We were very excited to meet our niece Savannah and happy to attend her baptism. She is a beautiful baby who always seems to be smiling.
Summer Vacation: Maryland
Our summer vacation began in Maryland visiting Emily’s family. Grammy Carolyn made us a wonderful dinner including a mixed green salad with avocado slices which I had several helpings. After a long day of traveling, a nourishing salad is just what I need. For dessert there were mixed berries, spongecake and whip cream. Uncle John, who is a children’s librarian, bonded quickly with Jasmine, getting her giggling and playing with his silly faces and antics. Grammy Carolyn soothed Jasmine to sleep with a nice bedtime story.
Summer Vacation
June heralded a couple milestones for us. First it was Jasmine’s birthday. Second it was my niece Savannah’s baptism. And third, we wanted to begin introducing Jasmine to our family. And so with the help of Gran Gran Rachel, we planned a one week East coast vacation to Maryland and Delaware.
Like most kids, Jasmine is in constant movement, so were concerned how she would cope being confined to an airplane seat for many hours. Jasmine’s positive attitude and our detailed preparation paid off, because Jasmine did great.
Earlier we had gone shopping for additional luggage and had purchased a little rolling black suitcase for Jasmine. When we got home, Jasmine took it upstairs and filled it with a nice selection of toys and then took it back downstairs next to the door. She then yelled “I’m ready to go!” After laughing, we explained that the trip was still many weeks away. And that our next step is to decorate your suitcase. So the black suitcase now has pink poke-a-dots. On travel day, Emily filled the suitcase with snacks and toys which Jasmine happily rolled around the airport.
My preparation was researching and purchasing a portable dvd player. I then tested the battery life, which seemed to be about 3.5 hours, even thought the box said it was good for 6. We then acquired movies that would appeal to both parent and child such as The Incredibles, Elf, Robots, and Wallace & Grommit. The dvd player proved to be good investment as it provided a calming distraction during an unexpected 4 hour layover.
Food Adventure: Vietnamese
It’s my first fathers day and Emily said she was buying me lunch. So I picked Pho’s to get some lovely Vietnamese noodle soup. We started off with some Jasmine tea, which came in a very pretty pot. Our Jasmine tried it, but she didn’t seem to like it very much. Of course she may have been distracted by the chopsticks. She tried numerous experiments with the chopsticks with only one or two explorations having the purpose of grasping food. Let’s just say I came very close to wearing an eyepatch this week.
Our food arrived and we gave samples of our dishes to Jasmine to try. She ate bean sprouts, rice noodles, and cucumbers. She even took a bite of a jalapeno pepper, even though we warned her they are very hot. We just smiled as Jasmine’s eyes got really big with surprise and she quickly reached for a gulp of water.
We split ginger creme brulee for dessert, which sounded unusual, but tasted yummy. Jasmine absolutely loved it, she ate heaping spoonfuls as fast as she could.
Hot Air Balloons
We got up at 5:15am today to go watch the annual balloon festival. We were worried because of the low cloud cover and drizzly weather that the balloon launch might be canceled (and that we would have gotten up early for no good reason). We arrived on location at 5:45 and waited… But nothing in the sky. We decided to go for a walk in a nearby park since we were already here. And at 6am we saw our first of many balloons take off into the sky. What a beautiful sight.
