Avinash {hearts} bunnies

They are cute, fuzzy, and white.



They hop all over the place.



And, they love for you to laugh and chase them.





What's not to love????

Avinash's first birthday party!!

or, the best smash cake performance ever.

I so wanted a beautiful, colorful, cake-filled, outdoor, low key birthday party for Avinash. Oh, and balloons, tons and tons of balloons. And a bubble gun.

And it was!

We had such a glorious 70-degree day at Discovery Green. My Dad even flew down from Pennsylvania and my brother drove down from Dallas for the occasion.



Ryan was a little worried that we got too many balloons.

I mean, what if Avinash grabbed hold of them and started to float away? How would we get him down? Valid concern.



I didn't even realize that we knew so many people with kids in Houston.



Avinash just loved being at the park. I think he was happy that our picnic table was surrounded by gravel, especially since he could put it in his mouth.

He was so fascinated by all of the other kids too.



Plus, everybody loved the bubble gun. Nice to know that I have same interests as toddlers.




The best part had to be the smash cake though. We bought three cakes from Central Market. I bought tons of candles from Papyrus. And, yes, I filled every cakes with candles. Avinash knew what to do with his cake right away. After singing happy birthday.



And, with some help from his friends blowing out all those candles.



We set the cake in front of him and, with a look of serious determination on his face, he dug right into it. Icing, check. Cake, check. Filling in the middle, check.



I think he might have eaten the whole thing had we not stopped him.



We let him splash around in the fountain afterwards and put him in his monkey costume. Then we fed him french fries too, ha!

Happy birthday Avinash!!

Urban pumpkin patch.

At Central market, the pumpkin display was the perfect photo-op for Avinash.









Our urban pumpkin patch was tons of fun, everyone stopped to see the baby and there was no long drive there!

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Wishing you all a very happy and healthy Diwali!

P.S. Did anyone else notice how Bing had up a beautiful Diwali background and Google did not? Why is google falling behind?

Monkey business.

We all dressed up for karva chauth this year because we decided to go to Mandir with some friends instead of doing puja at home.





Avi had already worn his orange kurta and his gold kurta in the last few weeks.

So what was a baby to wear?

Monkey costume!

And once he had it on he wanted to hang out with all of his monkey friends.



about five seconds later...


What else can you expect? Actually I'm still amazed that he posed for the picture at all!

Avi's 1st Birthday!

Happy Birthday Avinash!!

We are so proud of how you are turning into such a great little boy right before our eyes. It feels like yesterday that we were still waiting for you to come and wondering if we were about to have a boy or girl. I am still so amazed by how wonderful your birth was.

And how did we celebrate the first anniversary of the most amazing day in our lives ever?



Why, shopping trip, Italian food and ice cream of course! Though, it seems that Avinash's favorite part was the escalator.

Which he promptly escaped from us in order to go right back to as soon as he could!



This baby has definitely taken us on an adventure over this past year. He is now practically running all over the place, surviving his first real cold, eating real food, learning to drink from a cup, saying mama/dada, playing ball, doing gymnastics, getting up to standing unsupported, climbing off the side of the couch, and getting into a hundred new kinds of mischief every day.



I wonder what he has in store for us next!

Saturdays.

Sigh, my typical Saturday. Get up as early as I do on a weekday. See twice as many patients as I normally do and then run around the rest of the day while trying to keep getting yelled at to a minimum (unsuccessful today).

At least I got this to brighten my day:



One of the doctors I work with also takes his boy to the same Little Gym's class and he snapped this picture so I could at least feel like I was there.

Sigh, back to drudgery..

Garba night!

One of the perks of living in Houston is the huge Indian community. One of the downsides is that we still manage to be out of the loop all the time despite all of the Indian friends we have here. We missed the Holi extravaganza in Sugarland tis year. And we missed this meet & greet event with Shah Rukh Khan at Reliant, literally minutes from our apartment. I did somehow manage to look up Navratri events in time to find a Garba dance to go to last night.
It started auspiciously enough. I got all dressed up in one of my new Salwars, put the baby in this ridiculously cute Sherwani.


The first floor of the convention center was closed but looked like they had an antique show going on that weekend. Ryan had an Indian shirt on too and we gave his friend Justin a shawl to wear. We walked up to the Indian booth on the second floor and asked to buy tickets. Of course the middle-aged Gujrati guy selling tickets took one look at us and said, "Oh tickets for what? Are you here for the antique show?"
Yeah, we always dress up in Indian clothes on the first night of Navratri, then go talk to some narrow-minded FOB asbout getting tickets to a closed antique show. Of course!

Old FOB jerks notwithstanding, we had a great time.



Though the dance floor did not look like this when we first arrived. I completely forgot to factor in Indian-time to our schedule. Luckily there was a Buffy musical sing-a-long going on at Discovery Green right outside which we watched first. It was totally campy and almost like a new generation Rocky Horror Picture show. It was like an organic gathering of geeks and nerds, who all had the episode memorized and danced along with the show. Ryan wants to create a whole series of these shows with other notable shows and movies of our generation. Any suggestions?



We eventually got out on the dance floor. We had a blast.



I even got Ryan and Justin to pose for action shots too!



Avinash was thrilled at the end of the night too--mostly because we let him out of his itchy jacket..

San Antonio weekend trip.

Naturally, our San Antonio Labor day/Anniversary road trip started with a stop in Austin.

I carried the baby around and tried to experiment with my new camera.

Oh, and Ryan gave a speech to a huge crowd in front of the Capitol Building!

I love how passionate he still is about politics. It is hard not to get disinterested over the years, especially as all of your values get eroded year after year. I basically feel totally withdrawn from the process. But, he is still fighting and trying to change things.

San Antonio was such a good change from Houston.

I'm sure that their PGY-3 residents don't get to first assist two or three aneurysm clippings a week, but it would be so nice to live there.

We had our anniversary dinner at Biga, beautiful ambience, excellent service and great food.

Perfect seasonal new American-even the salad was good. Avinash was a perfect baby at dinner too. He loved strolling down the Riverwalk afterwards too.

We took him on a river cruise the next day.

He was awake for about the first five minutes of it.

The city was just so colorful and vivrant. Soulful.

He never even knew what he was missing.