We've been hanging out in Wandering River for a month now, and I'm surprised how quickly time is flying by. Though I'm anxious to get into our new house at the end of the month, I'm really enjoying catching up with the family. As Anissa keeps telling Mom, "Memere, you are really spoiling us!" Mom and Dad are taking very good care of all of us. The girls are especially soaking up all the attention.

Mehdi, the girls and I also squeezed in a wonderful weekend visit with old friends, and it was so nice saying "see you soon!" instead of feeling sad that it could be a year or so until the next get-together. And last weekend we went camping with the entire family, and though the weather wasn't great we had a lot of fun. Anissa doesn't let her big cousins out of her sight for one moment. She idolizes them so much it's become useful for convincing her to do something. ("Oh, you don't like celery? Your cousins looooove celery!") She's even got a big kid bike like they all do (an early birthday present), and has mastered driving it up and down Mom and Dad's driveway.

I had forgotten how beautiful it us up here. We see deer trotting through Mom and Dad's yard almost every day, have seen a handful of moose, a coyote and Mehdi got to (finally!) see a bear. The sunrises (at 4 in the morning - the fact that I see them is one advantage of having a baby that wakes me up at such a crazy hour) are gorgeous and the sky is endless. Ahhh, the prairies.

Not much new here - just making ourselves very, very comfortable at my parents' house. So comfortable, in fact, that we may never leave! Anissa is especially living it up, doing all kinds of things she never gets to do. Today she helped Pepere corral his horses on the quad with Mehdi, and finally got to have her first hotdog/marshmallow roast. She didn't actually like the hotdogs or marshmallows that were cooked over the fire, but I don't think that - or the mosquitoes the size of helicopters - damped the experience in the least. And Elianne? She's one chubby, smiley baby.