Maine Memories

Julia and I just returned from a very happy and memorable vacation to Bar Harbor, Maine. This trip was one of my all time favorites. Even though I had visited this same house and town five years ago, having Julia around makes everything so much more fun!

Here's Julia seeing the ocean for the very first time.
Feeling the cold water for the first time!

Making silly faces

Nothing like feet in the sand

We went to a sandy beach in Acadia National Park. The first thing Julia did was hit the ground and rolled! Over and over again. She laughed the entire time and had a mouth (and head) full of sand! There were people there who were taking pictures of her and videotaping because of her very unique reaction to the sand.

Julia and Daniel digging and talking.

Cute Julia....

Most of the pictures that I have of her involve a lot of sand. Usually on her face. We have been back in Arkansas for several days, and I am still washing sand out of her hair!

Taking a hike at Acadia and throwing some leaves.

They found a rock to slide down.

This is a couple of days worth of sea combing. There is lots of sea glass on the beach behind the house where we stayed. All of us spent hours searching for it on the beach.

Julia, Mattie and Daniel having a picnic in the den.

Standing beside a whale skull at a small university in Bar Harbor. The only major there is ecology. They had a neat museum and the kids loved it.

Julia taking a break to color her daddy a picture at the museum.

Keeping us cracked up

Julia and Daniel entertaining us with a puppet show.

They also had a touch tank with lots of live sea creatures that you could pick up. Julia loved touching the live starfish.

Just had to post this picture of me telling Julia to "look up and smile!" HA!

The towns in Maine are very quaint, with bakeries, home made ice cream, neat little coffee shops, and this cute New England style library.

Julia having fun

Our hostesses....Mary Katherine with Daniel and Mattie

What we had for dinner.....every night. And even some mornings, we would have lobster omelets! Yum. I made the mistake of feeding Julia some lobster the very first night we were there. Of course, she LOVED it and wouldn't touch her chicken strips after she had a bite dipped in butter. Who could blame her?

The back of the house that we stayed in. This is the view from the beach.

This is the view of the beach from the inside of the house. It was an amazing sight to wake up to every morning.

Mattie set up this neat little sea glass "store" on the beach. She would search for sea glass and then put it in shells. She would sell it for 50 cents per shell. What a bargain!

Another night's dinner.

Maine is an amazing place. I am so grateful to have had the experience!

Lovn' Summer!

Julia got a new pool at Jee Jee and Paw Paw's house. She loves playing in the water and calls getting in the sprinkler, "taking a shower!"

We celebrated Father's Day at Jee Jee and Paw Paw's house. Julia happily announced, "Happy Valentine's Day" when she handed Paw Paw his gift!

Juicy Julia loving a juicy strawberry. I think she could eat a gallon a day!

Fun at home.

All of this from my delicious garden. Ha...I so wish. Our Wynne Farmer's market is my favorite stop after work on a Tuesday afternoon. I am going to try not to market it too much because I don't want to give away Wynne's best kept secret. I'll just say all of this, plus a dozen country eggs, for less than $7. WOW!

I went to pick blueberries one night and had a hard time keeping a little hand out of them while I was putting it in freezer bags.

Julia has been having a good time going to the summer reading program at the library. They have story time and a craft every week. This week, Jee Jee took Julia and she made this "art wrok." The fruit loops are the rainbow, cotton balls are clouds and then the sunshine.

I think the summer reading program is working to encourage reading. John and I have spent literally HOURS of reading to Julia the past few weeks. She will sit still and read for an hour or more at a time. Makes me very happy!

Silly Julia, keeps us smiling and so happy!

A Conversation with Julia

Julia's building something with her blocks and I asked her, "Are you building a castle Julia?" She says, "No Mommy, I'm building a architecture." Um......okay.

Farmfest 2010

We had a great time at Wynne's Farmfest this year! Thursday night was armband night where we could ride all the rides we wanted. Julia loved the cars the best. We probably rode this at least 7 or 8 times! Here's Sol and Julia!

Becca snagged this little gem of a picture on the roller coaster. I called it the car wreck roller coaster because that's what I felt like I had experienced when we got off. Julia entertained with a very loud, hearty laugh the whole way!

Here's the Farmfest family of the year, minus baby Rose hanging out listening to some music. Thank you both for coordinating this huge event and for keeping this long time Wynne tradition going! It's a full circle moment for me to watch Julia having a good time at Farmfest. I remember looking so forward to it when I was a kid....it was like Christmas!

Heres Tara and sweet Emmy listening to some music on the courthouse lawn. We also went to Julia's first Redbirds baseball game Friday night with Tara, Emmy and John. It was a fireworks game and our girls loved them! Julia kept blankie wrapped around her head like Mary Magdalene to protect her ears from the loud pops! I was so glad my John got to go with us. He's been missing out on most of our weekend activities because of his music playing/work schedule. He's having fun (well, sometimes) getting to play music for a living even though it can be a rough schedule with lots of driving and crazy all night hours!

Julia eating her first snowcone! She kept saying, "Momma, this is a very special treat!"

Taking a cool, much needed break from Farmfest inside the library.

Back at home, these popsicle breaks after dinner are becoming habitual. Julia and I like to go outside and sit on the deck with a popsicle and talk about our days. You just never know what Julia is going to say. She was telling me about the comode this morning and I couldn't make sense of what she was saying about it. Finally, I asked her to show me what she was talking about and she went and showed me the remote. Oh, should have know...the comode/remote. Close enough!

She also told me that she was building an architecture with her blocks this morning. Ha!

Another first. Here's Julia's first drawings of something other than a circle. She drew these fish on the bathtub the other night. She drew the bodies first, then the tail, the eyes next and ended each drawing with curly hair....lol! Pretty good, huh?

