best. pasta. ever.

Charli had a tremendously huge dinner tonight. When Nina brought her home, she and Bella stayed for a while, as they often do, and we pulled out the big box of blueberries and Charli and Bella went to town. Then, for dinner, Charli had more than half of a farmer's market empanada - not a huge meal, but about the size of a normal Charli dinner, especially after eating 50 blueberries. But then Brian grilled portabello mushrooms and asparagus and Sam made pasta with butter, cheese, a bit of yogurt, and some garlic salt for their dinner, and Charli wanted to try some of that, too. She was not too keen on the asparagus, and the mushroom was meh, but the Pasta, now that was something else. She stood at Sam's knee and ate about 1/2 of her pasta. Then we thought maybe we should get her her own bowl, and put her in her chair while I went to dish it up. Charli's chair happened to be right next to Brian's plate, so she ate some of his pasta while she was waiting. Then she ate her whole bowl of pasta. Then she took the rest of Brian's pasta off his plate, in fistfuls, and put it into her bowl - every last noodle except the very last one, which she put directly into her face. I have never seen her eat so much EVER.

Naptime for Charli...

On Saturdays we like to go to the farmers market to do the grocery
shopping for the week, then we come home and put Charli down for a
nap. Then we like to get on with all of the important things that we
do on weekend days that we just can't do effectively when Charli is up
and about...

more bubbles!

snow! and marbles

Well, we're back at home now, and it sure is nice to be home. Our flight left at 8pm, so ideally Charli would have gone to sleep at some point during the flight, but honestly I knew better than that. She obviously would not go to sleep with a whole planeful of people around. Unfortunately, we didn't check in early enough to get good seats, and the whole plane was completely full, so Charli had no room to run around, and was restless and little fussy, but not horrible. She fell asleep about 5 minutes before we landed, and this picture is of her passed out in her stroller while we were waiting for Brian to pick us up.

So what else happened in Colorado after Brian left? Well, of course, it snowed. I take credit for causing this to happen, because we brought a snowsuit out with us, and I sent it home with Brian, when it was 70 degrees and sunny out. Of course it would snow 3 days later. It was actually really great snow, except that it was only really great while Charli was sleeping. By the time she would wake up, it would be melting and slushy. We dragged her out into it anyway, and she really wasn't very fond of it at first. She got more interested after while, but it was really cold and wet and not much fun to play in, so after relatively few pictures, we came back inside. Due to the winter storm, though, there were apparently some avalanches in Colorado, and some highway closings, and Southwest allowed anyone who had flight plans on Friday or Saturday (that was us) to reschedule free of charge any time during the following 14 days. So, we decided to come home Monday evening instead of Saturday morning at a time that would require us to leave the house at 4:30am without knowing if our plane would even make it out. This meant a few more days without Brian (*sniff* but at least I had Charli - Brian said he was wandering around at home in the dark and reading Goodnight Moon to himself), but Mom was happy to have another weekend. I think Charli was really missing Brian, though - she started getting very clingy to me as the week went on.

Meanwhile, Sam brought out Marbleworks, one of her very favorite childhood toys, and built Charli a few different masterpieces. Charli did NOT destroy them. She loves Marbleworks! She spent days carrying marbles around in various containers, transferring them back and forth, maybe hiding them in shoes, and dropping them down the chutes.

Charli learned to play hide and seek! We spent a lot of time running around from the kitchen to the living room to the dining room, waiting for Charli to find us and screaming a lot. It was great!



Charli is talking more and more, and learning new words every day. Now she can say 'book', where previously she said 'boo'. She says 'duck' when she sees a duck (or most any bird), 'moo' when she sees a cow, and 'ba' when she sees a sheep. She says 'shoes' a lot, 'mas' (Spanish for 'more'), 'bubbles', 'bus', 'fishie'... She also says 'guck' when she sees a truck. That one took me a while (we thought she was saying 'duck', but she kept saying it when there were no ducks around), but I finally figured it out while we were walking around the neighborhood and she said it at the mail truck. When we got home, Carolina told us that's how Darian says 'truck'! Speaking of which, Charli can say 'Darian' and 'Bella', too. I should be trying to use more signs with her, but I don't know any more. She is learning the hand motions to 'The Wheels on the Bus' song, though, and she's starting to do the 'tick tock' part of the 'Cuckoo' song, too. Her fork skills are improving, she's running around like crazy, and she tests things out with her shoes before she touches them with her hands - Mom took her out to the green belt, where she very carefully inspected, followed around, and then deliberately stepped on... a bee. No damage (to either the bee or to her, especially since she was wearing shoes), but it was very funny to watch, according to my mom.

