Fun with Friends

A few weeks ago Beth, David, Elizabeth, Eileen, Evie and I all went to the Virginia State Fair. It was Evelyn's first fair and my first state fair. The animals were definitely a highlight. Evie and David were quite interested.

This little calf is only 11 hours old! It was too too sweet.
One of the many mommy/baby pig sets. :)
Virginia Tech agriculture students had a stand set up where kids could see and feel different types of seeds and grains and take some home in a jar. Beth and I made David and Evie grain rattles. :) Evie loves her jar full of corn, wheat, barley and cotton. :)
The quilts were probably my favorites. So incredible!!
Thanks for getting us the tickets, Eileen!


Last week Evie and I went on a CW walk/picnic with a lot of our friends. Evelyn loved playing with her friends and tried so hard to keep up with Amy and Kate! Sadly, they were much faster than her (except for this picture, when Kate was trying to pull the wagon with dead-weight Amy hanging on to the back ;)).

Jessie and I tried to get a good picture of Evie and James. This was our best try...
We'd try to set them next to each other and .2 second later they were like this:
Busy babies = busy moms!!

We just love being outside in this beautiful fall weather!!

Daddy's Office

Last week Mommy and I got to visit daddy at work! His office is SO COOL! He even let me sit at his desk and pound on his keyboard and play with his mouse! I had never played with a mouse since we only have a laptop at home. I'm not allowed to play with our laptop's keyboard so banging on daddy's was extra fun!
  
I took all the work I did that afternoon very seriously.


Maybe I'll want to be a lawyer some day...

Walking Baby!

Evelyn took a few steps on her own this week! She also stood up on her own without holding onto anything today. We can't believe how big she is getting! She was really into taking steps (with the incentive of a bite of animal cookie) earlier this week and we were able to get a few videos. :) Don't worry, she didn't get a whole cookie with every attempt, just a pea sized bite. ;) You can tell how pleased she is with herself too. :)

Jammin' Baby

Last week Great Grammy and Great Granddad came to visit. We had a marvelous time with them. Evie *adored* them and didn't stop smiling from the time they arrived until the time they left.

On the night before they left they took us out to eat at Plaza Azteca, our fav Mexican place. It was a beautiful evening so we ate on the patio. Just as we were finishing up the live music started. Everyone except Evie was glad they waited until we were on our way out, but she LOVED them. Here she is dancing. ;)

She was a little confused when the music stopped and everyone started clapping!

Here are a few pictures of our fun as well.

Thanks for coming to visit, Grammy and Granddad!

Evie and Friends

With my dislocated shoulder I can't type a whole lot, but I wanted to share some of these pictures of Evelyn and her friends. :)

A few weeks ago Jackson, Connor and Sam came over for dinner. The piano was a hit, even for the parents since the boys were gentle and careful.

Evie was a little miffed that she was getting left out...
And so she figured out a way to get in as well. :) 
These boys are quite patient and loving towards Evelyn and very aware that she is a baby and they are big kids and there are distinct things that they can do and she can't. For example, they were *very* worried that Evie was trying to crawl up on this window seat with them. I don't think they quite realized that there was no way she was going to actually get up. ;)
Poor Evelyn desperately wants to be grown up as you can see by her desire to climb everything and be tall...

Read the Grinch in Latin...

txt Aunt Katie...

and play with Nathan's remote control car.


Don't worry, not all of Evelyn's friends are boys. Last week we spent a day and a half with Amy and Kate, two of her big girl friends. Amy and Kate have an amazing baby baby grand piano that Evie was fascinated with once Amy showed it to her. Evie took it very seriously.
Amy and Kate are hilarious and had me laughing the whole time we were there. Amy did inform me that I was her favorite of all the princesses, which made me feel quite good. :) After her rest one day Amy's room was quite the disaster. She informed me that babies like Evie could only clean up baby messes. Medium girls like her could only clean up medium messes, and big messes (like her room) needed the help of big people, so please please would I help her with her room. I did of course, but she was a little miffed that baby Evie didn't help at all, not even with the small messy areas. This is what Evie did the whole time. :p

Evelyn hopefully realizes that she won't be able to get away with lounging while I clean up for much longer... ;)
Kate spent all one lunch perusing the paper instead of eating her lunch. She wasn't interested really in the food I made her so she went and got the paper and went through it page by page.
Evelyn has such sweet older friends and we're so thankful for them all!

Ok, so this ended up being a lot of typing. Off to take some meds and rest my shoulder. :)

Evelyn Ruth

Here are just a few pictures of Evie from a few weeks ago...
Evelyn learned over the summer just how much fun it is to pull all her books off the shelf. We're still working on putting them back on. :) I am glad though that she likes to take them off and flip through them!

This is what our house looks like at least once a day... :) I'm resorting to just one big clean up before Daddy comes home. ;)

Evelyn loves our piano!

Diaper change escapee!!
 
Our little climbing monkey :)

We love our baby girl!!

Richmond Day

Last month we had a free Saturday and decided to head to Richmond and do some exploring. We had heard good things about the White House of the Confederacy and Museum of the Confederacy (ie - that they weren't Confederate shrines) and we decided to check them out. It's kind of funny - they're squished right in the middle of Richmond between highways, hospitals and other random buildings. After a few minutes driving around, however, we managed to track them down. :)

Although the house tour guide was a little funny about Evie going on the tour, he was good and the house was very interesting. The Jefferson Davis apparently didn't believe in stifling their children's' natural, "creative" tendencies and so didn't believe in discipline. It sounds like they were quite the bad kids! Their house was beautiful, even if it sounds like it was a bit dysfunctional in real life.
No pictures were allowed inside, but here we are outside.
Out back...

In the front... not quite as grand (or white) as the real White House.
The museum of the confederacy was mostly interesting because of all the actual items they had. Here I am in front of Robert E Lee's tent - everything in it was really his...
And here is the sword and uniform he wore to the surrender at Appomattox!
Evelyn and Nathan liked the cannon best. :)

The Virginia Capitol is not far from the Museums so we walked over there next.

Cool buildings on our way over...
The capitol is a very large and beautiful building, originally designed by Thomas Jefferson. It was hard to get it all in one picture, but here are my attempts (there is a main, Greek temple looking building with large wing additions on either side).
This statue of George Washington by Jean-Antoine Houdon is said to be the most realistic statue that we have. Houdon came over from France and took extremely detailed notes, sketches and castes - he even covered GW's face with oil, stuck feathers in his nose so he could breathe, and made a complete plaster of his face!

Here is the exact place R.E. Lee stood to accept command of the Army of Northern Virginia.
We also enjoyed touring the different rooms and chambers.