I Need Drums!!

Lily's been enjoying all of the toys at Grandpa Brad's house this week. Among the favorites is the drum set. Also, she's taken note of the guitar collection....

We went to the Tennessee State Capitol and the Tennessee State Museum today. We managed to navigate downtown Nashville without too much trouble, and we must have climbed dozens and dozens of flights of stairs today. When we went to the museum, and Lily noticed an old guitar that was on display there: "That's just like Grandpa Brad's guitar!" she said excitedly....

The Hermitage

Among today's stop was the Hermitage, the Tennessee home and burial place of President Andrew Jackson. It's certainly interesting to see how history is presented differently in different parts of the country....

The Zoo

The first stop on our Spring Break agenda today was the Nashville Zoo. Lily was very excited about going to see the animals, and the weather today was wonderful. However, a whole lot of other people also seemed to think it was the perfect day to go to the zoo. The lines were exceptionally long when we got there; we stood in like for over 45 minutes before we even managed to make it through the front gates. The zoo was certainly busy, but it didn't seem particularly packed once we were inside. The overall outing was enjoyable, but the zoo was a little disappointing -- no bears, no otters, no lions. At least there were elephants, giraffes, zebras...and that was enough to make Lily one very happy little lady.

One Long, Rough Day....

It's been one of those "when it rains, it pours" days around here, except the water wasn't coming from the sky.... We started with a visit from an electrician. We did some work in our garage, and we decided that it might be a good idea to have a professional electrician look things over to make sure everything was done correctly. Everything checked out okay, so that was a relief. After the electrician, spiderman (AKA, the exterminator) came. He sprayed outside and treated the inside of the house, and everything was okay with that as well. However, he did leave the door to the hot water heater closet slightly open when he left. The door sticks a little bit sometimes, and I always check to make sure the cat didn't run into the closet whenever the door's left ajar. When I opened the door, I found a nice puddle of water under the hot water heater. We figured out the the hot water heater had a leak, so we turned off the water, drained it, and went to find out about getting a new one. We ordered a new hot water heater, and it will be delivered and installed on Monday. The bad news is that this means we're a whole week without a hot water heater; the good news is we're to be gone most of the week for Spring Break. And regarding Spring Break, we were originally supposed to leave yesterday, then plans got rearranged so we were supposed to leave tomorrow, and then today (sometime between the exterminator and the hot water heater) plans got changed again and so we ended up leaving today. Amid the flurry of people and things today, there was also packing and preparing to travel that complicated everything even more. At this rate, I'm just hoping that "Spring Break"actually yields some sort of real "break!"

ABCs, ASL, and Ws

Since Lily seems to have a pretty sound mastery of the ABCs (upper case letters, most lower case letters, and basic phonics), I decided to hunt up something else to try to keep her interested in letters...and I ended up with ASL. I downloaded an ipod application that has the ASL alphabet, numbers, and colors and I printed off a couple of little basic sign charts. Lily's doing pretty well with them so far, and she seems to enjoy making the letter signs. Her hands, however, aren't quite coordinated enough to handle sign language yet. It's kinda cute to watch her use her left hand to pull and move the fingers on her right hand to form the letters...

And, regarding the W.... Up until a few weeks ago, she has referred to the letter "W" simply as "double." The later part of the alphabet has long gone "T-U-V-double-X-Y-Z." The "W" is now complete.

ABCs

Lily got a new toy last weekend when we went to visit Aunt Janet. It's a little portable case with a chalkboard on one side, a magnet board on the other, and a set of letter and number magnets that goes along with it. The toy wasn't really something that Lily needed, as she has an easel with a chalkboard and a whole refrigerator full of magnets, but she seemed particularly interested in it and it wasn't expensive, so Mommy gave in. Over the past few days, she's been working very hard to write her ABCs on her chalkboard. She can do most of the letters without help, and she's made considerable progress in the last few days. (And, at this point, none of the letters are backwards!!)