Gaz's Southern Indiana Adventure

How to boil down the past week into a coherent blog entry? You'll have to settle for fractured and rambling, and likely incomplete. I'll try to cover everything as best I can.

Gaz picked up a few new tricks during our week in E-ville. She's hugging things now and clearly knows what we mean when we say "give X a hug." There was much cuteness as we encouraged her to hug all the stuffed animals we had gathered for her amusement. We discovered that she really likes cucumbers and cherries, so new food horizons are continuing to open. The freeze dried fruit snacks we got were a pretty big hit, too, but she'll only eat a certain amount of those and then she'll just hold onto them until her sweaty, slobbery hands turn the fruit pieces into sticky mush. Still, it's a good snack for the car and is now another weapon in the fight to keep her from screaming on long trips.

Let's see. . . She's taking a couple of steps at a time now, kinda lunging for the next nearest support. Grandma Cel got her a new standing toy (a Leap Frog Learning Table) and if you put that far enough but not too far from all the cruise-worthy furniture and start pushing buttons to entice her, she'll take a few staggering steps to get over to where the fun is. She's also more confident in standing by herself, which is also cool. The days of her hovering near furniture to pull herself up on are over. She just stands up whereever she is when the urge takes her. Her balance is pretty good, too. Stay tuned for more exciting ambulatory developments.

The waving is still hit or miss, and she never seems to wave the same way twice. Sometimes she waves her whole hand, sometimes she waves both hands, sometimes she does the open-and-closed-hand thing, sometimes she does that with both hands. She rarely aims her gesture at the person she's looking at, often waving behind her head or whoever is holding her or some convenient home furnishing.

She's still great with a crowd, and was very good at the family get together on Saturday, and at all the restaurants she was dragged to. She's a crowd pleaser. Of course, she saves all the tantrums for me (or whoever is "lucky" enough to be watching her in my absence). Which reminds me: at a rest stop at the junction of Indiana 63 and I74 she found an ashtray that said "Mommy's Little Monster," which she naturally wanted to chew on. Grandpa Charley had his work cut out for him, but he did manage to get it away from her. How apt, but she's too young for ashtrays. So says Mama.

I noticed halfway through the week that all the adults were referring to themselves by title (I was Mama, Dad was Grandpa, Mom was Grandma) and since there was much concentrated visiting, it was more obvious than usual. No real comment about that, it's just a thing. Just don't be surprised at the death of the personal pronoun in this house.

We did some exploring of the world. We went to see the bald eagle family in Henderson. The adults were out doing wild bald eagle things, so all we could see is the baby. Gaz of course saw nothing except for the bugs that were hovering nearby, but I'm sure she'll be excited to know that when she was just a wee thing we were out looking for honest-to-God wild bald eagles with her in tow. When she's older and we're embarassing her with baby stories, you know. We also went to Mesker Park Zoo, which is about half what I remembered and half not what I remembered. It smelled somewhat less horrible, probably because the Monkey Ship has no monkeys on it anymore.

The one tragedy of the visit is that just before leaving for E-ville, we bought a rocking recliner at CostCo to replace the old, sciatica-inducing rocker that we permanently borrowed from my folks. I only got to sit in it that evening, then not again for a whole week! It's as good, if not better, as Bob Marley and the Wailers at getting Gaz to go to sleep. It's amazing! I naturally spend as much time in it as possible. Another benefit of the new chair is that now Mark can fall asleep with Gaz on his chest or lap and I don't have to worry about him dropping her. There is much fluffy chair to keep them both safely contained.

I know there's tons more, but I'm tired and needing to send off resumes. Prod me for specific tales, if you like. I take requests. Pictures from the trip will be on my Flickr account, all tagged with "evansville" as I don't think this family can handle paying for two unlimited accounts now and I've used up my allotment of photo sets. Oh well.