Meaning "one stop"

Nora, on the monorail for the first time, imagines the future that will never be.

Affected thusly, she retreats to On the Boards and crafts her newest piece of fundable performance art:(You can tell her work is political in nature because in reality, the former was the latter and vice versa.)

With Apologies to Our Neighbors

Please find a backdated post here.

Not Quite Halloween

I was half organizing the living room, half playing with Nora this morning and picked up the scarf I used in class all last week to play the dragon's-egg-losing pirate, Lady R.  Nora used it to this effect:




I'll bring the dip if you bring the Dostoyevsky.

An Afternoon in the Life of Nora J

2pm

Nora, post bucket-swinging and interestedly watching kids running around at Volunteer Park. We'd just overheard a five-year-old boy say to a batch of other boys "Do you want to play Indians? Or Native Americans?" His query was followed with "I'm a dinobot!" and "I'm riding a dragon!"  Nora was understandably perplexed by the rules of the playground.

3:30pm

Here's our girl with something she does understand:  gears.  Or, rather, moving cool plastic things around that make other similarly cool plastic things move around.  This was in the waiting room of Children's Hospital.  (She was there to have her hearing screened; she didn't have that test at birth.)  The waiting room offered other exciting distractions such as chairs, couches, newspapers, fish (almost as awesome as dogs) and other people's shoes.

6:15pm

Oh, man.  This girl loves her some cherries.  Or, in this case, one cherry nabbed from the sample tray at Whole Foods.  Other patrons in the store could not hold to their must-shop-work-over-eat-soon demeanor once they spied her mug of destruction.

7:30pm

The marketing for these diaper wraps claims that because they fasten in the back that baby hands won't be able to find and loosen them.  Erm, except for babies who have realized that arms and hands rotate.  Mostly she just likes the sound the velcro makes, but I figure we're mere seconds away from her figuring out that the cool sound also means her behind can be diaper free.  

8:15pm

Nora and her papa, engineering bedtime.

Eight Months: TGIF (Time to Giggle, It's Friday!)

Thanks to Flickr for their new video upload tool. Take that, slow YouTube and Blogger!

Swimming and Swinging

It was still pretty hot out after Nora woke up from her afternoon nap, so we got all decked out to swim at the Volunteer Park wading pool. There are no photos of Nora in the water as that required all of my attention, but she loved it tremendously, even when I had her float on her belly in the deeper middle section--the section full of splashers, please note, even though the rules clearly stated no splashing. (The rules also clearly stated that babies must wear swim diapers...I am darn naive when it comes to my perception of whether others will follow rules in the same diligent manner as I, let me tell you. I WAS SHOCKED.)

Here's Nora, post dip and quite refreshed:

Thanks, Mama! That was totes awes!

Wait. There are still people in the water.

Uh, shouldn't that kid be wearing a diaper?

Mom. I've decided. We have to get back in.

Re-clothed, we headed over to the playground to add another first to Nora's park repertoire: bucket swings!

Why, yes, my hair does match the bark.

Speaking of bark, this is what Nora looks like whenever she sees a dog:

You're telling me!  Eyebrows!

When I Was Young in the Mountains*

Last weekend we headed over to Moses Lake for the Jorgensen Family Reunion.

That's all I'm saying. Besides, pictures are worth a thousand words. Or launch a thousand ships. But why can't I paint you?

See, I should have stopped talking. LOOK AT THE BABY!

PS Nora loves to climb stairs now.

*I know. I was young in the desert. But the former is the title of a great Cynthia Rylant picture book and the latter is just true.