When Sasha and I pick up James from BC we have to go up a long set of stairs to get there from the parking garage.
Here are some pictures on our way up. Sasha wanted to climb the whole thing by herself! And she did.

Here she is in the car on our way over:




At the bottom of the stairs Sasha got distracted with the bicycles, (or the boy) :








Here we go:



First resting area:



The Geology building (called Devlin Hall) is that second building... it looks deceivingly close, but the stairs go on and on:



Second resting area:



After several more stairs and a third resting area, here's the final ascent and Devlin Hall in the backround!



The main entrance is straight ahead, but Sasha chose to go up one last set of stairs:








Here we are.



A beautiful archway:






Taking a little break:



At the end of all that, James still has to go up another 3 flights of stairs to get to his office! We'll get some pictures of the inside once he has everything set up.


On another note, here's Sasha wearing the necklace that she made all by herself! There's video of it at these links if you're interested:
One
Two
Three





The rest of the pictures are of James rock climbing at the gym:

Water park

We took Sasha to a really nice water park yesterday. She had so much fun! Here are some pics from that as well as of the beautiful river running right alongside the park.

Montessori made at home

Here are a couple more of Sasha's Montessori activities. These toys are so great, but unfortunately very expensive. My Mom gave me a book called "Teaching Montessori in the Home" by Elizabeth Hainstock. I'm really grateful for this because not only does it show you various activities for each age, but also how to make them yourself!
This is a rough draft of one of them. Here's Sasha concentrating on putting the shoelace through the hole and then pulling it out the other side (which she just recently mastered):



Here's her little teapot set. She can spend so much time outside pouring water into those little cups, pouring them back into the teapot, pouring from one cup to the other, and drinking some every now and then:







Sasha in her pretty summer dress:

Some random pictures

Sasha found these jelly beans and brought them to me to see what they were. Rather than give her a taste of pure sugar, we used them for a very cool Montessori activity!
Here she is separating the different colors. She can do this all by herself!



Here she is holding on to her new big, blue ball - waiting anxiously to get home and play with it:



Here's Daddy tickling her neck:



Sasha in her reading corner:



Here's a picture of a section of the road on our way from Boston College to our house. We'll be taking more pictures of Boston as well as of BC to show how beautiful it is.

Settling in

We're starting to feel a little more at home here. James is loving his work. He gets to go rock-climbing all the time (which he loves to do) to gain experience for his upcoming trip. He also has to read of bunch of interesting papers about Geology. He's getting ready to go on a trip to Yucatan, specifically to Merida. His group will be repelling down into caves and collecting samples (stalagmites) to research hurricane activity. One that he'll be exploring in particular was discovered 46 meters underground when someone was digging a well. Today this well is still the only way scientists can get into the cave. So James has to learn and practice vertical rope work.
Sasha and I are going to miss him.
Sasha has been doing great. She's learning incredibly fast. She knows the basic shapes as well as basic colors. She can even name them!...in English and Spanish!
A lot of times she'll say a word in both languages... sometimes she thinks that's the name of it. For instance, when she wants milk, she says "lechemilk".
Wherever we are, she'll point to a car or other object and say it's color. Same with shapes (usually only circles and triangles).
She can practically feed herself (depending on the food) and uses regular cups to drink out of (except when it's convenient to have a sippy cup - like in the car).
We're starting to potty train her, but that might be a mistake! We feel that she's ready, even though she's still very young. She can communicate her needs to us just fine and she knows all about how the potty works. We'll see what happens. There's no rush.
We took some pictures of the areas that surround our apartment. As you'll see it's very green and there are lots of grassy areas for Sasha to run in. There's also a playground just across the street!
Here are the pictures all mixed up and in random order.