Making Waves

Hello. It's been a long time since I posted anything. It's not because we haven't been doing things, it's just that the faster our daughter gets, the harder it is to take clear photos...especially when we have to chase her in the process. Our little girl is so active these days. And her vocabulary is insane. She now speaks in fragmented sentences, but is able to get her point across without too much guess work on our part.

She says things like: up here, right there, sit down right here, nap time, night night, love you, miss you, daddy work, daddy home, daddy airport, daddy airplane, bubbles bath, help you, carry you, mommy please, thank you, welcome, play dough, color, puzzle, Elmo book, and the list goes on and on.

One of her most favorite words recently is: BONK! and Norton--her stuffed puppy. She carries Norton around every where and if she drops him or bangs his head on something she says, "BONK!" It's super cute.

Today we went to the zoo. Just the mention of the zoo gets her excited. I never heard her string so many words together as she did this morning when she found out she was going to get to see the animals. She said, "Zoo! Zoo! Mommy! Ele-p-tant, monkey, peacock, gaff (which is giraffe). Ha, ha, zoo, Mommy." I personally thought that was amazing. Especially that she remembered that all of those animals are at the zoo. She is such a little smarty pants.

Here is a little photo of us just after having eaten lunch by the fountain at the zoo.

[This is simply C. ]

Yesterday was a very hot day. So I got out the inflatable pool and we had some fun splashing around and keeping cool. Take a look:

Exploring the Arboretum

Our dear friend, Heidi, kindly gave us a temporary membership pass to the Arboretum. She gets her membership through work and is allowed to share the guest passes with us. This is totally cool because we can go anytime we want without having to be with a member.

I presented our little pass to the welcome window lady yesterday afternoon and breezed on in. The Arboretum is a fun place to go with little kids. They have an entire section set up for toddlers, preschoolers and elementary kids to explore, hands on. Here are some fun shots from our day.

Call me "Crazy"

Okay, so maybe I went a little overboard with the exercise on Saturday. Here's how it went down: First I went to the gym in the morning. I wasn't going to do much, but I got on the treadmill by the windows that look out over a cluster of trees and some open fields. When I do this, I tend to loose myself in my thoughts way more than if I choose to use the machines that overlook the entire gym and face the televisions. With that said, I programed my machine to do a 35 minute run. Well, I was feeling so good that ten minutes into my run I decided it would be fun to do sprints and hills. So I proceeded to do two minutes on/ two minutes off sprints and hills for 14 minutes. When I finished, I had run a total of 4.2 miles. Then I did some ab work and left the gym.

When I got home I had precious little time to shower, dress and pack up the stroller and day bag for a day in the city with our friends Ana and Kristina. We picked them up and made it to the train by 11:30 a.m. Just in time to park and get our kids and stuff onto the station platform.

We arrived in the city just before 1 p.m. We knew we had exactly three and a half hours to do whatever we wanted before we had to be at Kellogg to meet up with my hubby, who was to drive us home.

We set off for Navy Pier from the train station--an almost two mile walk. It was a beautiful day, a little cloudy, but warm enough to be comfortable doing all this walking. We arrived at the pier, had some snacks, took a few pictures and headed for the beach. We had only about an hour and a half left at this point.

The babies loved being in the sand. C found all kinds of treasures and really seemed to enjoy watching the birds dive in and out of the water. I brought along her shovel and star sand toy so she would have something to play with. I'm glad I did because this allowed me some respite from all the insane exercise I got that day. We sat on a blanket and played in the sand for quite some time.

After some time we felt a few rain drops which prompted me to look at my watch. Sure enough we only had about 35 minutes to get to the school. We put the kiddos back in the strollers and headed up the lakeside walkway to the Chicago St. underpass. This would have been perfect except that the underpass was filled with about three feet of water. There was no way we could take the strollers in there--nor would I want to. So we had to turn around and walk all the way back to the beach to use the Navy Pier underpass several blocks down. This little mishap took up 20 minutes of our time so we had to move fast. We got to the school with five minutes to spare. Phew. We were pretty tired by this point. But all was well because we found C's daddy and he took us home.

Later I went to one of my favorite websites http://www.mapmyrun.com/ and mapped out our trip all the way from Union Station to Navy Pier to the beach, down the walkway (and back), then to Kellogg Business School on Superior St. All in all it was 4.1 miles. So there you have it...a little over 8 miles for me that day. And wouldn't you know it, I went walking with a friend this morning and am headed to the gym in a few hours yet today. I guess I am a glutton for punishment. I should have listened to my mom years ago. She always said, "No pain. No pain." I kind of like a little pain. It lets me know I'm really living.