Coat Pegs and Sweet Potatoes

We went to the commissary yesterday, and got some baby foods for Elora to try (she's 6 months old now, you know, but where did the time go?). We started with sweet potatoes. She had half the jar at lunch time, and I mixed the other half with her oatmeal at dinner time.

She loved them! I know I need to wait a few days between new foods, but I'm anxious to see what she thinks of the other things we got for her. She 'll just have to keep enjoying the sweet potatoes until we're sure that the sweet potatoes like her. :)

Oatmeal Face!

We started giving Elora oatmeal a few weeks ago. This is from one of her first oatmeal experiences:

For the most part, she does pretty well with it, but sometimes, she'll grab the spoon and pull all of the oatmeal off. And sometimes, after she does that, she rubs her face. This is from a few days ago:

And this is from yesterday:

We wiped her face off when she was done, of course, but I still found it caked on her cheeks, in her eye brows, in her ears, and in her eyelashes! But it all came off at bath time. :)

I have to!

Thanks to cuteoverload.com, I stumbled into these:

and I just had to post them. I had to! (Especially for you, Kelly!) It turns out there is a whole website devoted to animals with lightsabers. It's called animalswithlightsabers.com . Genius, right?

Catching Up

This is what has been happening in my world for the last 3 weeks:

Elora can roll over. (See my new header pic.)

My in laws came to visit, and we spent lots of time together as a family:


We went downtown, and among other things, ate at Oschen Wili's (Thank you Corinnea, for the recommendation!):


We went to Strasbourg:

We went to Lichtenstein Castle:



And, we went to Zurich:




I took hundreds of pictures! I've spent the past 2 days weeding out the bad ones, tweaking the good ones, and posting the best --there are still a ton-- to my photobucket. Oh, and doing 2 weeks worth of laundry.

chocolate covered *bliss*

After discussing chocolate dipped strawberries with Katelyn on Saturday, I decided that I just had to have some. I bought a package of strawberries, a cup of the Baker's microwaveable dipping chocolate, and went to town. It was perfect; I had just enough chocolate to cover all the strawberries. There were 2 plate's worth. We had the first plate for dessert Sunday night, and the second one for dessert on Monday. Delicious!

Also, *head-palm*. You were right, Jennifer. I wasn't using the macro setting on my camera, so of course I was getting blurry up-close shots. Not any more! Please see Exhibit A, the above photo of delectable chocolate-y strawberries.

And, here is just a random adorable shot of Elora playing with her toes, and another of her sitting in the Bumbo, trying to pick up her teddy bear. She was keeping me company while I folded laundry, and she was being so cute that I had to go get the camera.

It's official!

Kelly is now officially Mrs. Rapanaro:


Peguy is now officially Mrs. Tallack:


And Brandon is now officially in the Navy for another 4 years.


Not such great pictures of the jewelry that I made for the brides, but hopefully they'll send me some better pictures later. These pictures were pulled straight from Facebook. :) And, not such great pictures of his re-enlistment, either. The flash should have been on, but it wasn't, and I couldn't very well interrupt the ceremony to tell his CO to turn the flash on.

Buddy Revisited

My mom was digging through her old photos, and found some pictures of me and my buddy. The first one was taken Christmas 1984, when I was 9 months old. (Can you believe how blue my eyes are? And they stayed that way until I was about 12, when they turned green.) I'd just received him from Gramma and Grampa, as well as the swan rocker that I'm trying to eat. Grampa made the rocker. The second one was taken when I was about 4, I think, and I'm sitting in Grampa's lap. This one pretty clearly illustrates how I felt about my Buddy.
And here is another shot of the giant Buddy that I bought for Elora. The eyes are different, and this one is enormous...but otherwise, a pretty good match, huh?

Ok, I won't bore you with anymore about Buddy. I just miss mine (still!) and I'm excited that I found one for Elora, even if he is too big to take to sleep-overs.