Birthday extravaganza

As the capstone to a week-long celebration of Elizabeth's first year of life, Grandma and Opa hosted a truly memorable doggy-themed bash, including Elizabeth's favorite foods (ribs, roasted red peppers, bread) presents, balloons, and a personalized birthday banner.


We then followed it up with a puppy-themed cake (Elizabeth enjoyed one of the cupcake paws).


Elizabeth went into a sugar shock, but could thankfully remember some commands.

We had to go for a walk the next day to work off the calories.

Elizabeth's birthday bonanza

As today is Elizabeth's first birthday, we did the traditional thing by allowing an sweet indulgence - banana bread cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

At first it was cute.

Then it was endearing.

Then we realized we probably overindulged our doughy munchkin.

Yup, she's gonna be a fatty.

Birthday weekend - the fun begins

Tuesday, Oct. 20, is Elizabeth's first birthday. Really, though, it's like a weeklong celebration. Maybe even longer.

The festivities started this weekend, when we had a few photo shoots with the birthday girl. Here are a few of the best shots.

More pictures, as always, here: elizabethward.shutterfly.com

Umbrelievable Umbria

Just wanted to share a few photos from our recent trip to Umbria (in central Italy), which involved sleeping, eating, napping, eating, driving around a bit to look at some rolling hills and the hill towns that dot the countryside, and watching Elizabeth eat rib bones.

We stayed one night in Pescara (which did, indeed, smell a bit fishy), two nights outside Norcia (home of truffles and smelly hog heads), and two nights outside Deruta (home of famous pottery which, thankfully, we didn't dote over).

Seriously, the rib bones were great. More pictures here: elizabethward.shutterfly.com

Thanks to Jay and Linda for planning a wonderful and memorable adventure. Molto Bene! Grazie Mille! Viva Italia!

Alpenhorns!

Kate is normally not a very demanding person. But a few weeks ago, she was driving me crazy.

"Why aren't there any good places around here to hear some alpenhorn music?" she would ask.

Or, "How come we just can't seem to find any good alpenhorn CDs? It just sounds better in person." On and on it went.

A few days went by when I realized that we were thankfully only a few hours away from

alpenhorn central. So we made plans for a musical weekend in the Swiss Alps where we could hopefully find some melodic mountain dwellers (as well as some cheese and good hiking paths for me).

And boy did we succeed!

Here's our attempt at a family photo on our first hike to get to those heavenly horns. The best part is not the ridiculous looks on all of our faces or the fact that we completed missed getting the mountains in the background. It's that Pecos is being squished and poked ... and yet manages to keep it together for the only nice smile in the bunch.

And here they are!

Not impressed? I guess you had to be there. Or not. They really weren't that impressive.

We also tried to get Elizabeth in front of a background that looked fake...just for her Gigi, who still thinks the photo we took in front of the Picos de Europa was fake. Here's our best shot, on the train up to Kleiner Scheidegg.

Here are some other attempts.

Oh and here's Elizabeth's first taste of sauerkraut.

And finally, here's a family photo outtake.

A smattering of updates

Hello, faithful blog readers. Same ol' same ol' going on here at the Ward household. Well, except for the awesomeness that is Elizabeth. While she's still our little munchkin, she apparently is now in the same lofty cohort as giraffes and Tyra Banks, measuring in at the 95th percentile for height for her age group.

Here's our amazing amazon now dancing like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. (Tom's photo is the bottom well, in case you couldn't tell...he's the short one)

And while I'm frankly not a fan of this picture because I think it looks like E is stoned, Kate indicated that she likes it. So here it is, our stoned baby.

In order to be as tall as she is, we had to change her diet to include "growth" foods such as ice cream and french fries. Here's Elizabeth enjoying her first tastes of both.
And when she's not showing off her super dancing or super eating skills, we like to think she still retains some super-ness....perhaps super baldness....so we sometimes give her a cape.
Finally, here's a cute video of a future whirling dervish and metaphysics major ... when she finally gets it in video two.

Kate's little helper

Kate and I had talked about getting a maid recently...someone to help with the cleaning while Kate tends to the baby. But we think we found a solution: Elicit the baby to help with the cleaning.

Because we thought this was SOOO adorable, here's another video of them finishing up...again without pants (Elizabeth is battling some diaper rash, you see. So the more fresh air, the better).

