Weekend Update (a little bit late)

Hello everyone! Maia's gone down for her third (!) nap today--she probably won't really sleep, but being up and about sure is making her cranky. I think that she's still recovering from a weekend full of people and places and driving here-and-there. We went to Portage on Saturday morning to visit with Grandma and Grandpa G, as well as Maia's Aunt, Uncle and Cousin. Before we arrived in Portage, however, we went to the Binder Park Zoo in Battle Creek (a place that I visited plenty of times with Grandpa Bill and Grandma Donna when I was a kid).

Maia seemed fascinated with and confused by all the new animals whom she met at the zoo. She barked at the kangaroos, made her duck "quack!" at the peacocks and had no idea what to make of the giraffes. She also identified both the red panda and the pygmy goats as "Ma-Mo" (Mona). It's another peek into the brain of a person trying to organize the world into categories and things that she can understand.

We spent the night at Grandma and Grandpa G's house, where Maia (thankfully!) had the best night of sleep that she's had out of our house since . . . who knows when? She did wake up a couple of times, but we were thinking that it would be significantly more challenging than that. On Sunday morning, we went to another beautiful, big park in Kalamazoo, where Maia fed the geese and said "goose" for the first time.

New words: veggies, diaper, cart (referring to anything with wheels that's not a bike or car), bite, cookie, milk (she's been signing it for months, but now uses the word, too), ear, mouth, nose, feet . . . some others that I'm forgetting.

From Late April