First Grader

No qualifications of "rising" this time around - Zara is officially a 1st grader! She walked into school and immediately began chatting with teachers and friends. The first picture shows her awesome confidence and readiness to take on the (1st grade) world. In the second picture she's pointing at her name on an alligator outside of Ms. Branson's class. Early reports indicate she had a fantastic first day.

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

We spent 3 fun-filled and very tiring days with family and friends in Brooklyn. The late nights and early mornings took their toll on the kiddos, as you can see from this picture of the 2 of them sacked out in the car. Lucky for them, too, because they both napped through the only significant bit of traffic on the whole trip - the New Jersey Turnpike. For once, the root of all driving evil was not the Washington DC Beltway?! Looks like there was some construction on the turnpike, though. Hopefully they are widening it some more so the merge of cars only and everyone else doesn't back up for miles and miles...

And we're walking....

Maryann was headed back to Australia, and flying out of Dulles. So naturally we took the opportunity to introduce Amity to the Udvar-Hazy extension? addition? to the Air and Space Museum. It's all one big happy Smithsonian family, who keeps track of the distinctions, anyway?

Here we see Zara and Amity, and then just Zara, camped in front of the SR-71 Blackbird. Man, that thing is cool. The other two pictures show the kids, of course, and the space shuttle prototype Enterprise. It never flew in orbit but they did a bunch of test runs with it. I believe they'll be getting one of the actual shuttles soon and passing the big E on over to another museum... stay tuned!

Another tooth later...

This time the tooth came out at bedtime! This one required a bit more of an tug, but came out very easily with minimal trauma to all involved. What is not pictured is the 1 dollar bill, folded into nested origami hearts, she received in the morning. She had asked the Tooth Fairy for a "real, live Zebra" but allowed that "if not, money would be ok." We hear some kids get as much as $5 a tooth (or more?!?!) but Zara's tooth fairy seems to be more of an artist type fairy - of modest means but endless creativity!

Happy 18 month Birthday, Amity!

Ok, so we kind of slacked on the month birthdays, but 18 months is a big one. So here's Amity. Aged 18 months.