A Few More Pictures of Some Recent Adventures

This one's a bit blurry, but here's Elsa drawing with sidewalk chalk on our trip to visit my brother, Dan, and California:

Shortly after our trip to California, the Falconers came to visit!



Elsa and Liam got along so well that by the second day they were sleeping, waking, and pooping at exactly the same times all day.

On Labor Day we took an early evening stroll at a local beach. I hope to take many trips there next summer with Elsa. Here she is, enjoying the sand. She's taken to lying down in everything.

A few weeks ago I bought this collection of beans, peas, lentils and barley for Elsa to play with. She absolutely loved it, but immediately started throwing handfuls of it all around her. We put them away and spent the next few weeks cleaning it up and trying to think of a cleaner way for her to play with them, because she just enjoyed it so much. Today, I braved the beans again. But this time we 1) played in the hallway so they wouldn't spread out so much when thrown, and 2) laid out a large sheet so the clean up was a lot easier, and it also prevented the beans from bouncing across our wooden floors. It was so much fun! So many projects with Elsa just feel daunting because they take so much time to set up, and then she is only mildly interested for about 5 minutes. But this! This was a complete success in every way. She played with those beans for an hour! For a while she was just so content to run her fingers through them, and to pick them up and watch them fall back into the bowl (she didn't even throw any this time!). Then she moved on to filling a smaller bowl with the beans and dumping it all back into the big bowl. When she started to lose interest in that, I collected a few of her small toys (a ball, a block, a plastic bee, and a wooden heart) and I would hide them, one at a time, among the beans and she find them. She even loved setting everything up and taking it down because she got to play in a big sheet! We both had so much fun! I really appreciated being able to spend our morning together in such an enjoyable way!

These pictures don't even begin to cover all of the wonderful adventures we had this summer. I hope to post more pictures soon, but there's also a very real chance that I'll give up trying to catch up and just focus on trying to keep up. She's growing so much, it's incredible. Although it can take a lot of energy to try to keep up with her growing interests, activity level, and, you know, general speed, it is also so much fun. It's gotten a lot easier to be appreciative of the time we have together during the day, and for that I am truly grateful.