Summer Babe

August is almost over, and I only blogged once the entire month. And honestly, that post was pretty slapdash (oh man, that word just popped into my head, and I'm about to start overusing it in daily life. Get ready, friends.) So back to the blog... SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED!!

Let's see... we are still eating new foods. Annabel eats a new food twice a day for three days. Here's the rundown in order of consumption:

Green beans, sugar snap peas, avocado, rice cereal, banana, spaghetti squash (from the garden!), pears, collard greens (from the garden!), sweet potatoes, chick peas, yellow squash, carrots, and apples.

Get in my belly, pear.

I'm having way too much fun making baby food. I've probably mentioned this before, but Fox's firm generously gifted us with a Beaba Babycook. It steams and purees -- one container to wash. After a long day of work, only washing one thing when you make baby food is key. Now that I've used it a dozen or some times, I can say with confidence that the French are geniuses, at least in the baby food appliance department (which is probably the most important department, really).

Annabel has loved all the foods, but none as much as the collards from our garden. My heart bursts with pride (and honestly a lot of surprise) to report this. Collards are my favorite too, so maybe she remembers them from her time on the inside. Observe her enjoying this treat from the Fox garden:



Our philosophy: if you aren't making a mess, you aren't doing it right (or having enough fun).

Annabel has now figured out how eating works. At first, I never thought she would get it. She could not be convinced that her hands were not a part of the transaction. She wanted the spoon. She thought she knew how to use it. WRONG. Exhibit A:

To be fair, sometimes she did pretty much get it right.

But now, she opens her mouth in an appropriate fashion, swallows at the right time, and all around understands how to be fed with a spoon. It really is amazing to watch someone learn how to do everything from scratch. She's ready for finger foods, but I'm so scared of her choking. We'll get there eventually. I can spoon feed her into her teens, right?

In addition to eating food, we've had some great visitors. Our good buddy Karl came to visit. He helped keep Annabel out past her bedtime on her 6 month birthday. He's really good for things like that.

Our dear, dear Libby came to visit as she moved her sister from New York to Houston. Annabel crashed a family cookout for these Koch sisters and giggled the whole time. The Kochs were also witnesses to Annabel's second foray into solid food. She was much happier eating with a cheering audience.

Fox's parents came to visit. Annabel loved playing games with GranDeb. They also kept her for a few hours while we went to see Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings at Variety Playhouse. It was fantastic -- thank you, thank you Foxes!

While we're talking about good music, Fox's band played a really great show in Marietta at the Strand Theater's rooftop deck. It started at 6, so Annabel and I were able to go for part of it, pre-bedtime. She likes to seize any opportunity to wear her Bellwether Station onesie.




The weather was great, and we had so much fun. Annabel even started dancing side to side, which was a new level of cute.

We went to visit my folks in Columbia, and they had not seen Annabel since before we went to California on May 13. They could not believe how much she'd grown and changed. On the trip there, we reached another milestone -- Annabel sat in her first restaurant high chair! We like to stop at sketchy Mexican restaurants when we travel, and we found a good candidate in Monteagle, Tennessee with Mi Casa. It was pretty good. Check out this high chair pro:

So it's entirely possible that we got carried away in Mi Casa. But as crunk as the pictures appear, we were not loud. Annabel is a baby ambassador. She goes places where people don't like babies (such as restaurants, airplanes, movies, and San Francisco [okay, she's been to one movie and she was asleep the whole time -- we aren't getting carried away here {how many different parentheticals can I use? I'm not even certain these are correct any more. When I close all these parentheticals, it is going to look like a ridiculous emoticon, but really it is just punctuation.}]), and she behaves. It's glorious. People say with amazement as Annabel Jane smiles sweetly at them, "What a good baby." And I think to myself smugly, "Yes, I'm sure you were a grumpy, rotten baby, and now you sit in judgement of all babies." Ugh, sorry -- the babyhaters have been getting to me lately. It's one thing to dislike ill-behaved babies and too-permissive parents, but another thing entirely to dislike someone because they are a parent or a baby. We were all babies at some point, people. It's disturbing, but true. You can't Benjamin Button your way out of this one, grumpypants.



Annabel has also started to enjoy water, which is fun. Look at her in the Best Float Ever:





Oh also, she has Two Teeth (forgive the seemingly errant capitalization. I have been reading a lot of Winnie the Pooh to Annabel, and I love how A.A. Milne capitalizes certain words to give them Special Meaning. I'm trying it out.). The Two Teeth are adorable. I love them even though they are crazy sharp. Behold:


She is really digging the Jenny Jump Up too.




So there you have it -- a pretty good rundown of the last half of our summer. If you are Facebook friends with me, you may be disappointed that most of these are the same pictures I recently posted in an album of the same name. However, they are really fun pictures (and a really apt title [and a swell Pavement song to boot {here I go with the parentheticals again}]).


I'm going to bed before this punctuation situation gets any further out of control.