Wow! September just flew by and we’re already a week into October! The past few weeks have been extremely busy in our household. In addition to school and work responsibilities, we have been busy having fun as well. Three weekends ago we took advantage of a nice warm day to take a family hike at a local nature center to explore the outdoors together (see above and below). Emilia loved running around outside, but wasn’t so keen on her papa trying to show her a frog up close.
Then two weekends ago we had visitors from Madison—two former colleagues (and friends, of course) of mine and their families. I was so busy taking pictures of Emilia with her new friends Belle and Wesley that I forgot to take any photos of my colleagues and I. But the kids are cuter than us anyway.
This past weekend many interculturalist friends of mine were in town for a conference, and I enjoyed meeting up with several of them. We also had one of my closest college friends and her partner visiting us. We visited the Minneapolis sculpture garden and a local apple farm (Emilia loved eating the apples right off the trees--see below), and enjoyed a walk to the park and a sunny but crisp fall boat ride.
Emilia absolutely loved having all these visitors; she acts shy and innocent for the first minute or so around new people, but her true self soon shines through as she calls them all by name (or just “boy” in the case of my friend Kim’s spouse—apparently she doesn’t much care for the name Jason) and orders them to play with her. She kept telling Jason, “Boy make castle!” And make castle he did!
I couldn't help but post a photo of our little Spanish girl in her flamenco dress (a traditional Spanish dress). This was a gift from Agustín's brother and his wife (who would really like to have a little girl to dress up like this). The last time we tried this on Emilia over the summer it was still really big on her. Well, I came home from a morning of studying at the coffee shop last Saturday to find Agustín had spent the morning playing dress-up and photo shoot with Emilia because apparently she's almost grown out of the dress already. Just like her mom, she is not exactly the picture of grace and femininity. It doesn't help that Agustín put a onesie on under the dress, which you see peeking out the sleeves. Oh, and Emilia put the bracelet up on her bicep like that of her own accord. But she sure likes dresses and such much more than I did at that age, and handles heels better than I do even now.
