Busy busy busy... I continue to maintain that visitors are tiring, but they're nice in terms of Eytan-visiting-time and also for inspiring outings. Mike's mom and stepdad were here, and we managed a couple of wineries and a trip to the local botanical gardens.
And my mom was back for a couple of days as well -- so you get some compare contrast photos of how big Eytan has gotten over the past few weeks (9lbs 9oz!).
Relatively, though, he's still pretty little...
Musings
I expected Eytan to be a little bit of a tricky name around here -- thus spelling it Eytan instead of Eitan in the interest of phonetics. I think that's helped in avoiding the Aye-tan (like aye aye, captain) tendency, but we are getting a lot of Eaton and Anton. It's interesting because, while I know Eytan is a little unfamiliar, it's not really such a hard name -- but turns out familiarity and difficulty are quite different. I've realized recently that while I've lived many places where Jewish names weren't always familiar, I've probably never lived in places before where even the concept of "foreign" sounding names was, well, foreign. In my experiences, teachers might trip over Aninda or Yi on the first day of school, but names from other languages were not necessarily uncommon. Here, unless the names are Anglo-y or Latino (or even hippie or biblical), they are.
Outings
Meanwhile, Eytan has done a bit of exploring the last few weeks -- helped along by an infant stroller base, a cooling off of the weather, and weight gain that makes him big enough for many different kinds of carriers. He has gone peach picking and wine grape stomping,
he has accompanied the baby goats when they were getting their hooves trimmed and all the goats when they first got to explore their new pen under the willow,
and perhaps most exciting of all, he and
Ernie the goat and mike's mom and I all went to the Cashmere
elementary school one morning so that all the kindergarteners could pet a goat and
reinforce learning the letter G.
Day-to-day
Meanwhile, Eytan's other pursuits include sleeping,
getting his diaper changed,
yelling,
smiling (in this case while hiking),
hanging out,
surfing,
hiccuping (sorry, no pictures here), and occasionally dressing up like a disembodied hand.
From my perspective, this whole Eytan the baby thing seems pretty disconnected from the previous pregnancy episode. I know that, ideally, one usually follows the other, but somehow they feel kind of unrelated. Odd.
Gaspar
In non-baby news, we are wrapping up the season here. Our garden harvest has been manageable, mostly because we let the weeds and imperfect irrigation scheme crowd out half our plants and so grew a reasonable amount of food this year. Our strawberries did really well, though, as did some dahlias.
We have wood now for our stove for the winter.
And our attempts to downsize the goat herd have been, well, a very little bit successful. We almost had takers for Ed and for Ernie and Bert, but those all fell through. We did, however, have a young boy adopt Gaspar as his birthday present, to raise and show at next year's county fair. A little sad, and not really the goat that was going to cut down on our hay usage by going to live elsewhere, but probably a step in the right direction. Bye Gaspar! We'll have to go see him at the fair next year.
5 comments:
I could have warned you about the Eytan, the foreign name thing. :) I clearly remember being rather surprised at how much trouble people in Wenatchee area were having with Elan and Ari which seem even easier names. It was quite different from what we are used to in our neck of the woods. He'll have to learn to enunciate early in life.
What a wonderful picture of Eytan smiling at you! And *I* smile at all the pictures of Mike and Eytan; Mike looks in his element as a daddy. And those dahlias are beautiful, too.
And the foreign names thing...yeah. Obviously my kids have names that are as Anglo as they come, but watching other parents comment on foreign names in the school directory, scratching their heads about them, makes us appreciate just how unusual the diversity we were accustomed to in the Northeast is in other parts of the U.S. It's there, but the sheer numbers and variety in New Jersey, Boston, etc. are pretty unique, we're coming to realize.(There's even a kid in E's school with a clearly pronounceable, phonetically Anglo name that is Native American--you know, like John Runningwolf--and there are parents who keep commenting on how strange that is. Never mind that we live in Ute Pass, where John's relatives probably antecede ours by several thousand years.)
And yet every kid with a trendy "normal" name seems to have a creative spelling just to be original.
Delightful to see the smile on your little guy - and just as lovely to see his family smiling back.
All the pictures are great, but the hiking one is a real keeper (as a few others have already commented)! He's getting so big already!
Lina, I had forgotten about that, but now I remember you telling me before... funny :) I've been going with the "it's pronounced like wonton but with a long A" tactic -- that at least inspires a giggle :) GEB that's really interesting to hear about name-tripping parallels in your neck of the woods. And thanks Kate and Ben, we think the bigness and smiles are pretty fun too :)
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