Baby Elephant - part 2

It's been too long since we've posted a video... let's hope this one makes up for it.

Why walk, when you can DANCE!

Portraits

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!!! A million thanks to our photographer friend Kathryn for doing portraits of our kids. Here's a preview of the pictures she took.

Birthday girl!!!

My how time has flown!!! We celebrated Spring's first birthday last week!

We let Spring open her presents in the afternoon so she'd have time to play with them before bed. Reed was pretty excited about the stroller that Grandma sent.

But eventually he let her play with it.

Reed was also good about helping her open the presents.

And happily, Reed let Spring open some on her own too!

Showing off her pearly whites after opening presents.

We spent the day together as a family and went out for dinner at our favorite local vegetarian restaurant. We got a wonderful surprise there when we discovered that there would be live music that evening. The music was a little hard to describe, trance-like and peaceful, but energetic at times too. The artist (Christopher of the Wolves) played various instruments simultaneously including didgeridoo, a type of steel drum call a hang (pronounced han), drum, bells, ectar (one string guitar) and a type of Chinese flute. The artist was really nice and explained to Reed what he was going to do while playing in case Reed got scared (though once he got going there was nothing scarey at all). Reed and Spring sat wide-eyed enthralled for the first few songs. Eventually, the newness of the music wore off and they started dancing to the music. After we finished dinner, I sat Spring on the floor so she could dance there while I cleaned up the sweet potato fries she'd strewn everywhere. She danced so vigorously that the musician joked that he thought she was going to start turning cartwheels!

After dinner, we came home and had cake. Spring wasn't super excited about the cake, perhaps because she had gorged herself on hummus and sweet potato fries at dinner, but we still got a good cake picture!

Then last night, we had my family over for dinner for a birthday celebration. Since we had already had a cake, I decided to make an apple pie. Spring seemed to prefer the apple pie over the cake, and I am reminded that for several birthdays, I requested an apple pie in lieu of a birthday cake!

Are you people seriously going to let that pie burn?

Yum! (For some reason, all the pie-eating pictures were a little fuzzy.)

The sticky aftermath.

Beautiful fall

We've been trying to take advantage of the gorgeous fall weather we've been having by getting out as much as we can! I know that the rain will come eventually so I'm just trying to soak up all the sun I can, while I can!

We've taken lots of trips to the spinny park and the adjacent beach.

This picture illustrates one of the big differences between Reed and Spring. Spring LOVES to get messy. She loves to dig her fingers in the dirt and in the sand, she loves to squish avocados and peaches in her hands, she doesn't seem to have any aversion to different textures. When Reed was this age, he wouldn't touch anything sticky or wet (like diced bananas or finger paint). When we took him to the beach in Florida when he was a little over a year and he scrunched up his legs as I tried to put him on the sand in order to avoid touching the sand.

And we've played outside in the yard lots.

And last weekend we went to a craft fair at a local farm. Reed got to take his first ever pony ride on this cute little pony named Blue. As soon as he got off Blue, he wanted to get on one of the other ponies, but sadly, mom and dad didn't have another five dollars.

I also took Reed and Spring for a short "hike" at Manchester State Park. I explained to Reed that we couldn't bring the stroller and that since I'd be carrying Spring, I wouldn't be able to carry him. He did really well on the hike. At point, we noticed some logs of to the side of the path. Reed asked why they were there and I explained that a tree had fallen across the path and that somebody had cut it up and put beside the trail so people wouldn't have to walk over it. For the rest of the hike, he kept picking up sticks and putting them beside the trail! I told him I was proud of how he wanted to take care of the trail! Sadly I didn't get any pictures from the hike.

In other news, Spring is now up to three teeth. She's got her top front teeth and one on the bottom. She also set a new personal best a couple days ago for walking while we were at the library. She took five or six steps and these were very controlled as opposed to the lunging steps into our arms she'd taken before. In the days since that, she's taken a couple controlled steps, but still isn't walking across the room. Still could happen before her birthday though! :)