Enjoy…

- pulling himself up whenever he can and getting into all corners of the house, making cooking extremely challenging for mom (see last two pictures below)

- FINALLY sleeping through the night (11-12 hours) consistently without night feeds after 10 1/2 months

- loves to feed himself whole blueberries and big chunks of avocado but starts to refuse puree baby food, or anything from a spoon… messy meal time!

- already knows how to climb up stairs at grandparents’ house

I do a decent amount of reading (for how busy I am). I didn’t really get into reading until college, where for all intents and purposes I finally got to read things I was interested in. Also, I guess spending 1hr+ a day on the “throne” and having flown to LA (four times I think), NYC, Maine (through NYC), Russia and Ukraine (through Netherlands) and Russia again (through Germany) this year helped.

Here is a list of books I enjoyed this year:

• China Now: Doing Business in the World’s Most Dynamic Market
• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
• Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web Application
• Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up
• The Little Book That Beats the Market
• The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
• Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
• Performance Dashboards and Analysis for Value Creation
• Scrappy Project Management: The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
• The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008
• Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations.

Here are books I already dug into or planned to read in early 09:

• Beginning Ruby on Rails
• Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
• Outliers: The Story of Success
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
• The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

I remember this time last year, getting together with my pregnant friends, we’d talk about how we were feeling and thinking over delicious little mandarin oranges from Trader Joe’s called “cuties” (plus other snacks of course). That’s when I fell in love with those mandarin oranges. They are easy to peel, sweet and juicy, and they provide lots of vitamin C. Now they are in season again, and I have a bag of “cuties” in my kitchen. But we’re no longer expecting, glowing preggers. We’re moms. Most of the time we’re tired, distracted, constantly moving, and we’re wishing that we had time to sit down and share a few cuties with our friends while carrying on an adult conversation.

Ok, enough of that. I’ve been fighting a cold since Friday night, and not being able to smell anything right now is making me down. I can’t kiss Ari or smell his yummy baby skin, but I guess I could be glad that his poop doesn’t smell either!

Ari is crawling everywhere now, and sometimes even pulling himself up. Last night he started sticking his tongue out at me, but I’m hoping it’s only temporary. Yesterday he did his second model job posing for Gap’s spring baby clothes. He had a tough night the night before the shoot, so he wasn’t very happy on set. The crew tried sooo hard to make him smile, but all he did was staring back at the clowning adults with a serious look on his chubby face. He was too mellow to get excited. I felt so bad, but what can you do… he’s an infant. I hope they got some good shots. I forgot to take a picture with my cell phone… would have been nice to have a photo of him on set, getting his hair done like a star.

Ari’s been very vocal lately. No words yet, but he’s definitely saying something. We also noticed that he’s an introvert. He’s quiet and observant in a group, but he’s much louder and active alone at home. He doesn’t like noisy and crowded places either. We learned that in a Chinese restaurant during dinner time.

I’ll upload the pictures from Taiwan one of these days… maybe after I recover from this nasty cold…