Do me a fava

I read some article recently that suggested having toddlers help with tasks like cooking, cleaning, and feeding the pets. With lots of guidance, of course. So I decided that Jory should help me shell some fava beans.

First I tried to get him to squeeze the beans out of the pod, but that didn't go well, so I gave him the job of putting the empty pods in the pod bowl.

Pretty soon it turned into a race to try to keep Jory's hands out of the bowl with the beans!

More Family Portraits

Back in December we hired a photographer to take some family photos. Yes, we have thousands of photos of the three of us, but Jory looks angry/suspicious/bizarre/blurry in thousands of them, and I look like a zombie in just about all of them. None of those things are terribly surprising, but they are disappointing.

The photographer took more than a thousand photos of us, and surprise surprise, Jory looked angry/suspicious/bizarre/blurry in the vast majority of them. I had put on lots of makeup and styled my hair, so at least the zombie effect was muted. But the good news is that we have a few lovely pictures of the three of us now, one of which joined our Christmas cards (mailed out in January).

This is our Christmas card photo:

And here are some of the other good ones:

 

Jory in the Z!

Jory has started asking to sit in the cars, and he decided he didn't need anything bigger than a two-seater!

The ball pit at Google

We went to Happy Hour at Google last Friday, Jory thought he had found heaven on earth - a pool full of balls - until he started to sink into the balls. And then he freaked out.

Father of the Year

Jory's new favorite thing in our next door neighbor Jeremy's yard is the trampoline; of course, he insists on combining it with his old favorite thing: balls. Daddy invented a new game involving throwing one ball in the air, then trying to hit it with another ball, but this did not go as smoothly as hoped.