Weekend in NY

Andrew, Matty and I are currently in NYC, blogging on the lap top! We arrived yesterday and immediately went to Steppingstone park in Great Neck. It was a beautiful day and after 5 hours in the car, we needed some fresh air and Matty needed to crawl around. He also had the opportunity to try out his two new hats, both of which stayed on for a total of 2 minutes before he ripped them off and almost threw them into the Long Island sound!


After a nice time at the park, we went to dinner at Shish Kebab and had yummy gyro salads, always a favorite when we make it to the island. Then we hit up Ralph's Italian ices for the best Italian ices I've ever had! Who has ever had chocolate chip cookie dough Italian ice? Seriously, the best. We then had a nice night back at 225 Shoreward where Matty decided to sleep ALL NIGHT, without waking up once! This is a rare occurrence and would be nice if I could actually enjoy it but I tend to wake up every hour or so and worry about him...I'm sure Ill get over that sometime soon!

Today we headed into the city to meet up with my parents who had tickets to see South Pacific (a Christmas gift from us!). It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm and a nice breeze. We enjoyed walking around the city but someone didn't like the subway very much...Matty had a bit of a melt down, poor little guy. While my parents were at the show, we went to Central Park, to the "sheep meadow"...the big field outside Tavern on The Green where I just found out today there used to be a sheep farm. Of course, all day long I kept hearing Andrew say "sheet metal"...I knew we were going to Central Park but I had no idea where he was taking us! The "sheep meadow" was packed! It was pretty fun people watching (and celebrity scouting...I saw none) and Matty's aunts, uncle and cousins came to meet us for some fun and ice cream. Matty had his first ice cream sandwich...he loved it!

We then met up with my parents again (they loved the show!) and headed to dinner at Citrus and then to PINKBERRY! Yes, we were in the city for more than 24 hours before out first Pinkberry experience! We shopped a bit at Fairway and then headed back on the subway (fun again for Matty!). My parents hit the road and we are now settled in at Andrew's sister's apartment. tomorrow looks to be more fun and yummy eats as we are going to attempt to head out early in the morning to see the Donut Plant, a donut joint our friends Ingrid and Josh rave about. Let's hope the 5 borough bike race through the city tomorrow doesn't stop us!

***More pictures from the trip to be added soon!

Birthday Boy!

my test to see if I can upload pictures to the blog..I think I figured it out!

The first of many....

Well, we have a laptop!!! We are the proud owners of a Mac book, pretty exciting. It's great to have the Internet at our fingertips again. And I'm pretty excited to have something to update my iPhone with as well as Skype, which I am sure we will be using to chat with family in the near future. In addition, we will hopefully be using the new computer to keep the blog going! I'm pretty disappointed in us for slacking with it because as I have looked back, it was a great way to document Matty's first year of life. Unfortunately we didn't document the second half as well as the first but there will be much more exciting things to come so here's to "the first of many"!!!

So...no pictures on the computer yet so I can't upload pictures but I can give a quick update on our lives...Matty turned one 3 weeks ago! Oh my god, where did the year go? We had a birthday party for him and had a great time celebrating with friends and family. Matty is cruising all over the place but has yet to take his first steps not holding onto anything, but we are pretty sure that time will be coming soon. He is very active and in 10 seconds of being on the floor, can tear up the house to look like a tornado hit it! One of his favorite things to do is climb the stairs, so we have been on a search for the perfect baby gate. I think we have bought (and returned) about 10 gates so far! We finally have the right one that works with our staircase and banister (which is what made it difficult!) but have only gotten the bottom of the stairs installed...it might be another month before the top is up. Right now, we do have one but it isn't one that you can open or close so we have to climb over it each time we are going up or down, I guess that will get old after a while.

Still no teeth...12 1/2 months and no teeth! Our pediatrician isn't worried...he said they will come when they are ready. Matty does fine without them and gums everything pretty well. There really isn't anything he doesn't eat. His current favorites are bananas, grapes, strawberries and peas. He is a pretty big fan of peanut butter and jelly too. One might think with all he eats he would be a bigger kid but he is still a little peanut! At his doctor's appointment this week, he was 20.8 lbs (13th percentile) and 29 1/2 inches (38th percentile)..he still fits into some of his 6-9 month pants! He is in the big kid room at daycare now too where he is playing either inside or outside most of the day but takes a 2 hour nap from 11-1 every day! Amazing! the kid who never used to nap more than 30 minutes at a time now naps 2 hours a day most days! He's sleeping pretty well at night too. He still wakes up once during the night, usually between 2-4am, I know I could probably wean him off of it but right now I don't mind.

