It’s been a busy week around the Casa McPherson. We’ve had visits by Terri and Randall, my grandmother is still in town, and now Pat, Dave and Ry are visiting. Last weekend it was my Uncle Jon’s 50th Birthday on Saturday night and Race for the Cure on Sunday morning with my parents and cousins Glenn and Beth. Clare handled all of the excitement fairly well, considering it resulted in some missed naps. She’s quite the little social butterfly and loves to be around people. She was probably held by half a dozen people at the birthday party and handled it pretty well. She only lost it at the end – which was after the cake and toast, so we didn’t miss to much by leaving.

Clare with the birthday boy!

Mom, Clare and I

Mom, Clare and Grandma

Race for the Cure was great fun. I heard there were 50,000 people there – it’s the biggest Race for the Cure on the West Coast. We ‘raced’ with Glenn and Beth and Mom and Dad with a blistering 5K time of an hour and fifty minutes. Half of the time is spent waiting while the 50,000 people are corraled through Portland’s streets, so more like a Meander for the Cure. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures from it, but you’ll just have to picture Clare in her finest pink ensemble with every pink bib, blanket, binky, etc. that I could find.

Clare is growing by leaps and bounds. While I won’t continue to brag about how exceptional she is, I will say that she’s reached another mini-milestone (an inchstone? Footstone?) She has been reaching for toys for a few weeks now, but caught one on the hanging toys on her bouncy seat and brough it to her mouth. She’s attempted this before, but for the first time actually had the coordination to follow through with it. I did capture it with a few pictures.

Got the toy…

Into the mouth!

So proud of herself!

She’s also quite chatty these days. At brunch on Sunday she was talking to Beth and, if you ask her Daddy and Grandma, she said her first word. Now, these people are about the most biased audience ever, but they both claim that after Beth said ‘Yeah!’ to Clare she responded back with a ‘yeah’ of her own. I was looking down and didn’t hear it, but they both swear it’s Clare’s first ‘word sounding noise’ so I figured I’d preserve it in my electronic baby book 🙂

Tomorrow marks the return of Grandma T and a long weekend in Bend.