The day after I was born, my Mommy caught a cold. Then my daddy caught it too. When I was 9 days old, I caught my first cold. Boy were my folks worried! They called the nurse, the midwife, and everyone they could think of. They bought a humidifier and tried to pull snot out of my nose with a big blue snorkel bulb. That made me REALLY mad. Sometimes Mom would take me into the bathroom after she took a shower so the air was hot and humid and I could breathe. The rocking chair Aunt Sandy gave us fits into the bathroom and she could sit in the steamy bathroom and nurse me.

When I was sooooooooo little my preemie clothes still fit, our friends Marion and Tom and their daughter Savannah and son Josh came to visit us. Savannah was uncharacteristically cranky and I wasn’t too sure about Marion, either.

Daddy dug a hole and put my placenta in it and then planted a fig tree over it. You might think that is gross but it is a tradition for many people and now it is a tradition for us, too.

Then all of the sudden when I was about 7 weeks old I learned how to smile! Here is a picture of one of my first smiles!  Pretty soon I was smiling at everything, especially Mr. Face which was a present from our friends Eric and Martha who live across the street. Their baby Andrew was born one month after me.  You can visit them here.

I started to sit up in my Boppy, a gift from our buddy Reshma. I’ve almost grown out of my preemie socks in this picture. And, I seem to be enjoying the couch. I don’t like it anymore because it is too slippery.

I love my Grandpop Hyman. Here he’s looking a little rough because it was break-the-fast after Yom Kippur. I, of course, didn’t fast, so I’m raring to go. Mom did, though. The groovy “cowtfit” is from Meghan and Drew Newman.

Much later, in the end of October, Mom and Dad went totally nuts and took me to Budapest, Hungary, because Mom had her Board of Directors meeting there. I was really nice on the plane and slept and ate almost the whole way. On the way to Amsterdam we had bulkhead seats and I got to lie on the floor and play with dad while mom watched the movies. In Budapest we stayed with our friend Cerasela. We didn’t scan in her picture yet (because in most of the pictures I am naked), but here is the street she lives on,

We rode the metro lots of times. The metro stairs are really steep.  All the folks on the metro thought I was absolutely adorable, even if they couldn’t believe Mom and Dad would take such a tiny baby out in public. Mommy finally said, “He’s American. He’s strong. American babies go outside when they are little.”

Of course, we had to go to my daddy’s favorite place in Budapest, the Botanical Garden.  We lucked out, there was an orchid show!  All those orchids gave me an appetite and I had a picnic in the garden.

Then we went to the Decorative Arts Museum, which is a beautiful building decorated with Zsolnay tiles all over. The ladies in the exhibit Mommy wanted to see were horrified that I wasn’t wearing a hat and they yelled at her that I was going to get a cold. Mom and Dad were getting pretty fed up with Hungarian attitudes towards babies! So they went to lunch at the palacsinta restaurant in the Korona hotel and changed me on the table. HA HA HA!

We went on a super long walk up the walking street, Vaci utca. I slept through the whole thing, including the big market at the end of the street, Vorosmarty ter, and Dad choosing dessert at the famous bakery Gerbaud. For some strange reason, Dad refused to change my diaper in Gerbaud.

We also went to Budaors and visited our friends Kati and Ferenc Molnar. They have a big family now: Bogey, Hajni, and Jonathan. We have to scan in some pictures with the whole family together. We had lots of other adventures in Hungary, but those are all the pictures we had on the CDs!