On Sunday, Raley visited Santa for the first time (we missed it last year, I guess). She wasn’t entirely sure about the man in the red suit (apparent in the photo!) but she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, if not a smile. Santa was impressed with her; he confided that 9 out of 10 children who are introduced to him and give him “the look” burst into tears. The two boys right behind us (the younger about Raley’s age) did - hysterical screaming. I’m glad they weren’t right in front of us!
We’re up late packing up the car; tomorrow we start our drive to visit my sister in Colorado for the holidays… 10 whole days of vacation! Hooray! We managed to get all of the presents wrapped and everything in bags and boxes; now it’s just a matter of making it all fit. Then a 17 hour drive with a very active 21 month old. Wish us luck!
Happy holidays! I hope you get whatever you asked Santa for this year.
Huh. Time really does fly, huh? And now it’s the holiday season with Christmas in less than two weeks. I’m really looking forward to the time in Colorado to hang out and chill with my family :). But first, a little recap on the past few months…
Halloween:
For Halloween, Raley was a monkey. I made her costume (one of my first sewing projects since moving to California!). We went to a Halloween party at a local historic site, and took some pictures in the cactus garden:
Monkey in the Cactus
So long, monkey!
I get a “Where the Wild Things Are” vibe from those pictures, do you? And before you ask, no, I haven’t seen the movie yet. Haven’t seen very many movies in the past 21 months, actually!
Raley got to visit with three of her grandparents in California, as my father and Dan’s mother both had business trips out this way (well, northern California, but that’s close enough to justify a little side trip!), and Dan’s father tagged along.
Then in November we took off on our Thanksgiving vacation. We were planning to visit Dan’s brother Sam in Oxford, England, and fly direct from LAX. Those plans changed when Dan’s grandfather passed away the week before. It was a loss - 91-year-old WWII prisoner of war with a great sense of humor and some really funny stories. But we were able to change our flights to be via Chicago and got to be there for the funeral. So we got to spend some quality time with many family members, including Raley’s great-grandmother and great-uncle and both sets of grandparents and uncle Sam. Despite the sad circumstances, it was good to get together.
Then we flew over to England (on the same flight as Sam) and spent a lovely week touring the countryside. I think Dan and I are a bit more ambitious doing driving tours than many people… our biggest was the day that we visited Stonehenge and Tintern Abbey in Wales, driving through Bath enroute, starting and ending in Oxford. Raley was a good sport for most of the time, but she was kind of fed up with being in her car seat by the end of the trip. But I think she’s a future roadtripper anyway… got to start them young!
Here’s a few of the photos… you can see the entire set on flickr.
Stonehenge
Rollright Stones
Tintern Abbey
the Tiny Explorer tackles the hedge maze at Blenheim Palace
Wow, I just barely managed to get this one in for the month, huh? Kind of sad, actually. Some of you will be happy to know that less blogging means more time knitting (I might actually have an FO post very shortly… it’s been very hot to model my wool sweater, but I can sacrifice for the sake of the blog) and reading (I picked up a couple of Neal Stephenson’s books lately - I read Cobweb first and just finished Quicksilver and had to hit the library up to get into The Confusion ASAP! I’ve read his Cryptonomicon a few times, but hadn’t ventured into the Baroque Cycle until now) and I’m also trying to actually cook meals some nights and work out some, too (the baby weight is not losing itself, sadly, and she’s a toddler so I don’t really have much of an excuse anymore).
Anyway, one of the highlights of the summer was a visit from my sister Jenna for a week and a half, and my brother-in-law Reid for a too-short 3.5 days. Jenna, being a good blogger, has already blogged this trip here and here (as well as the vacation/drive home to Colorado) so I’m just playing catch-up.
Hello aunt and uncle!
