She took her first dip in a pool--a Charlotte sized pool, thanks to her Grandpa. My parents have a full size pool but it isn't ready for swimmers yet, so my dad picked up this baby pool to tide her over in the meantime. It was money well spent:
Then she had her first encounter with a sprinkler. Chad wanted to water the lawn and she thought this new sprinkler business was interesting, so he let her experiment:
Then yesterday she went to her first parade. I suppose technically it was her second, since last year we took her to a 4th of July parade. She was only 5 weeks old and slept the whole time, so I don't think it really counts. We went the parade in Berea, the city we grew up in about a half hour away from where we live now. It's a small college town (we went to college there too, at Baldwin-Wallace) and every year they have Memorial Day and Independence Day parades. We've gone every year for as long as I can remember. Our good friend Dylan (he was the best man in our wedding and we've known him forever) grew up on the street where the parade passes thru and his parents still live there. We gather near their house, every year, and even if it's been almost a year since we've seen each other it never feels that way. It just feels like home.
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| Charlotte and Dylan, having a picnic |
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| Yay, one of the few photos with all 3 of us! |
The parade route is right around the corner from the first house Chad and I lived in together. We moved in several months after we got married, when we were seniors in college. We lived there just shy of a year, and moved when we bought the home we live in now. It feels like we lived in that house for much longer; we have fond memories of that time. My dad nicknamed it Old Blue--it was a really old house, built in the 1850s by a quarry worker. A professor we knew owned it and rented it out to us for practically nothing. It was right in the middle of the two buildings almost all of our classes were in. I took an art history class in the evenings one semester in Marting Hall, which was just one block away from Old Blue. We had Henry for about a month at that point and he and Chad would walk up to Marting during my class break (it was a 3 hour class. Art history for 3 hours tests one patience and ability to remain awake) and bring a snack and we would sit on the steps and talk for a few minutes while Henry explored. They'd walk back when my class ended and we'd all walk home together. I remember a few times getting to one of my sociology classes early and realizing I'd forgotten a book or notes. We lived so close I was able to make a mad dash back home, grab what was missing, and fly back to class just in time.
We spent our first Christmas as a married couple, adopted our first pet, graduated college, and started our first "real" jobs in the short time we lived there. When we found the home we wanted to buy my childhood best friend, Rachael, and her new husband moved into Old Blue. They lived there for awhile until they eventually bought a home and moved to Columbus. Yesterday after the parade we walked by the house and it looks so cute:
When we bought our house, it was a creamy yellow color. A few years later we decided to get to new siding and we both were thinking about changing the color. We decided we wanted blue, and we knew the exact shade: Old Blue "Blue". We ended up with an exact match:
Now we live in "Old Blue II."
Happy Memorial Day! Please do me a favor this week and have a chat with the weather gods--the forecast for Saturday is rainy. This does not bode well for an outdoor birthday party. I am working on Plan B: Indoor Party but I really, really hope to go with Plan A.
~Stacy
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