Author: magrilless

And the Animas River that goes through town is now low enough to be safe for a little person to tube down on her Daddy’s lap. When we got to the put-in and I lifted her up to hand her to Bill, she started to balk. “No, no, I want to go with Mommy. No. Put me down. Pickle pants.** I don’t want in the water. No thank you. Let me go back.” At which point I turned around and walked away and they were in the middle of the river. Bill said it took maybe two minutes for her to be having a great time, splashing, and giggling through rapids. And by the time I met them downstream, it was double thumbs up. It’s my turn to tube with her next time. Bill says it was pretty awesome to just have Mags sit on his lap calmly and happily for 45 minutes; this hasn’t happened since . . . well . . . maybe ever.

*We watched it carefully and it has healed up nicely with no infection or complication. And very little complaining.

**This is our version of “cheese” for pictures. I asked her to say it and took her picture in hopes of snapping her out of the complaining. However, it just got stuck in the middle of her stream of no’s. She didn’t miss a beat. Very funny.

First bite from the garden!

Show of hands: Who’s tired of hearing me say “I think Tess is working on teeth”? Okay okay. Your wish is my command; I’ll stop saying it for awhile. Because she popped out two yesterday! Whew. It’s about time! So she now has tiny toothy ridges for her two front bottom teeth. Very efficient of her, I think, to do two at once. Starting Wednesday through today have seen her more touchy and grumpy and needy than normal. Luckily she really likes to be outside and luckily we live on a very quiet street where we can walk up and down in the cool evenings to fall asleep. She really has been quite the trooper!

Some of the grumpiness can be attributed to her doctor’s visit on Wednesday where she got three shots in a row (nice timing, teeth!). She’s healthy and wonderful and right on track developmentally. She’s a little teeny, coming in under the 15th percentile for height and weight, but she comes by that naturally with all the petite ladies in the family. And of course her head size is above the 75th percentile. Indeed, we’ll have to graduate her to a new hat very soon. The doc was impressed with her sitting capabilities and head control; she said we can start trying out the bike trailer with her. Way to go, Tessa!

I’m happy to report that I didn’t break the baby. After a few days of trying to get Tessa to nap in her crib (which she’ll do; just for 30 minutes at a time), we decided that sleep was more important for her and to go back to the trusty old stroller. Unfortunately, she then spent several days only doing those catnaps in her stroller too. Fortunately, yesterday and the day before have seen a trend going back toward actual napping. So glad I didn’t break the baby of napping at not-yet-6-months old.

She’s pretty boring to write about because she’s so darned easy-going. Things are sweetly going on. We’ll try solid food again in the next couple of days and see how her body reacts this time. No teeth to report; I’m trying to be patient about that since there’s no changing it. She is making some new sounds: “ba ba ba ba ba ba” or “ya ya ya ya ya ya.” Her utterances before were continuous  vowels or breathily separated. But just in the last couple of days, she’ll say a few “words” with one breath, vowels separated by consonants. Conversations are now much more interesting.

Here’s a bee update for you all. First off, thanks to several of you for your name submissions. We settled on Priscilla and Aretha for our two royal ladies. And both are doing a great job at working at their hives. Pretty much, if you have a healthy working queen, you have a healthy working hive. So, so far so good.

Each week we open the hives up to take a look at the status of things inside. We’re looking for several things. First, we want to make sure they have enough room to work in (so they’re not building honey comb in random places, called burr comb), but that they’re also cozy enough (so they’re not building burr comb).

Second, we want to see all stages and types of food. They need pollen packed in lots of cells for the protein in their diet during the winter. You can see lots of it in the picture above. If you click on the picture and look closely, you can also see all the different colors of pollen from all the different flowers they’ve been to. They also need honey for their carbohydrates. There should be cells shimmering with liquid, still getting filled up, and there should be capped honey cells, like the white stuff in the picture above, stored for winter.