Bye, bye

Alice has discovered that she loves closing and opening doors. She blows kisses when saying goodbye to people, and frequently says goodbye to us just before locking herself in the bedroom or the den or the bathroom. This is endlessly hilarious, especially once she realizes that she can't then get the door open again.

Gardening

After Sarah defended her thesis, we spent the rest of the weekend planting our gardens and doing random yardwork. Alice helped, a little bit, with the flowers. Mostly she picked the flowers or snapped their stems.

(more than) 15 months old

So, yeah, this is old. She now likes to read books to her Baby Dolly, give medicine to her Baby Dolly when Baby Dolly gets an ear infection, give her Baby Dolly baths in the toy kitchen sink, and repeatedly blow Baby Dolly's nose with Kleenex. Unfortunately, she's not very good about then throwing away the dirty Kleenex, so we usually have a very Kleenex-covered floor. We tried to get her to demonstrate all the animal sounds and party tricks she knows when we were taking these pictures, but she's only a moderately well-trained monkey when the camera is rolling.

Catching up...

Whew! It's been a while since we've had any postings. We've been very busy the past month -- Sarah finally just got her PhD, so now that the mad scramble to finish up her dissertation is done, we'll try to get a lot of pictures up over the next week or so. Since April, there have been a lot of trips to the park, trips to the zoo, and trips to the bathtub...

Messy eater

Remember when we were complaining that Alice didn't like to feed herself? Boy, do we wish we could go back to those days! All the cracks in our floor are permanently caulked with foul-smelling yogurt now. It turns out in regards to parental workload / time commitment, the clean-up after Alice insists on feeding herself takes a lot longer than sitting with her and carefully feeding her ourselves ever did.

Safety first!

As biking season approaches again, we're trying to get Alice used to wearing a helmet. She's kind of taking to it (for short stretches only, and not necessarily buckled), but at least like her cousins before her, has come to appreciate that safety starts in the home!

More static

Another fun - and hair-raising - day at the park. Alice, ever the adventure baby, now wants to do the slides all by herself.