Toast

Too much of this:

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One Whole Year

Brand New

One Month

Two Months

Three Months

Four Months

Five Months

Six Months

Seven Months

Eight Months

Nine Months

Ten Months

Eleven Months

One Year!!!

Yogurt, Winnie the Poo Style

Step 1: Dip your hand in the yogurt

Step 2: Bring the yogurt hand to your mouth

Step 3: Suck your yogurt thumb when mom takes the empty yogurt container away

Step 4: Play in your highchair while mom tries to clean up the yogurt

Homeward Bound

On Saturday we make the eight hour journey home. The flight went much better, thanks to my dear friends at Baby Einstein and HP.


THANK YOU to our family, especially Paul and Amy. We LOVED spending the week with you.

Lake Tahoe: Day Five

So my narrative faculties begin to wane as the temperature rises. It is now eight trillion degrees and forty bazillion percent humidity, so the creative juices have obviously evaporated. You will have to be okay with less Dostoevsky and more Hemingway (because I'm as good at writing as them).

Matt, Ben, and I woke up bright and early Friday morning ready to spend some time on our own. We ventured south to D.L. Bliss for a hike and some beach time. It was wonderful. We did two hiking trails, but a little challenging, but the scenery was incredible. Ben slept for the second one.


When we got back to the house, Ben took a looong nap while everyone but mama went down to the lake and mama blogged. Aaaahhhhh....sweet silence. I LOVE my nieces and nephew and son, but together they make a good deal of noise. As an introvert, I need my quiet alone time. I'm actually a little anal about it. If I go to long without me time I start to get really crabby and, well, not very nice. So the peace was welcome. Ben woke up just as everyone came back, and we were joined by loads more people. Because so many people were there and we were all itching for some fun, we had an impromptu birthday "party" for Ben. I use the term party very liberally...by "party" I mean we had cake and Ben opened two presents. It was over in 20 minutes. But it was fun to give Ben cake and watch him play with the balloons and tissue paper (Why do we even put presents in there?).

ghetto cake

After the "party" Ben went to bed, the kids played with play-dough, and the grown-ups went down to the lake. After that the kids went to bed and we drank and laughed and talked.

Lake Tahoe: Day Four

Thursday began, of course, around 5:30. The good thing about that day, though, was that Ben eventually fell back asleep around 7:00 and slept until about 7:45. So we did have a bit of a reprieve. Which was good because Thursday was the big day. We loaded up around 9:30 and spent most of the day in the boat. We tried the other infant life vest on Ben, and, happily, new life vest = new baby. MUCH better. He actually slept for most of the trip to Emerald Bay.


We pulled the boat right up to the shore and spent the early afternoon having lunch and playing on the beach.



After a bit we packed back into the boat and went back, stopping so Matt could "tube" (the vernacular for "flagrantly risking your neck by holding onto a raft-like device while the driver of the boat speeds to and fro trying to throw you off"). I didn't get any pictures of Matt tube-ing because I was busy trying to distract an increasingly wary traveler. ("Look Ben, there's Daddy! Isn't he crazy? No baby, Mommy's not trying to inflict abuse onto you by confining you into a foam vest in which you cannot move or breathe. I promise it's because I love you...")

After boat time, Ben slept, Paul and Alysa went to the lake, Amy, Sean, and Kylie went to the store, and Matt and I crashed on the couch and watched Clear and Present Danger (believe me, after a week of Noggin, it was a really good movie). We dined on pizza, sent the kids to bed, and stayed up late talking and watching comedians online.