Zoralee's month (three short videos at the end)

This month that Zoralee and I have been in Anchorage, she has grown right on up. Most notably and excitably, she began walking! Now, a couple weeks into it, she rarely crawls anymore. I'll hear her coming into the room and I'll watch the doorway, and it is startling just how tiny of a person comes in! She's like 1/6 the height of the walls. Tiny as a bug.

Here's the day she started walking on her own. We were at Scott and Amanda's house pretty late one evening, and without any encouragement, she just started walking. She carried Gauge's mardi gras beads around, shaking them, dropping them, and being distracted enough with them to not worry about falling.

Around that same time, she sprouted a top tooth, then a couple days later, the second top tooth. Now she's got four, and she immediately figured out she can grind them together and drive Mama to jump from the Cliffs of Insanity. I don't have any good shots of that yet. Either the teeth or me jumping.

But here she is with a still-favorite activity, looking out the window.

Sometimes it pours, in the not so fun way. While she was teething, Zoralee was sick with a bad cold, and to top things off, she fell against the kitchen table leg and ended up with a perfectly straight scratch from mid-forehead to lips. This is a couple days later, after the wound has healed, but you can still make it out.

This doesn't show the scrape, but is this the cutest dress? Thrift store. $1.99. I can finally put her in dresses, now that she can walk! She could be in them when she was lying or rolling. But the minute she started scooting and crawling, they'd bunch up beneath her. I guess that's something to consider when giving dresses as gifts to babies. Then again, there's no telling when a baby will do what.

VIDEOS:

1. Zoralee is becoming a real chatter-er too now, although not so much to other people. Just to herself or her imaginary friends. Here she is on the bed, arguing or giving a speech or ??

2. singing a duet (not sure why the ghostly hue)

3. simply walking

new facial hair-do

Jason gets bored with his facial hair in the fall. This time, just the mustache disappeared. I believe this is the most Amish he has ever gone. Brandon says he looks like a garden gnome, but just you wait - in a couple of years, it'll be all the rage. I think it's a very handsome look.


The best part was getting Zoralee's assessment. Just as the pics show, she was skeptical at first, but when she warmed up, she gave him her best kisses. Then, as she walked away, she got in one last, long stare.

us

ahoy! we come a-sailin' to the land of Blog!

Haalow! We're here - for awhile anyway. We're trying out AT&T's internet service, and we have 30 days to decide on it. We can see that the answer will probably be "no," but this'll give us some temporary access. The connection is as slow as a turtle on a glacier made of molasses, so I don't know how photo uploading will go.

This month without internet has been an eye-opener. I daresay Jason and I have rather enjoyed the lack of immediate access to every drip of information in the entire world. I actually had to call my mother on the telephone for her chocolate sauce recipe rather than google it. Not that google could, with its might and money and all-seeing eye, find the equivalent to yours, Mom. Besides, I don't know what we could give up to be on the computer more. We've been hanging with people nearly non-stop, much to our delight and occasional fatigue. (For great posts about marital disagreements on television and internet, see this link over at Rachel's blog and then this followup link. Be sure to check out the comment sections for those posts too).

On the other hand, we want to purchase plane tickets for Christmas. We want to monitor our bank account online (since we don't actually "balance" our checkbook - hey, that's real life). And email is a good way to communicate with Shelsea about the next box of hand-me-downs she wants to mail (woot!) and to learn that my grandparents, in their late 70's and early 80's, marched themselves into Verizon the other day and got cell phones.

Plus, okay, I've got a few Zoralee photos I need to share. And little by little, I'm catching up on y'all's lives too (at least those of you with an internet presence). xooox