My stepmother, Mary Kay Fausch, sent Linden a handmade quilt with a beautiful rainbow pattern on it. She loves it. She uses it everyday, rolling around, practicing her crawling, balancing on her stomach with her arms and legs in the air whimpering...
A classic moment...
I just like this shot from below of Linden's very circular face among the tree tops.
...to stare brazenly into the face of death and ask for a rain check; to screech in the night like the wolverine one bite shy of freedom from the trap; to...I'm gonna get the leaf!
Sporting her brother's old hat and sunglasses, Linden goes out into the world, UV protected and ready to bring...it...on...to say to the world, I am baby, hear we squeak; to make the boys cry and put the girls to shame; to stake her rightful claim on this fistful of dirt we call life, throw caution to the wind and bury the hatchet of destiny into the heartwood of history...
Ooh, a leaf!
Winnie claims ownership of her children...
No, my dears, you can't get away. Your feeble struggles and droolings are futile: you are still mine, mine mine!!! Mwuuuuhahahahahahaha!!!
Here's a perfect example of what I was talking about. Linden gets ready...
Insert leaf and...
So begins Linden's fascination with grabbing anything she can and stuffing it into her mouth. Here's how it usually goes: She sits somewhere, mindlessly moving her hands in a circular motion at the wrists; she sees something she wants; her eyes get really big, her mouth puckers into an 'O', she makes little rhythmic grunts while staring at the thing intently. From there it goes something like this:
Linden is in leaf-shadow.
Rowan under a giant red maple tree. He found a leaf he liked, which is why he's smiling in this picture. You can see my coffee cup in the background.
Rowan is not too sure about the scarlet oak branch he's got. The acorn has no cap, so that just won't quite do, you know.
I think this is the first picture of Linden in her chair at the dinner table. She's eating solid foods now like avocado, rice gruel, apple, carrot, cauliflower, pear and beets. She likes the avocado and gruel, enjoys carrots once in a while, barely tolerates apples and pears, and is on the fence about cauliflower. Beets, her newest food, she seems to like--we need another test.
That's alot of chair photos. By the way, look at his eyes, they look slightly more like Winnie's when he smiles really big, but the brow is all Baba, and that baby's growin' right across his face, man. Love it!
Wow. Alright, Winnie uploaded the photos, and she could have included all these in one post but didn't so now we have many posts involving similar photos. Sorry, folks, but still Rowan looks mighty cute in this one...horribly, terrifyingly aware of his own greatness.
This is one of Rowan's school photos in which he's behaving extremely well and enjoying sitting on an old wooden rocking chair that actually fits him. One hand on the chair arm, one hand on the thigh, look at the camera, (smile)...
Rowan, Mama and Linden in Dunn Meadow on the IU campus. Linden is nearly bald at this point, but that's OK.
Rowan's best (human) friend, Ian. Ian adores Rowan and gives him fierce, violent hugs, which Rowan seems to grudgingly accept.
Rowan converses with another friend, Ruby, at his school during the Halloween party. Ruby is dressed as a ladybug--very chic.
For Halloween, we came up with embarassingly awful costumes for Rowan: gay aerobics instructor, Chinese CEO. We finally manned up and, with the help of Bel, made him a shark costume (technically a blue shark, as Rowan is very fond of blue sharks because they eat whales, at least dead ones).
Rowan shows off his fins and tail, the latter of which almost fell off while on a trick-or-treating excursion. Now, as it happens, at this same excursion, I dropped the lens cap to my camera somewhere on the sidewalk and for the life of me I couldn't find it, returning home with the idea that, oh well, it's not a big deal, at which point Winnie corrected me that it IS a big deal, and I went back out, this time a little further than before, and finally found it lying on the grass right next to the sidewalk. Lesson learned: don't be a dumbass.
Rowan flaps his fins in this absolutely lunatic procession. Please note: boys = cowboy, pirate; girls = princess.
Linden wears a constant look of shock on her face, and it only gets more shocking when she sees something she wants. More on that later.
Rowan blows out the candle for honestly I can't remember whose birthday we're celebrating here, but look at Linden in great anticipation for what Rowan is about to do--is he going to eat it, is he going to yell at it, what is he going to do?!
