This May has been the rainiest ever in Colorado. The creeks are overflowing, with several driveway bridges along North Turkey Creek washed away. Luckily North Turkey Creek itself has not closed-- and as Mark reminded me, we should just be happy its not snow. On the bright side, everything is so green and beautiful. I love this time of year before it all turns brown. During the breaks in the rain (and sometimes during the rain), we've been climbing in Clear Creek and hiking at the various open spaces around Evergreen. I have this dream that we could do a hike every day all summer... we've had some good runs but have not quite managed every day.
Three Sister's hike to celebrate Grandpa Z on May 21
Kenny & LoLo at Three Sisters
US Thai Cafe for Daddy's birthday
Red Rocks hike with lots of flowers blooming
Red Rocks resting
Hiking at Red Rocks
It snowed on Mother's Day again this year. Seems to be an annual tradition now. It did melt by the next day, at least.
Mother's Day hike at Red Rocks
Ama... she let me put barrettes in her hair!
Rainy day hike in Elk Meadow. Ama had on one of those stiff raincoats, I don't think she could lower her arms any further.
At 23 months, Ama is a stubborn, loud, sweet, happy little thing. She wakes up in the mornings and takes roll call. LoLo? Dada? Mama? Ama? Its very important to identify the location and status of each family member. Then we go to the window to look for horses, deer, elk, and bunnies. She loves animals. We go through a bag of carrots each week feeding the neighbor's horses. She stands at the fence and calls them-- "horses neigh! horses neigh!" until they walk over to receive their treat. Dogs are called "woof" and bunnies are called "hop". She loves Kenny's cat Charlie and follows him around, squatting down so they can see eye to eye. I am trying to teach her to watch for the twitching tail that signals he's about to swat... one of these days she is going to end up with a big scratch.
She loves dandelions-- the puffed out version-- and inevitably gets her mouth too close when trying to blow them and ends up with a mouthful of dandelion seeds. She collects rocks just like
Daddy and hides them in the backpack so I end up carrying many extra pounds around. She is obsessed with buckles-- the kind on her booster seat at the table, on the baby backpack, on the baby swing-- and can be entertained for many minutes buckling and re-buckling. She claps for herself and looks around quite pleased each time she buckles. And she can't unbuckle yet, so an attendant has to standby ready to unbuckle immediately or endure the help, Help, HELP growing louder and more frantic.
She loves belly buttons, and goes around to each person in the house and asks to see their belly button. She still drinks her milk from a bottle, and loves hiding the bottle in the laundry basket, between the books on her shelf, in the bottom of the toy bin. Every night there is a frantic search for the bottle. She hates having her hair done-- screams Ow! if I touch it-- so it usually just hangs in her face. Once she let Tammy put her hair in pigtails and I love the picture... it may be years before I see pigtails again. She talks a lot, but it often takes a few tries to understand what she's saying. She sounds kind of like a Gremlin... statements are often preceded by "hmmm" with a deep sort of growl, yes is pronounced "yesh". She loves Daddy and drags Mommy by the hand around the house everywhere with her. Mark says its due to fear of abandonment after I left for a 2 day business trip.
She likes swinging, hide and seek, and peekaboo. There's nothing so funny as a good game of peekaboo:
After spending years watching way too much HGTV, we decided to go ahead with a renovation. We added a garage and a new main entrance, and got a new exterior look. It was your typical delayed, drawn-out renovation that did not adhere to our standards of efficiency and planning ahead. It was pretty stressful even though it didn't impact the parts of the house we mostly live in. We're hoping never to renovate again. But I'm happy with the result.
