Merry Christmas to you all. Hope you all get to enjoy time with friends and family and that Santa is good to you.

We are headed up north to my parents in New Hampshire where internet is slow (dial up), cell phones faint (1 bar) but snow is plentiful. Hopefully Jace will get over his wariness of the snow because otherwise it will be a long week.

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A couple years ago, our friend Derek told us about the “veggie vision” technology they were evaluating for the Stop&Shop grocery stores. This fancy high-tech image processing system would determine which fruits or vegetables were being passed across the scanner so that it would be unnecessary to type in the produce-specific code. It’s probably difficult to get a computer to do this reliably (and I never did see it show up at an actual store), but Jace seems pretty good at it — at least for the basic classification of fruits vs. vegetables. Even when faced with a completely new food item, he just needs a quick glance — no touching, tasting, or sniffing required — to tell whether it is a fruit that should be stuffed in his mouth, or a vegetable that should be kept away at all costs. He provided a great demonstration of this a couple days ago while visiting Nick, Julia and William, where he rejected all vegetables but eagerly reached for figs to gobble down, despite never having encountered them before.

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He doesn’t always refuse all vegetables, though. Jace has a color-coded system for showing how hungry he is. Tonight for one of the many dinner courses, I heated up a frozen mix of carrots, corn, peas and green beans. On a typical night, these might all go untouched. If he’s hungry, all the orange items disappear, but all the yellow and green items remain. A bit hungrier and only green items will be left. Note that these are very discrete steps. If a particular color qualifies for eating, every bit of it will disappear. So far I haven’t seen the green things get touched…

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Jace is becoming more adept at stacking and balancing. Today I put half a dozen chunks of banana on his tray. He used his left hand to place them all into his right hand. This was not an easy task, since his fist is only big enough to hold two of these banana chunks, and banana is slimy and slippery. But after a minute or two of squishing and stacking, he held a delicately balanced tower of banana chunks in his right hand.

And then he shoved the whole thing into his mouth.

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This morning it was in the 50’s when we woke up and a little nippy in the air. Made me realize that winter is approaching and wonder what we are going to do. Most weekend mornings Jace and I head out to the local park for an hour of running around, climbing, swinging and generally letting off steam. At daycare they go outside in the morning and afternoon to play. But soon it will be cold, and icy, and snowing which will put a damper in and keep us much more housebound that we are used to.  Not to say that you can’t go to the park when it is cold out but it will definitely slow us down some. And Jace has far to much energy to be kept inside our little home. I think he will be literally bouncing off the walls at some point (or at least off the couch!)

One thing I did find is that there is a local tumble gym that has open play on sunday mornings from 9am to 11am. Something tells me we might be heading over there a few times this winter in a effort to exhaust our little tornado. Got an other ideas for us? Post your ideas in the comments section below.

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To brew your own beer, first you need to climb up near the top of the hop plants to get to the hop flowers:

Next, sort through your harvest to select the ripest hops and minimize leaves and stems:

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A few weeks ago, Steve’s mom sent Jace a book with accompanying finger puppets — The Tickle Monsters! Jace absolutely loves these (thank you!), and he instantly figured out how to operate his tickle monster finger puppets on his own (so that he can be the tickler and not just the ticklee).

All four Tickle Monsters:

Jace preparing to engage a Tickle Monster:

Tickle Monster!

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Xander, what are you doing in that baby cage?

Don’t worry, I’ll save you…

(photos courtesy of Xander’s parents)

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Though we didn’t manage to say anything about it here at the time, Jace has been walking for a couple months now. He spent a couple days acting as though he was being followed around by a basketball referee (take just two steps and keep a pivot foot), and then went straight into walking as the primary mode of transportation, never really crawling again. This turned out to be a bit hazardous, since he hadn’t yet (still hasn’t, really) learned to look where he’s going, and the sport of being a toddler has resulted in a few minor injuries. Nevertheless, he’s more or less survived thus far.

His next big trick is talking and singing.

So far his vocabulary consists of the words “Uh-oh” and “Hi” (I think actually that’s probably the Japanese “Hai!”, used to indicate agreement). He occasionally comes out with the word “No”, and when we left him with the Sim clan for the weekend, Caroline tells us that he finished a bottle, lay back, stretched, and said quite clearly, “Ahhh… I like that.” Jace also chatters away, combining random collections of D’s, G’s, and Zh’s in unbroken sentences, the length of which easily rival those of my world history professor in college.

And then there’s the singing. Despite the inability to say any of the words, he does easily recognizable renditions of the happy birthday song and the alphabet song. I’m about to get started working on teaching him Stairway to Heaven, just so he can expand his repertoire a bit.

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Bet you have all been wondering what happened to us? Well, I have to say it has been a very crazy month around here. We took several trips, recovered from those trips, got sick, recovered from getting sick, and that brings us up to date. Oh, you want more details? Well stay tuned as I try to get back into writing.

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The weather made a sudden change to heat and humidity this weekend, and Jace got the opportunity to cool off in the pool at Chuck and Monica’s barbecue. Despite what it may look like in this photo, he was overjoyed to take a dip with a bunch of girls:

In fact, he stayed longer than anybody, waiting until he was alone with the last dedicated party girl (don’t tell Allison’s parents):

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