Play date Wednesday

Sierra was napping when we usually meet Lorae and Harper and Sarah and Sophia so we got there late. Sadly, Sarah and Sophia had to leave shortly after we arrived, but Harper and Sierra had a lovely time crawling on each other, shaking toys, banging on the ottoman, and other general baby fun. Sierra took about a half dozen magazines out of the magazine holder, but she very sweetly gave Harper a snuggle. So cute!

Sierra gives Harper a hug:
Banging on the ottoman:
Hi babies!
Harper and Sierra

Today, Sierra got to go play with her other buddy, Mason, while I went for a bike ride. Cloudy and cool, but luckily the rain held off. Yay! I'm thinking about doing a triathlon on Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day to me (my first!).

Spring in Virginia

At, least I think it's still spring. My watch tells me that it's April, but check out how we spent Saturday afternoon:


Sierra was not a fan of the water. Too cold still. I braved the chilly water though and got a few laps in while a friend watched the baby. We have had several consecutive days of temperature into the 90s and it's finally supposed to cool off again tomorrow. Phew -- for awhile there I thought we had skipped a few months and landed mysteriously in July.

We had a busy weekend. Friday night and Saturday night, we hosted 3 high school girls at our place. This was formal weekend at Woodberry and the boys' dates come from all over and are housed with faculty. I don't know how many times during the weekend Jason said "I can't believe Sierra is ever going to grown up and going to high school dances." (Let's not think about that just yet.) This meant I was up past midnight both days to make sure the girls got in safe and sound. They were all very sweet. We had no problems with them or their dates and it was a pleasure to host them.

Saturday morning, Sierra and I headed up to the Culpeper Hospital to the Baby Fair. I was working at the babywearing table and Sierra was my model/assistant/real-life example. It went really well. At one point, Sierra was napping in a mei tai on my front and I was using another mei tai to explain to someone how it worked. I looked up, and I had an audience of about a half dozen people watching my demo. I hope the event generated some interest for the Culpeper Babywearers group. The timing was right, anyway. Our monthly meeting is Thursday.

Despite being up late two nights in a row, I still managed to get up and get my long run in on Sunday morning. Usually, I go in mid-afternoon, but I was soooo glad that I ran in the morning that day. It was blazin' hot by the time I usually run. Not sorry to have missed running in that!

I was going to try and get a short run in with the jogging stroller today, but it just didn't happen. We had a track meet, and I spent most of my morning doing entries. This was a smaller meet, just Woodberry vs. one other school, and though the meet ran well, we got killed! Sadly, Woodberry has a lot of injured athletes and we just don't have the depth in the field events that our competition did.

Failure or Genius?

FailBlog says this is a FAIL, but I say "Where can I get one?"

Baby storage

I recently bought a couple storage bins as I am continuing to try and find a place for everything in our tiny house with no closet space.
Apparently, you are not supposed to use these bins for storing your baby.
Well, damn. Where am I supposed to store my baby?




And what if she likes being stored in the bin?

A no-win situation

How I managed to overlook this, I have no idea.

I am registered to do the run portion of a half-iron triathlon with two friends.

I just realized this morning that the race is the same day as the Virginia Prep League Championships -- a pretty important track meet that we're hosting. Which means, I need to be around to run the finish line.

I don't know whether to scream or cry. Or both. Or do one then the other. I really want to do this race and I've been training for it for weeks, but there's really no one else that can run our camera at the track meet.

The most upsetting part of this is that it looks like I'm going to have to let my friends down, which really sucks. If it was just a personal disappoint, fine. But I really hate to be the cause of others' disappointment.

I welcome any ideas.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that Sierra had rediscovered the staircase. Well, since that time, she has been training regularly, and is now quite adept at getting up the stairs. She's even pretty good at coming down. I've taught her to do go down backwards and she seems to be catching on. Yesterday, I was spotting as she followed Jason up the stiars. At the top, she crawled around so she was facing me, gave me a huge smile of accomplishment, then turned her little self back around and came all the way back down!

Busy week/Slacking blogger/Demanding baby

I have a lot of excuses about why I haven't posted in NINE DAYS, none of them very good. The fact is, I just didn't make the time to do it. Which is too bad, because the point of starting this blog was to post regularly. Every nine days is not very regular. Though, if you compare it to the frequency of my myspace blogging before I had this platform, every nine days would have been miraculous.

...

Okay, just for comparison, I looked up the dates of posts on my previous blog: June 6, June 30, July 2, September 6 (A LOT happened between July and September!), September 15, September 22 (A week! That was good!), January 6 (oops!). See, nine days between posts is excellent relative to my former record (though not my more newly established patterns).

Anyway, I could post an exceedingly long post right here and now, but so as not to overwhelm you, I'm going to write a couple posts from this week and back date them.

Buddy Mason

I may have already mentioned that my friend Tricia and I have an arrangement so that we can each get one ride in a week with the cycling team. Monday, I watch her two boys and Thursdays, she keeps an eye on Sierra so I can ride. The rain held off for Tricia's ride and while Parker was still napping, Mason and Sierra had some baby play time.

