Copycat

Here's a little video of Georgie laughing when I repeat everything she says.

Rainy afternoon

As soon as we left the book festival this morning, it started raining and didn't stop. But I think we made the most of the rainy day. We went to Target and finally found a storage solution for all the clothes we've been handed down for Georgie. Then on the way home, we stopped off at a custard shop in Del Ray called Dairy Godmother. Every day they have a new flavor. Today was oatmeal cookie and it was perfect.

The other thing Dairy Godmother sells besides frozen custard is magic wands. Georgie actually liked the wand more.

When we got home, Georgie and I got to work on building our storage cubby hole thing.

A bit of parental bragginess: Georgie is very adept at using a screwdriver. She went around "tightening" each one after me. She was very thorough. See video below.

National Book Festival

We headed downtown this morning to go to the National Book Festival. We decided to have a breakfast of cilantro eggs and salmon at Teaism first though. We got there before they opened so we took the opportunity to walk around the Navy Memorial and National Archives building a little bit.

Escalators are one of Georgie's favorite things.

The book festival was extremely crowded. I wasn't expecting. I thought there might be a few hundred people but there were thousands. A lot of the people were in line to get best-selling authors to sign their books. We didn't have any interest in this, although we would have liked to have seen John Irving read. His reading was scheduled for Georgie's naptime though so that was out. Instead we mostly got a lot of free tote bags and rode the carousel. We rode it twice, once with each parent, because Georgie cried when it stopped the first time. She cried when it stopped the second time too, but by then we had spent 10 bucks on it.

Haircut, Playground, Chimney Swifts

We went into the city today so Nikki could get a haircut. This is what it looks like:

After a helping of Ray's Hell Burgers, we went home and walked around. We wound up at the small playground down the street.

On the way back home, we stopped and talked to a birdwatcher. There have been a lot of birdwatchers on our block lately. It turns out we live next to a fairly well-known roost of chimney swifts. They are pretty amazing birds and seem to be going to town on the huge amounts of flying insects we have right now. (p.s. by Nikki: Thanks, Darla, for tipping us off about them!) Here's a video of them:

Thursday morning, September 24

Georgie woke up, looked me in the face, and said "park" this morning.

Wednesday, September 23

From our trip to the park this morning....

Barcroft

Just a couple of playground pictures. Georgie is feeling much better. I'm getting there too I suppose. After struggling to find a nice playground in Williamsburg, we realize how lucky we are to have so many nice jungle gyms so close.

Home again

We spent Sunday relaxing and going to outlet malls. Georgie got a new pair of shoes and I got a wallet with someone else's initials on it (and therefore heavily discounted). Nikki got a few items to complete her fall collection. Then we went to a kind of bad "oriental buffet" restaurant. The kind where the whole picture of the variety of things you can get is exciting but once you start trying the items one by one, you're disappointed with each one. Then we went swimming in the hotel pool. I had to work last night so I snuck off for a nap while Nikki played with Georgie around the hotel and the business park it's in.

I wish I had taken the night off last night. I had been successfully fighting getting sick since Friday morning. I was drinking those Airborne things, which I had never used before. I think the zinc-based things are kind of a racket but the Airborne thing was really working. Until I tried staying up all night. I set up in the 'business' corner of the lobby and could feel myself getting progressively worse all night. Maybe it was inevitable, maybe not. After about 2 I decided to apologize to the night watchman for crowding his space but he said he appreciated the company. I told him I work the night shift too and I know just what he means.

I took a little nap this morning while Nikki took Georgie to a playground, shown above. Then we all drove home together. The only eventful thing on the drive was that I found a toy crane machine that was Japanese-style (two opposing arms) rather than American-style (the 3-pronged claw thing). For some reason these are easier for me and I won Georgie a baseball-uniformed Mickey Mouse on the first try.

We got all the way to Woodbridge before we had to come to a complete stop on the interstate, so a pretty easy drive for I-95. Georgie went to bed just after 7 tonight so maybe this cold and this trip have finally got her bedtime back to where it used to be.

Busch Gardens, round 2

Second verse, same as the first. Things started out great but gradually we had to accept the fact that Georgie has a cold and still try to get the most out of what we can.

Georgie woke up in great spirits from her nap. So we rushed back to the park for a late lunch. We split a sampler plate in the Italian part.

Then we played some ring toss. Georgie had fun tossing the rings on the floor and making this poor guy pick them up. We bought a bucket of 150 rings and landed not a single one on a bottle. But we still got a free stuffed banana just for buying the giant bucket. We also saw some friendly birds in the aviary and saw some bored-looking wolves in an enclosure.

We had some basic park food for dinner but topped it off with strawberry shortcake.

Now we're getting ready for bed. None of necessarily want to stay an extra day but we also don't want to get involved with Sunday traffic on 95. We'll see.

Busch Gardens, round one

Georgie made it through about an hour of the park. Not bad for a kid who's coming down with a cold. We entered the park and went right to the Sesame St. area. We started to play on a jungle gym when a live Elmo show started. Georgie has never seen a TV show in her life but somehow knew Elmo's name. She got really excited about the dancing puppets. She couldn't believe what she was seeing.

After one song, though, it got a little too noisy or busy or something so we got in line for the water ride. This was the point where Georgie decided she needed a little more rest before going too crazy at a theme park. So we decided to head back to the hotel for a nap and try again this afternoon.

But not before stopping to see the "horsies." She loves horses and didn't want to get pulled away from the bars of the stalls. She's alseep now and we'll head back to the park when she's up.