I love this picture of Julia and Mattie! Julia and I went to Rogers weekend before last. Julia adores Mattie and the feeling is mutual. She also adores Daniel, when we are gone.....lol. We had a blast playing outside in their backyard and having a sushi picnic! Also went to the Fayetteville Farmer's market (pretty neat!), a neighborhood garage sale, and saw the new museum that is being built in Bentonville. Another milestone on this trip was that Julia slept with Mattie in her room on her trundle. They laid in bed whispering when we put them down. I couldn't help but listen. I am pretty sure the conversation had something to do with cinnamon cereal being for breakfast!

The backyard activity of choice was to dig up worms and "feed" them sand. Here's Julia feeding them in the sandbox. I am so glad that Mattie led this activity because I am not much on anything slimy and poor Julia would just have to miss out on the awesome opportunity to hold a hand full of worms if I am in charge.

A friendly game of tetherball. Julia laughed for twenty minutes while playing this game. She thought is was hilarious that the ball would swing around and hit her in the head EVERY time she pushed it.

The first two days of Memorial Day weekend 2010 were spent potty training Julia. We started out Saturday morning saying goodbye to the diapers and setting the oven timer every 30 minutes to remind us to go sit on the potty. She insisted on wearing this black ballerina skirt (I have no idea why) over her new panties all day. First day went okay, second day was better, and we haven't had any accidents since! Wow, I anticipated it to be much worse. We did make use of a bag of marshmallows and some fruit snacks for incentives. I guess I will have to pay a therapist to tell me why I am just a little sad about this milestone.

She is just growing up so fast!

Trust me, I know that I will be in big trouble for posting this one some day, but I just couldn't help it. Memorial Day, John and I took Julia to the Memphis zoo where they had lots of water activities for the kids. Julia was soaking wet and loved being in the water sprinklers. Here she is when we were leaving the zoo sitting on her potty in the parking lot.

We also helped to celebrate sweet little Stella's third birthday. She had a water party with bubbles, water guns, sprinklers, and a blow up pool. Lots of sunscreen and laughs!

Here's Julia enjoying her cake and ice cream. This normally mild mannered child pushes everyone out of the way when they start cutting the cake. She has no patience for waiting in line.

Here is my little pirate after the library's first day of their summer reading program called, Make a Splash, READ. They read stories about pirates and then got to make this pirate hat. Julia wore it home and here is my little pirate saying, "Argh!" with her hooked finger.

We are looking forward to lots of fun activities at the library this summer.

And here are Julia and sweet littl Joanie Terhune. These two were having a very serious conversation in front of the hay bale. We love having the Adkisson/Terhune family over to visit. Julia is still talking about Dempsey and Joanie.....days after they left!

I just couldn't pass this one up. Aren't those little ringlets delicious?????

Julia-isms at almost 2 and a half!

Julia's first pigtails! She doesn't like me to mess with her hair much, but she was pretty amused when she saw herself in the mirror. She has the perfect hair for pigtails because you can twist the pigtail one time and this perfect little ringlet curl stays in place.

Another view

This was the first time she realized that she could actually get out of her bed at nap time and find things to play with in her room. We are amazed that she has just now figured it out since she has been in her bed since December! We walked in after nap and found her piggy bank by her head.

Then, under the covers.....all this money. We both thought she was talking more than normal when we left her to go to sleep. No wonder.

Funny things that Julia said this week:

"What would you like for supper tonight Julia?" Her reply, "squid!"

Her stomach was growling and she said, "My tummy's burping!"

"I hear the train Mommy. The train is by the library, actually."

"I'm getting busy!" What she says instead of dizzy.

She has started singing songs that she knows and putting in her own funny words. For example, one of her favorite songs right now is Twist and Shout. So at dinner time, she started singing, "Twist and chips. Come on, come on, come on chip now. Come on and dip a little closer now. And let me know that you mine."

This girl keeps us rolling. You never know what she is going to say.

She goes way out of her way to wade through a mud puddle.

We took her to Village Creek thinking that she would want to hang out at the playground and play. Fortunately, we came prepared with her swimsuit because once she saw this muddy lake, it was all over.

Floating...

Whats a trip to the lake without a Popsicle?

NYC 2010

I got to go on a girl's trip to NYC this Mother's Day. We left Memphis Wednesday and came home Mother's Day Sunday. I went with a friend, Leann, and another of her college friends Tiffany that I met for the first time at the airport! It was NYC like I have never experienced it. They made me venture out and see and do things that I have never done before. Some of my new favorites were the audio tour to the top of the Empire State Building, wandering through Soho, hanging out at Chelsea market (a very fun area of the city!) where they tape the Food Network, and the Museum of Modern Art....amazing and I can't stop thinking about it! Other highlights of the trip were seeing Billy Elliot on Broadway (an UNFORGETTABLE performance), hanging out with the cousin Scottie and her husband Jason that live in NYC (I loved every minute of being with them!), and shopping till we drop then having long lunches in outdoor Italian restaurants where they make the world's best pizza.

Sorry for the tiny pictures....I didn't even bring my own camera and took these from Tiffany's Facebook page. Here is Scottie, Tiffany and I at the Donut Plant, a tiny little hole in the wall place that makes the most delicious doughnuts. I had a coconut creme pie one, fresh out of the oven.

Leann, Tiffany, and I in front of our hotel, The Warwick. Great location....right in the middle of everything!

Us in the bottom of the famous LOVE sculpture in Manhattan.

Scottie and I enjoying lunch in Little Italy


Tiffany, me and Leann holding our cotton candy. It was served after our sushi dinner in a very fancy restaurant. I loved the unexpected twist. Who would have thought cotton candy??

Me, Leann and Tiffany after Billy Elliott on Broadway. LOVED it!