So that's a lot of good news. On the bad news side, I had to try a (completely ineffective) disciplinary technique on her. Charli was being deliberately disobedient at the dinner table - she held something out, and I told her NOT to drop it on the floor, and she looked me right in the eye, opened her hand and dropped it on the floor. So I smacked the back of her hand. She looked at her hand, rather curiously, and then she smacked herself on the back of her hand. Then she threw something else on the floor, and smacked herself again on the back of the hand. ROTTEN CHILD! Consider me trained; I won't be doing that again.

In other (non-Charli) news, Kim learned how to make TERRIFIC panna cotta, and we ate it twice. Kim and Brent are making a cello (yes, you heard me right), I gave Brent my cold, and Kim and Sam spent some time volunteering at a farm, where they were compensated with eggs of various colors and sizes, and fresh bread. Also, during this trip, we realized that Sam, Kim, and I all used to really hate French toast, and now we all really liked it, but it took all of us a very long time to realize we liked it because we all hated it so much that we were traumatized and just never ate French toast anywhere for years. Based on this coincidence/revelation, we came to a new conclusion: Mom used to make terrible French toast! Now she makes delicious French toast, and we all like it. Such a possibility never entered our heads before because we never knew Mom could make anything bad to eat.

sick

Charli was so sick yesterday. She had a really high temperature, and was so subdued, like we've never seen her before. When she woke up, she was fine, but she started getting a little fussy and tired by around 9. By the time the rest of us were having our breakfast, she was rubbing her eyes and pretty warm, and after breakfast she actually passed out on the couch with Brian. So unusual! She slept about 45 minutes, and when she woke up she didn't want to do anything except be carried or sit on someone's lap or lie around. She was very calm, but of course I was increasingly frantic - fortunately the parentals were around so I could say things like "Should I be freaking out?" and they would say "No, she's fine". I restrained myself so well that I only asked Brian ONCE to look up baby fevers and what can cause them on the internet. :)

Charli's fever stayed very high all day long, and then broke right around 5:30, when she actually laughed at something. About 1/2 hour after that she started walking around, and by 8pm she was just about back to her normal cheerful self - still slightly fevered, but way down from her previous temperature.

This morning she woke up with no fever and happy as a clam. Hooray!

In side news, Brian actually went back to SF yesterday (after he looked up baby fevers for me). I was going to go home yesterday, too, but decided to extend my stay through the weekend, since I can work from here, too. Mom was pretty pleased about that. :)

happy bunny day!

Happy late Easter, everyone! We've come to Colorado for the first time since last April, I think, which is pretty crazy considering we seem to see our Colorado relatives all the time now.

Charli has been having a busy time. We came out here Friday afternoon, and Charli was great on the plane. We were flying Southwest and we got in line early, so we managed to get the bulkhead seats where Charli had a relatively large amount of space to run around. This worked out very well for us, especially since none of the bathrooms had a changing table, so we had to change her on the floor. I would make that trade any day of the week. When we got to the house, there were fresh made cookies! Yum!

On Saturday, Charli woke up and did some egg hunting training in preparation for the neighborhood Easter egg hunt that she was signed up for. Then we dyed lots of eggs with Dave W., who brought over some hard core egg dying technology. Charli was interested, and increasingly enthusiastic about throwing eggs into cups of dye from greater and greater distances. This could have led to disaster, but she lost interest before she could find out how fun it was to have every adult in the room respond at the same time to something she did.

The Easter egg hunt started at 3pm, unfortunately, which tends to be right in the middle of Charli's nap, but we woke her up and dragged her over. She was a little dazed, but it didn't really matter. Even wide awake, she couldn't have competed with the mass of kids who actually wanted to find Easter eggs. The younger kids got to go first (younger = 5 and under), and then the older kids got to go a couple of minutes later. Charli wandered around close to the starting point and some sweet girls told us where to find some eggs under a big stuffed rabbit, and then we picked up a few eggs on the ground that were passed by, and then she pretty much lost interest.

