When Clare was a few months old we went to a friend’s first birthday party. I was watching the birthday boy and all of his little friends and thought to myself “those one-year-olds are certainly busy.” Well, now that I have my very own I agree with my first impression. Our particular almost-one-year-old is awfully busy crawling, exploring, tasting, pulling up, climbing over, grabbing, talking, lifting, rolling, hitting things together, throwing them away, etc. Every once in a while she’ll sit down with one of her beloved books, but for the most part Clare has places to go and people to see. Since my nickname for her is Bug, these days she’s a Busy Bug or a Doodle Bug.

We have to say Stinker instead of ummm… other names because Clare understands what we’re staying pretty well these days. So far we can just tell because she follows our basic instructions (most of the time) like “sit down please” and “can you put that toy IN the box?” It surprises me though when I ask her to do something and she does it, so it makes me think that she’s understanding quite a bit more than we’ve given her credit for. Hence the cleaned-up language around our house lately

We celebrated Jeremy’s first Father’s Day last weekend with my parents. Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate, but darnit we decided to go hiking and have a BBQ so we did it anyway. You can’t tell from the picture below necessarily, but we did have a nice time even though it was a hike in the rain. In fact we had waffles at the Waffle Window in the rain, hiked in the Gorge in the rain and then BBQed in the rain. My mom said it reminded her of camping – I think she was being charitable But the Father’s in question (my dad and J) thought that the company made up for it – especially one smily and kissy little girl named Clare.

All this busy-ness makes for a sleepy little girl. Below is the position that Clare finally crashed into a nap in this last week. I don’t know if you can tell from the position but she was literally mid-crawl and she just couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. Regardless of whether or not she’s a Busy Bug, Cuddle Bug or Stink Bug on a given day when I see her sleeping like this it reminds me that she’s my precious little angel.