Needless to say, we had a great time, and it all went by much too quickly. With Jenna I had a great partner to explore LA’s fabric district - Michael Levine’s annex ($2/lb of fabric!) is one of my new favorite stores. Jenna also came to one of our Mommy & Daddy & me swimming classes. Raley likes to splash her hands (occasionally feet), she likes to do “Humptey Dumptey” off the wall (into our arms of course, and then turn and grab the wall - a safety tip), trying to drink the pool water, and she loves to sing the “Tick Tock” song (”tick tock tick tock, I’m a little cuckoo clock; tick tock tick tock, now I’m striking 3 o’clock - whee! whee! whee!;” on the words you swish them back and forth and on the “whee!” you lift them up into the air; repeat from 5 to 1 o’clock for tons of fun!). The rest of swim class (kicking, paddling, putting her face in the water) she could leave - I don’t think we have a future Michael Phelps on our hands here. But we all have fun and it gets us in the water once a week.
We also went to Sea World with Jenna and had a great time (duh). Raley enjoyed the killer whales:
Can I touch it?
and I enjoyed the Commerson’s dolphins:
These are not “baby killer whales”
I mean, Tursiops are great and all, but it’s great to see something different once in a while. I also mixed some work and pleasure by going to talk to some folks in the rehab area, which is not part of the general public part of the park so Jenna and Dan (and Raley too) got to see some of the behind-the-scenes parts, which was fun.
Raley’s highlight of the day, though, was in the kids’ Sesame Street area, in the toddler arena. She impressed me with her persistence and calm under pressure in dealing with the bigger (meaner!) kids:
Yellow blooooooock!
And it all works out in the end. Way to go, buggle*!
We also went to the OC Fair, where much fun was had, especially in the petting zoo. Raley had a special fondess for the pot-bellied pigs, to the point where she’d weave past the goats and sheep in order to get close to them. Which she succeeded in doing:
Pat a pig!
After that we saw pigs all over the fair, including a spectacular sand sculpture, Mount Pigmore. No better opportunity for a family photo!
Think Pig!
After the fair, we were inspired to practice “Old Mac Donald.”
EIEIO!
Animal sounds are Raley’s go-to words… she knows the sounds that cats, dogs, cows, monkeys, and snakes make (interesting combo, huh? no sheep, horse, or even birds!). Old MacDonald is a perfect combination of two of Miss Raley’s favorite things - animal sounds and music. She likes music so much that she even learned how to climb on a chair and turn on the radio so she can dance (and then Mommy can rescue you before you fall off the chair!). I’ll leave you with this:
“Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin world go round!”
*”Buggle” is her nickname. We’re not quite sure how it came to be, but it did and it’s sticking. There are subderivatives, like “Sluggle” = sleeping buggle, “bug”, “bugglicious” etc.
I will get around to blogging about our trip to Indiana to see family, but for tonight here’s some fun to tide you over. This is just after we arrived home; we’d gotten the clothes from our suitcases into a laundry hamper but the hamper hadn’t yet made it out to the washer and dryer in the garage. I was out (getting my hair cut, as a matter of fact), and Dan was watching Raley. She started moving the laundry… and kept doing it. He grabbed the camera to take some videos and captured what I think this is one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen. Enjoy!
To celebrate our Memorial Day, we decided to go to the San Diego Zoo today. We bought a family membership last fall, but so far (this time in California) we’ve only been to the Wild Animal Park, which is a little bit further north and thus closer to us.
Raley got two souvenirs from the day. This is the first:
Cute shirt!
That might not seem too significant, except that she didn’t get it at a store. In fact, we didn’t even buy it. This is where it came from:
First Aid!
Yep. That’s the First Aid building. Here’s Raley’s other souvenir:
Owie!!!
Check out that lip… looks bad! But not nearly as bad as right after it happened. We were in the ampitheater watching the Sea Lion show. Raley got down to walk between us, and bam! fell into the backs of the seats in the row in front of us, landing mouth first. Blood came pouring out, and she was screaming, and boy, was it scary. I was worried that she’d knocked out a tooth or something. We basically sprinted to the first aid building (conveniently located very close!) where a very nice paramedic checked her out, cleaned her up, and reassured us that it looked like it was only her lip. Her teeth are all still there and look OK, and there don’t seem to be any other cuts inside her mouth. We tried to put some ice on it, but she wasn’t having any of it, so we settled for a chilled pacifier, which also helped to put some pressure. Once the bleeding stopped, we changed her clothes and walked around long enough to get her to take a small nap in her stroller, and then headed home. She ate some dinner and then crashed in bed. We’ll see how she’s doing tomorrow, but I think Dan and I are more scarred by the experience than she is!
