melted smoosh

dearest Sweetpea, what a big girl you are! the very  day  after i announced via your 10-month post that you weren't pulling up to stand by yourself yet, you decided to prove me wrong. while you were playing in our family room (with Nana and Pappy here), you crawled over to the recliner and pulled yourself up like you'd been doing it for years. now you can balance without holding on to something for several seconds at a time -- longer if you're distracted by a toy. my favourite is whenever i have you stand on the changing table while i button your pants. you usually steady yourself against my shoulders for a few seconds. then you let go and stand there with a huge grin on your face, and finally you smile even wider and slooooowly let yourself tip forward until your forehead touches mine.  you pull a lot of silly faces these days -- the Zoolander "Blue Steel" face, the gruff old man face (you pull your bottom lip up over your upper lip), the cheesy

yeppppp, i went there with the cheesiest title imaginable for this little post about our trip to Bethlehem, PA last weekend to celebrate our fourth anniversary. it was such a good time. i think we probably would have had a phenomenal experience anywhere we had a whole 24 hours to ourselves, but when you throw in Oktoberfest and a bunch of museums? homerun for the Wills!  my vacation-planning style is equal parts Hardcore Booking Everything In Advance + Let's Leave a Little Free Time to See What Tickles Our Fancy. aka i spend ridiculous amounts of time on Trip Advisor poring over hotel reviews and coming up with a rough framework for activities before we leave, but if we stumble across something more awesome when we're actually there, well then it was Meant To Be. sadly, there weren't any rooms left at the historic Hotel Bethlehem when i started sleuthing last month, since our trip happened to fall over Columbus Day weekend. i'm determined to go back at some point and