Rocky Point Fun

We met up with Grandma, Grandpa, Uncle Mike, and Auntie Cristina at Rocky Point on Saturday for a picnic dinner. Rocky Point has finished their new spray park, and it was a big hit! Amanda had a great time. The weather was perfect - not too hot, but warm enough that she didn't get cold in the freezing water. I anticipate we'll be spending quite a bit of time at this park over the next few summers!

I just love the expressions on her face in these photos...and her skin is turning a beautiful caramel colour. She's just like her Dad - it doesn't matter how much SPF 50 we put on her, she still gets darker every time she goes out.

After the spray park, we had a great dinner (thanks Mom!). Amanda ate 3 huge pieces of watermelon, and would have eaten more if we hadn't cut her off in fear of the diaper deluge that would await us today.

In other news, we are finally tacking potty training a bit more diligently. Amanda is in pull-ups and seems to be doing pretty well. We're thinking that we will use the pull-ups only for a few days, then move straight into underwear and see how that goes. She's definitely ready (in fact, she was probably ready a couple of months ago) but we're not sure if we are!!!

Circles

What a great Canada Day weekend! On Saturday we headed out to Langley for the Canada Day event out there. Amanda had a fabulous time, despite the somewhat overwhelming heat. We watched some shows, played on the big red frog, and ate way too much junk food (Amanda especially liked her first ice cream sandwich, although most of it ended up dripping down her arms). Afterwards, Mandy fell asleep almost instantly in the car, and we took a quick detour to my friend Cynthia's place to see her beautiful new baby girl, Kimberly.

Sunday we had a very lazy day, complete with a long family nap in the afternoon. Ah, the beauty of long weekends - you can spend a whole day relaxing and not have to feel guilty about it! It was way too hot to do much of anything else, anyway. In the late afternoon, once the weather had cooled off a bit, we pulled out Amanda's inflatable pool, which turned out to be more work than we expected...there were a few small holes that had mysteriously developed since last year. We managed to patch them together enough for the pool to last through a good hour or so of splashing. Our little fishie loves the water these days.

Monday we managed to get organized enough to head out to the Vancouver Aquarium for a few hours. Amanda loves the aquarium, especially the "Baby Buggas". As soon as we told her where we were going, she would shout "Baby Buggas!!" excitedly every time we stopped the car. We actually watched the beluga show from the downstairs viewing area, which I'd never done before... a different way to see it, plus the air conditioning was very nice!

Now we're on "summer schedule"...Jeff is home with Amanda every day, although she'll continue to go to daycare once a week or so to give Jeff a break and Amanda a chance to catch up with her friends! Although the weather cooled off quite a bit today, the two of them had a great time wandering around and Amanda was exhausted by the end of the day, so much so that she almost fell asleep in her dinner. At least it's a bit cooler, so she's having an easier time sleeping these days.

A few more pictures have been posted, including some from Canada Day and the aquarium. Enjoy!

Amanda at Just-Over-2

Since we haven't given an update on Amanda in awhile, we thought her birthday would be a good opportunity (OK, so we're a little late). Who is Amanda at 2?

• She can count up to about 13, but usually starts at 3 unless prompted, and often skips 6 (five, memen...).
  
• She knows her alphabet, and can sing the alphabet song ("ABCs", as she calls it) pretty much on her own.
  
• Speaking of singing, she sings all the time! She knows several songs - Twinkle Twinkle, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Baby Beluga, Muffin Man, and lots of others. She will often sing a whole song completely on her own. She's not always totally on pitch, but she does get the basic idea and she has a really pretty voice.
  
• She also knows the difference between pitches that are "high" and "low". She loves to sit at the piano and hit high notes, saying "high high high" (in a high squeaky voice), then the low notes ("low low low", in a deep voice). Very cute!
  
• She knows tons of musical instruments - even less common ones, like harp and French horn. If she's listening to music on the radio, she will quite often tell us if she hears a trumpet, trombone, piano, or guitar. As she says the words, she mimes like she's playing the instrument.
  
• Her hair is still curly, especially in this hot weather!
  
• She talks like crazy...pretty much all the time. We're at that weird stage where we can understand most of it, but it's unintelligible to other people, so they just think we're pretending she's talking.
  
• She's getting a bit pickier in the food department, but she's still a pretty good eater. She seems to especially love chicken.
  
• She moved into her big girl bed just after her birthday, and she loves it. She gets excited every time she goes in her room and sees her "own bed". She's been sleeping well, but last night we experienced our first night terror - not fun! We're hoping it will be a short phase.
  
• She loves going to Nancy's house and hanging out with her friends.
  
• Although we wanted to hold off on attempting potty training until the summer (when Jeff will be off with her), she's been very interested and so we've been introducing it slowly. In the next few weeks we'll make a real attempt and see how that goes. The downside: now she likes to make a big deal out of it when WE use the potty successfully! :)
  
• And combining those last two items...one of her favourite songs to sing on the potty is Patty Cake, and we have to bake cakes for every one of her daycare friends before she'll let us stop. Sometimes we even get to bake cakes for Mommy and Daddy too!
  
• She gets more beautiful, and funnier, and more girl than baby, every single day. We are having a blast with her and can't imagine life without her.
  

Site Updated!

Welcome to our new site! Because we have such a beautiful kid, we decided it was time to move our stuff over to a site that has no connection to our last name, just to guard against the crazies. Sad, isn't it? Anyway, this new format will be much easier for us to update, so you can anticipate that we'll be updating a lot more often and posting A LOT more pictures.

The other big news is that we splurged on an account at Flickr. It's a huge photo sharing tool, incidentally started by a bunch of Vancouverites, that allows us to upload a virtually unlimited number of pictures. It's also a cool place to check out...you can see photos from people all over the world. Some of the pictures are amazing! We like it because we can upload lots of pictures and not have to worry about eating up too much space (our old site was huge, and we were going to have to start taking pictures down soon). The other nice thing is that pictures are very high quality, so you can print them right from the site without too much fuzziness (should keep the grandparents happy!).

We've transferred a large selection of photos of Amanda onto Flickr - most of the ones from the old site (although we may have missed a few), as well as some different ones. And because of the large upload capacity, we will probably be posting at least a few new pictures every week. (Ya right - like Jen can restrain herself to only a few a week!!). You can easily link to our entire collection of photos on Flickr by clicking the photo badge on the top right. The only downside - we can't post videos on Flickr, so no videos have yet been posted. We'll figure out a way to do this soon.

So how can you stay updated with the news from our corner of the universe, and all the new pictures of the world's cutest girl? (No bias at all!!). If you use an RSS aggregator, like newsgator (Jen's choice) or Google Reader (Jeff's), you can add our site's address to your feed list and you will automatically see all the updates.

But, if you're not a nerd like us, feel free to drop us an email and we'll be happy to send you a quick email whenever the site is updated. Just be prepared for lots of emails! :)

Please let us know what you think of the new site! We've set up a special email address for this site, again so our last name is invisible (jenniferandjeffrey@gmail.com). All emails to this address will automatically be forwarded to Jen.

One more note...if you do notice anything on this site that gives away our last name, please let us know so we can fix it!

Monthly Birthday Portraits

2 Years!!
Originally uploaded by JenJeff.

All of Amanda's "birthday portraits" (the photos we take of her every month on her rocking chair) are now in one set on Flickr. Each time we add a new one we'll add a new post to the blog, which will link you to the entire set.