Bye bye summer!

Thus concludes our summer of vacations. The suitcase has returned to its permanent home of the basement rather than at-the-ready in the bedroom. We have only had 1 weekend at home this entire summer and will now officially not know what to do with ourselves until Christmas.

And what a nice weekend to go up North. It was by far the nicest weekend of the entire summer. Paige had a chance to go in a little baby pool and chase our local "Chippie" around. She had a fascination/fear of the chipmunk and would say "Chippie...CHIppie!" and call him, only to scream with fear when he came close to her. Then she would start it all over again even holding out peanuts to feed him.

I should also mention that despite all of the nice outdoor activities for Paige to do, her favourite thing by far, was to look at hunting magazines. Her personal favourite..."Hunting Regulations 2008". Strange?

She learned a new word this weekend. "UP" as in pick me up. This is her first command word (of many, I'm sure). I have never once attempted to get her to say up, but as I was changing her diaper she said "up" clearly. Then the rest of the weekend she continued to say up whenever she wanted to be picked up, to get out of her highchair etc. We were all impressed as she had just decided to say this all on her own. What's more impressive is she strung together a couple of words as well. "Up gamma" (grandma), and "mama shoes" (when she wanted her shoes on). Crazy smart I tell you.

an aside note...

I have been trying to cut down on buying a lot of "baby food". Instead, I try to feed Paige grown up food either by spoon or cut it into finger food sized pieces. She's getting a lot better at eating bigger pieces now that she has a top tooth. She can bite into pitas, crackers, tomato slices, etc. I notice that she isn't interested in purees anymore anyway. I gave her blueberries today as I was loading the laundry. She appeared to like them until I noticed that she was putting them in her mouth, sucking out the fruit and discarding the "shell" on her tray.

Also, I thought she might have chicken pox, but nope. Phew!