Anna's Summer Vacation

I'm sure our loyal readers (yes, both of you) have been dying for another photo update. Well, as a bonus for being late with this, I have three separate albums to share. The last month and a half have been quite the whirlwind. Anna has been on six airplanes, visited plenty of family and friends, and of course celebrated Connor's first birthday, as Karen described below.

Anna's first big trip was to San Diego for the 4th of July. We flew down to visit with Karen's parents and extended family for the long weekend. Anna got to meet her second-cousin Aliza for the first time, which provided hours of entertainment for the adults in the crowd. The full slideshow is here.

This weekend was also the point where we decided to let Anna cry it out at bedtime. She was becoming too difficult to keep asleep once she was set down, so we just sucked it up one night...put her down, went downstairs, pulled up a couple of chairs, and watched the baby monitor. After 20 minutes of standing at the side of her pack-n-play, she figured out how to sit herself down. After 20 more minutes of alternating between standing, sitting, settling on her stomach, and then freaking out and standing again, she finally decided to lay down and stay down. Forty-five minutes after we walked out of the room, she was sound asleep. It wasn't easy that first night, but it didn't take her long in subsequent bedtimes to figure out that we weren't coming back for her. Nowadays, she is very seldom asleep when she goes into her crib, but we just put her there and walk away. In the universe of unsolicited parenting advice, this is one practice we believe in wholeheartedly.

The following weekend, we left for a week and a half in Ohio with my parents and sister. It was Anna's first trip to Ohio, where I have an obscene quantity of relatives on my mom's side. Luckily, my sister came through with a party at her house, and brought the whole family to us! It was great for me to see everyone again, for Karen to put some more faces with names, and for Anna to be the star of the show (one of her favorite pasttimes, it seems).

Anna had some other big firsts over this trip. She spent her first night without mom and dad when we went with Bridget and Adam down to Cincinnati for a day and a half. (My mom was very glad we didn't tell her that until after we returned.) She met her Great-Gramma Jean (who is only 3 feet taller than Anna). She got to play in her first kiddie pool (it's unclear whether she or Bridget enjoyed it more). And she ate her first grass (with no ill effects as far as we could tell). All the photos from our Ohio trip are here.

Finally, in early August we headed up to Portland for the wedding of our good friends Jamal (yes, white Jamal) and Kari. I was in the wedding party, and since the rehearsal was on Thursday - there was another wedding at the venue on Friday - we had a nice long weekend to explore some parts of Oregon I never made it to when I was up there for work. We took a trip out to the mouth of the Columbia River in Astoria, then drove back down the coast a bit to Cannon Beach. There, Anna got to walk on sand for the first time (hilarious), and we had a nice outdoor lunch where, again, she was the star of the show, smiling and babbling for four nice older ladies who were just thrilled to meet her.

The wedding itself was at Bridal Veil, a gorgeous little lakeside venue tucked into the forest in the Columbia River Gorge, 20 miles or so east of Portland. During the ceremony, Anna was screaming her head off with the nannies on the other side of the lake, apparently the result of a playtime accident that saw a two year-old trip and fall on her. But she recovered and was a rock star for the reception, despite it rolling well past her bedtime. She even grabbed a 45 minute power nap on Karen's shoulder 20 feet from the live band, then woke up smiling and happy like we would have never expected at 11pm. We took a ton of photos, and only a few of them actually feature the illustrious artist formerly known as Baby G, but we thought we'd link them anyway because, well, we think they are pretty cool. So if you're just here for the Anna pics, you've been warned. Click here if you want to see all the shots from the wedding.

Oh yeah...and with all the traveling we've been doing, we have another Bad Parenting 101 photo:

Hope everyone is doing well. Less than two weeks until Anna's first Notre Dame game!