Spring in December!

Poppy here... it's been quite a long time since I've blogged. Today was a terrific day, almost as much fun as Christmas! Here in the "Berry" the temperature hit 68F! Of course, when the temperatures near the mid-50s Poppy begins thinking about doing things outside. Mommy isn't too keen on chilly-weather activity but I thought it would be good to get Karla out of the house. So out on the deck we went at 10am much to Mommy's chagrin. BUT! I was nice outside. We looked afterwards and it was 63 degrees. So on went jeans, shoes and a light jacket and out into the great wild we went. I was just planning on standing at the end of the deck since previous encounters with grass and the outdoors were very tentative. However we're apparently past all of that. Karla heard the neighbor girls dancing outside to music (a common summertime occurrence) and shot off the deck like a rocket and went running uphill to them all. She went right up to them and said "Hola!" So they were all excited and curious to know who Karla was and then why Karla wouldn't say anything to them they could understand. I explained that Karla spoke both Spanish and English. That got the girls even MORE excited because they wanted to know the Spanish words for all sorts of stuff so they could interact with Karla. Fortunately I knew most of what they asked. Pelota (ball) was a huge hit with them and they kept calling the balls "pelotas" long after Karla had wandered away from them. So Karla pretty much instantly made 7 new friends. They invited her to play "Fairy" (which seems to involved lots of standing around calling each either other boy names) but Karla was much more interested in finding "doggie!!" We met even more of our neighbors today when they brought their dog Sydney outside. It was chasing frisbees in the cul-de-sac and ran up to Karla when she went running over ("DOGGIE!! AQUI!!!"). Karla then immediately huddled against me and didn't want to pet the dog. So the neighbor let me toss the frisbee a few times and Karla just screamed "DOGGIE!! YAY!!!" or "DOGGIE!! AQUI!!" every time. Then Jennifer came out and we walked along Blackmoore down to the other cul-de-sac and encountered 4 more dogs which was just the greatest possible thing ever (according to Karla). Finally Karla looked ready to drop and we came in to find out we'd been outside over an hour and a half. Karla ate a little bit and then went right up to bed. She woke up a little over 2 hours later, called "Poppy! Poppy!" and wanted to go right back outside. We got a little more food in her first, put on new pants and boots (the others were soaked) and headed out for round two. More fun with another neighbor doggie (more shouting!). Then we did a couple of laps around Grandview, played with the neighbor girls again and slid on the slide A LOT. A great time was had by all.

I've uploaded a special set of Flickr images to document our day.