Ryan had his first case of the hiccups today.  Aside from that he pretty much eats and sleeps.  I have to leave out the traditional 'poops' from the previous sentence;  we haven't seen much of that.  A certain amount of constipation early isn't exactly normal, but at the same time it's typical enough not to be exactly unexpected and we know how to cope with it.

Alice got to watch Cinderella for the first time today.  She's known the character by sight for a while now and gets excited whenever she sees Cinderella merchandise in stores, so this was a big event for her.

Alice loves slides.  Last year someone at church gave us just the plastic slide part to put one in our yard, but we didn't have anything to attach it to.  I finally tracked down a couple pallets, and used one to make a platform for part of it.  I have two other pallets that we'll use to keep stuff off the floor in the part of the basement that occasionally gets wet.

We went to my cousin Kara's graduation party today.  She is co-valedictorian of her class, which is very impressive.  I got to see a lot of family I hadn't seen in a while, and a one family member I had never seen before at all--  another cousin's new baby that was only about 2 weeks old:

Alice had a lot of fun at VBS this week.  Mommy and Daddy had a nice vacation, too, but we're glad Alice is home.  We went to Elkhorn on Friday for the last day to see the closing program.  Here's a picture I took of Alice and Grandpa:

It's normally my job to put Alice to bed, and we have a pretty good routine set up.  Alice gets in bed and I read her a poem from "A Light in the Attic", then sing "Jesus Loves Me" and "Night Night, Alice."  Finally, I sing "God is Listening" before saying a good night prayer.  It's almost always the same prayer, though I will occasionally add something.

Last night after finishing "God is Listening" I paused for a moment to take a breath, and Alice took over.  She's said the prayer with me on occasion, but this time she went solo.  Not only that, but she didn't stick to the script: she was actually praying.  She took nearly a full minute, and was talking in her pseudo-gibberish that's hard to make out.  I caught snippets of "thank you for" and other references to things that she did that day.  She was talking to God, and that's as good a prayer and as a father can hope for.

Our care group met at the Zoo today.  We were pleasantly surprised with how active most of the animals were.  On most of my previous visits most of the animals didn't do much, but today just about everybody was out and about.   The polar bear put on a good show, as did the otter (of course), some deer, a pelican, the flamingos, the prairie dogs, the new giraffes, and a few others.  They were all very active.  However, the new playground area stole the show with Alice.  There are three slides bigger than any she has yet tried.  One was for bigger kids, but she loved the other two.  Melody had her camera along and took most of the pictures, but I did get one with my cell phone:

Here are a couple photos off of my cell phone:

Alice had a doctor visit today.  I wasn't able to be there, but I'm told she is now officially 3' tall.  Also that she's nervous about scales that you have to stand on. 

Videos of Alice.  Enjoy :)

Dancing (4.8Mb)
Earmuffs (1.5Mb)
Jesus Loves Me (12.5Mb)
Mommy Shoes (1.9Mb)
Puzzle (21.5Mb)

All are in Windows Media Video format, since that's what I have software to make.  They're served up over our home dsl line, so certain times of day it might take a while to download.

I rented FraggleRock through NetFlix, and Alice is just eating it up