learning something new every day

Roxy has gotten pretty mobile these past couple of months. My dad spent a lot of time helping her walk around the house and she took her first big walk from one place to another when we were visiting Nate's folks in Pennsylvania. Walking isn't her preferred method of locomotion. She can sure scoot across the room faster than she can walk, but she's choosing to be upright more and more every day.

She also started climbing things, like the couch (as seen above). She's usually frozen in that position for a few seconds before letting us know that she's stuck, not happy and would appreciate some assistance, please! Nate or I usually give her a little boost and try to show her she needs to put a little more effort into climbing up than just sticking her leg where she wants the rest of her body to go.

Now... the photo that will go in the baby book under the heading "First Encounter with Baby Goat":

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the calf that licked her entire leg in one slurp or the face Roxy made when the piglet snuffled her bum for a good five seconds.  

Anyone still out there?

My new year's resolution to blog more certainly fell through! I have a good excuse, though. We were out of Australia for about a month. I was paranoid that if I blogged about it, some stranger who peeked at our home address and blog address from our Christmas postcard would break in and steal all of our stuff. (I know this is crazy, but I didn't want to risk losing our second hand microwave and IKEA furniture - ha.)

I've also taken on a side job that has taken up a lot of my spare time lately. Working from home with a toddler is an eye-opener. A task that, in the past, would have taken three 8-hour work days took two and half weeks worth of naptimes!  No complaints, though! I love thinking about things that don't involve dirty diapers or nursery rhymes.

Anyhoo, in late January, Nate traveled to Argentina and Chile with our former UCD labmates and some other folks. They went for a week-long conference, but traveled around for a few weeks before the conference began. He was gone for about four weeks. Way back when we first discussed this trip, I decided that Roxy and I would hightail it out of Brisbane for the month (smack dab in the middle of summer) and visit family in California, Pennsylvania and Virginia while he was gone.

All of our trips went well and I'll post about them more later. For now, though, I'll show you why blogging hasn't been top priority since our return to Oz. Roxy and Nate both came down with bad colds that had them out of commission for about a week. This picture pretty much sums up how they were both feeling:

Poor baby!

Things are back on track now that everyone is relatively healthy. Nate's got a lingering cough that he's hoping to ditch before he goes to Greece in about a week and a half, but Rox is back to her old self.

Okay, so we're back in business. Expect more posts soon!