As I'm sure you all knew, June 28th was International Mud Day! Molly's class at daycare celebrated by making some mud puddles and inviting the parents to join in the fun. It was a beautiful morning for Mud Day, and Molly enjoyed it while being her normal, cautious self (you'll notice that she's not completely covered in mud - most kids weren't but there were a few more adventurous ones). Here are some pictures of Molly...
making mud pies...
Getting her feet wet...
doing some mud jumping....
and some more mud jumping...
some mud surfing (or mud karate - i'm not really sure what she's doing here)...
some mud painting...
and finally, some cleaning up...
It was a pretty fun morning at Buckeye Village - and since Molly loves the water so much, we decided to do some running through the sprinkler this weekend to top it all off
Over the past couple of weeks we've caught Molly "reading" aloud as she's looking at her books. Obviously she's just memorized the story as we've read it to her, and associated parts of the story with the pictures, but it's been cute to watch her read the story aloud to herself or to us if we ask her. Here's a clip of Molly with her nursery rhymes book, which she sings to rather than reads once she sees the picture, but she does read with some of her other books too. Enjoy!
Molly got quite a treat this weekend - and she'll probably be talking about it for weeks.
Our realtor Susie, who helped us find our home, happens to live on a 200 acre cattle farm about an hour outside of Columbus with her husband Tom. She was nice enough to invite us and our friends (whose home she also helped find) out to the farm for dinner and an evening feeding the cows.
Molly and her friend Ellie had a blast. Here they are riding on the "tractor"
After a great dinner (steak, of course). We all headed out into the fields to herd us some cows and bring 'em in for their dinner. Molly is supervising our friend Tom here (he is a retired faculty member from Animal Science Dept. at OSU).
And here she is getting ready to take some hay out to a group of cows
And here they are on the way back (Molly let Tom drive on the way back to the shed)
Then Ted, Ellie, Molly and I followed the rest of the group out to some more distant paddocks to check on a few of the other cows
And here they are.
The rain held off until the way home, so we had a beautiful evening out on the farm. Nice and warm (a little humid) and surprisingly bug free.
We're not sure which she liked better - seeing the calves or driving on the tractor. Either way, it was a great experience for Molly and a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon and evening in June.
When we were house hunting, Grandview Heights was top on our list of neighborhoods we wanted to live. It's a great walkable neighborhood, with a really nice little downtown strip with good restaurants & coffee shops, along with a Jeni's Ice Cream shop! Door to door, it takes us 7 minutes to get to work by car & is equally an easy bike ride (well once the construction down the road from us is completed!). Even though our address is "Columbus", Grandview is it's own municipality, which means it has it's own school system, which is top notch. Because of all these great things, there is very little turn over of houses in Grandview. There were only about 4 houses on the market when we looked, in contrast to ~40 in another popular neighborhood we were interested in as well. Since moving here, we've realized just how lucky we were to find our house and have been grateful ever since.
This Saturday was a great example of all the things we love about Grandview... The morning started off with the Grandview Memorial Day Parade.
Just a quick walk down the road to the parade route & to meet up with some friends.
Here comes the band! Molly's got her bucket, ready to pick up any candy & treats! Fortunately, she still has no idea what candy is and was more happy to pick up the bouncy balls and stickers being passed out.
The Grandview fire trucks! Molly's favorite, although this time it wasn't carrying Santa. Every Christmas, the firetruck delivers Santa to the library for the kids to tell him what they'd like for Christmas.
Lots of fun at the parade... Post-parade coma during our walk home.
Saturday evening we went to the Grandview Hop! This is kind of like a neighborhood art walk, with local artists & music along Grandview Ave. We started off with some good wood-fire pizza at Figlio's and then walked up and down the street to check out the "hop". Although Molly still doesn't know what candy is, she has now figured out that she likes ice cream and immediately asked for some when we walked by Jeni's. Poor kid is in for a surprise when she realizes that most ice cream doesn't taste nearly as good as Jeni's! Last time her favorite flavor was riesling poached pear, but yesterday's favorite was pistachio & honey.
During our stroll Molly got really excited when we passed "Brutus the Buckeye", the OSU mascot. Guess this kid might be turning into a Buckeye after all, although we have to teach her the correct order of his name.
