It's a BIG day!!

It's a BIG day for the Glassman Family. Both Mom & Anna hit major milestones today! Mom is 30 and Anna got her first tooth! I've decided that like Anna, I'm not growing older, I'm just growing up to be a big girl too :)

It's beautiful in Virginia today - 70 degrees & sunny. Here are pictures from my birthday picnic at Nottoway Park:

Anna was entertained by tearing apart the cracker box

First time on a slide!

First time in a swing!

A foray into fruits

In the past week Anna has sampled pears, applesauce, and peaches. And the winner is...pears, which is possibly her favorite food so far. Although it is closely rivaled by green beans.

Trying to crawl is hard work!

Here's a little video to go along with my narrative about attempted crawling:

And I know someone is going to say, "Please say you gave her the toy after you finished shooting the film." And my answer is, I did, but apparently during the shooting of this film Anna's goal shifted from a pursuit of the toy to a pursuit of the camera. When I gave her the toy she paid no attention to it and shifted her focus onto moving toward the camera. (You'll notice she does an excellent job looking at the camera in the film. She's not doing that for the benefit of the audiance, she's just zeroing in on her next target :)

Jammin' in the Jumpster

On Sunday Anna took a ride in her jumpster for the first time:

The desire to move

I guess before you force yourself to use every muscle in your body in a new and difficult way, you've got to have an end goal in mind. While Anna is not crawling yet, she certainly has the desire to move. (I say "yet," although Matt & I had a debate yesterday as to how we will define the "First Crawl." We want to get the sticker on the correct day on her calendar :) At first, I actually wanted to call yesterday the first crawl because she made forward progress. She does this by getting up on her knees and flopping forward. Sometimes this results in going backwards, which is incredibly frustrating to her as she is measuring her progress towards whatever toy, or magazine*, she is trying to reach. But Matt convinced me that we should define crawling not by the forward progress but by actually moving a knee and hand forward. So when you see, "First Crawl" on the blog, you'll know what we mean.) Mostly, she sees something she wants a few inches out of reach and works like crazy to get there. Although it is pretty funny when she notices something that she wants across the room and this is what will motivate her to flop onto her belly from a sitting position and start trying to move. You can't say she doesn't set high standards for herself :)

*Until a few weeks ago Anna was generally content playing with her toys. She still likes her toys, but as of late she is much more interested in anything that is not hers - remote control, papers, pens, cell phone, flashlight, adult food, etc. The other day I left her sitting on the floor while I went upstairs to get something and when I came back down I found her rummaging through her diaper bag - which I can't imagine how she got because I really don't think I left it that close to her!

Happiness is a stuffed frog :)

Happy Halloween!

Anna had so many fun activities she wanted to do for her first Halloween, that she celebrated for two days! First, Anna's Halloween daytime outfit - consisting of the black turtle neck that Uncle Dan pointed out would be perfect for Halloween, a bib from her grandma, and who knew it, but she happened to have orange and white striped pants in her closet!

On Halloween night Anna slept a little later from her afternoon nap - she wanted to be well rested for her evening. When she got up, Mom, Dad, & Anna all had dinner quick and then Anna hoped into her horse costume (from her Nana!):

Anna's first trick-or-treat was at the Smith's house (next door), where she picked out some Whoppers for herself. Anna hit a few more houses before we ran into our neighbors, Elise & Andrew, who were trick-or-treating in a group of about 10 kids ages 1 1/2 to 4. We trekked around with them for a little while and Anna admired all the little kids costumes & she took notes about how to work the treats better next year :)

Finally we landed at our neighbor's Nick & Jennifer, where Anna got to hang out with Porter, the pug dressed as a devil, and Maddy, the lab dressed as an angel. It was too hard to get all three of them in the picture, but her is Anna with the "devil":


After all that excitement Anna was ready for bed. However we continued the Halloween celebrations last night by once again visiting the house with over 100 carved pumpkins. Here are our favorites from this year:




And of course, Halloween would not be complete without some pumpkin custard from Neilson's, where we ended our Halloween celebrations last night: