One of the main highlights of our vacation was getting to meet this cutie-pie — my 5 month old niece Hannah.  (Apologies for the picture, Mark’s camera was on a goofy setting early in the trip, resulting in some grainy indoor pictures).  She was such a trooper on this trip.  She spent a lot of the time in a carrier strapped to either her Mom or her Dad.  And during the trip, my brilliant sister managed to dress Hannah in a whole bunch of the cute clothes that I had bought.  The shirt she’s wearing here, for example.  As you can probably guess from the drool on her face, she’s working on teeth.  If you ever got your fingers near her mouth, she grabbed them and started sucking/chewing on them.  About the funniest thing was her interest in food.  She hasn’t started eating solids yet, but boy howdy is she interested.  She’d track your fork from your plate to your mouth and would try grabbing for everything.

My boys were never that interested in solid food.  And once we started baby food, they weren’t that keen on moving to big people food.  I was worried we were going to be feeding them pureed mush for ever.  Thankfully, they’ve turned out to be pretty good eaters.  There are a lot of things they don’t like, but remarkably, they eat them anyway.  I’m pretty sure that when I was their age I would have just refused to eat the food.

This one is Hannah’s big brother, Colin.  He’s helping Grampa Carl steer the boat.  Sort of.  I think this was more of a picture opportunity than anything else.  His wardrobe seemed to consist mostly of shirts with sharks on them.  And of course, his Bruce the Shark hat.  He is 2.5 and he is so sweet with his sister.  If she got moved, he wanted to know where she was.  And the kisses — he gave her lots of kisses.  I’m sure she’ll annoy him once she is mobile and trying to play with his toys, but for now, he seems pretty thrilled to be a big brother.

Spending time with Hannah and Colin, while fun, reminded me that I really am glad to be done with having small kids.  They were a lot of work!  Will and Joe aren’t old enough to be allowed to just roam around a theme park on their own, but at least I wasn’t worried about keeping my eyes on them every second.   I’m also pretty sure that I wouldn’t have wanted to spend 3500 miles in a car with Will and JOe when they were 2.5, we would have definitely sprung for those plane tickets.  In fact, I guess we did — our first trip with them to Florida was at that age.  Oddly, I am unable to find those pictures.  I know they were digital, but….where are they????

I’m sort of rambling now, and really ought to just wrap this up and try to get something done.  Monday was super-productive, yesterday:  not so much.  But today’s another day!

Later –
Suzanne