Where's The Off Switch?

Amelia is getting more and more verbal, which has been pretty funny. But she's still firing on all cylinders all the time. Here are some of her more amusing moments.

I'm pretty sure we weren't in danger of losing her in the family room.

I think she needs to work on her Spanish. In case you can't make it out, she counts like this: "Uno, dos, tres, broccoli, cinco."

She's singing "Let's Go Fly A Kite" from Mary Poppins, which has become a favorite movie. As we've been watching the Olympics she knows that they are in London. When you ask her who lives in London her answer is "Mary Poppins, Uncle Pete and Aunt Bunny."

 On Sunday we got the chance to go to a nearby pool with some friends. Amelia almost immediately wanted to start her "diving" and was checking out the diving board. After that being nixed, she was content to do her regular diving. She scoots to the edge, put her hands in place and then jumps. She wasn't jumping as far as she was before, so there was a little bit of explaining that she had to jump out farther.

The nice part about this pool was that she was jumping into water that was two feet deep. That meant she could jump in and stand up without any help, but we were still there to make sure she was coming up quickly.

And our little diver in action.

When she got home it was straight into pjs, and playing with her toys. She decided to put on her "Silly Hat" that my mom sent her. It's silly because it has a flower on it and looks like a watermelon. Her other hat is white, so it's not so silly. The color of the photo is a little off, but you can only expect a camera phone to do so much.

As you can see she keeps a pretty busy schedule. She used to slowly wake up and then slowly go to sleep. Now it's either all the way on or asleep. Even at night when we put her down you can hear her reading and singing to herself until she just passes out.

Last week we got this report card from her gymnastics class. I have no idea what donkey kicks or the mailbox is, but the idea that she's learning to do cartwheels and handstands has me slightly nervous. I may have to go watch a class and make sure it's not anything like I'm imaging. Because "Amelia" and "Springboard" seem like a bad combination.

At The Park - Old Stomping Grounds

We were at the playground near our old house and it was funny to see the difference between her first few park outings and now.

She is driving the "City Bus". Amelia has recently become slightly obsessed with different trucks, but especially school and city buses.

While she used to be afraid of the tunnel, that's clearly gone.

Trying to see what's on the other side. She asked me the other day to help her look out a window so she could see the neighbors. I tried to explain that's spying and she shouldn't do it, but she's clearly trying to see out of her bedroom windows after we put her down.

Daredevil child. She's learned to swing herself onto the slide to go faster. Excellent.

But she's pretty cute (and sweaty), so I think we'll keep her.

We Didn't Want Trees Anyway

More storm fallout. We have one tree in the yard (literally one in the entire yard - front and back) so of course it got hit by lightening, or something else that killed just the top part of the tree.The tree splits in two at the base. The trunk on the right is the one with the dead branches.

The dead area at least 20 feet higher than the top of our house.

Gravity would not be on our side if we only cut down the one trunk.

So this is going to be fun. But considering I can see from my office the root ball of a similar sized tree that took out a number of  fences in the storm, we'd rather do it ourselves before Mother Nature does it for us. The crazy part is that because of the placement of the tree in the yard they can't use a crane so it will all be done by hand. Any one need fire wood? Because we're about to have enough to build a bonfire they could see from space.

Power

So, we've had an interesting two weeks. After a nasty heatwave the DC area was treated to a Derecho. I've never heard the term before, and frankly it sounds like something Matt would make up. However, it is very real and knocked out our power for five days. And the best part is that the temperature didn't go down and continued at 100+ degree days. Because of the heat we lost everything in the fridge within less than 24 hours. We went to eat the ice cream for lunch and it was already soup. Thankfully there were no injuries or major home damage in our neighborhood.

The big damage for us. Our neighbors had a whole tree pull out of the ground and take out about three backyards.

 This house is around the corner from us. It's surprising, but there's two trees down and they didn't hit any wires, cars, parts of the house or the bocce ball court.

 

To escape the house one day I went on a drive to IKEA. (Amelia and I slept in the basement and Matt slept in the family room because we didn't want to deal with getting a hotel room) On the way home I saw this.

 Seriously, let the man out of the cow suit.

Amelia enjoyed sleeping in the basement with me, but it did mess with her nap schedule. Thankfully her school had power, so she went there on Monday and Tuesday. But the weekend led to the nap taking her.

We finally got power back on Wednesday late afternoon. And less than 24 hours later we were on a plane to Grand Rapids, MI. Where it was 100 degrees. Seriously. Thankfully the hotel DID have air conditioning. a pool and power. We had a great time visiting with relatives, and Amelia LOVED all the attention. She has a "cousin" about six months older than her and they didn't really play as much as egg each other on. This was the first time Amelia was at a wedding where she had some understanding of what was happening. She kept asking where the bride was and when they were getting married. Unfortunately, most of this was during the service, so I ended up in back with her. 

The wedding was beautiful and we had a great time at the reception. Amelia had an even better time. She was able to bounce from Memere to Pepere to Uncle Steve to any number of Matt's cousins. She worked up quite a thirst. 

She must have had four glasses of orange juice, along with at least three cookies plus wedding cake. Thankfully Amelia is a total ham, so she burned off most of the energy on the dance floor. She kept pulling Matt and his father back on to the dance floor. I would say she spent at least an hour out there before melting down. Thankfully it was a quick walk across the street and straight into bed. It was about 10:30 when she went to bed and SHE SLEPT TILL 8AM. This has happened NEVER. So apparently we have to do the following to get her to sleep in:

Spend 45 minutes in the pool jumping in and climbing the ladder out and repeat

Go for a 15 minute walk in the direct sun

Let her play, run around and bust open her lip at the Children's Museum for over an hour

Go to wedding with all sorts of interesting people

Let her stay up and dance her head off

I'm tired just looking at that list, so maybe we're not going to get 8am for awhile. 

We flew back on Saturday and thankfully still had power. Sunday night we had more thunderstorms and one of the bangs was loud enough to wake both Matt and I while also shaking our house. I seriously thought we were having an earthquake till the lightening hit. Amelia and Teddy slept through the whole thing.