Narcissism!

Can you believe how long his little legs are?


Just for posterity, that's the face I'm usually wearing when Jim looks like that.

Random tidbits.

Jim's reading nook in the living room. Sometimes the chair lives here, and sometimes it goes in his room. We need more baby chairs.


Jim knows how to give hugs on command now. Whether he'll actually DO it is questionable, but when he does it's adorable.


We have nowhere to put this permanently yet, but fortunately for Jim, Noah is pretty tree-like.

Ahhh, the great outdoors.

Have I ever mentioned that we love Mistletoe State Park? Because we do. It's only about half an hour from us (20 minutes, once we move!), and it's basically the closest thing I can find down here to the woods I grew up with. It's not the biggest park in the world, but it's pretty and it's clean and I've never run into any other hikers there, so I like it. Lack of popularity is definitely a selling point in my book.


Jim strides boldly into the wild unknown.

Anyway, we took a hike there a couple weeks ago, and it was awesome. It was the first really good fall day we've had so far - about 60 degrees and cloudy, with that excellent dead-leaf smell that is so hard to find down here. For some reason Georgia trees just don't usually do much during the fall, so one of my priorities at our new place is planting some trees that will actually turn colors and smell like October at the appropriate time.


How to Turn a Baby* from Downcast to Overjoyed in Four Seconds.

Jim was overjoyed to find that there were quite a few leaves on the ground there, and he took great pleasure in bringing us the best ones he could find. At times this appeared to be all the ones he could find, so the walk took about three hours even though we only went 4-5 miles.


Jim's look-at-THIS face.


Presenting Noah with a particularly good specimen.

It's pretty great that Jim is now old enough to go on walks. He walked probably about two miles on his own, and rode more-or-less happily in the ergo for the rest of it. I look forward to many more family hikes in our future.


*I can't stop calling him a baby. He's still totally a baby, right, guys? Right? Guys?

We took Jim to a field. We took a lot of pictures.

As you can see, Noah is determined to instill an early love of football.


Look at his hair blow. Awww.




This is how most of the afternoon was spent. Jim jettisons ball; Noah retrieves it.


Waving is serious business.


If you look verrrrrry closely, you'll see the main problem with going outside in Georgia ever. This particular nest was about twice the size of Jim.


An airplane! Jim is good at identifying airplanes.


Jim finds something...


...and by the look on his face, it's something awesome/gross.


Noah is obsessed with tying knots.


Jim clearly regrets volunteering to help with the knot-tying.


More airplanes? This is Jim's favorite place ever.


Stairs are pretty easy to climb, as long as you have a hand-hold.


Running down the hill to climb them again is the best part.


Aaaand again (and again, and again, and...).


Playing limbo with the rail on the bleachers.


Clearly, Jim was made for sporting paraphernalia.


And one bonus climbing picture, just to give the grandmothers heart palpitations. Did it work?

Sandwich tantrums, chicken chasing, and general diabolical behavior.

He's practically a monkey these days.

So the other day Jim runs up to me, brandishing one of his books and pointing furiously at a large picture in the middle of it - a sandwich, rather sizable, bulging with various meats and cheeses. He looks at me and starts signing FOOD all serious-like. So I ask him:

"Do you want cheese?" NO! He gestures wildly at the picture.
"We don't have a sandwich. Do you want a banana?" NO NO NO, stabs at picture with his index finger.
"How about some grapes?" NOOOOOOOOO!
"Jim, we don't have a sandwich. No sandwich." Overcome by grief and despair, he hurls himself to the ground, completely despondent that he can't have his sandwich.

His sandwich-deprivation-tantrum lasted a good four or five minutes. Poor kid. I guess he gets full marks on picture recognition, though.


He's also not really into having his picture taken.

Speaking of food and communication, Jim has a couple new signs AND words (real spoken words, sort of!). He can do banana (rubbing his index fingers together, saying "buh-daaaah") quite well. He can do cheese, too, but it took me a little longer to recognize. It's supposed to look like this, but he just rubs his hands together, and he can't quite say the whole word so he just goes "zzzzzzzz" instead. So if Jim ever comes walking toward you rubbing his palms malevolently and hissing, don't be scared. He just wants cheese.


This is what happened last time he saw me get the camera out.

