i suppose you sneaky folks have already spied this image on the flickr page, but i'm late late late with our fathers' day post and this is what we've got. so!

happy belated fathers' day!

we had a truly excellent day from start to finish. alden was in a great mood and sat through a nice breakfast at egg, enjoying mama's pancakes with cherries and a bit of papa's bacon. then he napped on the train ride over to the metropolitan museum of art, waking just in time to explore some of papa's favorite galleries.

now that bun's more mobile, hanging out in the ergo for extended lengths of time becomes tedious for him (and back-breaking for us), so while papa explored, alden and i visited various benches and chairs in the museum. he had a blast and made a few friends.

alden loves other children. love love loves them. usually this is charming and makes us quite proud, but sadly, not all babies get to socialize as much as our bun. we met one such baby girl, whom alden was quite smitten with, while waiting for papa at the round seat seen in the above photo. the baby was with her very stylish grandmother, who had given her a wonderfully elaborate, laser-cut plastic bangle in YELLOW (our favorite) to play with. she set the child down, standing next to alden at the chair and began cooing over them both until our little hero patted the scrawny wee beasty on the hand, in an attempt to get her to share the treasure. well. that just would not do. granny swooped in, grabbed the baby girl away and huffed, "he's aggressive, isn't he??" to which i calmly replied that he is assertive, but loves and is accustomed to playing with other babies. and with a huff and a puff, they were gone.

every day we encounter more kindness and smiles than not, but we do receive our share of blank stares, eye rolls and even blatant rudeness. it's just part of being a human and interacting with other humans and i'm trying to take that stuff in stride, though it breaks my heart that anyone could look at my smiling, waving cherub and just turn their back. one would have to be completely without love or joy in their hearts to not return the smile of a baby, so instead of worrying about als having his feelings hurt, i try to turn that feeling around on them and gently convey to him that there are some sad folks out there, but it's not up to us to cheer them. heavy. obviously, i don't say all that. not just yet. but i'm working on believing it myself, so when the time comes, he really gets it.

well that was a tangent. i'm good at those, huh? anyway, our day was wonderful and we all had fun and didn't want to go to bed, lest the day should end. but, end it did, as lovely days do, with some well-earned shut-eye and dreams of more weekends with beloved papa ian.