Uff!

For Evie's Birthday, we bought a family season pass to Marbles, the local kids museum. It's a great place for her to explore and it's always adorable to watch little kids pretend to do boring adult tasks, like grocery shopping and mowing the lawn.

Evie trying to convince me that grocery shopping is fun.

Evie's favorite stations, by far, are the ones that involve domestic animals. When we arrived for our last visit, she went straight for the vet station where she found a stuffed cat that she hugged for the next 45 minutes. She carried it around, patting it, meowing at it and giving it kisses.

Absolutely adorable, except the cat was meant to be used for pretend surgery and its entrails were spilling out of a velcro pouch in its stomach. She may not be cut out for a life in medicine because shortly after she noticed the cat's dangling liver and heart, she abandoned it. Poor cat.

 Post-op

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Last week, Evie and I went to Charlotte to hang out with my parents while Matt prepared for a trial. He had been particularly busy and hadn't been able to spend much time with us for a couple of weeks. Evie showed that she was thinking about him by pointing out "DA" in the many photos my mom has of the two of us hanging in their house. We'd be in the kitchen and I'd hear "DA!" and see her looking at the picture of Matt on the refrigerator.

 She's usually pretty precise with her Da sightings, but she kept 
pointing at this piece of junk mail and saying "Da!"
Still not sure what message she was trying to relay with that one.

The cutest was when she pulled down a photo album and started flipping through the pages, pointing at every picture of Matt and saying "Dada" and then kissing the picture. Video below:

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Now that Matt's around, she isn't as obsessed with pictures of him and has returned her focus to her true love: dogs and cats. She searches for them everywhere! Whenever we hear her say "uff!" or "meeeeeee!" we know she has spotted a picture of one, even if we don't see it right away. Yesterday she grabbed two of her wooden blocks, one with a drawing of a dog and one with a cat, and sat in her chair barking and mewing at them. It's so fun to see her become more interactive with us and her environment.

She had an involved conversation with the cats on this t-shirt 
during a recent visit to WalMart and has been seriously 
questioning my fashion sense after I decided not to purchase it.

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Well, Hello! And Welcome to My Blog!

For the past year, I've been wanting to start a blog to chronicle my early days with Evie, but have been putting it off for several reasons. For one, it seems most entries have one cohesive thought or theme throughout and the nature of our days are so fragmented that I can't remember my last cohesive thought. It was probably about the lyrics to the Hot Dog Song, so depth may be a concern. I also worry that it would be boring to read about our days, since there is so much repetition. The biggest hindrance has been my severe sleep deprivation for the past year and a half which has left me with the vocabulary of an ESOL second grader (slam dunk!), so you might wonder if Evie is writing the blog most of the time.

I'm no expert, but it seemed like starting with an apology for boring, poorly written posts would be a surefire way to hook new readers.

For a refresher of our past year, start here: