summer adventure - days 19-22

Tuesday morning, Laura dropped Jed and I off at Audrey's house.  I stepped out of the car, walked through the grass, and was immediately attacked by a host of fire ants determined to make me pay for disturbing their lawn.  Fire ants are the devil incarnate.  They were forged in the fires of Mordor by Sauron himself, tiny little bodies of evil wrapped in sin and deep-fried in venomous villainy until they emerged from Mt. Doom, red-hot and averse to all happiness.

At least, that's how I imagine them.  There's no way such creatures could have been made by a loving Heavenly Father.  Sauron must have made them - who needs Orcs when you can make Fire Ants?

Part of me was glad I had found the fire ants myself, though, because then I knew not to put Jed down in the grass.  I had forgotten that part of living in Texas, but it didn't take long for me to remember.

Audrey has a small baby of her own, born at the end of May, so we spent plenty of time talking about pregnancy, birth, and babies.  We hadn't spent that much time together since we were roommates at BYU, and it felt just like old times.  Except we both have babies now.  Which is totally weird.  Besides the high temperatures outside, it was nearly impossible to coordinate the two little ones' schedules in order to go anywhere - so we stayed inside most of the time.  I did take Jed outside a little bit each day, when he started to tire of the same toys on the same spot of carpet - it was nice to get a little bit of sunshine every day.

Jed liked Andrew's mobile more than Andrew did!

On one of our daily walks, we found a nest in a tree.

Practicing standing by himself with the coffee table
for support, which was a new trick at that point.

He just HAD to suck on his toes, so he leaned
forward and folded himself in half to get to them.

One of the evenings, I met back up with my mom and siblings to go to the mall and get family pictures.  When we were walking towards the door of Macy's, we saw a man trip through the door and another man trying to catch him and help him up.  At least, that's what we thought at first.  When one of the men threw a punch at the other, we realized that the two men were actually scuffling.  It turns out that one of them was trying to shoplift.  The shoplifter broke free and ran straight at us.  My very first instinct was to jump in the way, maybe swing the diaper bag at him, but I thought better of it and stepped out of the way.  The man blew right past us and into the parking lot.  A cop started chasing him, and we tried to shake off the scare.  It wasn't until a couple of minutes later that it hit me what a close call that had been, and I started to cry from relief that we (especially my little baby!) were all fine.  By the time we got to the photo studio and took the pictures, we had recovered from the experience and had a grand time trying to take serious pictures, while not able to help being silly.  I thought the pictures turned out well:

We also got some really cute pictures of Jed.

On Saturday Jed and I flew home, with no major catastrophes.  He charmed everyone on the plane, and had people 6 rows back playing peek-a-boo with him.  Scott and his parents picked us up from the airport.  Jed and I had A LOT of fun on our trip, but we were also very glad to be home.  I know Scott was glad to see us too; he had really missed his baby!