On Easter, Mom had a basket ready for Charli, and hid even more eggs around the living room. Charli was actually interested in these eggs, because they were stuffed with socks and hairpieces and little doodads, and she liked opening the eggs up and seeing what fell out of them. The candy in the neighborhood hunt was less interesting for some reason, although she did try a jellybean, which she spit out. Yuck. I don't like jellybeans either.

We had a delicious Easter dinner with squash soup and lamb and ham and asparagus and beans and mashed potatoes and cauliflower and fresh baked bread. There was probably more, but I was so full that there was no more room for brains in my head, so I can't remember. Oh yeah, salad. And we had homemade sorbet for dessert!

So, to sum up, we had a terrific Easter weekend, and we hope you all did too!

levin weekend

Kim and Brent were WWOOFing at a vineyard up by Russian River Valley last weekend and they had some free time, so we went up and spent most of the weekend with them. We thought we could run around for part of one day, and then Brian and Sam could help out at the vineyard for part of another. It was AWESOME!

We went up on Saturday and got a really great room at the Geyserville Inn. I had to get a suite, because we all know how well it worked when we tried to put Charli to sleep in the same room that we were staying up in... The inn had 4 suites, all of which are housed in a separate building than the one the single rooms are in. Since it's off season, though, no one was staying in any of the other suites, so we had the whole building to ourselves - not that we could go into the other rooms or anything, but no one was running around on our lawn, and we had the whole parking lot to ourselves. So, there's our building, and you can see Sam and Brian hanging out on our patio (we had the bottom left corner room), and there were all these nice bushes and flowers and hummingbirds and lizards and bees... We just left all the doors open and let Charli run wherever she wanted to, so she was probably having the best time of her life. And that lawn I mentioned - not too shabby, is it? It had wisteria, picnic tables, lots of room to run around, and did I mention it was all ours? The place was really perfect for our family.

We hung out at the inn for a little while, and then we decided to hit some wineries. We started out at Stryker Sonoma, which had the most tremendous wisteria arbor I've ever seen, and is owned or part owned by a family that Sam is friends with, which is why we went in the first place. They had a grassy outdoor area that Charli ran around on, and unfortunately they also had large glass walls that Charli walked right into (only once - although we did notice her afterwards a few times walking very slowly up to them and feeling them curiously). We didn't actually see her walk into the glass, we just heard a loud BONG and turned to see her looking very dazed a few feet away from it... The we went to Ridge, where they had someone giving samples of really good chocolate as well as wine tasting, and we realized that we had been very foolish to come out to the vineyards without bringing any picnic makings. So, after Ridge, we stopped at a grocery store and got cheese and apples and bread and salami and chocolate, and then we went to a winery called Sbragia, which the folks at Ridge had told us had a nice patio. They did indeed have a nice patio, but it was all on top of the building, so all concrete and no grass. Charli ran around anyway, and we all had our picnic with some Sbragia wine, and when everything closed up at 5:30 we headed back to the inn and ran around our yard some more. Charli had some picnic leftovers for dinner, and after she went to bed, Brian and Brent went out and got us a PILE of pizza, and we had more wine and pizza for dinner.

Kim and Brent ended up staying late and sleeping on the floor, which enabled us to go out and have a big breakfast the next morning, rather than being efficient and getting to LeVin at any sort of reasonable hour. We ended up checking out around noon and not getting to the winery until about 12:30, which was just in time to look around a little and then have about a 3 hour wine tasting (and olive oil and cheese and cracker and bread tasting). The winery is in a really gorgeous location (although I guess everywhere out there is pretty beautiful), and the wine was quite tasty. We ended up buying several bottles from hosts Eric and Holly, and having a really terrific time. We headed home around 4, having not only done no work, but also kept Kim and Brent from doing any work, and helping keep Eric and Holly from getting anything done either (we can't claim sole responsibility for that, as there were 2 other WWOOFers and one of their mothers tasting with us). Sam and I passed out immediately on the way home - extended wine tasting is really exhausting, apparently.

You can see a lot more pictures of our weekend here.