On February 25th Cheryl and Lura went with the Mommy & Me group to Wilderness Park. This is a fairly large wooded park and campground, right in the middle of the Los Angeles suburbs a few miles to the south of our house. Here Lura is (cautiously!) feeding the ducks at the pond in the middle of the park.
Mark was out of town for two major trips during this period; for a week at the beginning of March he went to London, Brussels, and the Netherlands to meet with some colleagues. Afterward we realized that this was the longest period of time we've gone without talking to each other since we started dating almost five years ago; it was a lot harder on both of us than we had anticipated. Fortunately, Cheryl's Mom flew in again to help her care for Lura while Mark was away. On March 2nd, they went out to the outlet mall in Camarillo, and two very important words entered Lura's vocabulary: "purse" and "shopping"! She was very interested in the purses at the Coach outlet, but she was persuaded to settle for this paper bag instead. Daddy's credit cards breathe a sigh of relief...
On Cheryl's birthday, March 4th, she and Grandma took Lura for her first haircut, at the age of 18 months and one day! Here she is, sitting on Grandma's lap before...
..and here she is fifteen minutes later. Mark used to undergo transformations like this about every six months when he was in grad school; you see a lot better when your hair no longer flops into your eyes!
On March 7th, after Mark came back, we went to the Manhattan Village Mall in the evening, and Lura had her first taste of frozen custard. Mark isn't sure just how "regional" this treat is, but he definitely remembers Ted Drewes frozen custard as a St. Louis specialty from his childhood!
Here is our traditional three generations photo that evening before Grandma headed home the next day. What a big girl Lura is getting to be!
In mid-March Mark had to go to Washington, DC for a few days to participate in a NASA proposal review panel. The last time he was in the area, he didn't get in contact with his family who live there in time to arrange a visit, so this time he made sure not to miss the opportunity to drop in on his Great-Aunt Elma, who now lives with her son Ralph, his wife Carol, and their daughter AnnaMarie, on March 14th. Mark hadn't seen Aunt Elma for a few years, but he hadn't seen Ralph, Carol, and AnnaMarie in something like a decade! It was wonderful to have a chance to catch up with them after all this time.
The next day Mark unexpectedly had the afternoon at liberty, so he took the subway to the National Mall and visited a few of the museums. He especially wanted to see the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives after performing in 1776 a couple of months ago, but he also wanted to visit the National Air and Space Museum, which he hadn't seen since he was an undergraduate at Princeton in the early 1980s. From there he took a bus to the new Udvar-Hazy Center, an annex of the museum at Dulles Airport, and on the return trip he recognized the couple in the front row of the bus as his friends Dwight and Mary McKay, whom he also had not seen since he was at Princeton, along with their daughters Catherine and Susan! They were visiting the nation's capital during spring break at Purdue, where Dwight works; talk about a small world!
Cheryl has generally been a lot better at staying in touch with her long-standing friends, like her friend Jen whom she's known since junior high school and who now lives a bit to the north of us with her husband Mike and son David. Here is Lura at David's third birthday celebration on March 20th, with a special piñata designed for little kids: it opens when they grab and pull "ripcord" ribbons, instead of having to hit it with a stick.
And here's our little shopper in a local mall a few days later, carefully considering a price tag! We mentioned above that "shopping" has now permanently entered her vocabulary; she enunciates multiple-syllable words very carefully, so it comes out like "SHOP-ping". That's a good skill to have once she starts singing!
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