An Early X-mas at Uncle Mike's

Our next December trip was the 4-hour drive South to El Paso, Texas, to spend the weekend before Christmas at Uncle Mike's house. Grandma and Grandpa Hayes flew in from Michigan as well, and with Mike's girlfriend Toni hanging out with us for much of the weekend, it was a pretty full house.

As we drove across the Texas border, signs advised us to "Drive Friendly, Texas-style!" I interpreted "Friendly, Texas-style" to mean "Give at least one warning volley," but fortunately, nobody pointed any guns at us during our stay...

We had a fun-filled weekend, complete with an early exchange of Christmas gifts. Without further ado, here are some pictures and videos...

Uncle Mike and Toni.


We drove into the nearby mountains for a Nature break.


Grandma gave Shreya a cool ball-run toy for Christmas (pictured in foreground) but Uncle Mike's stereo was so much more interesting!
(Back home in Albuquerque, she really loves this toy now.)

Shreya tries to communicate with Uncle Mike's fish.


Uncle Mike's house has STAIRS! (no sound with this video, sorry)


Shreya opens a present from Uncle Mike.

Shreya, come here!

As the reader may have already worked out, this blog is only loosely chronological. Sometimes, one or both of us are working on a post and Something Happens, which interrupts it and puts it on indefinite hold, sometimes to the point where it is easier to do a new post than to resume the interrupted one... Such a thing happened a couple of months ago right after our trip to Seattle. Shreya was sleeping. We had written the following (italicized) lines and were in the middle of editing the video clip which we had filmed in Seattle and that was to accompany them. Suddenly we heard a whimper, followed by a thump, followed by Shreya's howling. Upon rushing to the bedroom and panicking ("Where is she?!") we found her on the floor, in the ten inch wide slit between the head of the bed and the wall. (Yes, she sleeps on our bed, and yes, our headboardless bed was ten inches away from the wall, for fear of dangerous spiders. Needless to say, now the bed is up against the wall.) So we picked her up, made sure she was OK, cuddled and soothed her and forgot all about the video clip we were editing.

Here's a little footage of Shreya from our visit to Seattle last week.

Lately, Shreya has gotten a lot more mobile, and is now a very persistent explorer of her surroundings.

Ah, Irony, how we hate thee!

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Even the above was written some time ago, and remained unposted, because , of course, we still had not finished editing the video, since the main problem with it is that the sound is not good, and we still haven't figured out how to improve it. So, here it is anyway, despite the bad sound. The volume is very low, so you don't have to hear the deafening hiss... This video was filmed on August 6th.



And here is one from tonight!