Junior MD

Doctor Alice displays a pretty poor bedside manner - laughing at her patient's illness and then rudely changing her mind about whether to share a relevant page from the latest issue of the NEJM. It's like she almost enjoys seeing her mommy have the sneezums!

Sharing?!?

Sharing with friends is clearly an advanced concept that Alice has yet to grasp; however, she has mastered grasping her friends' toys. I guess a baby has to start somewhere. Here is the evidence from our most recent play date with the yoga babies--our very talented friend Anne took all the pictures!

Piano girl

All that time hanging out with her Aunt Virginia has clearly had an effect on Alice. They share a couple of things in common: blonde hair, an inability to do math, and a love of music. Alice serendipitously discovered the piano with its top open the other day, and now she frequently crawls out there to stand up and play on it when mom & dad are busy doing work. It's very cute, and sometimes Kirke will come out to join her for a round of "Chopsticks."

Cooks in the kitchen

Sarah bought Alice a fancy new kitchen set so she can help out at dinnertime: there are always more pots that need banging! Alice seems to like the playset a lot, but that may just be because she can usually find a few old Cheerios or Puffs in the cabinet or on the floor around it.

Kirke and Alice play hooky

Usually when Kirke is on call at the hospital he's busy the whole night and so basically comes home and collapses and sleeps through the following day, which he technically gets "off" from work. By some miraculous bit of fate, Monday night (Kirke's most recent call night) was a very slow day at the hospital, and Kirke actually got a lot of sleep. He still got to take Tuesday off, though. Since he was feeling chipper and it was a gorgeous autumn day, he pulled Alice out of daycare and they spent the whole time exploring and playing together. They went to the park and the arboretum and the local fish hatchery (where Alice was fascinated by trout that were bigger than she is!) and finally the zoo. Guess what Alice's favorite animal was? The badger, of course!

She didn't really get the point of the petting zoo, though - she thought the goat food was actually something that maybe she should eat, herself.

Ashes to ashes

Some pictures of the grandkids and great-grandkids at the Simonson gravesite from this past weekend. Note the lovely (and clever) vegetable bouquets for an old Iowa farmer!

More Puffs!

We went out to western Iowa for the funeral of Alice's maternal great-grandfather. It was a lot of fun exploring some of the old farmsteads and stomping grounds. We'll get more pictures of those adventures up later...

For the most part, Alice really enjoyed playing with her older cousins -- except when they were force-feeding her ever more Banana Puffs!