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!

A day in the park....

dinosaurs! geodesic domes! and flying!

oh my!

A visit to the park on a glorious fall day can be fraught with all sorts of dangers, obstacles and fun!

Alice is 8 months old!!

Now that she is 8 months old........Alice is pulling herself up to standing on everything within arm's reach, waving bye-bye on command about 30% of the time, and talking primarily in "vowels and bowels" (as evidenced from the most recent video). oh the fun!!

Watermelon cheer

Alice has started trying to imitate what she sees Mommy & Daddy doing. She can (sort of) wave goodbye now, cup her hands during Grace at mealtime, and dance while holding onto the couch. She especially likes trying to replicate the many strange sounds that Kirke makes. You can tell from the video that this leads to many delightful roundtable dinner conversations.

Busy baby

Alice is getting better and better at finding ways to entertain herself. She's crawling all over the house looking for toys to chew, paper to rip up, or low objects to scootch under. Her current favorite "fort" is the executive baby playstation. Although she still likes sitting in it and pushing all the buttons, she especially likes to crawl onto the disk-like platform underneath it and get it to sort of rock around. But then because of the way it rocks, sometimes she gets frightened & stuck in there, and then she needs Mommy or Daddy to come rescue her and airlift her out, so she can go scootch under the couch instead.