Picture Story

 The last few months have been super busy and I haven't had a chance to blog about every thing that has happened but I did take a bunch of pictures and they tell a pretty good story.

Ariah is the spitting image of her daddy- eyes, nose, hands, feet, they even wake up with the same bed head. Besides looking like him, she acts like him. Kay says that Kyle was a climber. He climbed everything and got into everything. I couldn't capture the actual moment when Kyle

 wrapped Ari's arms around the tree and let go of her and she totally held on but I did get the moment after. I couldn't believe she just held on like a little panda!

In our dining room we have set up a giant playpen, the size of the entire room. Ariah is pretty content to play by herself with her abundance of toys and one day when I got out of the shower this is what I saw, she stepped on the stuffed puppy dog's head and climbed up on top of her activity table. She's not trying to get over the gate yet but I know it's just a matter of time. I love watching her figure things out.

The next set of pictures are of a humming bird that was found at a friend's birthday party in the park. The hummer was a juvenile with a broken wing, less than 20 days old, it still gaped for mom to feed it. The kids that found it were poking it so I stepped in and put it in Ari's little play bucket. We took it home and googled

 how to take care of it. I taught it to feed from a dropper. I never knew that hummers have long, skinny, clear tongues that they push into flowers to get the nectar. They don't open their beak very much, they just stick their tongue out. I totally fell in love with this bird and when I realized I wouldn't be able to fix it's wing I found a wildlife rehabilitation center and brought her in. While I had her (it) I was feeding her 4 times an hour with sugar water and since I couldn't get her to eat dead ants for protein, I made her a meal worm smoothie. It was really gross and a hugely uncomfortable for me. I bought a bag of dried meal worms which totally grossed me out and then I pureed them with sugar water. I was surprised it actually worked. At one point I knocked over the whole bag of dried worms and I freaked out. I am such a girl but when those maternal instincts kicked in, it was all ok.

When I brought the humming bird into the wildlife rehab center I inquired about volunteering and who takes care of the hummingbirds. It turns out that the satellite hummingbird home care person that founded the center 20 years ago, is moving away and needed a replacement. After some training and filling out a bunch of forms, I am the new humming bird care taker for the Tri-Valley and I am super excited!

Back to Ariah now. We have been wanting to get her ears pierced for months now and we had a day off so we finally did it. Rather than take her to one of the places in the mall we took her to a piercing shop. They use a needle to pierce with a cork on the back side, like the old days. Ariah was really interested in the folks piercing her ears and kept looking from side to side. Once we finally marked the spots and agreed that they were even, they poked the holes in her ears. She didn't really "cry", she just did that sobbing breathing in thing and looked at her daddy with big sad eyes.

just because she's cute!

...and she WALKS!!! Awe, my little toddler!