Today's Fortunes

Mine: This year your highest priority will be your family.

Jasper's*: A bold and dashing adventure is in your future within the year.

Until his adventure begins, Jasper's going to make due with grabbing my hair with both hands, shrieking, and trying to eat my face.

* Jasper didn't actually eat his fortune cookie. He had pears for the first last night (yum) but we haven't moved on to multi-ingredient foods just yet.

At seven months

Jasper has begun devouring the American literary classics.



RIP, Mr. Salinger. And happy seven months, kiddo.

Sippy Cup Madness!

As part of our transition into big boy food and drink, we've introduced Jasper to the sippy cup.

Sippy cup, Jasper. Jasper, sippy cup.



He likes it. A lot.

Maybe he thinks it makes him look suave?



Every once in a while he actually gets some water out of it; he finds that a little alarming.



Unfortunately, I kind of think that the sippy cup is contributing to the excessive and seemingly quite painful gas Jasper has been having lately. He tends to swallow a lot of air, which can't be good for his little tummy.



So until we either get better at actually drinking or until I find a kind that lets him swallow less air, we might take a sippy cup break. Assuming I can get it away from him.

On the train

Jasper and I have been taking BART again. There's a networked computer for me and a big project at work, so we're back to commuting. For the first week or so, as we were getting back into the rhythm of working outside the house, we drove, but that meant having to move my car every two or four hours and being able to figure out if this is the second or the third Monday of the month in order to avoid street sweeper parking tickets. It also meant having to be on the bridge before 3:30pm, which, well, cuts into one's productivity. So we're back on BART.

So we're back to sharing an elevator with the young mom whose jaw dropped when she realized my 6.5 month old is as big as her 8 month old. Back to chatting with the probably homeless woman who seemed to be riding the train to avoid the rain and to panhandle for change; she was especially enamored with Jasper ("I can see it now, in five or six years, he'll be out playing baseball. 'Throw the ball, Jasper!' Like a scene from Leave it to Beaver."). And the brusque afternoon commuter who looked up long enough from her romance novel to advise me to keep socks on Jasper when he was learning to walk to keep him from being too mobile too soon. And all the young women who flirt with him as he looks over my shoulder. And the business man who took one look at me holding Jasper and trying to push his stroller off the train (mind the gap) and grabbed the front of the stroller to haul it out.

I like BART. I'm not really a driver, and given the choice between spending two hours (at least) a day in the car with Jasper in the backseat, most likely screaming his head off and sitting on a train for a little over an hour, actually interacting with my son, its an easy choice. And part of me likes the crazies and the strange sense of community that comes with being crammed on a train together.

Now, off to pay that parking ticket...

Because I'm a bad blogger

but also because its hard to write a blog post with a squirmy and restless infant in your lap, I give you the gratuitous photo post. Presented without captions or explanations.