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After three long weeks apart, Sergio and Simone drove up to visit on the long weekend to spend some time in DC. The skies were blue and the weather beautiful (not like now, which is like some kind of crazy oven) so we were able to get out and see some DC sights. Our first stop was the Smithsonian Zoo, where we saw a baby gorilla, lions in the sun and a panda lazing on a rock. Our impulse zoo souvenir purchase was a panda mask which Simone refused to put down for the rest of the day – there was something kind of spooky about a toddler in a stroller with a face of a panda.

Knowing we were going to miss the fireworks on the 4th, we thought we’d hit some other iconic American sites. I love this photo of Simone at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, which she was calling “the man in the chair”. She walked all the way up the stairs where you could look out over the Reflecting Pool and the Washington Monument – and the tourists. The city was thick with tourists in their star-spangled clothes – a trip to the Museum of Natural Science was essentially a people-dodging exercise but Simone had a good time, especially with the dinosaurs. I took her to the gift shop afterward to reward her awesome behaviour and she carefully considered every item in the place before putting everything back and saying she didn’t need anything. Ah, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I was in the odd parental position of trying to sell  her, increasingly desperately, on any of the toys and trinkets but she wasn’t buying it.

We also managed to catch the Spain/Paraguay game which made Sergio awfully happy – I think there will be a big soccer ball shaped hole in his life after World Cup. The nice thing about watching the games in DC is you are guaranteed to see citizens of said country at the game – a group of very happy Uruguyans were beeping and honking in the streets post game, which wouldn’t necessarily happen in Durham.

We escaped DC for Durham to start packing boxes and getting ready for yet another move. It doesn’t feel as painful this time around (yet), just familiar. But it was sad to come back to DC without them – though I am really liking my job, I can’t wait until we’re all together again.

After Kyla graduated, we headed to the Outer Banks for a relaxing week with Diane and Greg.  None of us had been there before and it was a nice surprise to find that the house we rented was actually as advertised, with a big kitchen and plenty of room and a swimming pool (plus very close to the beach and some nice sand dunes).

The pictures, from left to right and going down, are:

1.  The view of the ocean from our 3rd floor balcony

2.  Simone standing by the balcony door

3.  Simone at the beach in Nags Head

4.  Sergio, Diane, and Greg playing Settlers of Catan (our favorite board game) after returning from the Outer Banks

5.  Grandpa Greg and Simone dancing in the rental house

6.  The light house at Nags Head (we also went to one in Ocracoke that you could enter from the inside that had an amazing spiral stair case)

7.  Simone filling up her “pool” next to the “big people” pool

8.  An external shot of the house we stayed in

9.  Kyla and Simone at the pool

10.  Sergio and Simone playing soccer upon returning.

Below that is a recent video of Simone doing her new favorite thing – playing harmonica!

There is much more (big) news to announce which I will do in my next post, which I plan to do later this week!

Congratulations, Kyla!

She graduated on May 9th from UNC’s SILS program with her Master’s degree in Library Science.  We have been working towards this for three years, and she is going to be working in Washington, DC for NPR over the summer (starting in two weeks)!  Here she is with her mom, who made it out here with her fiance Greg for the ceremony and stayed with us for 10 days in Durham and the Outer Banks:

The ceremony was very nice with all of the sky blue (or “Carolina Blue”) gowns the undergraduates wore.  Kyla, being a grad student, wore a black gown and is already at her seat in the grass in the picture below:

Kyla was nice enough to award me with my own Master’s Degree for “Love and Support”, which I was very honored to be awarded:

We went to the Outer Banks the next day and spent a week there, which the next post will be about.

Kyla made this video yesterday featuring Simone doing some break-dance moves two days ago, set to the song “Peter Piper” by Run DMC:

Simone Breaks It Down from Kyla Sweet on Vimeo.

Summer came a little early this year.  After a particularly cold winter, we have just had a mini heat wave with temperatures hitting the 90′s in early April.  Some cooler spring weather is now here, but it’s safe to say that we’ll be wearing short sleeves or t-shirts until October.  Here is Simone enjoying an ice-cream cone that an actual ice-cream truck sold to us recently.  I don’t see ice-cream trucks very much anymore, so it was a nice surprise.  Even if it the song it was loudly playing was a muzak version of Lambada (The Forbidden Dance!).

Next we have a picture of Simone pretending to drive our car.  She really loved honking the horn and playing with the dashboard buttons and did not want to get out.  Lately she hasn’t wanted to go in the house at all when we get home from work and school – she just wants to be outside until we eat dinner.

Over Easter, we hid eggs and Simone found them all with a little prodding.  Then she ate three and a half of them on the spot.  I didn’t think she’d like hard boiled eggs, but she proved me wrong.  I couldn’t get her away from them.  The flower head band she is wearing makes her look a little like the Statue of Liberty, though.

I finally got her to wear a hat I ordered for her a few months after she was born, though.  It’s a pink trucker cap that says “Lil’ Buddy” on it and I have been trying for a long time to get her to wear it, and she finally did.

