So, where were we….

In addition to the non-stop fun and cavalcade of relatives, the computer hard drive crashed, again. Computer tech on the side Mommy diagnosed it and replaced it. Dad is almost officially banned from touching the computer. He’s got some bad laptop juju. He’s going to have to get his own if he keeps breaking this one.

That notwithstanding…

We’ve had an exciting couple of weeks. We went down to Sun River for a cousin reunion of sorts. It was my uncle’s 75th birthday. I’m very fortunate that a few years ago they settled on Sun River as a great place to spend a week in the summer, and their children, my cousins head out there too. Otherwise, I would never see them, and certainly not keep in touch with them, except maybe the occasional Facebook status update or wall posting.

For this momentous birthday, my cousin who is an editor on a very successful reality show or two, spent the last year travelling around and contacting her father’s family, friends and co-workers, shooting footage of them sharing memories about her father. She spent nearly 1000 hours, over the past 3-4 months to whittle it all down into a 45 minute amazing video of his life story; the world premiere of which was in Sun River! To top it off, my sister was the chef for the weekend, cooking fabulous meals for everyone every night, including salmon that was better than restaurant quality.

The house the family was staying at was near a great park. Little S and I wandered down there a couple of days. The first day, she crawls up the landings to the arch and proceeds to climb the darn thing without any fear!

Climbing over my head, until she got to the point where she had to crawl down the other side, and that didn’t quite compute.

She crawled all the way up to the big slide and went down it like a 4 year old. It was tall and fast, but that didn’t bother her.

She also started something new over the weekend down there. Perhaps inspired by 6 year old cousin once-removed (or something like that), she chose that weekend to start standing by herself.

As if that weren’t enough, since she was summarily dismissed from the premier of the movie for not turning off her cell phone, or something like that, she decided she would prove she didn’t need us anyway and took her first unaided steps for Dad!

Of course none of this was captured on the camera, other than the cell phone camera, so, you’ll just have to take our word for it for now.

We got back from our getaway and the next morning Nana and Bim (Grandma and Grandpa) were here for a few days visit. She showed off how big she’s getting with the assisted walking down stairs maneuver

And, she’s developed a complete OBSESSION with her bike!  Once we discovered how fearless she was, she now has to wear her helmet when she rides it, which means much of the day is spent pointing to the closet door where her helmet is and signing the word for “hat”. And signing and saying bike. (which sounds like Bee)

 

She will ride that thing down small hills and pick up her feet to go faster. She will cross the street (with us as crossing guards) and ride down a whole block and back. Unfortunately, she discovered that it’s really fun to push it up a hill and then pick up her feet to roll back fast. At least she likes her helmet!

The neighbors have a little bit older kids and told us we could borrow their bike, which just sits there most of the time. Turns out, that wasn’t such a great idea.

 

Because she is in LOVE with it. She doesn’t have to do anything but steer while Mom or Dad pushes on the (broken) handle on the back (that makes us have to bend over the whole time). But, she can go much faster! So today, she ditched her bike, crawled up the driveway and told dad she wanted to ride that bike. He obliged, and now she wants nothing to do with her bike outside. She’ll still use it inside to do zooming laps around the living room, but she has MOVED ON outside. She can’t touch the pedals, so she doesn’t get any exercise with it, but it’s still her preferred mode of transport now.

There’s some great video of all of this. I’ll work on getting that up for the next installment of the Lorpi files!

(maybe this will work…)