The First of Several

Yesterday I wrote this big long post. It took a long time. I added a few pictures. Blogger ate it. I still have the post, but I don't have the pictures, and when I try to replace them, I just screw up the formatting, so it goes something like this: "Here is a picture of Pike Place Market." [insert picture of chocolate Easter bunny.] So, rather than spending hours trying to fix the ugly post, I decided to just rewrite it, but to break it down into a few smaller posts. That's probably a good idea anyway. The big long one was pretty disjointed.

I will end this post on a cute note. My daughter was just sitting next to me holding a Hungry Caterpillar rattle. (Last night I gathered her infant toys and put them in a storage bin, having decided with Andy that there is no point in having rattles and teething rings cluttering her toy box at this point. Naturally, as soon as I did that, she noticed the bin full of fascinating toys and wanted to play with them.) She held it up to me and I said, "caterpillar". She mimicked me, "oh-bee-gal".

I repeated, "caterpillar", and she said, "jimmalon".

"Caterpillar".

"Feemiki".

"Caterpillar".

"Cassaaaaa-do".

"Caterpillar".

"Mihrumph".

I said, "very good", and she went off to play.