Pictures! (mostly of Adara)

Here are a few highlights from the last two or three months. Sorry, what with being pregnant, going to Utah, and my YW duties, I've been a little overwhelmed. And this blogging stuff can take quite a bit of time! But - on to the feature photos:

On the right we have Adara with Sweetie and Moon, this season's lambs at the Biltmore farm. The lambs were about the only animals she would touch. Getting her to touch anything else, including the baby chickens, involved drama, screaming, and frustration, so we quit trying.




Here is Adara looking fascinated at the geese in Liberty Park, Salt Lake City. Afterwards we went to the model of the canyons in the area. There were signs written in Spanish with advisory notices on them, but I didn't see where they'd posted the notice in English. Since the kids were the ones using the play equipment, I thought they should have put up pictures.

Adara borrowed pajamas from her cousins, Xander and Xavier. The new charge for checking bags on the airplane limited how many clothes I brought, which gave us this cute opportunity.


(Top) Being chased by cousin Carmen. It's amazing to me that the oddly-balanced body of a toddler is able to run at all without toppling over.
(Center) A visit to the Great Salt Lake with Xander, Xavier, Aunt Dolly and Grandpa Hoefer. Trying to walk in the water by herself, she went almost completely under, and the wet clothes were making her colder than being naked. So we went almost-skinny-dipping. The only part of being at the lake that the babies did not like was when they stepped in the thick mud on the bottom of the lake, or on "mud bars" with their tops poking out of the water, and the mud sucked their feet under, sometimes as far as up to their knees.
(Bottom) Back at home with Papa: Saturday morning, Sesame Street, snuggled in blankets, waiting for a large special breakfast.

Looks like that's all the pictures this post will hold. More later.

Love from the Wilsons.

Siblings

Yes, I'm pregnant, and it's announceable because I am finally (almost) done with the 1st trimester and therefore in the "this kid's really set on going the distance, isn't he?" 2nd trimester, which means I feel much better about announcing it to the world. I just wouldn't want something to happen when the kid still weighed less than 4 paperclips and have everybody saying, "Oh, I'm so sorry." I mean, yeah, okay, a potential baby would no longer have potential to be an actual baby and that's seriously a tragedy. But having the entire world say "sorry" about an unrealized potential (which has the beneficial side effect of me not being sick anymore and not having to go through labor (which, incidentally, was not that bad the first time around. Second time's bound to be different, though. Hope it's not different in a bad way.)) would be a bit much for me.

I can understand Jenna's question about me being pregnant. I pretty much said so on her blog. But Writer . . . you must not be very familiar with Adara's mini-movie series: Starfire, the Unknown Hero and Starfire II: The Unknown Shadow. Otherwise, reading the "unknown hero" comment as "I'm having another baby" would be a very creative interpretation.

And speaking of Starfire -- episode two is now available on YouTube in three parts. It's only part II of the Starfire series, but it was too big to post all as one video. So it's "Starfire II: The Unknown Shadow, part I" and so forth.

And still speaking of Starfire, or Adara rather, that's the original reason I logged on today. Creative vocabulary use is one of the joys of toddlerhood and I wanted to share. Today when we were outside, Adara pointed at her eyes and said, "Eye." Then she squinted and waved her hand ambiguously in front of her face, made the sign for hot, and said, "Hot." In essence, she was saying, "My eyes are hot." Which can also be interpreted as, "the sun is bright and it's burning my eyes." Ve-ry creative, Adara. Very creative, indeed.

Ain't language development the awesomest thing in the universe? I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the study of language and I have yet to become un-fascinated with the subject. Did you know that almost universally, regardless of ethnicity, geographical region, or anything else, most babies' first sound is "ma". Which, of course would explain why, almost universally, the word for "mother" in just about every language that I (in my modest exploration of the world) have come across, is "mama.

Perhaps you did know that, but did you also know that the ability to learn language seems to be actually pre-wired into our brains? Not an actual language, of course, or else we'd all just come out speaking. And if we did, I wonder what language we would speak and if we'd have to learn a new language in order to communicate with adults? Hmmm . . . Anyway, we all seem to have certain parts of our brains that are just waiting to input data into them so they can start processing and figuring out the rules of the language. Doesn't matter what language data you input, the brain's wired up to figure out what the rules are. Cool, huh? Well, it could also be, like, a "duh!" cuz otherwise how would we all have learned to speak. But when you think about it, really, how did we all learn to speak?

Okay, really, I should stop. Hope your reading's been as much fun as my writing.
--Mary

Blog break

We visited some neighbors of ours today.  They had their t.v. turned on to a football game. As we watched, Adara started calling the football players "papa".  We tried to teach her that the generic name for a papa is "man".  Her interpretation was to look at the football players and say "mmMMMmmm!"  It's the same noise she made when we brought out the ice cream, and probably was a good assessment of why a lot of women watch football.  

We have a ton of pictures to post, but I won't be able to get to it until after I'm done with Young Women in Excellence (which I'm responsible for) and the proofreading for the arts magazine I'm volunteering at.  So stay tuned.  Delightful pictures of our trip to Utah, and other random moments from the life of the unknown hero, are on their way.