The week of 'yar!'

Although I just posted a few days ago, there's still a lot of stories to tell this week. 

For one thing, I forgot to tell you all about the first sweater that I've ever knitted. I sure learned a lot. It took forever to finish it, but it's done. I sent it off last week to a little girl named Mina Lockhart who lives in Dartmouth. She was born in December and she gets her gift in June. At least I knitted a sweater that's for a one year old so hopefully she'll get some wear out of it!

A picture of the Stella d'Oro daylily at the front of our house...in the rain. It sure has done a lot of raining over the past week or so. They say the mosquitoes will be upon us a week or so from now. Great. 

One of Sarah's favourite things to do is to play with the static cling 'stickers' that we have for the door onto the deck. Here's a butterfly in the rain.

On one of the nice days this week Sarah and I had some fun on the deck with her hat and various expressions on her face. She's very interested in emotions and facial expressions these days.

Holy pout, batman.

Sarah the clown.

Sarah's having a lot of fun drinking out of the monkey glass that Nana and Bummpa gave her when they came to visit (see last post) but she's also branching out to drinking out of the container that I water inside plants with. What a clown.

Sarah is really enjoying the bird feeder on our deck and she can now identify two of the birds that spend the most time there. She's very good at saying 'grackle' and the red-winged blackbird she calls 'black.' She also said 'car' this week and calls a muffin, 'muffo.' I have one of those mini-muffin silicone muffin pans and she sure loves her mini-muffins! This weekend Dale taught her to talk like a pirate. She's very good at saying 'yar!' During the week Sarah and I had a great time saying 'buffalo'. It was like our code word. Every time she got a bit grouchy this week I would say 'buffalo' which would lead to her forgetting that she was grouchy in her hurry to say 'buffalo' and laugh...boy did we ever laugh!

Her favourite book this week is 'Good Night Moon'. She asks for it to be read to her at least 3 or 4 times a day. She's very good at saying 'night' and today she added 'moon' to her vocabulary. She can't say them together though. She's getting close to saying more than one word at a time, but she's not there yet. However, with a combination of signs and words she is generally talking in sentences. It's pretty neat to see.

On Saturday we got into our biking gear and although it was threatening rain we put Sarah into the bike carrier and took off for the Assiniboine Park and the Zoo! The trip took about 1/2 hour and Sarah had a great time in the carrier. I was having a hard time keeping up with speedy Dale on his new hybrid bike! Sarah ran around the zoo for over an hour, stopping for two quick snacks and tripping by the bears. The paths aren't very smooth and she doesn't look where she's going so naturally she tripped. However, this was a worse than usual tumble - it drew a bit of blood on her lip and I think she bit her tongue a tiny bit and she had a bump on her forehead. Luckily the red squirrels and the Markhors were right there so she was easily distracted. After the Markhors there's the slide, so, she was off again!

On Sunday (Father's day) Sarah gave her Daddy a card and a piece of artwork. When I was supervising her artistic endeavours yesterday I silently thanked the person who invented washable crayons. What a great invention! Anyway - in the morning Dale and Sarah went swimming and after her nap he took her to the park to fly a kite while I made dinner. Apparently Sarah is great at flying kites. She stood very still and held onto the string while Dale launched the kite. She loved letting out the string but after it was all out and there wasn't any very exciting going on (except the kite flying around) she gave the string back to Dale. When he wound the kite back down it got interesting again when she could touch the tail.