swimming and gardening

Alice has been enjoying the warmer, less rainy recent weather--It has lead to swimming and gardening! We think she has a natural aptitude for the "posey patrol"!

Bike mechanic

With the spring weather, it's time to take the studded winter tires off the bikes and put on the smooth road tires. Alice helped with the air pump.

Field trip

We took another field trip to the zoo this past week. Alice was particularly fascinated this time around, because she got to see big versions of all the animals she has recently been reading about in "Goodnight Gorilla," "Dear Zoo," and "I Can Count! - Baby Animals." We think the giraffes are her favorites, although she has been doing a lot of lion roaring lately.

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...