our mama friend, ginny is a super photographer and last week she captured alden at a playdate with a bunch of his buddies. this is classic als, right here. ginny generously agreed to let me share this image with everyone. hooray! i think she's building a website to showcase her babies and family portraiture--i'll provide a link when i find out.

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this week has been super busy, but mostly with playdates and outings. alden is turning into quite the social butterfly. i must admit that i was a little worried before, as he tended to freak out in new environments or with new people, but he set straight to playing at a friend's house the other day and let a bunch of new friends hold him the next! he still plays mostly by himself when with his pals, but he is only 8.5 months, after all. i don't think it's necessarily reasonable to expect too much interaction amongst the babes at this point. some would beg to differ, but i'm trying not to sweat this stuff. each at his own pace! and alden's pace at just about everything is pretty much as swift as i can handle at the moment.

we've had some rough nights and cranky spells, which i'm blaming once again on teething. the first top chomper is halfway out and is now very official looking. top chomper two is still in cutting-through/blister stage, making for one clingy, irritable little guy. he's a champ, though. one tough bun!

once he wakes up, we're all heading down to park slope to pick up a secondhand organic cotton mattress that i just happened upon during a chance sweep of craigslist this morning. fifty bucks! it's either too good to be true or true serendipity. we'll find out soon. hopefully it's the latter, as i had intended for my entire tax refund to go toward a ridiculously expensive coco mat mattress, but now i can use just *part* of it on pretty crib bedding. hooray! the woman on the phone said she had used it for her son, who has asthma, which means (one could assume) that at least it won't be redolent of cigarette smoke. a friend of ours bought a secondhand organic mattress only to take it home and find that it reeked. what's the point?? why bother with a healthy mattress if you're just going to blow smoke at the baby? eh. humans. anyway, hopefully ours will work out nicely. i have high hopes.