Jacob and Samuel Bregard threw a party to celebrate their first birthdays. (Samuel turned one on April 9.) They invited babies from near and far, along with their parents and some other old folks. There was cake and candles and toys and diapers for all. Here, Jacob (and Amy) blow out Jacob's candle while Samuel and Max start to dig into Samuel's cake.
Jacob is ONE YEAR OLD today. We'll post some photos from our little party. But really, who has time to keep a blog with a toddler running around? In the past month, Jacob has started to crawl, sprouted 2 teeth and stood on his own (without holding on) for 40 seconds. Wow!
On Wednesday afternoons we usually go to the baby group run by the International Women’s Club of Kyiv. Jacob has a chance to play with (or ignore) other babies from around the world (including Canada, China, Finland, France, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine, the UK, and the US). 
It's fun to compare how the babies are progressing. Compared to a statistically insignificant group of his peers, Jacob has been slower to get teeth and stand on his own, but faster at growing hair and learning to pick up and eat minute objects, such as grains of rice or individual cat hairs. Meanwhile Mike, normally the only dad to attend, hangs out with the mothers.
This week, Roman and Mikael bopped heads, Maia upchucked her fruit salad on her mother's shirt, Jacob gnawed on a plastic apple, Rose bawled, and generally a great time was had by all.
At 11 months old, Jacob has now learned to open the bottom drawer of the dresser and pull out toys and clothes, or better yet, try to climb in with them. Coming soon: installation of our first baby-proof latch. Also note Jacob's first two teeth, which emerged from his lower gum last week.
We went to the Kyiv zoo with our friends Andrea and Andrew. To be frank, out of all the exotic animals we saw, Jacob's favorites were the fish. The cockroaches were pretty cool too, he thought. The elephant was just a big stinky gray wall and the hippo was a pair of ears in a dirty pool of water. He liked the lions but I don't think he realized that they were big cats that were far away.
If you won't feed me, says Jacob, I'll just eat the table. We were out at a cafe in downtown Kyiv. Jacob had borscht and liked it – maybe it's time to start feeding him a wider variety of dishes. His favorite foods remain bananas and yogurt. And tables.
Jacob Forster Rothbart, 2006 -
Ink with food-coloring pigment on recycled office paper.
A lunchtime conversation. We were having a fine lunch of tofu goulash:
Take 1 rice cake.Jacob happily let me feed him for awhile. Then suddenly, he'd had enough and pushed me away.
Add tofu and frozen peas.
Pour boiling water over it.
Mash with fork.
Jacob and Mike sleep together on the living room floor. Lately, Jacob has been refusing to sleep when put back in his crib in the middle of the night, and so often one of us ends up sleeping with him.
Here are a couple more photos taken with the MacBook Pro internal camera. The camera software includes a number of funhouse mirror special effects.
Jacob always enjoys playing in the mirror. He's been particularly fascinated by the computer camera, which also essentially looks like a mirror. When we had the warp effects turned on, he kept glancing over his shoulder to check whether Amy had changed how she looked in person or only on the screen.
Jacob is slightly sick this week. He was acting fussy and cabin feverish this evening after two days inside, so we entertained him for awhile taking photos of ourselves with the built-in camera in my laptop. Not even ten months old and he is already quite a ham.
Jacob has been practicing standing, first with the help of stable objects and then with anything he can grab on to (including less stable things, like his father).
