Last week of freedom

This Friday is my first day of teaching, which means that I have to start leaving Emmett again. Yuck. Luckily it is only Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and only for six weeks. It is not going to be easy to leave him, but the good thing is that he gets very excited when either Andrea or I return from having been elsewhere. His excitement is shown by rubbing his feet together and hopping up and down a bit. The feet are too funny...it is like he is a dog and is wagging his tail. He probably pees, too. I should check that sometime.

Andrea's mom left yesterday as did my brother who had come for a short weekend visit. With him went the jetta as a gift, so we are officially car-less. The garage is so empty now with the exception of the scooter and the strollers (the kayak still hangs...I need to figure out how we are going to take that out w/o a car). Our first car-less trip was to our friends Anne and Alex's place to have some pictures taken with Augie and Ethan. We were going to try to use our new citycarshare account but all of the cars nearby were reserved so we bussed it. I haven't mentioned this here, but in the past week Andrea and I got iPhones and one of my primary reasons for wanting one was because the muni system has an online gps bus tracking/next arrival website, and having that information in your hand makes taking the bus much more efficient---and it really worked well for our trip.

Today Emmett and I went on a long walk to find teething biscuits, which for those who haven't had a kid are cookies or crackers that immediately turn to paste as soon as saliva touches them so that thems without teeth won't choke whilst eating. We had been talking about getting some for a while and while I was in the park last week a woman gave me one of the rice ones that she had gotten from a Japanese market which Emmett loved (I was a little bothered by taking food from a stranger in the park, but Emmett seems fine---not a good first example for the "don't take treats from strangers" lessons). Anyway, I failed in my biscuit search (and in my speaker search from goodwill, but I did try on some boots), but to reward Emmett for being such a good sport in our Haight Street walk I took him to the really fancy children's area in Golden Gate Park to check out other kids and ride the swing. As I had my new, fancy iPhone in my pocket, I thought I would take some pictures of smiling Emmett as he rode the swing. I couldn't see the screen so well as it was incredibly sunny, but this is what I found I had photographed when I got home. The iPhone is a great device.