we can cross off interior design

an interior designer madelyn is not. we went tile shopping today and madelyn selected this as the tub of her dreams. matt and i both cracked up when we walked past, but maddie was in love. tile shopping with a one year old is not for the faint of heart. luckily one of the stores had a little play table with books and coloring books with crayons that kept her in one place for more than 5 minutes. she actually behaved very well and didn't touch anything that we asked her not to.

after some napping and cleaning around the house, we headed out to our annual neighborhood block party. this year one of the neighbors (ava's mom) arranged for the teacher of our music class to come and do a session during the block party to help entertain the littler kids for a while. what was exciting for me was that matt could see maddie participate and help get some video so that we can share with all of you - my loyal readers.

madelyn loves miss sarah (the teacher) and is often right up next to her. the nice thing is that miss sarah says that madelyn is just like one of her kids and that maddie is fine getting in to everything. the benefit of the classroom is that there is a table where all the supplies can be put out of maddie's reach, but she does spend a lot of class time trying to reach everything on the table. she is getting really good at doing all the motions and participating, but today was not as stellar a performance. enjoy!

here are some more pictures from the block party tonight. love.

they had a two person bounce house that maddie really enjoyed. especially when an older kid would get in with her to do some actual jumping.

she enjoyed riding a train with a whistle and it was even self-propelled. it took a little bit for her to get the hang of steering it but she managed to get it going in a circle on her own. the train whistle also reminded me that i taught her how to blow a real whistle today. she didn't like how loud it was, but tried it a few times anyway.

madelyn's new thing is to squat down and look up at people so that she can make eye-contact when she greets them. here she is saying "hi" to miss sarah while she was getting set up.

here she is 'riding in cars with boys'. (you might notice that she is actually pushing him out.)

enjoying her first juice box. she wore more than she drank, but really enjoyed the straw.

reading books with daddy and ava.