Sarah's Fall Activities

Sarah has had a busy week so far, and it's only Wednesday morning! On Sunday, we took her to the "pumpkin patch" to pick out a pumpkin. Every year, one of the local churches brings in hundreds of pumpkins and sets them out on the front lawn of the church. They sell them as a fundraiser for their annual youth mission trip, and we purchase our pumpkin from them every year. As many of you will remember, Sarah had her first pumpkin patch experience last year when she was about 2 weeks old! We propped her up in the middle of some of the pumpkins and she just cried and cried! Well, this year was quite different-she enjoyed looking at all the pumpkins and touching them. And it was so hard to believe that this year she was WALKING through the pumpkin patch! The time has certainly passed quickly!
















Monday was the October Festival at daycare, and Sarah had so much fun! All the kids were dressed in their costumes, and there were all sorts of games, food and prizes for everyone. We watched the Mad Scientist perform at his show. Sarah participated in the cookie decorating activity and she also made a pinecone bird feeder with some help from Mommy. She enjoyed eating the snacks at the festival, particulary Ms. Kay's homemade pumpkin muffins! And she just loved swinging on the playground with her friends Noah and Hannah.














Tonight will be her first trick-or-treating experience, so we'll see how that goes. We are planning to take her to a few houses in our neighborhood, as well as Dax and Nichole's house.

I'll post more Halloween pictures after tonight! Hope everyone has a SPOOKY Halloween!!!

My trip to San Diego

So, I thought I would update everyone on my trip to San Diego last week. It was fairly uneventful, as far as work meetings go. The flight there went smoothly, but it was quite devastating to fly over all the California wildfires. The city of San Diego itself was smoky and smogy, but we were about 20 miles from the nearest burning fire, so no danger of having to evacuate. Besides being tied up in meetings all day every day, Nichole and I did manage to take some time on Friday to go to the famous San Diego Zoo and we also made the trip across the bay to Coronado Island. Both were spectacular!

Sarah and Duane survived their week without me. As suspected, Sarah was a very good girl for her daddy so things went smoothly for them. And her fall festival got rescheduled due to the rain we got last week, so I didn't have to miss it! :-) In fact, it is this afternoon, so I should probably sign off here and wrap up some last-minute things at work before heading out for the day. I'll leave you with some pictures from San Diego!

Meet the Lehtinens

So, we finally decided to create a family blog, mostly so people can be updated on the "latest and greatest in the life of Sarah." Clearly, we are slack in this area, as she is already a year old. But better late than never, right?

Since her birthday a few weeks ago, Sarah has started trying to walk. She has great balance now, and can take quite a number of steps before she realizes that crawling can get her to her final destination much quicker! She is also working on her vocabulary. She has been able to say "mama", "dada", and "uh-oh" for quite a while now. Over the weekend, she learned how to say "thank you," and she says words that resemble "Hi", "Bye-Bye", "cat", and "dog."

We are working with her on transitioning from a bottle to a sippy cup, but that is not going well at all. She has always been great at drinking juice and water from a cup, but now that we are trying to get her to drink her milk from a cup, she wants nothing to do with it. So that has been a bit frustrating.

Healthwise, Sarah is doing great. It has been about 6 weeks since her surgeries for her ear tubes and her tear duct probings, and everything is going well now after our somewhat rocky start the first week with her eyes. Thankfully, her eyes look great now and are tearing properly, and the ear tubes have been such a blessing. It has been wonderful to not have to go to the pediatrician every 2 weeks for antibiotics for ear infections!

The rest of this week will be interesting for all of us! I leave tomorrow for San Diego with work until Saturday. So this means that Duane will be a single dad for the rest of the week. I am confident that Sarah will be a good girl for her daddy! This will be the longest I have been away from Sarah since she was born, so I know this will be a hard time for me...especially since I have to miss her first Halloween carnival at her daycare!

Here is the most recent family photo I have...it's from Sarah's birthday a few weeks ago! More updates to come once I return from the left coast!