Today is Portman’s birthday and we celebrated with a family (plus Uncle Gordon) lunch at Lauriol Plaza. We like going out for Mexican food because there is always something that Harper will eat, and it’s usually okay if she makes a mess. Today I forgot to bring her bib, and what a mistake that was! Harper was an angel during lunch, but towards the end of the meal decided to dip her tortillas into her black beans as if they were salsa, then fling the black bean juice all over her body. We didn’t even attempt to clean her off, and instead she rode home naked. A few highlights:

Harper playing “peek-a-boo” using the tablecloth:

The first black beans to hit her head:

Shaking her tortillas covered in black bean juice:

Post-shaking (outfit sacrificed to the black beans):

Car ride home:

Yesterday was “Free Cone Day” at Ben & Jerry’s, and you don’t have to ask a pregnant woman twice if she wants free ice cream! We met our friends Trish and Colin in Old Town for cones and a stroll by the Potomac to watch the airplanes. It turns out that there is no age minimum for free cones, so Colin and Harper enjoyed one as well. This was Harper’s first ice-cream-cone and I had to practically wrestle it away from her to lick off the drips! The kids made quite a mess, but it was totally worth it.

We spent last weekend in Charlottesville celebrating the dedication of the new home for the McIntire School of Commerce, Rouss and Robertson Halls. The weekend kicked off with a sweltering hot ceremony to dedicate the new building and a gala extravaganza on Friday evening to celebrate its opening. Since this was literally the culmination of Big Daddy’s past 10 years of work, our entire family (all 11 1/2 of us!) came into town to help celebrate. It was so much fun to have everyone together! Friday evening was especially entertaining, as those of us who were not pregnant, shall we say, “cut loose.” It was punctuated by Uncle Luke’s inebriated insistence that Tiki Barber be in our family picture! Unfortunately Tiki did not oblige.

For the first time, Harper took great interest in her new cousin Charlie, and spent lots of time examining her toes. It was a great weekend and we can’t wait to get everyone together again!

Yesterday Harper received a spring care-package from her Great Grandma Abie, and let’s just say we were both grateful for the entertainment! Abie sent her a large collection of books that are perfect for Harper – she can’t rip them, and most of them have pictures of “real” things. Harper absolutely loves to read and spends hours each day flipping through her books. The highlight of the care package for Harper was her very first Pooh Bear. For those that don’t know, I used to have a slight (okay, huge) obsession with Winnie the Pooh, and believe it or not this is actually Harper’s first Pooh toy! She spent the afternoon feeding him raisins and showing him around his new home, then he accompanied us on a trip to the playground and a walk around the neighborhood.

Yesterday we finally got around to putting sand in Harper’s sandbox. We’ve had it fully assembled for a couple months now and it has been seasoning on our porch. Portman spent the morning hauling 600 pounds of sand (literally) out of my car and into the box, and Harper was elated when it was finally finished! She had so much fun that we had to strip her down and hose her off afterwards. I’m still a little wary about the amount of sand covering our patio and creeping into the kitchen, but I guess that’s what Roomba is for.

After a weak attempt at an afternoon nap, Portman cooked an amazing dinner for the three of us. He pulled Harper’s high chair into the kitchen and she sat there “feeding” her baby while he cooked. It was so sweet! A side note – you can see in the photos that baby now wears a diaper on the outside of her clothes and Harper is very good at taking it on and off.

Harper has been doing such a good job feeding herself lately that we decided to give her another try at eating at the table with us (instead of her high chair tray). Everything was going swimmingly until she decided to combine her pasta with her yogurt and attempted to drink it out of the yogurt container!

Yesterday the temperatures reached 88 degrees in DC, so Harper and I met Portman at his office and we had a picnic dinner on the National Mall. We brought Uncle Gordon along to show him what “boring families” do on a Friday night! This time we parked our caravan next to the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Monument and the World War II Memorial. You could see 4 monuments from our spot – the Lincoln Memorial, World War II, the Washington Monument and the Capitol! It was absolutely gorgeous. Harper had so much fun running around in the grass, and when we finished our dinner we gave the rest of it to the ducks, which was very exciting for a toddler! The ducks were extremely friendly and I was a little worried that they would take the food right out of her hands. Lots more photos on Smugmug!

As I’m sure everyone has heard, the Pope is visiting DC this week and today “the public” had its first opportunity to see him. There was a massive Papal procession from the White House to the Vatican Embassy, and it happened to go right by Portman’s office! Harper and I did not brave the traffic nightmare and instead met La-La (“ya-ya”) at Pentagon City for a shopping spree, but Portman’s entire company took a field trip down the street to see the Pope-mobile. According to Portman, there were nearly 75,000 people at just his intersection, and judging by the pictures it does look pretty crowded! I was disappointed to miss the event, but it would have been a little too chaotic with a fussy toddler. Of course not a single person in his company thought to bring a camera (obviously no moms work there), but they took lots of pictures with their cell phones, which are up on Smugmug.

Warmer weather means mom starts making homemade pesto again… Harper’s favorite! On the topic of food, I’ve been meaning to write about a few of Harper’s developmental updates. For a month or so she has been successfully feeding herself with both a fork and a spoon. She is at the point now where she won’t start eating until she has her utensils, and she can even eat yogurt, oatmeal and applesauce without spilling it! Meals definitely take a lot longer when she feeds herself, but it is pretty neat to watch such a small person eat like an adult. That being said, she is still incredibly messy, and often “eating with a fork” means she takes the food out of the bowl with her hands in order to spear it with her fork!

The other big news is that she finally gave up her bottle. For a long time she refused to drink milk from a cup, but on her doctor’s orders we boxed up all the bottles, and within just a few days she was asking for milk and didn’t seem to mind that it came in a cup. Finally, Harper recently start signing words to us. We don’t sign very much with her, but she has a few “baby signs” books and she randomly started signing “more, milk, bath, eat, and ball.” The funny thing is that she has been saying “more, eat, and ball” for months, but now she adds sign language to the actual word! It is really encouraging to see that she absorbs what we read to her, and we’ve started to teach her a lot more sign language. In the photo below she is signing “more” – I guess she liked her dinner!

Harper has taken to using the planters in the back yard as a balance beam. She walks the entire perimeter of the yard back-and-forth on an 8 inch-wide brick “beam.” She’s not quite ready for Olympic training yet – her little legs are covered in bruises and cuts from her frequent missteps!

This will be our 4th summer in our house, and every spring since we moved in, we have replaced the landscaping in our front yard. To say that Portman and I know nothing about planting shrubs is a massive understatement. We have managed to kill hundreds of dollars in shrubs every spring/summer, so this year like most other families in Northern VA, we decided to hire a landscaper to do the job the right way. The added bonus is that they warranty their landscaping for a year, so if it dies this summer we get it replaced for free! So yesterday they showed up and within an hour had completely transformed our front yard. I didn't take a "before" picture, but I found some that my mom took when Harper was born, and they show a pretty accurate "before."

And, drumroll, here is what professional landscaping can do!