Thanksgiving in Wisconsin: 11 months old

the walker pettigrew family packed up our parkas and headed to the dairy state for Thanksgiving this year. this was hana's first trip to wisconsin and the first time Grandpa Jim and Grammy Manzy will have seen her since she was 3.5 weeks old. while they are faithful readers of the blog, it really doesn't compare to the real thing, obviously, so it was fun for them to get reacquainted.





while there, they were treated to witnessing hana's first steps!!!!! when she walks, she usually screams and carries on because she's so excited. i had to teach her to walk with her hands up though because she kept trying to look at her feet when she walked which caused many face plants. as a result, she looks like franken-baby when she walks, which is amusing.

grammy manzy is an avid collecter of dishes, glass ware and antiques. while in wisconsin, hana got to use a 100 year old high chair, which converted to a jr. seat, which converted to a stroller sort of thing which converted to a rocking chair. and of course, as with many 100 year old items, it lacked the safety features of today's baby equipment. this proved to be hours of entertainment for hana. she quckly learned that since the tray on the high chair does not slide in like the one at home, but rather lifts overhead like a swing arm or something, that she could send her cheerios flying... this meant that mommy and daddy always had one hand on the tray while we ate with the other.

















while we were there, hana got the worst diaper rash of her LIFE. we were mortified by it's swift onset. it accompanied a bad bout of diarrhea and forced us to come to the realization that she no longer fits a size 4 diaper anymore. yes, that's right. my ll month old baby wears a size 5 diaper (larger than her 3 year old cousin) and size 2T clothes. we can hardly keep up, i tell you. well, eventually, she recovered from her horrific rash attack and through it all, she remained in good spirits.

overall, wisconsin was a relaxing time. grandpa and grammy live in a very small town surrounded by farms and dairies. we arrived for the start of the deer hunting season so we expected it to sound like our old neighborhood in L.A. (that's how my dad described it the first time he experienced it... gunshots, but without the ubiquitous "ghetto birds", aka helicopters) but wouldn't you know it, we slept right through it. we did see hunter decked in head to toe orange ducking into every available wooden patch, and piles of dead deer in the backs of pick ups... cheery. never the less, a good time was had by all, and the time flew by.