Two weeks ago we took a mini-vacation to Costa Brava, Spain. Jake's work was going slow and we wanted to do a little bit of traveling while we're in Europe, so we packed up the car Friday morning and drove 3.5 hours down the Mediterranean coast of France and Spain. We ended up staying at the Rosimar Spa hotel in Lloret Del Mar. Our hotel was literally 50 yards from the beach, and we had a room with a view to the sea. It was wonderful.
We got half-board with our hotel reservation, so a breakfast buffet and either a lunch or a dinner buffet was free every day we were there. It was sooo nice after a long day outside swimming to not have to wait to find a restaurant, order food, and be served. Having a tired, grumpy baby is not conducive to eating at restaurants. We did go to a couple of restaurants, though, so we could try the local food. I'm pretty pickey so I didn't really order anything adventurous, but Jake had some interesting seafood! I distinctly remember crayfish...gross....
Here are some pictures of the trip:
The French countryside on the way to Spain
Addelyn's first time touching the sea.
Addelyn getting knocked over by a wave - she's a trooper, though. She didn't cry once in all the times the waves pushed her down and splashed her face.
Addelyn LOVED playing in the sand right by the water's edge
Playing in the sand with daddy
See all the sand in her hair? It was from a really big wave. It was just barely over her head and got her completely soaked. Luckily daddy was holding onto her nice and tight. We moved back a bit after that one. No toddlers were pulled out to sea on this trip!
Soaked by the waves and still having the time of her life!
This is the face Addelyn made whenever the waves came and got her legs wet. The water was a bit chilly!
Daddy and Addelyn playing on the beach at Lloret Del Mar
Pretty view down the beach. There's a castle on that hill, but it wasn't open to the public.
Down the beach the other way - there's a castle on that hill, too.
There was a sea-themed park right by the beach - Addelyn simply had to play there every time we passed it (which was every time we left the hotel, pretty much).
Our hotel had a pool in it as well, which we went swimming in once. We also went swimming in the Rosimar Garden Hotel pool, which was much more Addelyn-friendly. We didn't bring the camera to that because we thought it would just be a hassle and we didn't want to run the risk of it getting wet. Addelyn had SO much fun there. First she walked around the kiddie pool (it came up to about her chest...maybe a little lower). Then we took her to the big pool which had a 0-depth entry. We spent about an hour in that pool just having Addelyn "swim" around, splash, and walk in the shallow end. Addelyn is so comfortable when she's in the water. She will kick her feet and hold her arms out in front of her as I support her tummy to "swim" to daddy - all the while making her "fishey" sound to say "I swim like a fishey!". Also, she would often stick her face in the water (sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose). When she did this she'd just come back up, spurt and cough a little bit, sneeze, then just look at me and grin ear-to-ear and shake her head and go "woah!". I don't know how I got such a tough girl when Jake and I are both such wimps about the water! I will have to have Jake film us in the hotel pool sometime soon to show you how much Addelyn adores swimming.
Addelyn on the way home after a tiring weekend at the beach. She got a ball out of the vending machine at the gas station. She was pretty excited about it.
The mountains in Spain on the way home from Costa Brava
More mountains
A bus that we passed had a long string of toilet paper blowing out of the top of it. I was a little too slow with the camera, but there was a good 30 feet sticking out before it finally broke off...
...part of which then blew onto this car :-)
That's it for our fun vacation! I'll do a regular Addelyn/France update soon. I have been taking pictures like crazy recently, so I need to stay caught up with posting them :-)
I was just listening to a song from a mix-CD I burned when I was pregnant with Addelyn. There's a song on it called "In My Daughter's Eyes" by Martina McBride. The first line in is this: "In my daughter's eyes I am a hero. I am strong and wise and I know no fear." And I got to thinking...why is that? I don't doubt that it's true, because I feel the same way about my mother, so why wouldn't Addelyn feel that way about me? But in this case, surely it's not justified, right? Me...be strong? I can't bench-press my own weight and I cry at movies that aren't even sad. How could I be considered wise? I go through most of my life these days guessing at how to be what I'm supposed to be - a good parent. And I'm certainly far from knowing no fear: I'm the girl who quakes with fear when anything with more than 6 legs is nearby. So what reason would Addelyn have to hold me on a pedestal?
