sky meadows state park, delaplane, virginia
Tag: Firsts
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firsts: sheet fort
photo of the week // week forty-threeSee All the Photos on Flickr:
firsts: building a sheet fort -
“you didn’t tell me there were people back here…”
sparklet’s first word is officially “hi”.she said it once last weekend, and the lady sparkler and i nearly jumped out of our skin. this weekend, however, she said it about half a dozen more times to pretty much anything that moved (and a lot of things that didn’t).
anyway, it now seems to be less like an verbal accident, and more like an actual word.
so, there you go.
(photo from the flight from manchester back to baltimore.)
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video: first waves
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7hsXI0slHw
after a week of “is that really a wave” questions, we’re willing to call it … it’s a wave. and once she starts, she just won’t stop. -
mother’s day, mostly
it’s possible that i am hardwired to be susceptible to guilt trips.
even if that’s the case, however, nothing in recent history has beaten the one that i got from our beloved m.o.h. (maid of honor) three days after the mother’s day that the rest of the planet had back in May.
(and by “rest of the planet” i mean “all you crazy people who have enough spare time to keep track of these things.”)
from the m.o.h., i quote:
Where was the sweet first Mother’s Day post on your blog?? Didn’t [Sparklet] give her mommy a present? I know [The Lady Sparkler] doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day, but I was hoping that [Sparklet] would.
well, funny you should ask, because instead of celebrating mother’s day this year we were in williamsburg, virginia celebrating the wedding of a very good friend.
(and by “very good friend” i mean “high school girlfriend.”)
so tonight, a scant 59 days after it occurred, we finally went out and celebrated mother’s day the way mommy sparkler intended — dinner at hank’s oyster bar, drinks at bar rouge and then desert at local 16.
a couple of things, for the record:
- [insert sweet first Mother’s Day sentence]
- m.o.h. is dead on when she says that mommy has no interest in celebrating mother’s day, and she isn’t opposed in the “you better want to celebrate it anyway, bub” sort of way.
- sparklet’s first gift for mommy was a digital picture frame for mommy’s office, chocked full of mommy-and-sparklet pictures.
- daddy’s first gift for mommy actually happened last year, but his second gift was 59 days of insistence that we were going to celebrate mother’s day whether mommy wanted to or not.
but, i digress.
in all do seriousness, we do love mommy and are VERY lucky to have her. she is the omni-energetic ying to daddy’s thirty-minutes-of-action-tuckers-me-out-for-a-month yang, and a boundless source of love and wonderfulness for both daddy and child.
there, i said it. (thanks m.o.h.)
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video: crawling!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYZYvSoik0s
over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen lots of pseudo-crawling/stops and starts … but this is the first honest-to-God, as-seen-on-TV crawling we’ve ever gotten.
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i haven’t looked it up yet, but the 2 mile trail we just did had enough altitude gain that it might as well been the north face of mount everest, as least as far as my frail body/flabby midsection was concerned.
and, sparklet was unkind — providing very verbal feedback every 10 feet when her daddy/sherpa stopping to suck wind.
the big news of the morning came on the way back down, when we ran smack into a herd of cows — animals, i should point out, that didn’t seem to be having a problem with the altitude.
we ran into them right as we were coming over a blind rise, so by the time sparklet saw them they were maybe 10 feet away, and she was utterly confounded about how a whole pack of her friends from the petting zoo got up here (and how she got on the wrong side of the fence, i’d imagine).
after about 10 minutes of staring (with a competition between sparklet’s eyes and her mouth for which could be open the widest) we finally said goodbye to the cows and continued on.
sparklet wailed, until we turned back.
after 5 more minutes of staring (and waving, and giggling) we once again said goodbye to the cows and continued on.
sparklet wailed.
it wasn’t until three more rounds of this that the cows were far enough away that sparklet finally lost interest in her first official “wildlife” sighting.
and, being the out-of-shape/selfish nit that i am, the whole time i was wondering why we couldn’t have seen the cows on the way UP the mountain, when i could have used the excuse to stop.
trail information:
Trailhead: 38.992886,-77.967272 (Google Maps); Length: 2.1 total miles; Elevation Gain: 360 feet; Trail Type: Out-and-back; Skill Level: Moderate.