Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Paela and Aderyn played a lot with trains this week. Aderyn is loving her newfound mobility. She is a happier camper the better she gets at crawling, as she can now chase us when we leave the room.

Or get into the cat food.

Or tear apart the train tracks Paela built up.

You can imagine how Paela and Star car feel about this. On the plus side, Paela is beginning to learn the powers of distraction. For example, we teach her to create decoy lines of the train cars she doesn't care about, in order to protect the line of her favorite train cars from the destructive powers of a baby on the move. She is learning, as this morning she used a decoy of the lego helicopter in order to keep Aderyn from crawling into the cat litter box. Go Paela, go.

It was a pretty low-key week. I think. I remember Camilla and Cameron came over to play in the kiddie pool in our backyard. Camilla had the most excellent idea of putting the slide into the pool, and Paela wanted to go down time after time, taking turns with Aderyn and the rubber duck. Aderyn's claim to fame was being the first to sit in the cold water. Of course, she didn't have much say in it, but she also didn't have much say against the idea.

Another night we went to story time at the Barnes and the Noble. Remember when we used have date night reading books in the aisles of the bookstore? I mean, books for our age group instead of books for Paela and Aderyn's age group? I was just remembering.

We are all almost over the colds that took us down last week. Now that I think about it, that's probably why we kept the week so low key. That makes perfect sense. I was exhausted from trying to get better and take care of the girls until they got better. Well, now that riddle is solved.

And riddle me this -- why would the stake open up the nursery toys for kids one stake conference, and lock them all up tight the next? At any rate, it left us sorely under-prepared in activities to occupy Paela. But Aderyn was happy as there were ample people to look at and ample floor to crawl on. Go Aderyn, go.