Playtime videos!

This first one is Natalie rocking out to her music table. Her favorite is the "ABC" song. In fact, she now asks for "acey" (meaning "abc song") all the time! So, she's slowly learning the alphabet...yay! And I have no idea why she suddenly backs away at the end of the video; who can understand the mind of a toddler? I also apologize for my singing along to the ABC song; I don't think it's too bad.

This one is her chasing Calla around, and specifically trying to get Calla's little stuffed giraffe. In case you can't understand her, she's saying "get it" as she crawls around.

Another wedding!

Last weekend we went to yet another wedding! This one was our good friend Eric's sister Lisa's wedding. This one was local, so we didn't have far to go. Natalie was explicitly invited, as she's Eric's goddaughter, so it was a good excuse to get her all cutesied up!

First off, here's how I styled her hair; it actually held up pretty well!

The previous pic and this one were taken during the "cocktail hour" portion of the reception. Here she is looking up at me:

To keep Natalie occupied during the reception, I bought her two balloons (one purple, one white, as those were Lisa's colors). So, she's got a balloon in most of the pics from the evening!

She also made new friends in the form of 5 year old Taylor (the flower girl in white) and another girl whose name I didn't get (she was about 4). They played an ineffable game of chase for quite a while in one corner of the reception hall, with the two older girls loving to chase after Natalie (she loved every minute of it too)!

Natalie also spent a lot of time on the dance floor. At one point, the groom (Chris) got behind her as she was making circles on the dance floor, and everyone else filed in behind, and she ended up leading a big conga line around to the song "Love Train". It was hysterical! If only I'd gotten my camera and taken a video then...but I didn't. Instead, we have some photos of her running her circles around the dance floor. I like this one because it looks like Evan took her completely by surprise:

We took a few shots of the 3 of us, but this was the best one I could find of ours (my friend Kathy has a better one).

Adorableness at home

I've got some cute pics and video from over the past week or so, with no real theme. So, why not throw them all into one post?

First, I feel I've neglected our first "child" a bit lately in terms of pics. Here's Calla one evening last week, completely worn out from playing ball. However, she has just enough energy to protect her chewie:

Here's Natalie relaxing on the floor under a blanket:

And here's Natalie looking adorable on our steps in her new shorts (sent to her by her great Aunt Jackie & cousin Ryann). I love the black & white; gotta love Old Navy!

Lastly, here's a great video of Natalie enjoying her new favorite pasttime: walking around in my shoes. This one made me a little nervous, as she's wearing a pair of my heals and I was worried about her falling and hurting an ankle, but she did amazingly well! I would say all told, she walked around in them for at least 5-10 minutes. We haven't done this again since; I let her walk around in my slippers now, which is safer and she seems just as happy.

Big Girl Milestone

Abbe is out to dinner tonight with colleagues, so it was Daughter and Daddy night at the Macbeth house. That's always a great time. After I got Natalie from daycare, we went to the field near our house with Calla and played "Best Game Ever." I take my 7 iron to tennis balls and Calla and Natalie chase them around the field. Always a nice 30 minute exhaustion exercise for both dog and daughter. After a while Natalie loses interest in chasing the tennis balls, but not the field itself. She wanders about examining acorns and trees, and asking "what's that?" while Calla continues to chase my efforts at tennis ball chipping in tall rough.

All in all, a great time.

After we did that for a while, we came home and I made some dinner. During dinner (it's Friday, so frozen pizza), we Skyped with Uncle Todd and Aunt Claire, who were just getting up on a Saturday morning. Todd and Natalie waved at each other, and Natalie demonstrated her maturing vocabulary and fork skills to her uncle.

After she was done eating, Natalie wanted to play with her blanket, which she puts on her head an walks around with, bumping into things. This is a game Scott, Todd and I used to call "Google Monster" when we were little, and apparently, it runs in the family because Natalie started playing it a few months ago. After some more play time, it was bath time.

Natalie's really good in the bath, or "shower" as she prefers. And she does prefer standing under the shower to sitting in the bath. So after our typically good bath, we did what we have done for the past few months: I sat her down in the "Froggy Potty" we got for her. We've been sitting her down in that after every bath to get her used to sitting on there. She also has a habit of liking to pee on the carpet while running around naked immediately after baths, so it seemed logical to try to head that off at the pass.

