Mastromarchi-Choy Family

Happy New Year everybody!

AJ dressed up for the first time as a tiger (Halloween Pictures).  He didn’t like the hood.  We did a Trunk or Treat during the day.  It only took a few cars for AJ to figure out that he can take candy and put it in his bag.   In the evening, we took him to a few neighborhood houses.  We stopped at a party on the next street over.  They had a pretty cool setup complete with a fire, popcorn machine, and beer on tap!  AJ enjoyed the outdoor Monster’s Inc movie (or maybe he was just tired   We met a few of our neighbors, but none with kids AJ’s age

Mom’s camera card was getting full, so I figured I’d grab some stuff off it. She had some old and new videos. Here’s some pictures from AJ’s first birthday. There will be more to come on that at some point. I still need to download the pictures from our camera.

I’ve been looking for a playgroup or Mommy & me activity for AJ that we could do on my Fridays home with him. I wanted to introduce him to being around other kids and hopefully meet some other families nearby with similarly aged children. A couple weeks ago, I found an all ages playgroup in Marlborough hosted by the Assabet Valley Family Network. I took AJ to his first playgroup meeting today. There were about nine kids in attendance – AJ was the youngest at 13 months. This session’s activity was a sensory table with rice and beans. The kids crowded around and enjoyed shoveling and scooping the contents into cups. AJ kept picking up handfuls of it and releasing it onto the floor. Yes, that’s right, we were the messy people.

Oh, and I’m still trying to get caught up on uploading pictures. These are some photos from February 2009. AJ’s enjoying some blueberry breakfast and having fun making a mess.

A beautiful, warm day today. AJ and I went to check out the Assabet Park in the center of town. Northboro has a great park off 135 that’s geared specificly for one to six year olds. I rode a bike over (with AJ in the trailer). He was a bit fussy about wearing his helmet. At the park, we tried out the bucket swings, explored the jungle gym, and had a snack at the picnic tables. Just before leaving, I put AJ in the sandbox to show him the trucks. Turns out he was much more interested in the sand. It was a brand new sensory experience! He was very curious – pushing the sand around, running his fingers through it, tossing it, scooping and stabbing at it with a shovel. He was having so much fun he didn’t want to leave!

Finally getting around to posting pictures from Christmas. We spent Christmas weekend in RI. This was the year of the Wii – Eric packed along our Band Kit and the Choy family spent much of the weekend rocking out.

Eric, AJ, and I spent New Year’s weekend in NY. We finally got the chance to introduce AJ to Eric’s extended family at his uncle’s annual New Year’s party.

Friday AJ started taking tentative crawls… by the end of the weekend, he was chasing us!  Here’s some video.

We’ve had lots of snow this year. One evening, we decided to introduce AJ to sledding.

Our 2008 holiday newsletter.

We had an ice storm Thursday night that took out power in much of the northeast. Eric went to work on Friday since they still had power. Lisa and AJ toughed it out at home until it started to get dark. Power was returned to much of our town over the course of the day, so we kept thinking that it would come back on at any moment. Luckily Lisa was able to go a few streets over to our friends Dave and Fabi. We managed to get a hotel room for the night and had power back by Saturday morning… that the was the longest we’d ever gone without power! But we consider ourselves lucky since many people may not have power for a few more days.