There are so many other fun things going on with Matty that's it's hard to write about them all, but with the new laptop, I am going to try!

Where did March go???

Did we really not blog at all in March??? Okay, well here's a quick one and a commitment to get back to blogging once we buy a new computer...which should hopefully be soon! In the meantime, Matty is almost one!!! And we are getting excited about celebrating his birthday with lots of friends and family next weekend. A few recent pictures...

Enjoying Sat morning music class...


First Passover and a giant matzoh



Matty had his first haircut!!! He's a little apprehensive...



But ended up happy...


A laptop(hopefully a Mac)is in our future and blogging will once again become a regular thing for both of us!!!

It's been a long time....

It's been a long time and in order to keep Denise from saying that our blog is dead, I'll fill you in on what's going up here in Manch... Matty has been growing before our eyes..He's now 10 months old and is moving all over the place. He started crawling just after new years..Now he's unstoppable...He cruises from room to room and is seems very proud of his accomplishments. In addition he has now figured out how to stand up and hold on to things..This has caused him to get himself into everything on every table surface. Alas the babyproofing has begun to take shape at our house. He especially loves the dishwasher (hopefully this isn't his career aspiration).... He also grew out of his tummy tub and has graduated to a big boy duck tub....He loves the new tub and his bath toys..He plays and splashes and seems to love his bath time... We have been working on trying to get Matty to be a better napper. He has been sleeping better at night but still isn't a great napper...Slowly he has become more agreeable to napping in his crib as seen here. We also enrolled Matty in saturday morning music classes at Nini Bambini. He really loves the music and crawling around with his friends. There are instruments to bang (although he is more interested in chewing or climbing on them)... Finally, Matty asked me to show a picture of his new spongegbob pajamas.....

Post Holiday Post

The holidays are over and we are busy getting back into a routine...and one that included getting Matty back on a sleep schedule! Since Thanksgiving he has been having trouble staying asleep in his crib so we did what lots of new parents do, we brought him in bed with us. He slept, we slept...life was good...but then he started waking up every few hours even while in our bed and not being able to put himself back to sleep, we had a lot of sleepless nights again. Knowing this wasn't fair for him (or us) we started sleep training again last week and after 3 long nights of letting him "cry it out" (we still went in to soothe him every 5-10 minutes) he is a champion sleeper again (knock on wood!). He is actually loving his crib now and we hear him in there playing quite often. The other day, he went down for a nap and fell asleep sitting up and then leaned over his stuffed sheep! So cute...



The holidays were nice, quick but nice. Matty enjoyed his first Hanukkah...we lit the menorah each night and each opened a gift. Matty loved ripping the paper off and often found the paper more fun than his gifts! We celebrated his first Christmas (what a lucky boy celebrating both holidays!) at my parents house and had a great time eating, drinking, opening gifts, playing games and laughing a lot. Again Matty seemed to enjoy ripping the paper off everything!



And of course, we have all been enjoying the snow! We have had our share of it already and I'm sure there is more to come! I think we have had 3 or 4 big storms already! Our friends, The "renos" gave us a sled that we brought Matty out in the other day...it was cold but he seemed to like the sledding!


We can't believe the little guy is almost 9 months old already! I can't believe how fast the time has gone and how quickly he has grown up. He is looking like such a big boy lately! Still no teeth and not quite crawling (he is up on all fours and creeping backwards but not frontwards yet)but has been pulling himself up and so active! He is eating so well too, up to three meals a day and still likes and eats everything we give him! Here's a couple of pictures of him in the middle of some of his new favorite activities: He loves it when Andrew holds him upside down and if you get him near a bookcase, forget it...he pulls everything out!





Finally...we had his portraits done the weekend after Thanksgiving and used some of the shots for our holiday card and gifts for our family. There are 20 shots all together (including the naked tushie with the santa hat in the previous post...that was a joke) and one of these days I'll get around to posting them on here but in the meantime here are a few of my favorites:

Matty Claus

Wishing everyone a Happy Holiday!!!!!