No Pictures

There are several ways we fail as parents and forgetting to take our camera out these days is definitely on the list. Like this weekend, our first sailing overnight of the season would have been a good time to take some photos. Oh well. We'll call it imagination building.

I did want to make sure though, that we have written down at least the loveliness of this weekend. We went up to the Centre Bay outstation on Saturday afternoon and all made it home alive after lunch today. The weather has been the best kind of summer weather - hot and sunny all day long. The outstation was packed with lots of people we know and lots of babes all Talia's age and therefore lots of parents negotiating sleep and food in the heat. As it turned out, we were also probably negotiating more molar teething so our girl was a wicked combination of hot, sleepy and teethy - not an ideal frame of mind, but boat living caught up with her and I think she managed to have fun anyway.

She splashed in a dinghy-turned-swimming-pool with neighbour Quinn and later had a swim in our rubbermaid container. She tried a swim with Daddy off the dock but being lowered into the depths seemed to be a bit more than she could handle so that experiment was short-lived. She slept (after lots of songs and back scratches) in the very forwardest part of the v-berth. I spent the night in there with her but probably "sleep" would be a generous description of my night's activities - T. is a noisy sleeper with lots of tossing and turning to remind us why she has her own room and bed.

It was such a nice weekend and I was just full of thankfulness that this gets to be part of our lives together. Every year we wonder if we can afford to keep the boat, if we're foolish to hold on to something that never gets enough of our time and effort and needs so much of our money and every year after the first trip I think, "Yep, we can do this. This is good for us."

So there it is, that's our first holiday of the year. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Canada Day Milestones

Wowza. Three in one day. And a national holiday at that. What a girl.

So, first thing, she took 6 steps in a row by herself. Now technically, this a repeat of a trick done on June 28th, but only Scott saw that one so of course it didn't count. Sadly, he was at work on Tuesday and didn't witness this version, so technically it doesn't count either. Ergo, if anyone asks, no she still isn't walking.

Okay, then later in the day we were having dinner at mom and dad's and she ate turkey. Again, something she's done before but I have been feeling quite failure-y about feeding this girl, particularly in the protein/iron department and the meat eating has been very... intermittent? at best. Karen has suggested several times a thick cut of deli meat cut into strips and I have resisted - surely deli meat is a terrible, terrible thing? But alas, I saw organic roast turkey in the Save-On deli counter and decided that since Karen has been right about most things, perhaps I should give it a try. And of course, she LOVES it. Has had it at dinner 3 nights in a row. Between that and the dried apricots and raisins, I think we've got the iron counts covered.

And then finally, my girl signed for the first time. Now we are a bit... let's call it lazy? about signing. Scott is much better at it than I am but we've been at it since she started eating with the basics - please, thank you, more. I had heard that you could expect babes to start picking it up as early as 8 months, maybe more like 10 or 11. So here we are at 13 months with NOTHING. And then came out the bowl of watermelon... and voila, the girl can sign 'more'. Witness the cuteness below.