Few Days with a Friend

It's actually embarrassing to see Bobby get two blog entries in a row. It means I've been a slacker. I COULD change the time stamp on this entry to throw it between his two, but then people wouldn't see it and that's no fun.

As Bobby mentioned in his most recent post, Alice and I spent a few days last week with my friend Denise and her family in Effingham. Unlike our farm-locked Chambana, Effingham has a few hills and wooded areas. I don't miss the Rocky Mountains for a moment, but those woods...well...I could have built a home right there. We biked out to the country one afternoon. Denise had her 3-year-old on the back of her bike, her 5-year-old and Alice in a trailer behind her (we estimated about 100 pounds of cargo there), and she was STILL able to keep up with her 2 older boys riding up ahead AND maintain a regular conversation with me the whole time. Wow. I still can't believe it. We didn't have a camera at the time or I would have recorded such a monumental feat.

Alice enjoyed the abundance of new toys to play with, including a fancy trampoline in the backyard. The static made her hair stand on end:

We visited a playground another day where Kelsey (5 years old) showed Alice how to do everything. Here are the two of them on the merry-go-round:

Kelsey was quite attentive to Alice the whole trip, carrying her around, playing games with her, helping her ride bikes, read books, and climb up to the table for food. Alice wasn't sure what to think about all the attention at first, but suddenly and sharply decided on Day 2 that she had had enough. She screamed whenever Kelsey spoke to her. It made Kelsey cry. I felt SO bad for Kelsey. I didn't really know what to do besides teach Alice not to scream, then apologize to Kelsey for Alice's sudden grumpy behavior. Human relationships are hard work at ANY age.

And here is a picture of Alice going down the twisty slide by herself:

This girl has yet to find a slide she can't handle. Fearless, even when she lands face first on the ground. The noise of the vacuum sends her into a panic, but a tumble in the dirt makes her laugh half the time.

Later, she was climbing a rung ladder when her foot slipped and she hit her face. Her teeth cut the inside of her bottom lip a bit, leading to bleeding and some eating issues over the next couple days. Any tips for getting blood out of kids' clothes?

We made some peach freezer jam, too:

Alice is a SERIOUS kitchen helper these days. If I so much as stand at the counter for longer than 2 seconds, she's pushing a chair up beside me. She's getting better at scooping and dumping ingredients, but she has this habit of eventually tasting everything she scoops. She was measuring the finished jam into containers really well until she licked her fingers. Then all she wanted to do was lick the scoop clean.

Cody (3 years old) showed Alice the joy of eating cereal straight from the box and head-banging to Crazy Frog:

[flv width="400" height="300"]http://evansfamily.powweb.com/movies/2008/MVI_6459.flv[/flv]

Denise and I stayed up late every night. We went through photo albums, played around on the computer, and talked about anything and everything until our tired brains turned to mush. It was the kind of stuff I did in college with my roommates, but I couldn't have appreciated it back then as much as I do now :)

Time off is soooooo sweet, even when you have to be the mom again starting at 6am the next day.