Grandma comes to help

Last week I went to Denver for my annual conference and Kris's mom flew down to help Kris with the kids. So while I was seeing things like this:

That's the view from my hotel room. That's all I saw of the mountains.

There's a giant blue bear peaking into the convention center.

Meanwhile Kris and his mom took the kids on a monorail ride over to the Mud Island park to look at the replica of the Mississippi river that they could splash through. Seemed like a good thing to go do while Grandma was in town as she lives awfully close to the Mississippi and so do we.

And Silje learned how to ride Stian's old four wheel bike. She loves it, if you can't tell.

It sounds like they had a good time without me. I was happy to be back though, and I think they were happy to see me too.

First Day of Pre-K!

Fun with Photo Booth on the ipad

Changes

Silje is changing really rapidly right now. She's making just huge leaps in multiple areas.

She's gotten so much better at the gross motor stuff. She can stand unassisted, she can pull up, she can walk holding onto just one hand, she's doing some cruising (walking along a piece of furniture while holding on), and she's even starting to take just a few steps by herself. She'll let go of my hands and take two steps and collapse into Daddy's arms, or the reverse. It's mostly just controlled crashing at this point, but she's going to start walking any day now. She's so proud of herself with this stuff. She just gets a huge grin on her face when she does it.

She's getting a lot more verbal. She has new words that she uses like "dog" (a favorite), "ball", "more", "Rosa" (the name of one of her stuffed animals, it's pronounced the Norwegian way so she can roll her r's), "hi", "Nan" (her lovey), and I'm sure there are more I'm not thinking of.

She's learning some baby signs. She can do "eat" and "more" and "all done." We should work on some more with her. I'm torn over using too many signs with her as I want her to learn how to talk, so there is a balance in helping her to learn how to communicate and also encouraging her to use her words.

She's suddenly eating finger foods almost exclusively. She's gotten really good at it. This was something she was really behind in because she would just gag and choke on anything that wasn't a puree, but suddenly she is just doing great with it. I made curried vegetable hash tonight, which is not a finger food, per se, but is quite chunky and she loved it and gobbled it up. Her favorite food right now is probably watermelon. I swear she'd eat an entire watermelon if I let her. She's really good with the fork too. Incidentally, it really looks like she's a lefty.

And she finally has some teeth! Just two so far - the two front bottom ones. The two front top ones are coming in right now, but she won't let me look at them, much less get a picture of them.

She's just jumped forward in so many areas so quickly. She's becoming a whole new kid. She's also learning how to annoy her brother. I probably shouldn't giggle when she does it. For some reason she likes to shriek at him, which really annoys him and he yells at her, which just makes her shriek more.

"Impromptu"

That was Stian's word of the day. We went out for a walk this morning because it was so nice outside and we wanted to get out of the house. Well, most of us did, we kind of had to drag Stian kicking and screaming. On our way over to the park we noticed a big tree had fallen in someone's yard a block away and it was blocking the sidewalk and the road. We went to investigate. One of our other neighbors was there investigating too. He told us the house that the tree had fallen on was our U.S. Representative's house. Huh. I live a block from my U.S. Representative.

Anyway, when we were done gawking at the tree I commented on how the cars were just pouring into the zoo today (we were right by the entrance to the parking lot). Stian asked if we could go to the zoo. Turns out Kris just happened to have his zoo membership card in his pocket (well, not "just happened" he told me that he pretty much makes sure he has it on him whenever we leave the house, just for this reason) so we decided to make an impromptu visit to the zoo.

It is so nice to live so close to the zoo. It's a really nice zoo and we have really enjoyed being able to go so easily and so frequently. It's a pretty large zoo so there is plenty to do and we can't do everything every time, so it's not getting old yet. Today Stian finally got into one of the water features. They have a couple where people can get in and splash around. So far Stian hasn't wanted to do it, but today he did. This one is up in the "Teton Trek" part of the zoo (by the wolves and grizzly bears and elk) and is supposed to be like a geyser. Stian enjoyed himself and Silje did a little too.

Images

The kids are still off of school. Yesterday we walked over to the zoo (about two blocks) and spent several hours there. Then we came home, had lunch and naps, and then headed out on a long bike ride. We've been going on a lot of long bike rides. Mostly Kris and Stian bike and I walk and push Silje in the stroller. We have taken the bike trailer out once, but it's hard to negotiate on the old, narrow, bumpy sidewalks.

Anyway, on our bike ride yesterday I thought to take some pictures to show some of what we see regularly. I didn't think to take the camera out until the ride was half over, however. We took a ride through the park, they have these really nice, wide, paved trails that run through the woods, so we took one of those across the park. Then we crossed a busy road, walked past Rhodes College and over to the kids' school to play on the playground. They have a nice, shady playground.

This is their new school:

Then we biked home from there. We didn't go back through the park, but went around the west side of the park back to our house. Here you can see Kris and Stian biking along a fairly busy road. There is a bike lane, which is great. But I don't trust Stian to ride in the bike lane yet, he has a tendency to wander while he bikes.

Crossing the busy road to get back into our neighborhood. Look at the fancy gate type things! We live a block and a half from these. Down one black, turn right and down a half block. Right by these gates are some really huge, old homes. Two of them are for sale right now, I think one is like $800,000 and the other is a million. Stian wanted to know why we hadn't bought one of those!

This our street. We T into the street with the very expensive homes, so they are behind me in this picture.

And home sweet home. Not a million dollar home, but still quite nice. It's cuter on the inside than the out. We need to figure out what to do to give it more curb appeal. But first we need to finish unpacking the 4 million boxes that are still waiting to be unpacked inside!

The bike ride/walk was 2.5 miles - I have a nifty new app for my iphone that will map your route for you and tell you how far you went.