We spent a beautiful hour out picking strawberries with some friends and their girls. It is nice to be out with people that Emily is familiar with; so that, she is so much more bold. She also wants to be like the other girls so she generally acts better and tries new things to be like them too. I think she had a lot of fun, she didn’t have any inhibitions about picking the red strawberries straight from the plants on the ground. No lesson on how to pick was necessary. I might need to check over the ones we picked to see if we have any overly ripe ones.

Emily picked strawberries, visited with the different mamas, hung out with the girls, fell down and required comfort, played in the dirt, found mud, played with Julia, snuck snacks from Elena’s lunch, and sampled Mommy’s strawberry fried pie. I call that a successful outing! It is hard to take photos, herd kids, pick strawberries, and get great photos. So, I have no photos of Julia because she hung out in our front pack and no great individual photos of Emily. But we had fun and enough photos to help us remember it by.

We took a drive to the mountains with the girls to see some sunshine and feel the fresh breezes. We picnicked at Cades Cove, then we took advantage of a nearby stream for a little playtime. After our cold-toe fun, we took a hike up the trail along the stream. Julia rode in the front pack and fell asleep half way out. I take that as a sign that she enjoyed it. Emily rode in the backpack with Daddy. She loved it and near the end of the hike she put her head down on Robby and may have gone to sleep if we hadn’t been overtaken by horses on the trail. That was way too interesting to look at.

Julia is big enough to hold her own in her umbrella stroller. The only problem is that the stroller is small enough that Emily thinks that she should be able to push it. We let her push the ball around in the stroller and decided that she might have to wait a little while until she gets to push Julia on her own.

For as cold as the stream was, you would not have known it by the reaction of the kids. Julia never fussed about her toes in the water and Emily stayed in it until we told her to get out. We were able to trick Daddy into wading into the water. Julia has her usual serious face about having her feet in the water, but I think she was studying it more than showing her displeasure.

More beautiful smiles!

Julia joins me every morning when we go and get Emily dressed. We keep talking about Julia joining Emily in her room for bedtime with Emily and she has started to ask about Julia at night when we go to bed. Other than the side effect of each of them waking the other one up I think they will transition in this next step really well.

I don’t know how we could be more blessed by our daughters! May God grant them this sweetness and joy with each other for all of their lives.

We had some fun with curlers and Emily’s hair. I actually questioned whether Emily would let me put them in her hair at all, or how many she would allow me to get in. To my surprise she let me do her whole head. The video that we watched probably had a lot to do with our success. We left them in for about an hour, which was the point that she started to pull at the curlers. For being dry hair only that was in curlers for an hour, it added an amazing amount of curl added to her hair. We might try it again soon for real instead of play and see how it goes. She is two, so, who knows.