spring fever

Horray for Banana's! She is 10 months old in this picture (March 22nd) She LOVES her swing in the backyard. She just laughed and laughed! This is March 1st, before we planted the grass.. now it is bright green! :

Bob, Amy, Madison and Robby Jay came to visit the 2nd weekend in March. It was soo much fun! They are the best!

Emma eating "Mel's Mix" out of our square foot garden boxes we put together (March 21st):

(March 26th) Emma is really into books... We'll be having a first birthday "book" party in Farmington June 7th. You're all invited!!

My awesome jogging partner. It was pretty cold for a while and if her hands got too cold she would SCREAM... (April 7th):

Emma LOVES fruit.. here she is chowing down on a plum.. yum! (April 10th):

Emma got a lot of practice walking in Farmington this weekend.. (April 19th.. Happy Birthday Nancy!):

Happy Easter dress.. she's clapping because she knows she looks so cute in her hat! (Compliments of Grandma Shupe..thanks Mom! ) (April 12th):

Our first family trip to the park.. she LOVES being outside.. (May 1st )

I followed her around for 15 minutes trying to get a good picture.. John takes the camera and gets this one with his first shot! :)

I wanted to finish our family update on the last four months.. I did a lot of work on the back yard.. pulling bushels of weeds (for hours and hours) and tilling the ground by hand and mixing in compost and fertilizer and manuer to our sandy new mexican soil.. and only about 7 blisters later and several hundred gallons of water we have some tall, bright green grass growing in our back yard. Horray! Emma loves walking around out there and now I am not so worried about her.. yet we still have ginormous weeds probably because of all the compost and fertilizer... but I am not ready to kill them with chemicals. It is Emma's playground and Truman's (our terrific tortoise) main diet. He woke up from hibernation a few weeks ago and has actually been chowing down on the weeds. Love him for it! Does anyone know of any organic weed killer that is safe for tortoises to eat?
We spent two weekends in a row if Farmington in April with John's family. It was so much fun to be there for Nancy's birthday and to see both of John's brothers and all the grandparents and cousins. We also did a little shooting up there.. and I did a nice long jog in the mud and we went to a performance of Beethoven's full 8th. It was great..

oh.. I'm so out of order.. but another fun thing we did this semester was participate in Albuquerque's TEA Party.. it was awesome. About 4500 people showed up on April 15th to protest our government's big spending and passing the bailouts (without even reading them!) . It was great. It was a lot more partisan than we were hoping it would be, but we were so glad to be there and we hope we helped ! I made a sign saying http://www.fairtax.org/ You should all check it out and write to your state reps to get it moving! Emma also did great at her first protest!! :)

Okay.. now onto more important things.. Emma Jane has two teeth, her lower front anteriors (O and P). It is so cute! She loves to use them too! I am still breastfeeding her and she knows better than to bite me! She also is walking! She took her first steps on April 16th and spent about 10 days only going a few steps at a time, and then spent a couple of days going about 10 steps and now she is a pro! Well..she does look like a drunken pirate occasionally.. :) She is so much fun and still a great baby.. but she does have this increadibly high-pitched scream now... and she can get cranky when she wants to. She babbles all the time! She loves to say Daddy and Dadda... I of course always respond with "Mamma or Mommy." She says that only when she feels especially sad. :( On Saturday she started saying "Baby." I call her that all the time. I have heard her say "Emma" in her babbling too.. She's such a doll. She's been teething lately.. :( but a few weeks ago she went through a good growing spurt.. eating and sleeping all the time. She is about 18 pounds now and will be one years old this Friday.. I can't believe it!!

She is a little climer! (May 6th):

At UNM's Duck Pond on Mother's Day (May 10th):

This is Emma and Truman's first encounter... she just cried and didn't know what to do, it was hilarious.. but then she got very comfortable with him and would slap his shell like a drum. She loved it! Poor guy! .. so I took him outside so he wouldn't be destroyed by our little EmmZilla..