And in another brilliant seque, let me tell you more about Jim and cheese. Thursday afternoon we were hanging out outside (which is awesome, by the way - I read a book in the shade while he grubs in the dirt and chases chickens) when Jim comes up to me rubbing his hands and hissing, as described above. Naturally, I go inside and bring him a cheese stick. He's delighted to see it, of course, and proceeds to bring it to his mouth when, all of a sudden, out of nowhere Beatrice the chicken darts in, snatches it from his hand, and takes off across the yard. Jim is momentarily stunned, but recovers quickly enough to give chasing, laughing hysterically the whole time. Apparently he has never encountered anything quite as hilarious as a chicken taking his cheese.

It was pretty epic, actually, in the most literal possible sense of the word. The chase ranged from the shed to the garden, from the chicken coop to the garden hose. They went back and forth - Jim would tackle the chicken and snatch the cheese long enough to get a bite, then the chicken would reclaim it and gulp down a couple shreds before Jim could catch up to her and take it back. I know, I know, sitting in the shade watching your child compete for second-hand chicken cheese isn't exactly Mother-of-the-Year material, but seriously, would you have stopped it? It was just too good. I wish I'd had a video camera with me.

Am I seasonally appropriate or what?

The wild Jim spots its prey.


He moves in for the kill.

Don't know what it is, but this new fall weather (seriously, folks, it's been in the 70s this past week! It even hit 65 once!) has me in the mood to bake. Last week my sister Emmy and I made banana cream pie and bright blue merengues, over the weekend I made apple turnovers, and yesterday I baked up a big batch of these Pumpkin Spice Whoopie Pies. Good thing Noah already had his weigh-in for this quarter.

These whoopie pies are probably Jim's favorite out of everything I've made recently. I got the recipe here, but I had to edit it a little. I used a little more vanilla and regular sugar instead of Splenda (I've got this unreasonable paranoia about artificial sweeteners), and cut the sugar in the frosting by about a quarter. It was still a little too sweet, so if anybody out there decides to make it, I'd cut the sugar in the frosting fully in half. Or use more cream cheese, maybe. More cream cheese is always better.

Pumpkin Spice Whoopie Pies with Cream Cheese Filling
Makes 12 plus some cupcakes

3 cups flour
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ginger
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cloves
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 15 oz. can of pumpkin
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Beat together brown sugar, sugar , oil and pumpkin. Add eggs one at time, followed by the vanilla. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet stuff until just combined. Using a big plastic bag (I used 1 gallon size, and it worked pretty well) with one corner snipped off, squeeze out circles of batter onto a cookie sheet, starting from the middle and working outward to make 2" circles (12 per cookie sheet). Bake for 11 minutes and cool on a rack.

Note - there will probably be some batter left over. Either make extra whoopie pies or do what I did and use the rest for pumpkin cupcakes. They take about 25 minutes in the oven.

Cream Cheese Filling
1 8 oz. package of cream cheese, softened
1 stick of unsalted butter, softened
8 oz powdered sugar, or more or less to taste (original recipe called for 16oz, but it was way too sweet)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

When the cookie part is completely cool, assemble by spreading frosting on the flat side of one cookie then smooshing it together with another one to make a tasty sandwich. Easiest way I found was to just put a big glob of frosting in the middle with a knife and let the smooshing press it out to the sides.

The Artiste

Jim's latest masterpiece. Pay special attention to the crayons...

Jim loves his crayons beyond life itself. Granted, he doesn't quite understand what life itself is, but he really is very fond of his crayons nonetheless. Unfortunately, he has very little patience for the finer points of their usage yet. I keep them on a shelf so that the house isn't entirely destroyed, so he stands under the shelf and points at them increasingly angrily until someone fetches them for him. Once he has them, though, he very rarely actually colors. He prefers to throw them at the cats, carefully break them into little pieces, smear them on the windowsills, laboriously peel off the wrappers, and so on and so forth. The only way to persuade him to actual use them for their intended purpose is to restrain him in his high chair with a couple crayons and a piece of paper, at which point he will perhaps deign to honor us with an artwork or two.


Jim post-art. Can you guess what color of crayon we found in his diaper later that afternoon?

Or he might just eat them instead. Close enough, if you're a toddler.


Bonus pictures: Jim concentrates VERY hard in order to smear crayon on the camera lens. That's why the rest of the pictures this month may or may not be kind of blurry.