Well, tonight, I sat her on the potty and asked if she needed to go pee. She said "pee" and when I picked her up, she'd peed in the potty! After her bath tonight, Natalie used the potty for the first time! Now, she's only 20 months old, so I suspect this is not the start of an immediate trend, but rather a successful catching of pee that would have otherwise wound up on the carpet, but I made a big deal of it with her nonetheless. It's a first, and a pretty important one.

This is another Big Girl milestone for Natalie. It's cliched, but it is hard to believe she's come so far already. It doesn't seem that long ago that we brought her home. And just in the past few months, she's putting sentences together, helping walk the dog, feeding herself with a fork and telling us what she wants (including when she wants to go to bed, unbelievably!). And now tonight, peeing in the potty.

It is amazing being a dad. I simply love it, and I love that little girl.

Fun at the pool

To try and beat the heat on Sunday, we went to our pool for a little bit. We only stayed for a little more than an hour, as it was getting towards lunch time and Natalie was getting tired. Got some cute pics of Natalie enjoying her snack in the lounge chair:

We finally found a hat that Natalie was willing to wear! She's just not into hats, but the sun was so strong that I wanted her to wear it. And it was a little big, so I think more comfy than some others.

Her favorite pool game can be seen in this video. She's finally at the point where she's starting to jump in on her own!

New haircut!

Not me this time - Natalie got her first official haircut! I ended up taking her to the "Cartoon Cuts" kids hair place in the mall, as I figured they'd be used to dealing with little ones. Unfortunately, Natalie was a little fussy, and didn't want to sit in the chair by herself. So, instead I sat her on my lap, and she watched the little boy next to her get his hair shaved, which proved fascinating (apparently). Then, her haircut went much better. So, here's the before picture from Friday:

And here's the after, on Saturday:

The woman did a pretty great job! The bangs are good; won't need to be trimmed again for a while. She took a little bit more off the length than I would've liked (I can't quite put it all in a ponytail anymore, as I could last week), but her hair seems to be growing pretty quickly, so I think shortly we'll be able to. I think I would definitely take her back there!

Oh - and on Natalie's feet in the first picture are her new sandals (she outgrew all of her other ones). They're really great - so cute with the butterflies! She doesn't catch the front on the sidewalk cracks and fall like she did with her previous ones, and they have tons of support. I found them at RackRoom Shoes for only $9.99! Can't beat it.

Adult?

This comic fully sums up how I feel sometimes:



Every now and again I find myself saying something when I'm with my friends like "we can't do that, there will be adults there!" And then I realize that by anyone's standard, I AM an adult! I have a PhD, a full time job with good benefits, am married, have a child, and find myself discussing things like taxes and retirement with my friends. This makes me an adult!

Yet, I still giggle sometimes when someone says "duty" (cause it sounds like "doodie"), and add "that's what she said" after someone else says "this is really hard". These are not things that "adults" are supposed to do. anyone else ever feel this way?

Busch Gardens

On Saturday, Evan and I dropped Natalie at my sister's house in Richmond for the night. Carrie watched her niece for us while we went to Busch Gardens with a group of our friends. Here are Kathy and I getting locked up as we entered the park:

I rode one ride (Escape from Pompeii), which was basically an elaborate log flume ride. Not too steep of a drop (even though i was terrified! I'm not a roller coaster person), and it got us drenched when we arrived, which was good as it was SOOO hot!



Since my friend Beta is 6 months pregnant, I went on the kiddie rides with her daughter Zabby. She liked the little ferris wheel, but got a bit freaked out while we were hanging at the top (only about 10 feet in the air) waiting for others to get on.


We had dinner at the "Elmo & Friends" buffet because we thought it would be fun for Zabby. Turns out, she was TERRIFIED of the characters! We felt so bad for her. However, we grownups ended up having a better time than expected! Here are Kathy and I getting our picture taken with Big Bird & Elmo:


And Cookie Monster stopped by our table. The girl in the costume is actually starting at UVA in the fall! So she hung out at our table for quite a while, and put on Eric's UVA baseball cap (but we didn't get a good picture of that).

And you can't go to Busch Gardens without seeing the beautiful Clydesdale horses!

We capped the night off with seeing the free concert as part of the summer concert series: Foreigner! Ah, 80s flashback. We went for the cheesy factor, so I was a bit frightened by the guy in front of us wearing a "Foreigner Tour 2008" shirt, and all of the women staring at the stage as if they were rock gods, singing along to every word. We of course knew some of the words though, like in this video! Sorry for the bumpiness; I was dancing around a bit. Luckily it didn't pick up my singing.