Army Crawl and Stingrays

Alex has begun to army crawl today. He is so proud of himself, now that he's mobile he thinks that he is king of the roost. He scoots along and chews up anything he can get his hands on. But he is learning that his sister is still top dog, when he tries to grab her legs she makes sure he knows who's boss. He also gets up on his knees when he gets really excited, but he just hasn't figured out how to put that together with forward motion yet.

Melly had an exciting day today, she got to touch a stingray! She also saw an octopus, a turtle, lots of fish, frogs, a few snakes, and even a spider or two. She also got to hear an electric eel strike, see poison dart frogs and after melting daddy's heart he gave in and got her a stuffed porcupine. For those of you who don't know, the porcupine has moved into her top three favorite animals. It's right up there with owls and butterflies. She often walks around the house saying "pine" and doing the ASL sign for porcupine.

I start school again tomorrow and my schedule this semester will be my toughest yet. Not that the subject material will be more difficult than previous semesters, but that I am going to continue to work full time and take all evening classes. So today I took PTO from work and we went out as a family to do something fun before all the work begins. We decided that Melly would love to go to the aquarium, so we packed up the kids and headed for Sandy. Fortunately my grandma was able to come along on short notice, thanks Grandma Smith, I know we all enjoyed seeing you again. Melly loved everything, she spent the whole time running from one exhibit to the next jabbering about the fish. The highlight for daddy was the stingray tank where he and Melly and Grandma touched the stingray. Mommy was too scared to try it. Grandma got a big kick out of trying to get Wendi to look at the spiders and the cockroaches. But of course Wendi wouldn't even look at them, regardless of the fact that she was separated from them by 15 feet of air and 2 inches of plexiglass.

On the way home we stopped at Cabelas to see more animals. By then Melly had seen plenty of fish so we only spent a minute looking at their fish tanks. We moved on the the bears and deer. She went through a dozen animal signs in under a minute and of course she spotted the porcupine. After that the rest of the animals didn't matter, all she said was, "jabber jabber pine, jabber jabber mommy pine jabber jabber." As we passed the stuffed animals she spotted a rabbit and had to hold it. Daddy took it away and meanly told her that we weren't buying her another stuffed animal. After thirty paces of trying to carry her in melt down mode daddy gave in an said she could carry it around until we left. I mean it was thirty bucks, no way were we buying it. Mommy took her back to the bin and what did they come back with - a stuffed porcupine. I don't know where she gets all these strange stuffed animals. She adds the porcupine to a collection including multiple owls, a seal, a moose, a snake, along with the more tame items like dogs and bears and lions and bunnies. She also has a hippo that isn't stuffed but she often carries it around with her. While we're on that subject we went to the dollar store a few weeks ago and let her pick out her birthday present, did she pick out a doll or something? No she picked out a rubber hippo and a big plastic ant.

So back to the stuffed porcupine she hugged it nonstop for the rest of the time at Cabellas. She just loves that it's a puppet and experimented with putting her hand in it and making it wiggle. It just melted daddy's heart and he had to buy it for her. (It wasn't $30 though, it would take a lot on her part to pry $30 out of daddy's tightwad hands.)

Enough of me talking, I know most of you skipped the text and are jumping down to the pictures so here you go:






I know it looks like Melynn is eating something sour, but this is actually her "cheese" (smile for the camera) face.




She loved looking at the screen as we took the picture.