Our first Ice Cream Sunday's

We went to a new Jungle Gym park about 20 minutes away and the kids had a great time. The only down side was that it was late afternoon and the jungle gym was a bit overtaken by adolescent teenage boys doing gymnastic flips off the equipment, running and jumping about and otherwise making it hard for toddlers to safely enjoy it. The funny thing is that Madelyn was completely taken with them. She stared at them for a long time, then walked up close to them and continued to stare. Of course she was completely ignored which probably surprised her. There was one boy who resembled her GuhGuh (older brother in the foster home who she was closest to) and we were afraid that she might run up to him mistakenly. I think she figured it out, but boy was she curious.

Then we stopped at Shari's (a local diner) and had dinner.  Turns out our kids like cottage cheese and salmon (not necessarily together). Despite Joel's (feeble) protests, we ordered them chocolate ice cream sundays. They were really happy and almost giddy and manic while eating them. We typically don't let them have deserts and sweets so they must have thought they had died and gone to heaven, or in Madelyn's case, died and gone back to her former foster family.  

Isaac had to eat his ice cream with limited assistance because 1) his neglectful mother was busy snapping pictures and 2) his dad was too busy scarfing down Madelyn's ice cream to help much.

We are trying to teach Madelyn how to smile for the camera. She will pose now but she doesn't really smile normally for the camera, so we started showing our teeth and she mimics us, which results in this very funny smile where she's just really showing her teeth.

This is one of the Jungle Gym's climbs. Madelyn actually went up this with verbal coaching and minimal physical assistance.

Initially, she was intrigued by it, but a little unsure, so Joel had her watch the bigger kids go up it, and after that she figured out how to do it. I think she's innately pretty adventurous from a  physical standpoint. For example, it's not enough for her to go down slides the normal way, she goes down head first, feet first lying down and turning, walks up the slide as far as she can, or any other variation she can think of.