In our defense, though, this is a crazy semester. Here's proof:
Mid-Late August:
- I started my last year of law school (woohoo!)
- Victoria started her last year of being a part-time single parent
- Elaina mastered "Jesus Loves Me" and sang it to her daycare friends at lunch
- I started a new area of responsibility at work (assessment of student learning outcomes)
- I took a volleyball to the face and wound up with some broken glasses and and a sliced face (I now have a scar on my upper lip)
September:
- We took our second annual trip to the mountains with some friends (a few pictures below). We had an amazing cabin with a huge covered back porch, complete with a view and a hottub. We did a lot of hiking and the only baby carriers we took with us were named Matt and Ben.
- We hosted some Butler friends who were down from Indianapolis for a wedding. We enjoyed getting to see them and their 10 month-old boy who has grown a lot since Christmas and whom Elaina liked trying to imitate by making a weird screeching sound. I thought she sounded more like a pterodactyl than a baby.
- Speaking of dinosaurs, Elaina has become obsessed with her wooden puzzle book of animals. I mean sits-and-plays-with-it-for-hours-each-night-obsessed. She even woke up this morning and--for a first in her life--turned down my offer to go eat some bities. She said, "No. No Bities. Animals."
- Tomorrow we have some formerly North Carolinian friends coming to visit for a few days
October will continue the busy-ness with me in Orlando for a conference (and hopefully seeing Victoria's brother Jordan), Victoria in Asheville, NC for a conference, a visit from Grandma and Grandpa Rust, and a trip to meet up with Grammy and Papaw Wade in the mountains. Oh, and I need to be studying for the professional ethics exam I will be taking in early November (step 1 of the Bar Exam/Attorney licensing process which happens to be almost as expensive as a semester of law school.)
Family Picture in front of one of the falls we hiked to.
Family picture on the awesome back porch of our awesome cabin.
Elaina's favorite parts of the hikes were the times she could play with water, mud, or acorns. She carried two particular acorns for about half a mile, dropping and picking them up, until finally we reached the waterfall where she decided it was time to throw them away. "Bu-bye, balls!" she said as they rushed away with the stream.
This close-up is to confess that we had a bad parenting moment in the cabin. If you look closely at the right side of Elaina's forehead, her right eyelid, and the corner of that right eye, you'll see the injuries she sustained when she slipped in her socks and fell down the flight of slippery, uncarpeted, wooden stairs in the cabin. She forgave us but still talks about her "Ouchie Downstairs. Careful."
Elaina and Ally (daughter of our friends Ben and Beth). These two had a lot of fun screaming each other's name and running around the cabin. Ally's about 6 months younger and lighter than Elaina which means Ben didn't have to work quite as hard as I did when the girls had to be carried over rough or rocky terrain. Not that it was a competition. Speaking of competitions, though, our cabin had a ping pong table and I beat Ben about 7 times on that.
