wade in the water

As you know we recently took a little trip toward summer. St. Louis welcomed us with oppressive, sticky heat and daily temperatures over 100 degrees. I LOVED IT! The purpose of our trip was to have the baby boy baptized, and it was an awesome day. I will devote a separate blog post to the baptism once I get the pictures from Papa Wade (he is our photographer extraordinaire). I didn't do a great job of taking photos the 12 days we were there, but that doesn't mean we didn't have a great time.

Splash, Splash, Splash!

Grandma Cooper picked up this little pool at Walmart, and we had too much fun with it! Owen took to it like a fish (he gets this from his daddy). The second time we put him in it, he was on his belly, intentionally dunking his face in the water over and over again! I'm sure glad I didn't spend $129 to enroll him in swimming lessons with the other moms in my PEPS group.

I love the expression when water gets on his face.

This is what Owen looks like when he is hot. His cheeks get quite rosy. This is something I hadn't seen before. He's plumping up quite a bit as well.. likely due to the massive amount of solid foods he is eating!

Nice faces

Cousins! Livi is in to dressing herself now, which I love. In the hour we were at their house, she had three outfit changes (and they are all quite creative). She and Carson really got a kick out of Owen (again) and were very willing to share their stuffed animals and my little ponies, etc. I take that as a very good sign.



Silly faces!



One night we indulged in the free baby sitting of Grandma and Papa Cooper in order to spend a fancy night out with Gaga and Papa Wade at Araka in Clayton. As you can see, Ryan has been promoted to Chef de Cuisine. He and Mike (the exec chef) just rewrote the entire menu, and we got to delight in the new flavors. He treated us to a tasting menu, meaning he picked our 8 courses and sent them from the kitchen. Our waiter then paired wines with each course. Many of Ryan's favorite flavors are also mine. We had a lot of goat cheese, ricotta cheese, risotto, fennel ravioli, etc. My favorite is always the pallet cleansing 'intermezzio' he brings before the meat dishes. This time it was a hand made cantaloupe vanilla sorbet. It did a great job cleansing!

Sweet Smiles at the Butterfly House

Because I had worked so hard on O's nap schedule, I didn't want to ruin the schedule on our trip. Though we kept our outings to a minimum, we did manage to go to the butterfly house just down the road from my parents' house.  

We learned that butterflies are cold blooded animals, but they need heat in order to fly. They must bask in the sun each morning to warm their wings before they can fly/start their day. I think I might be part butterfly...

Future Tigers

We also had several play dates with almost 2 year olds. Thursday night we played with my friend Angie and her beautiful daughter Adelaide (baby # 2, a boy, is on the way in January). I had followed Adelaide's blog, but this was the first time I met her in person! She's gorgeous. I wish that our visit wasn't cut short by O's bedtime!

Friday we got to play with Tyler and Ali Francis. We met Tyler last year at his first birthday party, and WOW has he changed in the last 11 months! There is nothing remotely baby about him now, and he is such a well behaved little boy. He honestly knows ALL of his letters. I was so impressed.

It is an absolute joy to watch your wonderful friends become amazing parents. God has surely blessed these families with equally joyful parents and babies.

The biggest highlight of the week is that O started rocking back and forth on his hands and knees. He's also got his army crawl down. We aren't quite to where he can coordinate the hands and knees to get where he needs to go, but we aren't far either. He's trying to crawl up on me when I sit on the floor next to him as well. As a first time parent, I am, of course, always looking forward to the next developmental step, and this is a fun one for me! I wasn't able to capture any pictures because he would get distracted by the camera and want to grab it rather than continuing to practice his crawling skillz.