-) two of three
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (-)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (-)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (-)four of 7
34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (x)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (x)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (x)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog inthe Night-time -Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (-)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (x)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (x)
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (-)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Bank
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I think that's 28 that I've read and about six more if we were playing horseshoes. There are a few in there that I've never heard of like The Faraway Tree Collection. What is that? And what's up with my baby-food cookbook Super Baby Food telling me to mix tahini with yogurt? Sounds gross.

There's an awful lot of Dickens on this BBC list, but I guess they're British, so....

The two books on the list that I'm most proud of reading are Ulysses and Moby Dick.

Brideshead Revisited is in my stack of books to read this year. And I'd like to read Winnie the Pooh to Alton in the next couple of years. We'll see if I read any others.

What are your favorites from the list? What book are you most proud of reading (or most ashamed that you haven't read)? Let me know in the comments. You can also comment on these pictures of my adorable son.

Here's Dad and Alton reading a book — No, David! — and playing a maraca:



This week we took Alton to a playground for the first time. In Golden Gate Park, he had his first ride on a swing, his first slide down a slide, and he got to play in the big boat with Dad.





Alton won't take a bottle. He thinks they are dumb. So we've decided to try and teach him how to drink milk from a sippy cup instead so dad can have a chance to feed him once in a while. Nobody's screaming, so that's an improvement. Of course he's spilling most of it down his front. But that's what bibs are for.



To avoid being pinched on St. Patrick's Day, Alton wore this little leprechaun number. Thanks for the new clothes, Aunt Sarah!



This week we tried the Johnny Jump Up seat for the first time. I'm so jealous. If they had adult-sized ones of these at gyms, I would totally exercise. Alton doesn't quite get it yet. So he kind of stands and swings and twists a little while he watches me cook.

Alton's Four Months Old

The 24th of February was sunny, so I put Alton in the front window and took a bunch of pictures. I need your help to decide which of the following three I should enter in a cute baby photo contest.

HAPPY BABY



SERIOUS BABY



or DROOLING BABY



Please tell me which one you think a panel of five women would like enough to give me $500. Also, do you think we should photoshop out the tattoos or do they make the pictures? Thank you for your help.

New Haircut and Other Updates

I got my hair cut two weeks ago. I really like it. It's fun. And now, when the baby pukes on my shoulder, my hair stays milk-free.



Alton is three and a half months old now. He started to laugh a few weeks ago. He makes these little squeals and my heart just overflows. He's also grabbing his feet and curling up into a little smiling bundle. He rolls himself onto his side this way. He's putting everything in his mouth now — especially his fingers. He chomps, too. I haven't felt any teeth, but he's working on changing that.



Over Martin Luther King Jr Day weekend, husband and baby and I went to Brooklyn for a fly-off-to-Rome-on-a-moment's-notice type of weekend. I bought tickets on Friday at 6 p.m. and was on a plane that same night at 10:55. Alton slept the whole way out. No red eyes for this baby.

It was 11 degrees in Brooklyn and it snowed. It was great to have a little winter this winter. I loved walking around in the cold with the baby, in his fuzzy coat, strapped to the front of me.

It was really great to see all our friends in New York. With a few hours' notice, they pulled together a party with 30 or so people. It makes you feel loved when something like that can come together so fast. Alton was a big hit. He smiled and cooed and made everybody love him. He's good at that. It's one of his best tricks.

Back on the West Coast the weather is the same (surprise, surprise). And I keep banging my elbow on door frames. I've hit the same elbow in the same place in different doorways at least ten times now — probably more like 15 -- over the past few weeks. It really hurts and I don't know why it's happening. I have always thought that I had a pretty good understanding of where my body starts and stops. But lately, man, it hurts to use my whole right arm. And I'm right-handed.

Did you know that you can't sell breast milk in California? It's against the law. It was just a fleeting get-rich-quick idea I had, but illegality makes it too tough. You can donate your milk to a milk bank and they will in turn sell it to hospitals and wherever, but I can't sell directly to milk banks or directly to people (moms and non-moms) who want it. I'm not sure what I think of that. If I really want to get rich off my surplus, there is (of course) a thriving online black market for breast milk. It's pretty easy to find. What you do is go to google and type "breast milk".

I will leave you for now with this: