Happy new year! On the morning of January 1st, Cheryl made us ozoni soup, a Japanese tradition she had first shared with Mark four years earlier in Hawaii.
From January 8th to 12th, Cheryl and Lura flew up to San Jose to visit Lily, Ken, and Justin. Mark stayed home and changed the oil in our vehicles, swapped shock absorbers on the van, went to the L.A. Auto Show so he could write a report for his alternative-fuels website; gearhead stuff... Here Lura is sitting in the suitcase, puzzling out how to open a Ziploc bag for the first time!
While Cheryl and Lura were up there they visited JoAnna, Grant, Amanda, and Austin. Here the girls play a duet on Amanda's "baby grand."
On January 11th, everybody went to Chuck E. Cheese for pizza and fun. Justin and Lura were fascinated by the stage show...
...and then Lura had fun riding the rides...
...and playing the games! She's holding prize tickets she won from the Bozo game behind her and Cheryl, dropping the balls in bucket number one all by herself.
Of course, she still has plenty of fun in the ol' Entertainer back home, apparently more so now than the last time we photographed her in it!
On January 18th Cheryl and Lura went with their Mommy and Me group to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Lura enjoyed feeding this parakeet; about this time "birdie" entered her vocabulary.
That evening Lura started walking! She had taken a few tentative steps for Grandma and Grandpa when they were here at Christmas, but January 18th marked the start of walking as a regular activity. That evening she walked repeatedly, a couple of yards at a time, and in the month since then (as this page is being typed) she has rapidly improved her distance and speed!
She's also getting more and more grown-up and "let me do it" in other areas of her life. In October of last year we showed a photo of her in her new inflatable tub, which we set inside the Jacuzzi in our master bathroom. By January she had decided that was kid stuff, and started fighting her bath each night until we figured that maybe she wants to clean up in the shower like Mommy and Daddy. So we moved the tub to the shower stall, and she gets into it happy as you please. She still likes looking at the kitties as they come in to look at her! About this time she also started naming them, not generically as "kitty," but as "Crickee" and "Monee" (Cricket and Melody). It took Mark a few months after we got Cricket before he was able to tell the two of them apart at a glance, so she's figured it out pretty quickly!
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