Monday

Clara and I watched our friend Jake for a couple of hours this afternoon. Clara had lots of fun playing with him. She read to him and shared her toys, but didn't want to share her Daddy. Jake fell over and when Chris went to pick him up she was all done sharing. It was fun having a baby in the house again. It wasn't that long ago and yet it seems like ages have passed since she was a baby.

Clara was enjoying Jake's bumbo, so I pulled hers out of the closet. In the first picture she wasn't happy because the baby reached out and touched her. Though she can't yet verbalize it, her body language screams "He's touching me!"



She quickly rectified the situation by getting out of her bumbo and moving it six inches away from Jake's. She then immediately started touching him.

Clara got a surprise in the mail from Grandma and Grandpa on Friday. Her very own backpack! Now she gets to haul around her own junk. I filled it a little too full for church yesterday and she needed help walking straight, but I think I've got the "stuff" to Clara ratio down now and she seems to be a lot more coordinated. Thank you Grandma and Grandpa!

And this last one is just a picture I took tonight of the crew on our evening walk. I've started forcing myself to bring the dogs along. Three of them are a bit of a handful, but the worst part is they save their poop for the walk so I end up picking up poop the whole time because it would be too easy to all go at once. No, we have to space out our pooping and to relieve oneself only once during the walk would just be ludicrous. (Notice our poor tree being propped up and the neighbor's construction zone?)