Korachrome: June 2010

We knew it wouldn't be long before she started crawling. I suppose she is more or less "scooching". One foot is walking while she drags her other leg underneath her.

This video was taken on the 14th of June 2010.

You can see at the beginning how much she wants to touch the door stopper, but she doesn't actually do it. She whines a bit, turns away, but keeps looking back at it with longing. About a week prior it scared her with the boing-oing-oing sound, and even though she is attracted to it, I think she's afraid it'll make that sound again.

In related news, she is standing up a lot now, and last night even stood for a second on her own! She wants to be walking so badly. D and I think that she'll never really master crawling, and will probably be walking in the next month.

Wow. So what didn't we do this past Memorial Day weekend?

First of all, Darren's parents (AKA Gammy & Pop) came over Friday afternoon. They were preparing to babysit Kora while Daddy and Mommy went to a wedding. It was the FIRST time we ever left Kora, so you can imagine our hesitation and anticipation. I think Kora knew something was up because she was awfully clingy all day. We snuck out at about 5:15. The wedding was a lot of fun (thanks Katrina & Linc!) and we got home around 9:30 to Kora sitting on Gammy's lap playing. Apparently Kora gave them a bit of trouble and cried and screamed for about 45 minutes while they tried to put her to bed. As soon as they brought her downstairs, she stopped. Sigh. As soon as she saw me, of course she started crying. So here I am trying to undo my dress while carrying her upstairs. I nursed her to sleep and she actually had a record sleep time of 3 hours! Unfortunately that has yet to be repeated.

By the way, I know many of you just read that and gasped. Yes, she is 7 1/2 months old now and pretty much wakes up every 1 -2 hours between 9PM and 8AM. It hasn't been a problem until recently when I started working again. We're going to work with her over the next few months to get her to sleep longer stretches at night. We refuse to let her 'cry it out'. Instead we have a book called "The No Cry Sleep Solution" which takes longer, but is much more our style.

Saturday afternoon we picked up Minh-An's sister, Julie, at the airport. We hadn't seen Julie since Christmas. We then immediately got on MARTA (the public transportation here) and went to Piedmont Park, where the Atlanta Jazz Festival was going on. As a New Orleans Jazz Fest devotee, I knew I was going to be a bit disappointed, but it was still pretty fun. And free! We saw Esperanza Spalding, an amazing bass player and singer that I actually saw in New Orleans last year.

Beautiful midtown Atlanta skyline from Piedmont Park

Sunday was a big day. Because we missed New Orleans Jazz Fest this year, we told ourselves we would put some Festy music on Pandora, cook some Fest food, and have people who are into Jazz Fest over for the afternoon. In preparation for this event, Darren ordered 75 pounds of live crawfish. Yes. 75 pounds of live crawfish. They were delivered via FedEx on Saturday (I didn't know you could do this!), so Darren was in charge of keeping them alive until Sunday. This consisted of hosing them off periodically, and keeping them on ice.

Speaking of which, I learned a very important lesson about eating crawfish. Apparently you're not supposed to eat them if the tail is straight. Good advice. A bad crawfish can linger in your mouth for hours. I know from experience.

Back to our Fest Party...Mike Brisson and Andrew Swagler showed up early to help set things up. It was such a nice, overcast day that we decided to set the table up in the backyard. We put some fans up to keep the mosquitos away. Guests started showing up around 12:30. Besides the crawfish boil, Darren made his awesome gumbo. Everybody brought their beer of choice, and Mike brought over his homemade ice cream, in the festive flavor of bourbon pecan. Yum!

Trying to juggle Kora and a crawfish

Sorting through the live and dead crawfish

Julie and Andrew relaxing after the big feast

Monday was pretty relaxing. However, we did make Crawfish Monica (or a cheap knockoff of the Jazz Fest original) for dinner Monday night, and we had the Brissons over again. And again with the delicious homemade ice cream.

On Tuesday we went to the zoo for the first time! Darren and I went ahead and purchased annual tickets because we figure we'll be going quite a bit over the next year with Kora. It sure is nice living so close to the zoo and the aquarium. Zoo Atlanta is actually pretty nice. There was a nice bonus as the gorillas just had a baby about a week ago. We got to see the mama gorilla cuddling and nursing her baby. So sweet. The petting zoo is great, too. Kora was really interested in all of the animals, and touched a goat.