Backtracking a little bit...

Since it's been a while since I've sent pictures I thought I'd post a few things here from the last few months. These are from our trip to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo (CO Springs) in early November. Sophie was so in her element - we called her "the Giraffe Whisperer". She seriously had no fear of going right up to the giraffes and petting them or feeding them, despite their sticky, long tongues! Caleb, on the other hand, was entirely freaked out by the whole thing! They sell giraffe crackers and Sophie could not get enough of feeding them - we had to pull her away!

Caleb wanted no part of feeding the giraffes and kept a safe distance from all but the newborns! 

By the time we were leaving he FINALLY rallied his courage and fed one piece of cracker to a giraffe - after much prodding and coaxing from Sophia telling him "It's OK, it's not scary!" 

By the end of our time there the giraffes were following Sophie around and one even stood in front of her long after she was out of crackers and allowed Sophia to pet her for several minutes. 

At one point the giraffe put her head on the railing and left it there while Sophia hugged her! I was slow with the camera so I got it as she was letting go.  It really was amazing!  

Feeding the birds was much more Caleb's speed!

About the name of this blog...

I'm sure the url and blog names have some of you wondering what's up, so here's the deal. I can't figure out if there's a way to password protect this blog yet, so I didn't want to use our last name or even the kids' first names as the url - anything that would be too easy for someone not "in the know" to find this blog and thus get information about our family.

Caleb's nickname is "boo" (or Caleb-boo or boo-boy, etc.), which came about when he was just a few months old. When Caleb started cooing he always said "ahh-boo" over and over. Mike and I thought it was just too precious and started saying it back to him and eventually it turned into us calling him Boo and him responding as if we'd said his name!

Sophie's nickname is "doodles" ("Sophie-doodle", "doodlebug", etc.) but the explanation for that one is a little longer. If you recall, Sophia was a bit, umm, "demanding" in her infancy, to put it nicely. When she was a newborn it was not enough for her to merely be carried or worn in the sling, there had to be movement - *vigorous* movement much of the time - for her to be even moderately content. Caleb and I spent many mornings dancing or jumping around with Sophie in my sling wailing her heart out! At the time Caleb's favorite movie was "The Heffalump Movie", a Winnie the Pooh/Disney concoction. One of the songs in the movie is the "name game", where the little Heffalump ("Lumpy") adds syllables and silly words to his own and his friend, Roo's names, all sung in a catchy little ditty. For the uninitiated, "Lumpy bumpity bee..." or "Roo-tee-toodilly-doo". Caleb loved the song, so we started singing and dancing to it regularly and it became the song of choice when Sophie was having a particularly rough time (read: it was sung dozens of times each day as we jumped and danced wildly about in vain trying to settle her!) We adapted the words and it became "Sophie-doodily-doo, Sophie-doodilly-dee..." etc. Because the words were sung so often following Sophia's name, it became second-nature to call her Sophie Doodles, and the name stuck!

So there you have it, "doodles and boo" or Caleb-boo and Sophie, too!

Welcome!

It has long been a goal of mine to start a journal for each child to record those random little day-to-day things that are just so cute that, as a mom, you think you'll NEVER forget but in the craziness of life end up vanished from memory just a few weeks later. Well, I bought the books many months ago but somehow I never manage to sit down and actually write, so I"m hoping that using a blog will be easier! The added bonus of doing it this way is that I can share these random little happenings with all our family and friends across the miles. I make no guarantees about how often this will be updated yet - we'll just see how it goes first! ;)