I think there are only a few people left who actually read this blog, and that's fine, and I think most of them live in the South but for those of you who don't, you may not have had the pleasure of experiencing a Southern summer thunderstorm (say that 3 times fast!). These storms show up in the heat of the day (or night) and pour down big, fat drops of rain, bringing some cooling power with them, and they often don't have threatening lightning to contend with, though sometimes they do and sometimes it's in the form of what I've always heard termed as "heat lightning" which means the lightning is simply going from cloud to cloud and not down to the earth. These summer thunderstorms have become one of my favorite things about living in the south. I love to sit out on our porch and watch the storm move across the sky and get sprinkled by whatever rain is carried onto the porch by the wind. I think part of the appeal is that it reminds me of vacations to warm, tropical climates like Hawaii, where on our honeymoon in Kauai we had many rainy morning breakfasts on the covered patio of the hotel, or Jamaica where we celebrated our first anniversary and were treated almost daily to an afternoon rainy cool down where we sat inside one of the gazebos and drank Jamaican coffee. You'll note these places are tropical, whereas Memphis and Nashville are not. However, according to one of my professors in college, Memphis has a precipitation pattern identical to that of a tropical climate - it precipitates year round with about the same amount of accumulation - it just happens to be farther north and therefore doesn't have the same temperatures, but in the summer it feels very similar.
Anywho, the point of all of this is that since I love observing thunderstorms from the front porch and since there was such a thunderstorm last Friday, Evie and Seth and I sat on the porch for a while and watched. Evie ended up playing with the water coming down from the gutters over the porch, and she was determined that every roll of thunder was actually an airplane.
As you can tell, she ended up quite wet and we had to change her clothes, but she certainly had a good time.
Speaking of airplanes, I've been enchanted by Evie's interest in all things locomotive. She talks about airplanes and watches the sky for them when she hears them. She identifies the cars and trucks on the road and gets especially excited if any of them happen to be yellow. This past Sunday we drove down to Memphis, just me and Evie, and we saw lots of people coming back from the lake so there were trucks aplenty hauling jet skis and boats, so we talked about those too. She also likes seeing buses and will often then request the "Wheels on the Bus" song.
Her interest in airplanes is something I kind of capitalized on last week while Seth was recovering from surgery. We are selling our house and the front flower bed had gotten a little too weedy for me to feel comfortable about letting it go like that until our closing date, so I bought a weeder and while I was at the store I saw child-size plastic ones too. I thought it would be a good way for us to be outside together, working, and staying out of Dada's hair while he recuperated, so I decided to buy one for Evie too, but then came the inevitable choice of a "girl" or "boy" weeder. There were three weeders to choose from: pink Disney Princess, green Monsters Inc, or blue Planes movie themes. While Evie does enjoy Cinderella and has several princess and pink things, I tend to shy away from getting everything she owns in pink or princess themes - not that I mind if other people do - I just don't always choose that for her by default. She's seen a little bit of Monsters Inc while waiting in the doctor's office and seemed to enjoy it, but I thought she would really appreciate the Planes one, even though she hasn't seen that movie, and I was right. When we sat down on the grass that afternoon to do some weeding together I pointed out to her that her weeder had an airplane on it and she was thrilled. She proceeded to call it "Evie's air-pane" and even started referring to my weeder as "Mama's air-pane" even though mine, of course, did not have a cool plane on it.
In the last week, Evie has developed some more final consonant awareness and is now pronouncing t's at the end of words like wet and seat, and also doing the developmentally appropriate substitution of the t sound for k's at the end of words, so the color is peent instead of pink, and she drinks milt instead of milk.
Two new phrases she's added this week: when we play ball she said, "I got it!" but the emphasis is on got and I can hear my own voice in her utterance of this phrase. She also says, "I got it!" when she does something physically difficult like climbing onto a chair or putting a top back on a marker. The other phrase that I didn't have any clue she would start saying is, "That's funny!" I don't know if she got this one from Will, who says it often, or from someone at school, but sometime last week, she turned over her box of toys and with a big grin on her face said, "That's funny!" and started laughing.
Funny story from this week: Evie and I went down to Memphis on Sunday and returned on Monday. It was a quick trip because we went so I could be at the inspection on the house we are buying in Memphis and I didn't feel like Seth was quite recovered enough from surgery to watch her by himself while I went to Memphis. On our return home we were delayed by some bad construction traffic and it added an extra hour to our trip, which then meant I would be hitting downtown Nashville right at 5:00 so I took the 840 loop which is much longer in distance but probably ended up being shorter in time. Evie got pretty fussy by the time we'd been in the car for 2 hours, just sitting in traffic for 30 minutes, so I turned on Raffi which still fortunately has a calming effect on her and makes her stop crying. But after another 2 hours of Raffi, I'd had about enough of that, so I switched it to Elvis's Aloha from Hawaii album - one of my favorites, and I remember watching the concert on VHS frequently after we moved to Memphis when I was 5. Evie seemed happy to listen to Elvis and once we hit the 840 loop my own mood improved so I started singing along to "My Way". Well, Evie did not enjoy that at all. She told me, "No, Mama! No sing! It's Evie's music." Appropriate that she asserted her ownership of the music during "My Way", I thought.
Tonight will be Evie's last night to sleep in this house. I have mentioned before, I think, about how this makes me a little teary. I think I've said before that one of the most difficult things for me in leaving is the memories of making Evie's room ready for her arrival and then bringing her home to this house. I am strolling down memory lane with the next few pictures, but I want to cap it off by saying how amazed I am that Evie is now as tall as her little pink elephant we painted for her (though she wouldn't quite cooperate for a picture this morning), and that even though I am somewhat sad to leave her and our first home behind tomorrow, I am looking forward to the new memories we are going to make in our new house.
Seth, Granna and I spent one weekend just covering up the bright blue
Seth spent hours and hours Photoshopping pictures of three different elephants together to create the mural of a family of three. Then we split the image into 9 parts so we could project it onto the wall and we outlined the elephants.
8-months pregnant and still able to get down and up from the floor.
The completed outline.
At first we were going to paint all of the elephants green, but then one of us had the idea to paint the heart made by the elephants trunks with pink and then we thought, since we were having a girl, it'd be great to have the baby elephant be pink too.
Putting the last pink touches on baby elephant.
Later that week, 8 months pregnant.
Our tiny little newborn in her first time in the crib. We only left her in there for a short nap because she was so small. I remember that we watched the Tony awards upstairs during her nap but I still got up to check on her every 15 minutes because I was so nervous about such a small baby being in such a big crib.
Now look at this big girl!
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