Nebraskatime

Rose and I spent our first week away in Nebraska. My best friend/college roomie Lauren (Laurs) was staying with her family there for a month while her husband was abroad, so we all crashed at the DeNys house. It was so good to spend time together again after over a year of mere phone calls. And Rose is only 2 months and a week older than Emma, so it was fun to watch them start building those bonds of friendship. They WILL be best friends one day, we just know it.

Emma took a couple of days to warm up to her future best buddy.

We did everything together. Rose LOVED having girly toys to play with. They passed these necklaces back and forth all week.

They ate food in the nude.

ZZZZZZZZ

All ready for church. Two little purple princesses.

They never smiled at the same time! I was so happy to finally crack the Emma seriousface and coax a small smile out of her for this picture.

Rose went shopping.

We made pizza. Wherever Jeff or I go, the famous bacon mushroom white pizza is requested. And we happily oblige. This pizza turned out to be superbly scrumptious.

Laurs formed the crusts and I was the saucier (pronounced sauce-ee-yay, pour les non-frances). Does that make her the crustier?

We went to the Omaha Zoo one day. I love seeing all the kinds of animals and reading about them. There were TWO white tigers! Sweet.

We love our jogging strollers.

They both passed out after only an hour and a half of zoology. Rose is so ladylike.

Like all zoos, there was an earsplitting train. It didn’t disturb two tired one-year-olds!

Can you find the mallard duck? The ducks were more or less walking on the fat Japanese Koi fish, swarming to gobble up crumbs from passersby. For some reason I was fascinated by the disgustingness of those fish, especially the white ones. Eeeeew.

Eventually the children woke up and saw more zoo. The jungle building was my favorite—it was this winding path through a giant indoor replica of a jungle, with animals swingin and swimmin free all over the place.

One more—cute redheaded baby! I normally don’t really love taking pictures of animals at the zoo when I’m with children, but I thought that Jay would like to see pictures of the animals.

And now on to SWINGS! We did lots of swinging at the park next door:

Love that face…

…and that one (Rose had to try all of the swings out).

Laurs and Emma inspired me to chop off Rose’s mullet. So now she’s got a little bob. I’m SO glad that scraggly growth is gone from her neck.

We had such a pleasant time together. I still can’t quite believe that we are both moms now.

In 8 years (holy cow—it’s been 8 years?), we went from this:

to this:

to this:

Hurrah for best friends! (and future best friends!)