21 months

First of all, "umm" is done. Hooray! That went quick. It was cute, but glad it's over.

It's been a long time since I wrote - yikes! As I think I said in a previous post, I threw my back out for about a week, but thankfully feel completely better now. And I've just been too exhausted at the end of every night to even consider sitting down with the laptop. But I got the dishes done quickly tonight and it's still early so here we are. Rosa is 21 months old today, and I felt like this was an auspicious occasion to get caught up (with a long post and lots of pix and videos)!

We've been doing a LOT of fun stuff since I last wrote. Here comes quick descriptions for all the outings where I managed to take pictures. By the way, at least on my computer, the videos DO work, even though they all look black until you hit the play button (and wait a little bit for it to buffer).

We went to the "Little Farm" in Berkeley with a neighborhood playgroup. Rosa's first experience with live farm animals! Cows, ducks, goats, piggies! Unfortunately I was so taken with the experience that I didn't pull out my camera until the ride home. Rosa and Mateus both had a great time and passed out instantly in the car.

After the Little Farm trip, we went to a storytime about farms.

We've been trying to do a big nature trip at least once a weekend for the last 3 weekends and it has been great! By nature I mean a place where we can be away from cars, off of pavement, and not at a playground (we get plenty of that during the week). We went to the arboretum in Golden Gate Park last Saturday. The highlight for Rosa (based on what she continues to talk about) were the 3 squirrels that we stopped and watched (and who stopped and watched us) for probably 15 minutes. I'm pretty sure they wanted Rosa's apple. I'm not sure what Rosa wanted from them...

Soon-to-be-Mama Eva came along on this trip.

Daddy found Rosa a beautiful, huge pink flower... that had fallen on the ground - for real!

Daddy does take a lot of the pictures, so here's one documenting that he was on the trip too!

The next Friday, a bunch of kids from the neighborhood went to the Discovery Museum in Sausalito. We had never been, so we tagged along. It was fantastic! Our first stop was the stream, with fishies, froggies, and sticks!
Then the kids climbed this cool hill that had a tunnel through it (Rosa is super into tunnels right now) and stopped to ride the giant lizard. Don't know the girl in the middle, but that's our friend Paxton at the end.

Then there was this cool maze of woven sticks... as you'll see, Rosa has entered a new phase where if something seems cool and forbidden, she tells me to go away when she thinks I'm going to spoil her fun.

It was a hot day, and I was more than happy to keep feeding Rosa "beeps."

And the following Friday afternoon, Rosa was in heaven - she got to hang out with her two best buddies that she talks about constantly - Peter and Ember (who didn't want to ride on the tire swing).

This was another Saturday "nature" trip, this time to Stern Grove. Rosa found a tap-dancing stage (I think it was a covered fire pit).

About a month ago, Jeff started building towers with Rosa, usually after dinner. In the beginning, it was Jeff building and Rosa knocking down. I knew that Rosa was doing more building lately, but one morning, I was cleaning up after breakfast and came out to find this tower that Rosa had built! I know there was no tower at all before breakfast, so Rosa did it all herself. Pretty good!

I posted this video because I was thrilled to have captured Rosa's version of counting 1-10 on video. She's only missing a few numbers!