I think we've told a lot of people about geocaching, but if you haven't heard you should check out this website: www.geocaching.com Become a member for free!
From here you can find coordinates for caches that people have hidden all over the world; but also in your neck of the woods. You don't have to have a GPS, thanks to google you can can map anything pretty accurately... but having a GPS is really the main part of the game.
So you pick a treasure that you want to find, download it to your GPS and go look for it. They are hidden in trees and buildings and underwater. A lot of them out here seem to be ammo cans and film canisters. As I understand it, sometimes people put money in them so it's a real prize to be the FTF [first to find]. We are having lots of fun trekking through woodsy areas of our surrounding neighborhoods. It's usually somewhere that we otherwise wouldn't go. You have to be stealthy - part of the idea is to keep the cache a secret and not draw attention to the fact that there is something hidden in the big tree stump. We are devising where to hide our own caches. We are keeping a journal and take lots of pictures of our adventures. I also log back onto the website and report when we find a cache & any pertinent details. Some people have found thousands. We're up to 5, I think. Our "team" is named SPAZ-ZAH! [Sare Pete And Zoe-Zah]
The song in the video is "Sleepy Tigers" by Her Space Holiday.

Can hair have a mind of its own?

Good morning, Sunshine!

Helping Daddy Build Chairs

About the Ferry Video [below]

To make the video below I used Google's Picasa 3. It's free software and is so easy and fun to use. Making these slideshow movies is a breeze. I didn't think about how small the video would be on the blog when I did the subtitles so I'll make them easier to read next time.
Pete, Zoe, Auntie Constance, and I took the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry yesterday to the opening of The Grub Hut. Pete has been helping his friend Sean get his new burger joint running so we were invited to try the grub. It's pretty tasty stuff.
It was a beautifully sunny day yesterday but Kingston was surrounded by fog. It was weird taking the ferry to the island because we couldn't see anything at all. I was very impressed by the captain's skills as we slipped right up to the pier. I guess he's had some practice, right?

The song playing is Lisa Hannigan - I Don't Know Why.
You can download the mp3 for free from Amazon right now. I also really like the cover art on her album.

Ferry to Kingston

pretty girl

Look, her hair is laying down today! Her eyes look brown in this photo, but they are still gold & gray most days. We love her puffy cheeks.

Quilt for Zoe

Mom made this awesome quilt for Zoe's birthday. I need to get some really good pictures of it.

crazy baby

This morning Zoe & I went to a Mom & Tot Yoga class at the ymca. It was the 1st time I have gone to the class. A new facility recently opened that is closer to our house than the one we have been going to the past few months. Now we only drive a couple of miles. It's a very fancy ymca, and very clean since everything is brand new. The nursery is huge and has plenty of room for kids like Zoe who Never Sit Still.
Anyway, there were 7 other moms in the yoga class. We kind of naturally divided up in the room so that the 3 of us with 12-ish month /year olds were on one side of the room and the moms with tiny babies were on the other. I knew that Zoe would be all over the place but I was hoping that the 2 other little girls her age would be doing the same. No such luck! If anything, it seemed like Zoe was kind of showing them how to pull on the jumpropes that were hanging up and how to push over the stairclimber things. She basically did laps around the room for the entire hour, playing with all of the other baby's toys, trying to talk to the other moms during their stretches. She would check in with me and look across the room to see that I was watching her, but otherwise she was totally exploring.
Luckily, other moms think that all babies are funny: during one long stretch where we were on our backs and couldn't really look around, Zoe squeezed around behind a woman on the other side of the room. She opened her purse, took out her wallet, opened her wallet and found her driver's license. Which she carried around the room until someone else said "she has your driver's license!" LUCKILY, it was funny.
It's true that Zoe LOVES taking everything out of my purse and then taking everything out of my wallet. So she's had lots of practice. Since there are toy purses for babies and books that are called "empty grandma's purse" or something like that, I know it's not just my kid. But it was a little awkward.
I really enjoyed the class otherwise, and nobody scowled at me when I was returning their toys and apologizing. So we'll probably try it again on Friday.
There's actually a lot more that happened [carseats as climbing toys, bottles, the instructor's scarf...], that's just the most memorable.

Food or Not-Food?

Here's some classic, Zoe jibber-jabber. And wandering around the house.

clapping

Zoe walked in last night while we were finishing dinner and was clapping. She was really excited about her new skill.

Miss Napkin Head

I don't know why we have this one green-checkered napkin in the drawer with the placemats, and I don't know why Zoe drags everything out of the drawer to find it. But she loves it.

tree & hiccups

I put our little Christmas tree away [calm down, this video is a couple of weeks old]. It was the first time that I let Zoe touch it. I was surprised by how gentle she was.

Life is Hard [and it's time for a nap]

More table fun

This week Zoe started putting things in certain places. She has been carrying stuff and throwing stuff and dropping stuff for a long time, but this week she took the potatoes out of the drawer in the fridge and carefully placed them on the shelves. It was really cute. She also put my phone in a drawer full of her toys. Not so cute. She likes to put lids back on boxes and take lids off of bottles.

More snow?

It started to snow again this afternoon and it has not let up. All of our Christmas snow had finally melted away, although we had plenty of the dirty slush piled up along the side of the road still. We'll see if we get to leave the house tomorrow. I hope so! We have spent most of the last few days inside of the house, just resting and doing some cleaning. I am selling the bed in our guest room on craigslist, along with some other stuff we have laying around. We'll probably get an aerobed or something for overnight guests if anyone decides to visit and needs to sleep here. But I'm ready to use that room for some art-making.
Zoe is walking around with my cellphone. She's actually holding it up to her ear and "talking" goblohabayayaghoeeeha. Yikes! Well now she's looking at the pizza hut coupons so maybe she's going to have something delivered.

leapfrog table

For Zoe's birthday, Aunt Colleen gave us some money to buy Zoe the Chicco Activity table. It's not sold in stores though, and I didn't have the patience to wait the 3 weeks the online order required. So we got this LeapFrog table instead. We saw how much Zoe loved playing with Morgan's table when we visited Derek in KC, so I knew it would be a hit. She has played and danced many, many times today. This will be the first of many videos I'm sure. Thank you Colleen!