Ethan and Gemma

Ethan and Gemma

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Also, I took this kind of cool picture of a peacock

It was lounging around in the slave cemetery at Middleton Place.  I wish I could have gotten a picture of it with its tail spread, but it was still very vibrant and beautiful:


Friday, August 12, 2011

Downloading from brain...40% complete

I've been very bad about keeping up with this blog lately (although I'm not sure if anyone even reads it anyway), so I'm going to dump a bunch of stuff from the past couple of weeks all into this one post (although I'm sure I'll only remember to cover about 40% of what's happened recently, hence the title). 

Anyway...

In the past couple of weeks, it seems like Gemma has just all of a sudden grown up.  She has gotten much taller, and is learning tons of new stuff every day.  She has suddenly become interested in putting puzzles together (she can put the fish, turtle, and crab from her fish bowl puzzle all in the right spots), putting shapes into the right holes in her refrigerator, and she figured out that she could sit on her Disney princess toy and use her feet to ride around, so she does that all the time now:


She has also started saying "Hi," but ironically, she thinks she has to hold something up to her ear (like a phone) whenever she says it.  She first started doing this with my phone and Cy's iPod after watching us talk on them.  Now she will hold up stuffed animals, food, whatever she has, to her ear and say "Hi."  Hopefully she will soon figure out that she can just say "hi" without using a "phone," but it is still super cute:


Gemma was officially 15 months old on August 7.  And yesterday, August 11,  she finally got serious about walking.  Yesterday morning, she walked halfway across the living room on her own a few times but then last night, she made it all the way across the room once and after that, she was pretty much off and running.


She is such a little monkey too.  She climbs in and on everything.  For example, I was in the kitchen cooking dinner one night and looked over and she had climbed all the way up the stairs in about half a second:

Or yesterday, when she crawled under a bar stool and then stood up and trapped herself inside so that I had to figure out how to extract her carefully without whacking her in the head:

 Or the way she frequently decides to stand on top of her Disney Princess toy instead of riding or pushing it:

But enough about Gemma.  Two weeks ago, my family came to visit.  Cy was able to get a Middleton Place pass from Blackbaud, so we went there one day.  Rachel and I of course took every opportunity we could to goof around, as you can see in the pictures below.




We also did a lot of shopping to get my sister ready for college.  I think Rachel is now as addicted to Forever 21 as I am.  And she will be moving to Charleston next week!

On Friday of last week, my mother-in-law was in town babysitting my nephews so we took all three kids to the aquarium.  It was shark week, which I was pretty excited about, until I realized that the only thing the aquarium did special for shark week was the giant inflatable shark above the entrance.  Bummer.  We did see some pelicans close up though, which was kind of cool I guess.

Friday was also mine and Cy's fifth wedding anniversary.  We had big plans for the weekend but of course nothing went as planned.  We headed over to Mt. Pleasant on Saturday and got lunch at Atlanta Bread Company.  Then we finally went to see Harry Potter 7.2.  We were so excited and were sitting there enjoying the movie when, right as Harry ran off to search for the lost diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw, the movie suddenly stopped.  Bummer.  We sat there for about 20 minutes and they did finally get it going again and we got to see the rest.  It was sooo good.  And we were soooo excited to see it finally:

Then we went to the Seaside Inn on Isle of Palms, where we had planned to spend the night.  We had booked a king sized ocean view room.  When we got there, they had messed up our reservation and put us in the wrong room and they wanted to put us in a room right beside the Wind Jammer where a really loud band was already playing.  So we decided just to spend the night at home instead.

We had dinner at Fonduely Yours, and it was super delicious.  Here we are in a very dark booth waiting for our food to cook.
Even though things didn't go as planned, we still really enjoyed our anniversary weekend.  Until Sunday, when Cy got hit with some sort of stomach bug.  I got hit by about Monday or Tuesday, and we both had it most of the week.  It was extremely unpleasant, but we did enjoy lying on the couch watching a sci-fi TV marathon that included Falling Skies, Alphas, and Stargate Atlantis.

What else?  A sewing update:  while my mom was here, she showed me how to make pillowcases.  They are really easy to make and so fun.  I made myself two pillowcases - one with pink cheetah print high heels and one with cupcakes.

Then Cy really wanted one too so I made him a blue one with owls on it.
And by now this blog post is getting excessively long, so I'm going to quit, but I'm sure there is a lot of stuff I left out.  But it's hard to find time to sit down and collect your thoughts when you are chasing a little one around all day long!