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.

long time no post

Wow. Charli is always go-go-go now, and work has picked up too, which means I not only have no time to blog, I apparently don't even have time to take pictures! The amount of pictures I take each month has been declining by about 50% each month since December. Horrors!

So what's been happening? Well, we had some more visitors. My family was all here for spring break, and that was great. They cleaned our deck! It looks awesome! Then Sam had a friend out this past weekend, and that was nice too.

During all this visiting, we found all kinds of new foods for Charli to eat: we found Charli-sized bananas (Golden Fingers, they're called) and Charli-sized grapes (champagne grapes - they're delicious!) at the farmer's market, so that's really cute. Charli likes to pick the grapes off the vine, and she's very careful about it. Sometimes the stem stays on the grape, and she's very careful to pick that off, too. Then there are the things that we weren't so sure she would like, but she did, such as... seaweed (keem)! She loved it, and ate several pieces. Of course, she eats a lot of paper, too, and this is just sort of like black, funny tasting paper, I guess. She also liked the grilled portabello mushrooms we had for dinner last night, along with the tremendously successful pesto we had. It's great; we're totally raising an adventurous eater!

Charli is communicating like crazy now. She tries to imitate the things people say to her, and has lots of words she can actually say. She still says babu, and she says hase (ha-zee, german for bunny), duck, baby, boom, bump, cheese (sort of... I think sometimes she means cereal when she says this), push (she says "psh", it's so cute). Whenever she drops anything, she says "uh-oh!" She likes to sit on things now, but she has to kind of line herself up with her little chair or your lap, and then back up until she sits (sometimes she misses, and says "oops!". Brian would go "beep, beep, beep" whenever she did that, like a truck backing up, and it only took her a day to pick that up. Now when she wants to sit on your lap, she points her butt at you and says "beep!" Charli can also sign more, milk, out, cereal, and eat.

Today Charli was able to go up and down some stairs by herself, too. Her motor skills are really coming along. She likes to kick balls around, although she's not so good at throwing them. She's pretty good at stealing them, too, since I never remember to bring any to the playground with us.

feminine wiles

Last Tuesday, we started a new share care with another family that Carolina nannies for. It's just one day a week - Charli only goes to Darian's house on Tuesdays, because I can't quite let her go elsewhere all 5 days a week. I miss her too much.

Darian is about 3 months older than Charli, and just cute as a button - you can see all that curly hair, and his eyelashes are about a foot long. Carolina sent this picture today - it's their second day together, and Charli's already got him wrapped around her finger...

babu

Charli has been using a name for her two bears for the past week or so:



In other news, Charli had her 15 month checkup a couple of Fridays ago, and she weighed 19lbs 6oz. The doctor did not give me a percentile to go with that, but since I am a newly unconcerned mother, I was not too worked up. As a matter of fact, I was so unconcerned, I forgot to ask how tall she was. So, I had to measure her today so I could post about it, and I do believe she is 30" tall! Maybe even a bit more! Such a big girl!

Charli also has a bunch of molars coming in, and has been sick for the past several days (as have I. We got it from Sam). She's really been in a pretty good mood, though, considering all that. I hear her coughing sometimes at night, but she still sleeps all night and wakes up in a fine mood. She's been eating a ton, too - Sam made a giant pot of curry last weekend and we're still eating it. Charli LOVES it.

Also, Sam's friend Loni came out to visit this past weekend, and a great time was had by all. We saw Watchmen on Friday (yay!) and went to the farmer's market on Saturday, and they ran around and had fun during all the times that were not those, I assume.

Charli took a great liking to Loni, and let her read more of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish than anyone else in history. We NEVER get to the wump of Gump page (unless we start in the middle).

the greatest structure ever!

If you know me, you may have realized that I am most likely to buy something for Charli if I think that Brian and I are going to play with it, too. It's especially likely if I think we might play with it MORE than Charli. That's why Charli has a lot of gear. It is also why Charli has giant inflatable blocks, out of which we can make forts and tunnels and stuff.

While we were visiting St. Louis over Thanksgiving, we came to a new appreciation of blocks. We like to build structures, and Charli likes to knock them down. So, after we came home, I got Charli some blocks. Unfortunately, they sucked. They didn't balance very well, so we couldn't build anything - all Charli could do was throw them around and chew on them. At least they were colorful. And then, I discovered Kapla. Kapla are "precision engineered" blocks, all of which are exactly the same size. They are awesome! Now, we can truly build the greatest structures ever!

Brian hard at work on the greatest structure ever

Brian's second masterpiece

Korin's opus

And, oh yes, let's not forget about Charli's part...

i'm sorry, could you repeat that?

Charli has a new... word? phrase? noise?



O ya, she's also getting much better with her fork...