Mason gives Sierra a hug. How cute is that?!

I'm really interested to watch these Woodberry babies as they grow up together. What fun! There are 9 less than 18 months old and twins will be born the end of May.

Happy hippity hoppity day

The subject was the text of text message I recieved from my friend Alison on Easter morning. And it was happy day for us. This was the first time in many years that Jason and I (and now Sierra!) got to spend the Easter holiday with family. Jason's brother, Zack, after living in California for almost three years, moved to Maryland less than a month ago. He's now less than 2 hours from us, so we invited him down for the weekend.

As I already mentioned, we had a gorgeous day and we headed out to Charlottesville where our church had their spring flower service. It was really pretty and we all got flowers to take home with us. Back at Woodberry, Jason and Zack had some post-church lacrosse tossing, with the help of Molly.

Jason had to stop and fix his shooter stringsStill fixing those shooter strings
Molly played with Zack while Jason was fixing his strings. Get it, Molly!
Can you find the ball
Zack

We headed up for their special Easter lunch, which was really quite lovely: shrimp cocktail, lox and bagels, roast beef, ham, salad bar, and lots of other good things to eat. We happened to be sitting near several of the Woodberry babies. I'm always a little fascinated by how little ones interact with one another ... they just stare and stare ... they can see the similarity in the other baby.

Lorae with Harper, Ping with Lydia, Em with Sierra, Courtenay with Marshall

Zack stuck around for the afternoon and actually did my long run with me. Yay Zack! We ran for 1 hour 40 minutes, and it was really nice to have the company because I usually do those runs by myself. We did a 70 minute loop and then I said "Well, you can call it a day or go another half hour with me." He went another half hour with me. I'm impressed, but admittedly, not all that surprised.

We enjoyed some burgers on the grill before Zack had to hit the road and Jason was back to school commitments.

Happy Easter!

Flower power!

Easter Sunday has proven to be an amazing Virginia spring day.

My mom told me a story about Sierra's cousin Harmony, who is 4 years old. Harmony and Grandma were walking down the street in downtown Galena on a particularly lovely day. A couple approached from the opposite direction. Harmony stopped directly in front of them, put her hands on her hips, looked up at them and said, "My! Isn't it a glorious afternoon!" Then she put her hands down and continued on her way. My mom said the couple looked too bewildered to say anything at all, but that's the kind of day we had, even if it was a tad cool.

The perfect afternoon to take my little flower in her flower dress and put her in the middle of some spring flowers for a photo shoot.

Look! One handed!Our little flower
Tee hee!Stop and smell the flowers
"Here's one for you!"
"My, what a pretty flower you are."
"My, what soft petals you have ..."
"What? I was just looking at it!"Don't tell the groundskeeper!
Can you see my little flower?
How about now?
I know I'm biased, but she's just so pretty!

A Perfect 10

Today, Little Bits is 10 months old. Yikes! How on earth did that happen? Why didn't anyone tell me it would go so quick?

(Well, truth be told, I have often been told how fast your babies grow up, but you really, really can't fathom it until it actually happens ... in just 61 days she'll be a year old! Sheesh!)

Two days ago, she climbed up the staircase. The. Entire. Staircase. Supervised, of course. She got herself onto the first step, and I stepped on behind her, thinking "Let's just see what happens here." Well, step by step, up she went. Pull to standing, reach up one step, right knee up, left knee up, pull to standing, reach up one more step, right knee up, left knee up, pull to standing ... all 14 stairs. Just like that. I couldn't believe it. No fear. And I can imagine that a staircase must seem pretty daunting when you are only 27 inches tall. Jason came home when Sierra was about half-way up, opened the front door, which opens right in front of the stairs. Sierra turned around, gave him a huge smile, and then turned back around and kept climbing. She was on a mission. The determination of this tiny little person is incredible.

She's also eating just about anything I give her these days. We are past blended and pureed food, if it's soft enough for her to mash up, she eats it. It's amazing what she can consume with no teeth at all. At dinner today she had pasta, avocado, ham, cheese, and peas. Oh. And icecream. Can't forget the icecream. I have created a monster with the icecream. I gave her a little taste not too long ago, now if I happen to have some icecream and she see it, she will scream until I give her a bite. Girl knows what she likes!

It's really great seeing her personality emerge. She's becoming more engaging, more interactive, as witnessed in the Peek-a-boo video I recently posted. She is curious, busy, determined, and outgoing. She smiles at everyone, is constantly on the move, and now loves "undoing." She'll take the folded laundry out of the basket, piece by piece. She empties her toy drawer and the bottom bookshelf in no time flat. She opens kitchen cabinets and drawers and takes out whatever she can her hands on (note: I purposely don't have locks on a couple cabinets in the kitchen because as exhausting as it is to clean up after the tornado all day, I want her to explore her world). The other day, I had to re-roll a roll of saran wrap. Have you ever tried to re-roll a roll of saran wrap? I don't recommend it (note: that drawer is no longer "available").