Monday, July 24, 2006

Beating the Heat

We're overdue for a new post here. I just got back from a youth conference in Colorado where it was in the 90's pretty much every day. I expected to come home to the cool Northwest. Instead, it's even hotter here (at least it feels like it is) than it was in Colorado. And our west-facing house gets like a sauna and doesn't cool off very well on days like these. After a shopping trip today and my violin lesson, we got home and decided to try out Lily's new inflatable pool for the first time. We set it up in the shade in our backyard.

As you can see, she loved it...especially seeing Mommy splash water on Daddy.

The water out of the hose wasn't exactly warm. Even though the air was hot, we still poured some hot water in the pool to adjust the temperature. Still, Lily's first reaction as you can see was, "Man, this water is cold! But I kinda like it!"

Lily stood and sat and splashed and squealed for about a half an hour...and then started to shiver. We pulled her out, but she didn't want to stop playing. She kept reaching for the pool even as we were drying her off. Guess we'll have to be ready to play in the water on our next warm day...which might be tomorrow!

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Independence Day

Lily wore her "Miss Liberty" shirt today, and now she's in her red, white, and blue sleeper snoozing soundly while Marysville is going berzerk. Our town literally explodes every year on July 4th. It's like watching a professional fireworks display on every block. From our elevated vantage point, we can see quite the pyrotechnics display. I guess that's one advantage of living so close to an Indian reservation.

I took Lily outside before bedtime to see a bit of what was going on outside. A few neighbors were already lighting off firecrackers and bottle rockets. I thought she would be afraid, but she took it all in stride. She even clapped for the exceptionally loud and long ones. It would have been nice for her to be able to stay up and see some of the show after dark, but we figured that wasn't going to happen this year.

Our little Miss Liberty is more stable on her feet now. She is walking further between pieces of furniture and the arms of her parents. We're still waiting for her first definite words, although we think that "bird" might be one of them. She spots every bird in the air, loves to look at little books about birds on one of our shelves, and points to one bird picture in particular and says, "buhh!" We kind of hoped we'd hear "ma" or "da" by now, but we'll take "buhhh!"