Today, Nora rode her pedal bike without training wheels. It took us a few weeks back on the balance bike to unlearn the bad habits she picked up with those blasted training wheels but now she’s got it and she’s unstoppable (literally unstoppable, we’re still working on brakes).
We’ve noted the resemblance between Nora and Colin, but it goes deeper than mere looks — both eat their chocolate chip cookies so that the chocolate ends up all over their faces! To be fair, Colin didn’t really eat his (er. . .my) cookie, he just licked it. Not sure that an oatmeal walnut chocolate chip cookie is the ideal first solid food for the baby, though given his DNA it’s definitely within the realm of possibility.
We took about a million pictures (roughly) on Christmas morning of Colin and Nora opening their presents (mostly Nora). Here is but a small sample of our photographic bounty.
Nora had never had a “friend” birthday party before, but we thought that 5 is a pretty important milestone birthday and deserved to be treated as such. Way back in August, Nora decided that she wanted her party to be at Pump-It-Up (a giant inflatable bouncy house place), so that is what we did. 17 pre-schoolers ran and jumped and bounced for an hour, then we sugared them up with some delicious cake and sent them home.
I sincerely hope little Ezra will never find out about this post. He made Nora this adorable little note. It says “Nora & Ezra” and we’re pretty sure those things around the edges are little hearts. Some of them are oxygenated (red) and some are not (blue), but they’re all very, very sweet.
Nora is taking Saturday morning art classes at one of the museums near our house. Last Saturday was the first day. She wasn’t entirely sure at first, but she came around.
We found this lovely “welcome home” sign Nora made for us hanging on the door when we got home from the Hospital on Monday. This was never going to be a mundane moment, but Nora’s thoughtfulness made it particularly sweet and memorable. Welcome home, little one!
EDIT: Nora informs me that the people on the “welcome home” sign are mermaids. The large grey thing is a pearl that’s lost its clam. The green stuff is seaweed.
Nora made us an unexpected door sign. We cried.
Nora’s new baby brother arrived on Earth at 11:32am CDT today. He weighs a whopping 8 pounds, 11 ounces and is 21″ long making him approximately the size his big sister was at almost 2 months of age. So far he doesn’t really do much more than sleep, eat, cry, and try to eat his hands. Both Colin and Jen are doing very well and resting more or less comfortably. Nora tells us that, “I’m not quite sure how I feel about my baby brother yet” which strikes us as impressively wise and circumspect for an almost-but-not-quite five year old human.
Colin’s uncle Brian’s birthday is on September 2nd so we’re afraid the two have a lot of shared birthday cakes to look forward to over the coming years. Happy birthday, Uncle Brian, and happy 0th birthday, Colin Hugh!
Colin Hugh after one pretty rough day.
Nora had been to the dentist before, back in Ann Arbor, but that was mostly just sitting with mommy while mommy got her teeth cleaned. This was Nora’s first real trip to the dentist, and it was a special kids dentist where everything was just the right size for a Nora and where there were fishies and books and toys and prizes.
These pictures are from our first trip to Space Center Houston/the Johnson Space Center. We’d already gotten her pretty excited about the eight planets and the Sun and she was naturally excited about the Moon (who isn’t?). We got to see MOCR-2, the historic mission control that controlled the Apollo 11 moon landing and was one of two control rooms used for all of the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle Missions until 1998. The second historic control room, the cleverly-named MOCR-1, has been gutted and replaced is now a Starbucks, I think. Nora was totally into the whole thing but was ultimately wooed away from space exploration by the giant multi-floor climbing gym in the visitors’ center.