Two noticeable earthquakes in two days… this fault seems to be having some issues! That’s the map from today’s aftershock - currently listed as a 4.1. It was noticeable - we have two glass lanterns on our mantel that really rattle, I felt a distinct movement, and the cats freaked the heck out. But it wasn’t quite as bad (or as long) as yesterday’s, when I actually picked Raley up and went and stood in the doorframe until it was over (the shaking lasted about 15 seconds).
You know when you move to California that earthquakes are a possibility, or even a certainty, but it’s still a little weird. Of course, Dan and I felt an earthquake in Maryland right after we’d moved there (leaving California behind, or so we thought), so it’s less weird than that.
The most suprising thing to me is the sound - there’s a loud roar that is hard to describe. My first instinct is usually that a large truck (semi) has driven into the house, shaking the foundations. Then I realize that I don’t have a truck in my living room, and it must be an earthquake.
Speaking of moving and shaking, here’s Raley demonstrating one of her new “tricks”: to clench all of her muscles until they start to tremble. I have no idea how or why she started doing this, but now she’ll do it on her own sometimes and she’ll imitate me if I start it. It’s cute as long as it doesn’t go on too long - she starts turning bright red! Anyway, enjoy this video and there will be a Raley update post shortly.
OK, I’m just a tease I guess! I decided not to pay $9.95 for hotel internet access just for a blog post (or two). So if you’re just looking for pictures, come back tomorrow!
So I’m posting from my phone on our drive back down to LA. We’re hoping we don’t run into any closed highways due to the wildfires - we have the phone # for California DOT to check the status when we get closer. We could theoretically choose between the 5 and the 101 without too much difference in time (some but not too bad), but we need to decide early. On Saturday both were closed!
Today Raley and her Daddy visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium so I hope to have some good pictures from that over the next few days!
Ok, consider this a teaser post. Today I went to day 2 of my meeting. Nothing to blog about!
Dan and Raley went to Point Lobos and Big Sur. He took some great pictures, which I’ll put up here once we get home and I can post from my computer and not my phone!
You make our days so much fun, watching you learn new things. Like how to suck on your toes (which, strangely enough, you only do sitting in your high chair).
Yummy toes!
This is a good picture of you and your eyes - they’re a beautiful dark blue color, almost gray like your mommy’s but with just a little bit more blue. And your hair (what there is of it) is still red. There are a couple of little wispies on the side, but not much. Unless you’re dressed in pink people assume you’re a boy. We’re too polite to correct them, but we find that we do tend to choose pink for you when we’re going out in public.
You’re a great sleeper (as I talked about yesterday), except yesterday. Tonight you were asleep before the end of your bottle, with not even a peep.
You’re getting a little big for your travel swing.
Touch the floor!
You like to grab the poles and stop it from swinging, or bend forward and touch the floor, or reach up and grab the stuffed animals from the mobile (it’s annoying when they won’t detach from the mobile and come play with you, though!).
You’re trying all different kinds of food now. Seomtimes you wear it more than you eat it:
The Dread Pirate Prunebeard… Argh, Mateys!
You just moved up to the “stage 2″ foods, mostly because they come in bigger containers and the little stage ones just weren’t enough food for you anymore - you’d get quite cranky when the food ran out! Now we get to try some fun combinations (currently it’s Banana-Berry Blend - yum!). I even got some turkey dinner for you for Thanksgiving (more on that later). Your digestive system appears to be doing much better these days, and you really look forward to dinner time! No teeth yet, but I think you’re working on them.
You’re getting a lot more mobile. You roll around with ease. On your belly you can pivot around in a circle - no moving forward or backwards yet, but turning in a circle is pretty cool! And you’re coming ever closer to the magic of crawling - this evening I saw your belly a few inches off the ground for a few seconds. We’re not ready for you to be moving around just yet. We’d really like for you to wait about 3 more weeks, because then we’ll be out of this apartment and into a house and we can really child-proof it. But I’m not sure you’re going to wait for us.
Mostly, I just hope you always know how much we love being your parents! Eight months have flown by and we’re so excited to see what the future holds!
