With the girl hydrated and changed, I set out to refill my own water. Then I sat down to check craigslist office space postings. I'm not sure what exactly followed, but here I am a couple of hours later, saddened and appalled at the lack of ourlittlekid updates this year. As many of you know, we've been extremely busy with weddings and school and life and such. There are a few extenuating circumstances which also contributed, but I think we should be able to jump back in as time allows. My first order of business will be to try to get up a video blog from Dot, as well as filling in some of this year's experiences with pictures and memories.

But first, I need some sleep…

Is she unspeakably adorable or what? Shout out to Caspar Babypants responsible not only for this song but for the beloved “Monkey River” mentioned in the previous post. Check him out, the music is quite fab.

The weather was to die for, we went early before it got too hot- or too crowded, and both kids did amazingly well even when we ran over naptime. Both also promptly crashed on their respective car rides home.

This was Ali’s second foray to the zoo. This same zoo, to be exact. Last time was in August (13ish months old) and boy what a difference eight months can make! The girl was excited for days, seriously had trouble falling asleep the night before, was generally just pumped. While the animals didn’t prove to be as interesting as it seemed she thought they would be, the zoo itself was quite a hit.

In the gift shop we let her pick up a toy and she hose a tiny stuffed monkey that has since been named “Monkey River” after one of her favorite songs from her favorite CD. She’s been sleeping with MR and taking it everywhere. Which is not unusual, we have definitely entered a “lovey” stage, though the object itself rotates from week to week. For better of worse, I totally encourage it, asking her if she wants to bring a “friend” when we leave the house. It’s just so adorable.

See the whole album!

We are amazingly well. Loving the city. Loving the beautiful house we are blessed to call home. Loving being near family and friends. Loving the weather and the time of year. Loving the funny, sweet, big/little girl Ali has become. Yesterday it was over eighty degrees here! Warm enough that we brought out the kiddie pool and let the girl have a ball.

Just for the record, some new set-up has been rigged in an attempt to keep me from losing aforementioned posts. And I can’t see whether the pics are working or not or how they’re sized, so please bare with if it’s awful!

More, more, more pics of the adventure! And hopefully more of others’ to come.
Life is very good.

Now, it’s Spring Break! I’m going to clean the house, do my application for the BSW program and become semi-fluent in Spanish before next Monday when I began fast-paced second year. I haven’t spoke more than a few words since I finished Spanish 4 in high school at the beginning of 2002. Seven years. Oops. Oh well, that will be my only class this spring so I will have time to focus.

Btw, yes we are still getting married. We have all the details just no invites yet so if you are needing travel info or anything please get ahold of either Tony or myself and forgive us for not getting this part together sooner. It’s one of the things that really slipped through the cracks…

Hopefully I’ll find some time for some more consistent blogging now.

PS- cannot wait for spring, warmth, and sunny skies!

Let’s begin with her recent foray into photography. As anyone who has been around us knows, daughter is quite adept at using our iPhones. She grabs them (now usually accompanied with cries of "Pictures! Please! Pictures! Please!"), unlocks the screen, scrolls through the programs to find the pictures or the apps we’ve downloaded for her to play with, and can entertain herself for quite awhile. Every so often I would find a bunch of random text in the notepad and more frequently my icons would be re-arranged. Since we’ve moved, she’s learned how to delete pictures (although its not clear she understands what she’s doing, she clicks the little trash can and then confirms the deletion) and paradoxically seems to delete ones she likes. Then, one day I discovered these:

It seems our little kid has become quite the Bourke-White, as a whole series of "Shopping Cart" pictures have appeared lately. Here’s one of my favorites (brief appearance by my foot in upper right):

Now that she can take pictures and subsequently delete them, who knows what kind of Ali art has already been lost. And yes, we let her play on the phones sometimes during long shopping trips (on long Costco runs or about the time we hit the curtain section in Ikea and she’s all played out). Which brings us to our next item of business, her easel. From Ikea. See what I did there?

Ali has loved coloring for quite awhile now, and has recently gotten very into colors. She likes to point out the colors of everything and is often more excited about the color than the item itself. We’ve been wanting to get her an art setup for awhile now (her table and chairs, previously for coloring, are now the domain of "eating" whatever she makes in her kitchen), so when we saw an inexpensive easel, we snatched one up, and she has really been loving it. Here are a few of our masterpieces:

She likes to do some side by side drawings where she takes one side and you take the other. She really likes the multicolored pacis, and Cookie Monster and Elmo are the only characters I can even remotely draw, so they tend to pop up a lot.

Well, I had to cut this post off once to head out earlier and now I’m super tired, so the rest will have to wait.

Check out new pics on the right sidebar. See what I’m (and sometimes Tony) up to via our Faceook statuses on the left. Or, better yet, come find us on Facebook.

Sorry

We need you to act TODAY to keep this school year whole!

Sign our petition and tell Oregon legislators NO MORE CUTS: www.stand.org/nomorecuts.

Urge the legislative budget committee to use the Federal Stimulus dollars to prevent further cuts to schools! Tell them Oregon’s kids can’t afford to lose any more school days.

It takes less than a minute to sign the petition. Do it TODAY, then pass the message to your friends: www.stand.org/nomorecuts.

We’ll present the petition signatures to the legislature this Friday.

Thanks for taking action today!

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Seriously people, the children are our future!

Pssst, Abi. Better late than never I hope.

Tony and Ali snuck in for a sec:

See more here.