This is also “parent appreciation” week at Simone’s school, and today’s activity was to have parents dress up their children in their favorite athletic gear.  We chose “Team Canada” in honor of the Canadian Hockey Team, complete with the Maple Leaf flag.  She loved waving it around!

I’m looking forward to a summer of popsicles  and ice-cream and more crazy hats.

Thank you for your patience … the website is back up and working better than ever!  And thank you again to Matchbox Creative.  After moving the files over from our old web host to our new one, I converted the blog from Blogger to WordPress.  Cornelius at Matchbox Creative then converted the look and feel of our old site into a WordPress theme, added some enahancements like a “Search” bar and a plug-in that shows nice pop-up images when you click on them, and fixed the overall conversion and made it so we can expand the site easily.  I am happy that I can now add larger photos, more videos, and more audio files.  The file limitations of our previous web server were starting to constrain our ability to post more information.  You can leave comments now, too!  

Now that the weather has warmed up a bit, we can finally take walks when we get home from work, instead of running straight to the kitchen to get warm and cook dinner.  As you will see from some of the photos below, we did get quite a bit of snow this winter compared to last year.  Kyla went to Vancouver a week before the Olympics started and we were definitely having colder weather here than she was having there.  She should be able to post about her trip there soon.  Unfortunately, she is bogged down with her Masters paper and has not had very much free time in the past few weeks.  We are looking forward to a trip to the Outer Banks in May after she graduates to unwind.  And then she starts an internship in June at NPR in Washington, DC for 10 weeks!  More on that later … for now, enjoy these pictures of Simone spanning from January to a few days ago.  We’ll put them up on our public album along with others soon.  

As you can see, our blog posts are back up, but the page template is still being worked on.  We should have this fixed in some capacity soon!

The potty training thing is actually starting to happen. Simone has been interested in her potty for a little while, but in the past two days she has been sitting on it and trying to use it, which is pretty exciting for us. No big results yet, but I think she’ll get it down pretty soon …

Going back in time a little bit, I wanted to post some pictures from our recent trip to Albuquerque. We had a great time! The flight out was good, and although I was nervous to fly alone with Simone, and we had to go to Albuquerque by way of Chicago and St. Louis, we made it in one piece and she actually made it fun to travel and there weren’t any mishaps. On the way back, not so good … but we’ll get to that later.

I stayed with my sister Elena for two nights on the west side of town, and her three boys Jojo, Christian, and Gaby were very good to Simone and she had fun playing with all of them. Every morning she would ask for “monkey munch” (her words for cereal, which I taught her and do not regret), and here she is having some with her cousins, along with a photo of her with her great grandma and my dad, her grandpa:

Her birthday party day arrived (a few days before her actual birthday), and we thought it would be fun to try curling her hair. She didn’t mind the curlers being in her hair, but she did mind taking them out. They should have stayed in longer, but she still got a bit of a curl from the process (the picture below right has her great aunt Patsy, grandma and grandpa in it):

Then, it was time for cake! Several family members and some of my friends and my parents friends were able to attend the party. The other picture below is my aunt Patsy holding Simone while Patsy tries to figure out her digital camera and Simone practices smiling.

We ate at Sadie’s restaurant the next day, and I finally got to eat a bunch of chips and salsa. They really do have the best salsa, and I bought two jars of it to bring home. I had a long list of New Mexican restaurants to eat at, and although I did not make it to as many as I would have liked, I was glad I went here (and The Frontier and Blake’s and the Indian Cultural Center’s restaurant). The kids got bored and headed over to the Ms. Pac-Man machine. If you know me at all, you know I love this video game and it warmed my heart to see her take an interest in the very best video game of all time (hands down). Although we hope she does not take an interest in other technical gadgets, TV, and games yet, but we know that’s a pipe dream. I think if you replace the milk bottle on the tabletop console with a pint of beer, you could sum up a good chunk of my 20′s:

Finally, there is this ad I saw on the side of the road for Blake’s (who make the very best green chile cheese burgers), and it made me laugh since they just flipped over their usual mascot:

As most everyone knows by now, Simone threw up all over the Duke student who sat next to me half an hour into a four hour flight from Phoenix to Raleigh. Rather than give you all the gory details, suffice it to say it was an unpleasant experience but everybody on the plane was very nice about it all and we somehow survived. I used to have a fear of flying, but after that experience I fear nothing – the worst has already happened.

We had a great time and miss everybody back in Albuquerque! Happy 2nd birthday Simone! I will post all of these and other pictures to our online album soon, along with some videos, and then our next entry will show the other birthday party we had for her in Durham.

I’ll let Sergio update about his trip to Albuquerque but with Simone’s second birthday came great power: her first big girl bed. It was procured on a trip to the closest Ikea – 3 hours away – a day best not spoken of, as it involved 6 hours of driving, toddler tantrums, about 20 Swedish meatballs and too many Allen wrenches. But let’s not dwell on it, let’s view the happy result: