The Great Dickens Christmas Fair

A few weekends ago we decided to take Jory to the Great Dickens Christmas Fair up in Daly City. If you can picture a Christmas Renaissance Festival, you've got it exactly. The Cow Palace was set up to resemble a Victorian Christmas London, complete with "actors," lots of costumes, singing, plays, and food.

Jory was in complete shock for about the first hour at the fair. He couldn't decide whether he needed to keep his eye on the mens' top hats or on the women's hoop skirts, but he was suspicious of all of them.

We took Jory to the "children's garden," essentially a little play area for kids to run amok in:

And of course he enjoyed himself even more when he found some garbage to tote around:

Jory's dad propped him on a stack of picturesque crates while we tried to get a beer from a "London dockside pub":

We tried to catch a Punch and Judy puppet show, but unfortunately we missed it:

In general I think we were all fairly entertained for a few hours. It was a bit of Christmas fun, and since we went after four pm, we only paid half price. Maybe next year Jory will have the stamina for a little more Christmas fair!

Nintendo Jory

 Jory has a new hat now that it's getting cold outside. Every time he wears it, we think of Squirrel Mario...

This next photo doesn't really have anything to do with squirrels, but it was taken the same day, when we went to the Dickens Christmas Festival. This is Jory sitting on the dockside boxes next to a salty English pub.

Jory style

In between when I wrote this sentence and went to Youtube to get the URL for the "Gangnam Style" video to link to, the number of views went up from 982 million to 983 million. Here's Jory jumping on the Korean bandwagon:

Future traveler

Jory found a comfy position and picked up a Cambridge guide book to read:

As you can see, he is a speed reader like his Auntie Emma!

The best part of Magic Mountain

Hands down, Jory enjoyed the trampoline the most! We have video evidence!

In San Mateo

A few weekends ago we capitalized on the combination of a rainy day and some free tickets (courtesy of our local library) to finally visit CuriOdyssey, a small science center that has a few exhibits to tinker with and a few animals. For a very small center, it was fairly entertaining.

Unsurprisingly, it was pretty difficult to get Jory to interact with any of the exhibits in ways other than banging on them, but we gave it our best shot:

I think we all enjoyed the animal exhibits a bit more. Here's Jory's attempt to communicate with a seriously annoyed bobcat (apparently there's not a cat on earth that likes Jory):

And here you can see the guys watching an otter do a back flip off the aquarium wall:

The birds of prey show was a bit of a bust, since Jory's not big on sitting still. I was actually shocked that his screeches didn't unsettle the birds. And that none of the bigger birds were interested in an 18-lb afternoon snack.

On the way home we followed a few signs to a giant playground in the same park. The playground was called the Magic Mountain, and it looked super cool at first. It turned out these dragons were the best part of the playground: 

There was a GIANT slide that looked like a castle, and we thought, fantastic! I ran up the steps to test out the slide to make sure that it wasn't too scary for Jory.

I ended up having to walk down the slide because it was too sticky to slide on! I think of this as a prime example of California dysfunction - spending a ton of money on a slide you can't use. It's supposedly one of the longest enclosed slides in California ... but you can't slide on it.

But the not-so-magic mountain aside, we'd had a great day not too far from home.

Trimming the tree

Despite our trepidations involving crashing trees, crazy cats, and ambulatory toddlers, we were excited to pull out our enormous stash of Christmas ornaments, courtesy of our wonderful friends Lee and Melinda.

First, KC and Jory opened the box, and we set aside the non-breakable ornaments to go on this year's tree.

Then Jory freaked out. And continued freaking out for quite some time. We're still not sure what the problem was. Maybe the prohibition against eating hooks? Or hooking the cats?

Jory's grandparents came over to help trim the tree too:

Finally, after it became clear that Jory was simply not going to cooperate and trim the tree like a nice little Christmas elf, I handed him a pile of empty ornament boxes. Lo and behold! It was a silent night for about 15 minutes!

Here are some pictures of the final product:

Thanks to all of our wonderful friends and family for contributing to our merry Christmas!

Professional shots of Daddy and Jory

Daddy went to a photo shoot for School of Engineering faculty on a Tuesday, so he had to bring Jory along. The photographer was nice enough to shoot some of both of them, and even though Jory didn't quite understand what was going on, he still managed to look cute!

What's cooking?

