The Playgroup Trio...

Every Wednesday, Julia gets together with her friends Victor and Kaitlyn (and Amy, Dora and I get to talk to grown-ups during the day...win/win). Here are a couple of pics of them together...

Mother's Day...at Dollywood ( =

Okay, so our last post was a Dollywood, but Mother's Day was beautiful so we decided to use our passes...and here are a couple pictures of David with Julia ( =

Julia at Dollywood!

Since it was my birthday today, I decided to do something fun during the day with Julia...so we headed to Dollywood (we'd been meaning to get our season pass anyway). It was a great day and Julia was a champ on all of the kiddie rides (= I wasn't sure how she'd do, but she actually threw a fit when I had to take her off the horse on the carousel and she rode the kiddie land rides over...and over...and over. I was dizzy just watching her (= You can see that by the time I wanted to get her picture by the water mill that she'd had it, and we didn't even make it to the park exit before she fell sound asleep...

Cooling off...

Julia had a good time today playing in her new baby splash pad. And she discovered that it's uncomfortable scooting on the concrete...something that I thought would prompt our girl to finally take her first steps. You can see in the video that she, of course, found another way (=

Top o' the World ( =

Well, now that Julia is finally pulling up and cruising, she's decided to conquer the jungle gym at the park...she made it to the top of the jungle gym today and was so proud of herself ( = Every time she went up the steps she would get to the top and then clap for herself...and she loved being in the mix with all of the big kids. I only had six or seven small heart attacks while I climbed around after her but I was so happy to see her get a little more daring ( =

Beautiful Spring Evening...

It was so pretty out this afternoon that I packed up the cooler and took Julia to the lake...and called David to tell him that dinner was at the park tonight ( = Julia and I found a picnic table and set everything up and played in the water until David came over after work. We had a great time and had the coals hot and ready to throw the burgers and hotdogs on the grill when Dave arrived. It was a really nice way to enjoy (what we hope) is the real beginning of Spring (=

Happy Easter!

This morning we woke up early to get to the early mass (hoping it wouldn't be as crazy as our usual time). It was actually perfect...we only got there about fifteen minutes early and we sat in the sixth row on the end...much better than the 10 am Easter madness. Mass was especially nice today and the choir was the best I'd ever heard them. Julia (who I intentionally did not feed before we left) amused herself by eating an entire apple and a cup of milk. She was an angel until just before communion when Daddy took her out to the foyer to wave at the other kids and show off her Nutri-Grain bar. They came back in time for Julia to get a blessing when Mommy received communion. Afterwards, we went to a really nice brunch where Julia was really good despite being very sleepy...except towards the end when Mommy had to take her out while Daddy paid the check since she got angry when Daddy took away her steak knife and threw a fork about ten feet, narrowly missing a fragile looking old lady in a wheelchair. Daddy declared her days of fine dining are over...and thus, so are ours. Still, it was a good day, and Julia got a new burst of energy when we came home and she saw her Easter basket waiting for her ( =

She's on her feet!

Well, at 14 months, this is the first picture of Julia standing on her feet (= She's generally not happy to be standing, but she'll humor us now for longer and longer periods of time before she starts frantically looking around for some way down...other than falling. We're pretty sure it'll just be a matter of time, but right now she's still happiest shuffling around on her bum.