And then I realized...it's because I am all of those things. When I am with Addelyn. When I'm around my daughter I could do anything it takes to protect her - body and soul. I feel like a super-hero I have such quick reflexes (yesterday I caught her when she dove off of her chair head-first. She didn't even touch the floor). I no longer feel the false limitations my mind puts on my muscles and suddenly I could lift a car off of her if I needed to. I make all of my parenting decisions with confidence and without hesitation.
But most of all, I am fearless. My flight reflex turns into a fight reflex and I go from scared little girl to a force to be reckoned with. For instance, I was taking Addelyn out for a walk one day and saw a dog running at us full-speed. I couldn't tell whether it was being aggressive or friendly, but my mind just fully kicked into fight mode. I put myself between the dog and Addelyn's stroller, faced the dog, and waited what seemed like forever for the dog to cross the street. I wasn't even scared; I wasn't thinking about how the dog could hurt me or whether I would be able to protect Addelyn from it if it tried to go around me straight to her, because failure wasn't even a possiblilty in my mind. There was no reason to be afraid because there was no doubt that I would succeed. (The dog ended up being friendly, so all turned out well). It just amazed me how calm I was able to be. It seems that way every time Addelyn is in danger. I never get the adrenaline-rush I always thought I'd get - that rush of fear that says we're in danger. I just do what needs to be done in the situation without hesitation or emotion - when I'm with Addelyn, I know no fear. (Unless there's a spider near us...then I'm still kinda scared as long as it's far enough away from Addelyn and she's not in immediate danger :-)
I took some good pictures of Addelyn yesterday, so I thought I'd share :-)
Addelyn picks me flowers whenever we go outside. Sweet girl :-)
"Here, Mama!"
Addelyn and her slide. She just learned to go up the ladder and slide down all by herself:
Here's a nice video of Addelyn's two new favorite things to do outside: play with her friend the tree (or her friend the fire hydrant when we go on walks). The game is always the same...she goes up to them and gives them a warm greeting, maybe with some hugs, then says bye-bye and walks away. After a few steps she turns around and runs back to them. If she's playing with tree, she'll "scare" it, and if she's playing with the fire hydrant she'll just go give it a hug and, much to my dismay, a kiss. Rinse, repeat. Addelyn's other favorite outside activity is playing on her slide. This video shows the very first time she's actually climbed up the ladder and successfully transitioned to slide down all by herself. I was quite surprised :-)
Feed the baby some milk
Gotta burp the baby (complete with sound effects from Addelyn)
These last two weeks in France have been great. We had a bit of a rockey start with the apartment having an ant problem and not being able to go to the store for necessities until Tuesday evening (we arrived on Sunday afternoon, but everything in France is closed on Sundays and Monday was a holiday). But now the bugs are gone and we have food in the cupboards and books and toys for Addelyn, so everyone is happy :-)
Addelyn has a couple of new French books - this is one of her favorites - a matching numbers book.
Jake and I got e-book readers before we left - Addelyn likes to play with mine. Here, she's telling me that the lady in the picture is smiling.
Addelyn likes to play with belts...oh, the things they decide are fun...
Addelyn has been working hard on potty-training. We started just after her first birthday. I bought her a potty-seat just so she could get used to the idea, and she's picked it up very quickly. I didn't want her to forget while we were in France, so we got another potty seat here and she's been going usually twice per day. She's even told me she's needed to go twice. The second time was so cute...she signed "peepee", then she signed "come here" and lead me to the bathroom where her potty chair is.
On our first weekend in France, we went to the African Safari zoo here in Toulouse. We all had a great time. The zoo is set up so that you drive through a sanctuary area where the animals (non-preditors, of course) are just walking around freely. I saw a rhinoceros for the first time...they're HUGE! Then you park and go through the walking portion where all of the animals are in cages as normal.
Addelyn in her new FOWARD FACING car seat on the way to the zoo
The first animal of the walking portion: the emus were very curious
Addelyn got to pet a very friendly mini-horse
I feel like I should make some reference to the Black Swan movie here, but I'm not feeling clever enough.
Addelyn and I in front of the macaws. She didn't care for them as much as the waterfall beneath them.
