new bubble game

after a few rainy days, today was a beautiful fall day. (granted matt had frost/ice on his windshield this morning that couldn't be scraped off by his windshield wipers.) since it rained last night, i thought that the playground might be too wet for playing this morning. instead we went back to the lotza fun room. we haven't been there in at least 6 months and they had a lot of new toys. and madelyn had the whole place to herself for over an hour! i guess they were really busy the past two days because of the rain, but we were the only ones all day today.

madelyn was totally overstimulated by all the toys. she went around the whole room saying "hi" to everything and could hardly play with anything before seeing something else that needed her immediate attention. she did spend quite a while feeding all the baby dolls in the play house in the middle of the room. and any other toys that got her attention for more than 5 seconds took a trip through the jungle gym tube. she would carry them through at least once and laugh the whole time. the picture shows her taking the bottles through when she was finished feeding all the babies.

after the lotza fun room we went home for some lunch and her nap. i had to fight to keep her awake on the drive over there because it was 10:30 and if she is in the car at 10:30 she falls asleep and if it is long enough that is her only nap for the day. i have been working on getting her back to a 1:00 or 2:00 nap time. she starting going down for her nap before noon after we got back from california and i hadn't really tried to push it back because when she sleeps 2-3 hours it didn't really bother me. but it is starting to be inconvenient to feed her lunch after her nap and it makes it difficult to keep her nap time consistent when we have to run errands in the morning.

because it really was a beautiful day out, we went to the park late in the afternoon. madelyn has been obsessive with her bubbles lately. she carries them with her everywhere when we are outside (i don't let her bring them in the house). sometimes she wants me to blow them, but most of the time she wants to "dip" the wand herself and can even blow out a bubble or two. so here is a new game that got her laughing when she was swinging with her bubbles (it is pretty bumpy because i am pushing her and picking up the bubbles).

yesterday afternoon we went to the park for a few hours. the sun had finally come out and the rain had stopped for a while. we did have to bundle up (i wore my first scarf of the season), but with the sun out it was a nice time to go. my trick for getting a little more out of her warm weather clothes is to put a long sleeved t-shirt under it. it was a lot easier this spring when she didn't care, but now she didn't like having to put on two shirts because it slowed her down from being able to "go".

all of the gorillas/apes/chimps/monkeys were inside and madelyn was very excited about seeing animals in every cage (usually at least half of the exhibits are empty because the animals are outside) and as a bonus almost all of them were swinging around and playing. she also gave a baby gorilla statute a close examination. she has never had any interest in it before, but we had also never gotten to see so much activity from the gorillas before and spent more time at that exhibit than normal.

love.