This week, Ari attended his first birthday party! Or, rather, he attended a birthday party for the first time. We were celebrating the first birthday of a coworker’s son. It was sort of like a first playdate for Ari – after the birthday boy opened his gifts (ADORABLY! growling with excitement at each one!), I put Ari down to sit on the floor and play with him. The other boy shared very nicely, and when he wanted to take something that was in front of Ari he would put something else in front of him first, like a trade – so cute!! Ari doesn’t really care yet about having toys taken away; he’ll just put his fingers in his mouth if there’s nothing else to chew on. Here he is reaching for the orange circle, which he enjoyed mouthing:

Andrew had a playdate, too – he finally got to play with Baker again! Any dog poop I hadn’t picked up was frozen solid so we weren’t worried about them stepping in it, hehe. They were a big, hairy blur:

Before the doggie playdate, I got to take some holiday snapshots of Jan and Pat with Baker, which she blogged about at Artless Articles. I do enjoy taking pictures, especially with my Sony Nex-F3! I just use the auto settings and it’s so easy. It has a large sensor size for great image quality, it works really well in low light, and you can point the flash up for better looking flash pictures. Those are my favorite features!

Ari is such a big boy in his go-pod, now. Sometimes he straightens his legs and pretty much just stands up in there. Also, he’s wearing 9-month size clothes! He’s starting to look like a little boy instead of a baby.

For eating, we’ve moved on from sweet potatoes to apples. He had some organic apple slices and some organic unsweetened applesauce. He got frustrated trying to hold onto the apple slices, and they kept ending up on the floor and then he’d cry. With the applesauce, he wanted to pick up the whole container and chew on it. I keep forgetting to put a bib on him before he gets all messy!

He’s been rolling around on the floor like a pro, but no crawling yet!