Anna finally has gotten over her hesitations about crawling in the grass and/or on the driveway. Now she makes a bee line straight to any left over dandelions or clover flowers that she sees, creating more laundry challenges for me. Dandelions are usually the first choice, but most are already spent so the clover seems to make her pretty happy as well.
We were able to experience a few of the local Independence Day celebrations on Thursday and Friday. Thursday evening was spent at the Concert on the Square in downtown Madison. For those of you who don't know, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra performs a six week series of free concerts on the steps of the capitol building each summer. We weren't quite sure how Anna would handle it, but wanted to give it a try so we planned to meet up with Anna's godmother, Melissa, for a picnic beforehand and see how long we could last.
Turns out Anna loves it :) Anna had "smile" conversations with just about every group of people around us, plus she got a kick out of dancing to the music. Good thing we brought lots of food ... that kiddo was hungry!Though Anna wasn't quite ready on the 4th to stay up for any fireworks, we managed to make it to a local community festival with some friends for the afternoon/evening. The real purpose of the trip was to keep an eye on Josh while his parents competed in the "Wife Carry" race. If you don't believe me, go ahead and google the term ... The Stanfords performed very well ;)
Anna really seems to like fresh produce. When we went strawberry picking a few weeks back, she didn't hesitate to grab a few whole strawberries from our pail and shove them into her mouth. Then last week when I was podding peas, she kept coming to snitch handfuls of peas. At the concert she proved to us that she could eat a whole, raw snow pea. We also have to hide the fresh raspberries until the end of a meal or she won't eat much else :) Crazy kid!Last bit of news ... I hadn't realized quite how well Anna had us trained until we were in a store recently and she kept pointing at things and saying her version of "What's that?" (da?!) and I kept answering her. It struck me that I must seem pretty odd saying the names of random objects over and over again, but Anna sure gets a kick out of it. At home one of her favorites is at a meal when she points at the clock or the phone to get us to say the word. For some reason "clock" almost always makes her laugh. Anyway, here's a pretty good image of what her curious "da" looks like. I think she was asking Matt what the camera was :)
