our weekend up north

as you might have been able to tell from our text-less last two posts, we spent the weekend at bill and kathie's place in northern wisconsin. to break up the drive, we spent a night at will and sandy's. we hadn't seen anders in person since christmas and he is still a cutie and a charmer as i remembered, but bigger and much more mobile. you can see the cousin resemblance in the post below (rob and will have some crazy-strong genes, i think). our time in hayward was really relaxing--boating, snacking, reading, napping, hot tubbing, card playing, hummingbird watching, sandbox digging, and chatting. we had pretty perfect weather--breezy, sunny, and warmish. we also were able to celebrate the first few waking hours of bill's birthday on sunday before heading back to iowa city (via osseo, WI and the original norske nook!). these are photos from our saturday morning cruise around the lake. eleanor enjoyed the sights, but also spent a good deal of time playing with some fishing weights and the little nail clipper attached to the boat key. did i tell you about that yellow hat, or what? if we ever print up all of our digital photos and they become disorganized, this summer's will be easy to distinguish--i'll just look for the flower hat.

hummingbirds, up close and personal

Hayward Ho!

the blogging gauntlet has been thrown

samantha has asked her blogging friends and relations to do a post every day this summer. this blog has been notoriously stagnant, largely due to my own academic-year busy-ness, so i feel like this challenge has my name written all over it. here is my own personal goal: a brief post with at least one photo that addresses an event, occurrence, or idea of the day. i'll (this is carrie) be spending a lot of my summer time hanging out at/around the house with eleanor and getting back to my domestic interests--cooking, baking, knitting, gardening, etc. i bet i'll be writing about that stuff a lot.
lately, i've noticed that we've been taking fewer photos of E. i think this is in large part because she loves to play with cameras and won't let you train one on her for too long before making a bee-line straight for it and trying to pry it out of your hands (note to self: somewhat realistic-looking camera = 2nd birthday gift idea). this makes for fairly frustrating and short-lived impromptu photo shoots.
still, i know how important it is (to me, at least) to keep track of how she's growing. just the other day, i was looking back at some video we took of her three months ago and couldn't believe the differences between her then and her now. it's impossible to notice those daily, incremental changes, but when you rewind even a month through photos and recordings, it's amazing what you see and hear--her hair is longer, she says a particular word with much greater clarity, she climbs stairs with greater ease, etc.
(i don't have the time or energy to figure out why the copied and pasted text above now looks like a hyperlink when it's not, so please do your best to ignore it. i'm having a hard time myself, but...)

here are a few photos from mother's day, just to try to catch up a bit. i think these adequately capture eleanor's love of the backyard. she most often talks about digging weeds (she says "we've gotta get all that creeping charlie!"), digging holes, raking, dirt, mulch and flowers. she helps by moving small piles of pulled weeds into one bigger pile. she is rarely without her gardening tools or her yellow flower hat (a 1st birthday present from will & sandy). in this first shot you can see our irises, which have mostly bloomed and faded now, as well as bee balm and rudbeckia from project green.