It’s cold here in Beijing, and Alex gets bundled up good when we go outdoors. As we were wheeling Alex out this morning Michelle started calling him Randy, after the kid brother in A Christmas Story.

Here’s Alex getting home about 10 hours later. He had a long day!

We’re sorry for the delay in posting… we’ve had a ton of stuff going on. The whole family has been passing around a bug, and we’ve been doing all sorts of things to get ready for our trip. But before we go into that, let’s get some old business taken care of–Uncle Jared and Auntie Yingbin (and Cousin Kyla) got Alex an awesome slide. We’ve found that every once in a while, when he’s really tickled about something, Alex will laugh several times in succession while he’s doing something. It’s not a “HAHAHA” kind of thing, but more of a “heh - heh - heh”. He started doing that the minute he saw his slide.

He isn’t quite ready to slide down without help, but he’s climbing the stairs and hanging out on top of it like a champ.

Here he’s showing some of his infectious enthusiasm about the whole affair.

Now on to the current events. At about 12:30 Saturday morning, we left LAX for Beijing. (Thanks for the ride, Jeff and Phet, and the use of the van, Mom and Dad.) I was personally very concerned about a twelve hour flight with a 364 day old, but it turned out to be much less of an issue than I was expecting. That’s easy for me to say, as we ended up getting separated and I only spent two or three hours with Alex. But the flight attendants were very helpful in finding us some open space in a fairly full flight, and much of the time Alex ended up asleep stretched across two seats, while one of his folks hung out in the third and made sure he didn’t do a header into a bulkhead or something. We also busted out the Benadryl–I’m not confident it made him drowsy, since he wasn’t asleep for the whole flight or anything, and it was a weird situation for him which might make him more wired than he normally would be–but who knows, maybe it worked.

Anyway, if you have occasion to fly with an infant anytime soon I personally recommend that you form a partnership with someone as supremely patient and good-natured as Michelle to take point with the youth.

We landed at about 4:30am local time in Beijing and for his birthday, Alex got his first passport stamp at Chinese customs. Not to sound unworldly or anything, but his dad didn’t even *have* a passport until he was almost 30.

Alex’s aunt Jinghong went above and beyond the call of duty by meeting us in the airport at such an early hour, and we all taxi-ed over to our hotel. Here’s the family unit in front of one of the Chinese New Year displays in the lobby.

I took a nap in the morning that ended up inadvertently stretching to the mid-afternoon, and then I headed over to meet the family at Grandma and Grandpa’s apartment for Alex’s birthday party. I missed lunch, but yogurt was on the menu. Here’s Grandpa feeding yogurt to Alex while Aunt Jinghong holds him. The kid loves yogurt!

Alex was very happy to be the birthday boy. Here’s Mommy right after putting on his pink crown.

He really dug the crown… here he is again. Can you tell he can’t wait to have his first-ever birthday cake?

Alex, Mom, and Grandpa were caught here hanging out on the couch, telling birthday stories.

Here Aunt Jinghong comes in with some birthday tales of her own.

Finally, the next two photos feature Alex and Grandma. Alex met his grandparents for the first time on his first birthday, and we were so happy they finally got to spend some time with him. He had a great time with them.

The Chinese don’t typically do cake for birthdays, but the grandparents didn’t want Alex to be unprepared for the birthday customs of his native land, so they got him a very nice one. It says “first year old, happy birthday” on it.

Here Alex is helping Mom choose the candle for his cake. He ended up wanting yellow, so that’s what he got.

Before we move on, a closeup of the baby figure on Alex’s cake. They did a very good job with this. He looks a little alarmed that the cake in front of him has been cut so close, or maybe that’s my jet-lagged imagination. Anyway, I defy that Ace of Cakes clown to make a better cake topper.

As it got dark, we headed out for a Chinese New Year feast that Grandma and Grandpa arranged. There were already fireworks going off in the streets. The Chinese are totally nuts for fireworks, which we’ll have to talk about some other time because it’s getting late. Suffice it to say, I’m writing this at about 10:30pm on the day after Chinese New Year, and fireworks are *still* going off in the street outside.

Here are Alex, Mom, Jinghong, and cousin Tongtong at the restaurant.

Alex and Tongtong are lamenting the absence of a ‘kids table’, because they know that’s where all the cool people hang out.

The spread was pretty amazing. Here are some of the appetizers…

…and here are the entrees. My conclusion was that I should have had a smaller piece of birthday cake.

Here is Tongtong with her father Dong. He does this awesome trick where he opens a bottle of beer with another bottle of beer. I’d come up with a better description, but I’d already had a few beers at the time.

Alex, Tongtong, and Jinghong spent a lot of quality time together at dinner. Alex did a great job keeping an even keel even though we were sixteen time zones away from home and that put him way past his bedtime.

Enjoying visiting with family surely helped! Alex got along great with everyone, and I’d personally like to thank my whole family in China for making Alex’s first birthday such an enjoyable event.

Alex got a lot of nice stuff for Christmas, but last weekend we discovered what he really wanted: a spoon. He got ahold of a standard teaspoon on Saturday while he was hanging out with mom in his high chair…

..and he started doing some crazy stuff with it.

You’d expect a shot like this to have some invisible wire assistance, like one of those lousy Hong Kong karate movies, right?

I don’t know how we missed this before, or maybe Alex has just gotten to the point where he’s able and willing to do strange things with silverware in the name of entertainment, but he’s pretty good at … well, whatever it is he is doing.

Plus, even after he drops the spoon, he’s still not done entertaining. Here’s his Flea impression. Note the teeth–I think he’s up to six, which is probably more than Flea has these days.

Here’s some footage of Alex with his spoon.