Cleanliness is Godliness

In this first video, Elizabeth shows the world her love of simple, clean living. In the second she flaps her arms like a city-dwelling pigeon who just discovered the powdered sugar remnants in the ziploc bag weren't powdered sugar. .... Now if only she could combine these attributes to dust the apartment...

More photos at elizabethward.shutterfly.com!

Paul Shaffer . . .

... you have some competition.

Fortunately, Elizabeth can take time off from her piano practice to play ball.

Tallulah and the Pyrenees

Before Elizabeth learned to crawl, stand, slam dunk, etc., we all took a trip to the Pyrenees. Sorry for not telling you all. It was so beautiful we wanted to keep it a secret.

Actually, we were busy too keeping up with Elizabeth – cleaning, baby-proofing, pulling electrical things out of her mouth - to write anything. So here’s the short version (and a snap of E waving to a local farmer).

Executive summary in 50 words: We weren’t prepared. No one spoke English; only Catalan. And because we didn’t know Catalan we accidentally ordered grossness like liver, pork ribs with baby-poop sauce, actual pigs feet, etc. Our unpreparedness, however, meant fate took over. And that’s how Elizabeth became an international baby model (See Hiking with Tallulah).

Day 1: Carcassonne and beyond:

One of the most striking towns I’ve ever seen. For those of you unfamiliar with Carcassonne, check it out on Wikipedia, here.

Unfortunately, we’d gotten up at 4 a.m. and were looking to start our long journey south so Elizabeth could get in a good nap. So we spent maybe an hour and a half walking around the town and stopping to take a picture of Kate sampling the local cuisine (croissants and orangina).

After three hours of snaking up mountain roads, we arrived at our “Allotjament rural,” which if you type it into google/translate just means “lodging.” Anyway, the place we stayed at was on the northern side (read: ski-slopey side) of the Pyrenees, but it had good views, quality amenities, and a gross breakfast composed of wet bread (by ways of tomato juice) and various thinly sliced cold meats (liver, pancreas, cat).

It was also tucked away down a road that kept tapering. Here’s a video of us driving the last few hundred narrow feet.

Day 2: We’ll be coming ‘round the mountain

Our place also had a very nice hostess who told us all about a wonderful place to hike.

Unfortunately this didn’t happen until day 3. On day 2, we were armed with only a poorly marked map and a vague idea of where we were. So we simply headed for higher ground hoping to come across a beautiful, well-marked hiking area.

Although our drive was nice, we didn’t exactly find this. Instead, we came upon the “Famous Cathar Trail,” to us was neither famour nor a trail. Here’s E and K standing by one part of it.

Day 3: Hiking with Tallulah

Finally, we figured out where we were AND, more importantly, where we wanted to go. After about 30 minutes we got to a town named Estana on the edge of the little known Cadi-Moixero national park. There, at the a hikers’ parking lot in the town square, a squat auburn German Shepherd we named Tallulah sauntered up to us and offered to become our local tour guide through the woods. Gladly, we accepted and took a glorious 1.5 hour hike, following Tallulah the whole way up a mountain, much to Elizabeth’s delight. Yes, it felt weird to follow a dog we didn’t know up a trail we weren’t familiar with, especially because we thought Tallulah’s owner might find us and think we’re stealing his dog!

On our way back into the town, we were stopped by a large truck with a photographer, a translator, and a driver – all of whom wanted nothing more than to take pictures of our happy family (dog included) for the local tourist office, which was trying to expose these mountains to the tourism industry.

So we agreed, posing with Elizabeth and Tallulah while the mountains provided a scenic backdrop. One of the poses they asked us to do was me squatting down to take a picture of Kate and Elizabeth while Tallulah sat by my side. Here’s one of several of those photos.

Afterward it was time for E’s nap, so we drove to Andorra, had paella (yes, in a land-locked country), filled up with cheap (tax-free) gas, bought what I thought was chocolate milk (it was not … it was something called chufa juice), and got stopped at the border and had to open our truck to show that we weren’t carting off boxes of tax-free goodies to resell.

Day 4: The return trip.

We stopped at a beautiful French town called Ax les Thermes, well known in the region for skiing and thermal baths. We also saw the scariest town we’ve ever seen, called Frejoiux, which actually had a free public internet window with the keyboard and mouse outside while the monitor was pressed against the glass on the inside. I checked my gmail.