I mentioned earlier that Jory has gotten interested in cooking. Naturally, this is absolutely terrifying because babies, knives, and fire really don't mix.

He got excited one night while I was making nopales:

If you know anything about Jory, you'll know that he soon insisted on doing it himself:

When he turned around with the spoon so I could taste it, he smeared cactus all through my hair and all over my sweatshirt.

He was a big help with the gravy at Thanksgiving; I couldn't spare a hand to take a picture because my son was playing with a steaming vat of liquid fat. Yes, I'm Mother of the Year.

Here he is doing some of his own cooking tonight:

Want to know what he was so excited about?

That's right! Hawaiian sea salt in a plastic container!

Another big problem is that Jory's favorite game is "rearrange the spice cabinet," so I can't find anything while I'm cooking!

Jory the Stroller II

Jory's really getting those walking skills down ... now we just have to work on his concentration!

A day of firsts...

 Jory and Daddy had a very exciting day together! First, we rode the Caltrain from Menlo Park to Mountain View, sitting up on the second level of the double decker. Then, we turned around and rode back. Thank goodness for Daddy's Caltrain pass!

Then we went next door to collect some eggs, and like always Jory got sidetracked by all the balls to play with. Even though Daddy would much rather he worked on dribbling a basketball, Jory did show that he has some soccer skills...

Finally, after his nap we decided to go for a hike up to the dish. Much to Daddy's chagrin, when we arrived at the dish after an hour's hike, we realized that Jory was missing a shoe! We diligently retraced our steps looking for it, but it was nowhere to be found... because it was in the car all along!

Superfluous noise

I loathe superfluous noise. Unfortunately Jory is enraptured by it.

Jory has decided that he's really into cooking (more on this terrifying development later), so I thought it'd be safer for him to fool around with empty crockery:

And here we are in the local toy store. Although this store is chock full of toys that could theoretically be good for a child's developing brain, here's the one Jory picked out:

Don't even think of "taking pity" on Jory and buying him a yapping dog toy. I guarantee that he'll be on your doorstep - with the yapping dog toy - within hours.

Jory the Stroller

The little man is now big enough to take a stroll around the neighborhood. Here he is strutting his stuff with Mommy:

They made their way to the park, where he has now learned to love the slides:

You don't get one of these every day

Jory's godmother Jessa sent a postcard from her new gig at McMurdo base in Antarctica!

I know this is a repeat photo from a previous post, but I noticed two things looking back at this picture from last year's NYE:

 - Jory looks so much older!

 - we miss Jessa!

Jory the Dunker

Apparently all that time spent watching Daddy play basketball have paid off: there's one thing Jory likes to do when we go next door to steal eggs from Jeremy's chicken coop - shoot hoops.

He's not so into sharing the ball either, he just wants to dunk the ball like MJ!

Incidentally, a further source of enjoyment comes in watching Mommy dodge the vicious chickens...

What kind of organism is Jory?

As some of you may know, California was voting on whether to enforce labeling of GMOs. We decided to try it out at home:

However, Jory voted against it; he thought he looked cuter without...

Swedish influence

I think Jory is the only kid on the block with a non-Christmas-related reindeer soft toy - courtesy of Auntie Pip and Uncle Mats, straight from Sweden!

Jory seems to be enjoying reading the Svenska text on the tag!

Fortunate Son

This morning Jory discovered an abandoned fortune cookie on the kitchen counter. Lucky for him, this time his standard jam-it-in-my-mouth-to-determine-its-properties strategy worked out ok.

And here's his fortune:

I don't think he's getting short-changed in the sweets department. I picked him up early from daycare last week and he had chocolate smeared all over his face; the local grilled cheese shop gave him a 'smore on Halloween; and he came home from daycare the other day smelling like maple syrup.

Like I've said, I just live here.

Walking!

Jory's been flirting with walking for the past few weeks, but he's finally come to the point where he walks about 40% of the time, and with pretty good success.

Here he is going Godzilla on his train set:

This is what happens when he takes his eye off the prize (and Daddy leaves his shoes lying around):

Watch out kitties and household breakables!

Our child is spoiled

This is his afternoon snack: a mini soufflee with spinach and feta that Tiffany made for him. I'm pretty sure I wasn't getting any souffles as a kid (and I just may have looked longingly at this one before feeding it to him).