May 11th Soren Update

May 11, 2008

Dear Family

Okay, well I was just looking through the pictures I took this week, and there is definitely a theme. I call it: “Soren puts weird things in his mouth”.

Life is definitely getting busier. We can no longer spend a whole day at home. Soren starts to get very grumpy around 2 pm if we haven’t been on an outing, so I have been scrambling to think of fun, cheap and easy things for us to do. The good news is that he is pretty easy to please (running around the clothes department in Target is like Disneyland to him), but the bad news is that we are going to be losing a staple very soon. We are getting very close to 100 degree weather now, and that means that the trips to the park are going to have to be reduced. Hopefully we will be able to keep him happy with the trips and swimming lessons we have planned through the first part of this summer (As a side note, I thought it was so funny when I was up in Utah for my brother’s wedding - all of my family is getting excited for summer so they can finally go outside to play. For us AZ folk, summer is the dreaded time of year – guess I never saw that from a kid’s perspective until now! Groundhog Day loses its allure down here).

My big project for the week was making myself a new, hip diaper bag. I got so tired of carrying bags that just didn’t have the style and function in the same package. After pricing bags I liked online, I realized that I was going to have to come up with my own. I am pretty proud of how it turned out, plus it has made my life easier at the same time. Now this is what I call a great Mother’s day present to myself!

Soren and I went out to eat with my friend Lori on Friday night. We went to our favorite, the Spaghetti Factory. Soren LOVED the food. Afterwards, we took Soren to a park in downtown Phoenix. The weather was beautiful. While we were there, something clicked, and Soren’s walking style changed. He is now much smoother in his motion and (Nooooooooooo!) much faster.

As you will see in the pictures, he is also getting much more ambitious about eating new things. On Thursday night he learned his latest skill: (drum roll please) he can now bite down and rip off pieces of food with his teeth. Since then, he has tackled lots of new things, from his own piece of pizza to a cube of butter he nabbed off of the counter.

Since I don’t know what to add to that, I will just sign off… enjoy the pics.

Ashley