Joy...

...is getting your dress so dirty from playing outside that you spend the rest of the afternoon chasing bubbles in just your underwear. I realize the picture below isn't exactly an illustration of the above, but trust me, that's what happened.

And Violet was very, very happy... until she wasn't. As Juniper knows, it ain't always easy being a kid. It can be especially tough to be a kid who has foresworn naps and is out of coping skills at 5pm. No matter. She made it through dinner and bathtime and finally to bed to rest up for another day.

Welcome, Baby Luke!

Luke arrived early this morning. Welcome to Earth, kiddo!

Apparently...

A conversation Violet had with Nana when my parents were in town for V's birthday:

Violet: Apparently, I like pears.
Nana: Lots of people do.
Violet: Well, who doesn't?

Goldbug Mystery!

Sally and Aaron and Juniper visited this past weekend and got a brief tour of our most-frequently-visited places in Little Rock. Aside from a few brief excursions, we mostly stuck to home, or very nearby, and caught up on each other's lives. Busytown was in play for a high percentage of the forty-eight hours our visitors were here and the following pictures feature everyone's favorite feature of the game: a Goldbug Mystery. When the spinner lands on those magical words, all the players get to search the board for the highest number of a particular type of object (traffic cones, anchors, etc) and then everyone gets to move forward that number of spaces. It's fun, even when the toddlers refuse to participate in the actual searching and just want to put magnifying glasses on the objects the adults have found for them.

Birthday

"Yesterday, when I was playing with my birthday stuff, I was really, really happy." - Violet, talking to Jason on Tuesday morning.

Violet had a great weekend with Nana and Dziadzi in town and had a particularly fantastic time on the day of her birthday itself. After a quick breakfast, everyone headed outside to see Violet's new bike, along with a helmet and matching bell from my parents.

After she got to check it out for a few minutes, we took it over to campus to ride around for a while. Every few feet Violet starts pedaling backwards and, therefore, applying the brakes unintentionally, and she's still working on steering, but she's definitely getting the hang of it.

Campus fountain with Nana & Dziadzi

In the afternoon, Violet was introduced to another exciting surprise: a water and sand table from Jason's parents. She was immediately enthralled and spent heretofore unprecedented amounts of time playing happily by herself. The two sides of the table stuck to themselves for about half an hour but the end of water-and-sand-table time saw one big mass of wet sand everywhere.

Since everyone was outside, Violet spent a good deal of time just running around and jumping off the patio (with grownups making sure she didn't clock her head on the dismount) and generally being a kid.

And then she got some of the grownups to jump with her.

While dinner was cooking, we got to play with the last big surprise of the day: a Richard Scarry game from the absent Roswellians. It's a perfect game for Violet's age and game-playing ability, features familiar characters and we've played it one or two times a day since opening it. In spite of that fact, there's no photographic evidence of its existence yet, but I'm sure we'll get some pictures of it in use soon.

Cake topped off the perfect Kid Day. Peanut butter frosting with a jelly '3' to mimic Violet's favorite cookie (peanut butter and jelly cookies - I'd never heard of them before but we discovered them at a bakery here and Violet is now a committed fan).

Haircut

Violet donated a 10-inch ponytail to Locks of Love on Tuesday and now she can eat, play, clamber, dance etc without a grown-up chasing after her with barettes and tails and cajoling words.