We even saw a sea lion show. Addelyn sat very patiently as we waited for it to start, and then her favorite part was right at the beginning: all three sea lions belly-flopped into the water making a big SPLASH. She thought it was hilarious! We didn't have the camera out at the very beginning, but here's her a couple of minutes later still laughing and talking about the splash:
We've made some friends already which helps pass the days and really helped when we first got here and didn't know where anything was. There's a nice family from Dublin, Ireland just down the sidewalk from us who have 3 and 5-year-old girls. The girls adore Addelyn, and Addelyn likes to watch the "big kids" play. Also, a French family moved in next door a couple of days ago. They have three kids: a set of 5-year-old twins (one boy, one girl), and a little boy a couple of months younger than Addelyn. So we've gotten the 6 of the kids together to play a couple of times. Even with the language barrier, they have a great time. Just last night I took Addelyn outside to play and the twins and the Irish girls were outside playing already, so Addelyn and I were of course joined by all of them plus another French boy from the other side of our apartment (it seems like I always attract the neighbor kids whenever I go outside...even back home Addelyn and I can't play outside without attracting at least 3 kids from 3 different families - do parents play with their kids anymore? because these kids all seem so starved for attention). I swear the man that walked by and saw me with 5 kids under 5 and a 9-year-old with no other parents in sight thought they were all mine and thought I was insane.
Here's a couple more pictures I've liked of Addelyn the last couple of weeks. She's looking more and more like a toddler and less and less like a baby every day.
we spend a LOT of time reading these days
One last funny story: before the French family with the three kids moved in next door, there was another French family with a probably 12-year-old girl and a baby boy living there. I didn't talk much with them until the day they left, when the little girl decided to steal Addelyn's ball from our yard. I was doing laundry, so I had to walk back and forth between our apartment and the laundry facility all morning. At my first pass of the neighbors' apartment, I heard the girl bouncing a ball, looked over, and saw that it was exactly like the one Addelyn has. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and just thought it was a coincidence. When she saw that I saw her, she quickly picked up the ball and turned around to hide it from my view. Okay. Probably not a coincidence. So I put the laundry in and walked back. As I passed by her a second time, the same thing happened: she's bouncing the ball, sees me, then quickly picks it up and hides it from me. I got back to our apartment and confirmed that the ball was, indeed, missing from our yard. The next time I went to do the laundry 45 minutes later it was the same story, except instead of just turning around and hiding it, she picked it up and ran into her house :-) Well, I would ordinarly have let it go. Addelyn wasn't using it and I'm sure it would've made its way back to our yard when she was done playing with it...but given that she was being so secretive about it and that I saw that the family was preparing to move out (suitcases etc...on their front yard) I decided to go confront her. When I walked up to her the next time, I walked strait for her. For a second, she turned to run, but you could just see the decision in her face when she realized that I was walking strait toward her - she quickly went from "oh no, run away and hide the ball" to "ohhhhh, is this YOUR ball?". Only she didn't speak English. I'm so glad I've been learning French. I was able to understand her and answer in French (I decided to play along with her innocent scheme). We ended up playing with the ball together and talking for a while, and then she brought out a delicious pastry for Addelyn, so all ended well.
Stats:
Age: 13.5 months
Weight: 23 ish lbs
Length: 31ish inches
Drinks: about 2-3 8-ounce sippys of milk per day (all of which is regular whole-milk) with meals and a couple of drinks of milk before bed every night
Eats: yogurt, and some cereal for breakfast; leftovers for lunch (spagetti, sandwiches etc...); and a fruit pouch, and whatever we're having for dinner.
Sleeps: 11-12 hours/night - 10pm-10am (most nights...sometimes she still wakes up in the middle)
Naps: 2-3 hours per day - her nap is 4 or 5 hours after she wakes up for the day
Awake for:4-7 hours at a time during the day.
Clothes size: mostly 18 month, some 24 month
Motor skills: spinning in circles, trying to jump (she rarely gets both feet off the ground at the same time), going up stairs well, going down stairs very slowly and with supervision, running, climbling the ladder to her slide, getting down from high places by herself
other skills:Does hand actions to songs like itsy bitsy spider and little bunny foo foo, starting to pretend-play words: mama, up, dada, nana (banana), "Aye" (light), "Bah" (ball), and "Ba (bath)" "ah duh" (all done), "buh buh" (puppy), hi, bye-bye, and NO-NO (is her newest), and I'm not even going to try to list all of the words that she tries to say, but doesn't say regularly. She's getting much more clear with her talking now. I think it won't be long before she explodes in her speech.
signs: around 50-60 that she does herself. And she makes up signs for words she doesn't know.
