Thanksgiving 2007

Thanksgiving '07

Album | Slideshow

We spent Thanksgiving at Carol's brother Bob's house in north Seattle with his family and Carol's nieces and nephews and other family. 17 people altogether. The feast was delicious and we all had a great time. Audrey and Charlotte ran and ran and ran with their cousins and came home exhausted. They both slept all night and "late" the following morning (until 7:15!). Carol and I went to bed at 9:30 and had our best night's sleep in a long time. We failed to get up at midnight to hit the outlet malls.

Charlotte decided a few weeks ago to give talking a serious try. All of a sudden she has a lot of words. The first color she learned was brown, which she says as "brr". Then she learned yellow ("lellow"). Anything that isn't brown is "lellow". She regularly says "uh oh" now. Carol is "maaa" and as of this week I am "la la" very consistently. Charlotte also clearly says "baby" and "happy". Carol heard her say "puppy" once but she hasn't repeated that. This morning Charlotte was sitting on my lap looking at family photos and she started saying "Audrey" clearly and repeatedly.

Audrey's favorite thing to do with me is play chase. We often play for a long time when I get home from work. Charlotte plays sometimes, too. Lately Audrey prefers a variation where once I catch her I wrap her up completely in a blanket and squeeze her, or reach in and tickle her. She could play this game for hours. Sometimes I pick her up in the blanket like a sack of potatoes and carry her somewhere else in the house. "Where am I now?," she'll ask from inside. When she's watching TV she loves to be all buried in a blanket nest so she just has a little opening to look through.

Audrey is also trying to learn letters and numbers. She's been singing the alphabet song. She can't quite get it right yet, but if we sing along with her she can make her way through it. And she's starting to do some reasoning with numbers. This morning at breakfast she said, "We have three girls and one boy." I started asking her questions like, "If your cousin Kristen came over, how many girls would we have?" Audrey was able to reason it out every time.