Many shades of blue

Well here I am a year later, and I have not blogged in all of this time. My little peanut keeps growing though. Here we are in our trip to Grand Cayman from June 17-June 24, 2010.

Passagrille

The Kelly Miller Circus

Looking Up

This may be one of my all time photos! We stopped after school to play at the park and decided to try flying our new Barbie kite since the wind was pretty gusty. Maya didn't want to at first because she thought the kite would blow away. And I can't blame her because each time we read a book about kites, they do fly away. (Piglet, Curious George, and Super Duck all come to mind) But once we tried it, we had a lot of fun! It was one of those perfect, unplanned afternoons that you hope you always remember.

Memorial Day

On Memorial Day we went to the cemetery to visit my dad's grave and to the Memorial Day Parade in town. By the afternoon it was pouring, but we had a nice start to the day.

Wings of Fancy

Today we hung out with some friends and visited the "Wings of Fancy" butterfly exhibit at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland. The gardens are 50 acres and include meandering paths past a Japanese tea house, fountains, a child's garden with a play house, a labyrinth, a rose garden,and for right now a butterfly pavilion. The room was smaller than I thought, but the butterflies were everywhere. They would land on you, so you were required to shake off your clothes and look for "hitchhikers" when you left. In the photo above, the butterflies are on a birdbath filled with pieces of fruit. My PBJ wanted me to hold her at first. she wasn't sure if she liked all of these butterflies flying around. She started to warm up when I let her use my camera to take some pictures of the butterflies. She took the shots below:

Home at Last!

This is my peanut sleeping in her crib at home for the first time. We flew home from Guatemala on May 1st, getting home pretty late that night. Maya was (and is) a pretty laid back baby, she adapts pretty easily to travel. My biggest problem on the flight home was that she was scared of changing tables in the bathrooms. My theory is that she associated them with getting shots at the doctor, because she had the same reaction when I first took her to the doctor here. She also had some ear pain and cried some during the flight. We upgraded the first leg of our return flight to first class, which turned out great because the only other people sitting there were 2 other adoptive parents who understood the crying. The extra room, private bathroom, and a little pampering from the staff helped in the stress of her crying so much on the flight. The customs part wasn't so fun. In Charlotte, we had to give paperwork to the immigration people and go sit in a room for a very long time. We were really worried we'd miss our connecting flight. The worse part was that the people working there didn't really tell us anything. Just led us to a room and said wait here. They separated us from the other adoptive families who had to wait in different places, so you were kind of isolated. It was really weird. Luckily we did make our connection once they "cleared us", I have no idea what was involved since they told us nothing. I was able to feed Maya some baby food before our second flight, which we were not in first class. My brother came to pick us up from the airport. Maya was not a fan of her first time in a car seat, but the drive was 45 minutes in the dark so she got drowsy pretty quick at that point. It was around midnight when we finally reached home. I showed Maya some of her toys and she played a little on the floor before drifting off to sleep. I don't think I got any sleep that night, which started the lack of sleep part of being a mom. Home at last!
P.S. I must say "home at last" a lot when we come home, because Maya now says "Home at Last!" every time we arrive home. If I say it first, she yells at me and says, "No! Me say it!"