Jogging stroller, and raspberries

I don't exactly consider myself to be a real runner, but I enjoy it enough that I've competed in several 10ks and a half marathon (I use the term "competed" loosely) and mostly I just enjoy running for fun.  I hadn't gone out running at all since before we went to China, but I finally went out for a couple miles on Friday.  It felt good to run again after all those weeks off.  Today, however, was the first day that I took the jogging stroller out for a real jog.  We've used the stroller just about every day for walks, but neither of us had actually used it for jogging until this morning when I took TongJie for a short jog in it.  He seemed to have fun.  I could hear him giggling off and on for the first quarter mile or so, probably because he enjoyed it being faster than usual.  After that, he must have gotten used to it because he stopped giggling, but I still think he was having fun.  We're planning to participate in a fun run this Saturday and I get to push the stroller, so I figured I'd better get a couple of runs in with it before then to get used to it.

We have a raspberry patch in our back yard.  The last couple of days it had been raining and we were not out in our yard much to check on the berries to see if they were getting ripe.  Today I looked and, lo and behold, we had quite a few ripe berries!  There are a LOT more to come that are still green, so soon we'll be getting a bunch of raspberries.  TongJie must have thought he was the luckiest little boy in the world when I held him up and showed him how to pick the raspberries right off of the bush.  He absolutely loves every type of fruit we've given him, and of course raspberries are no exception.  He was finding the red berries and picking them off the plant and stuffing them into his mouth as fast as he could.  I tried to pick some into a little container, but he was grabbing them out of the container almost as fast as I was putting them in.  I imagine, to him, it's like what would be for me a bush that grows an abundance of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies just dangling there waiting to be eaten.  I've mentioned before that we have some strawberry plants, but they only produce a couple every few days and we have to take them inside and wash them first since they grow right on the ground.  The raspberries must seem much better to TongJie because there is a huge supply of berries that can be eaten right away without having to wait to go inside and get them ready.  We'll have to get some pictures of him in the raspberry patch soon.

Speaking of pictures, I took a picture this afternoon of TongJie and Albert on the couch with Jeff.  Well, first of all it was Albert sitting with Jeff, but then TongJie didn't want Albert getting all the attention so he wanted up on the couch too:

Pretty soon, our cat Chestnut had to be right in on the action as well.  She's not one to be left out, as you may have gathered from some of my previous blog posts:

And, finally, here's a picture of TongJie and me at the park today:

TongJie has started signing the word "cat" in addition to "more," "finished," and "shoe."  And, of course, he can clap his hands and give high fives and he waves for hello and goodbye.  And he can shake his head for "no" if we ask him to do something he doesn't want to do.  We can also tell that he understands what we're saying to him a lot more now than he used to.  We think he's making great strides in his communication skills!