Grandparents to the rescue!

Weather aside, this was a much more satisfying trip to Portland than the last one (which featured a sick, cranky baby). Richard and I were actually called into action as emergency babysitters. Since we live across the country from the grandbaby, this happens rarely enough to be a delight. Basically, Daddy (who takes care of Lena during Amber's work day) was going to be out of town for a week. This is where being retired comes in handy. And it turns out to be really cheap to fly to Portland in February (go figure. Who wouldn't love 45 degrees and constant rain?).

The full set of pictures is here (mostly Lena, but not entirely). And here's a sample of particularly adorable Lena pics. She was 15 months old, btw. Running around and "helping" with everything, but mostly not speaking yet. Wow, it's hard to pick just a handful  of pictures to capture a baby's current stage of development. Let's go with these 4 for Inside Lena. Outdoors Lena needs her own entry.

Although she got a late start on solid food, Lena is finally eating a good variety of food. I think she enjoys the social aspect more than the actual food (she will NOT tolerate being left alone in her high chair for even a minute or two). Here she is practicing her new Baby Sign for "more," tickled pink that Grandpa understands and applauds it.

 
Lena perched on her favorite baby seat (the bottom stair in the finished basement) with two of her favorite toys, a plastic spoon and saucepan. Curiously, she loves pretending to cook and eat with the spoon, although she refuses to feed herself actual food with a spoon.

In the middle one, you see her in training as a service baby following the command "Take Grandpa his grabber." She also does "Take Grandpa his cane." Except when she decides that the item in question is too much fun to give up immediately and runs off with it.

Maybe it's not the best Lena picture ever, but something about that curious little face at the open door just melts my heart. She's ever alert to the possibility that she might be missing something going on in the next room. That's the "guest room" that we were about to start working on. 

Lena helps assemble the furniture

The kids had moved into their new house since our last visit, but hadn't had a chance to set up the guest room yet. So our plan was to pick out some furniture we liked, buy it for them, and assemble it. With one thing and another, this project took up pretty much the whole week. So the night before we left we were finally able to unpack and sleep on the fully assembled guest bed, complete with memory foam and a new fleece blanket. Lena helped, of course.
 


Dresser and sofa bed assembled at last, with 4" of memory foam folded up on the storage shelf above. It's a very cool futon bed design, easy as pie to unfold, but the mattress is too hard for us.