Visit to North Carolina/Kidzu in Chapel Hill

We got back from NC late on Monday afternoon. We had a great visit and got to see a bunch of good friends, including Ericka, Anna, Scott & Laura (and their daughters, 5-year old Ellie and 6-month-old Caroline), and John & Tanya (and their daughter, 4-month-old Molly).

Sophie liked her first taste of NC and looks forward to going back more often. She really got confident with her walking during the trip. We think she's now mostly left crawling in the past, and we're encouraging her when she falls down by saying, "Up!"--it seems to work pretty well. Our friend Anna thought her walk looked a little like Frankenstein's and encouraged us to dress her up that way for Halloween. We do hope that she's walking a little more fluidly by late October, however. On the other hand, Mindy did call her "Frankensophie" yesterday morning.

It was fun to see Sophie around babies on the trip--she really seemed like a little girl around them, which was a bit of a shock. She's grown up a lot very quickly.

We also discovered on the trip that she likes Indian food and really enjoys a mixture of refried beans and rice at Mexican restaurants.

The weather during our visit to North Carolina was truly brutal--as high as 100 degrees, with a heat index of 110 degrees. So we spent as little time outside as possible. One of the places we beat the heat was the Kidzu, a children's museum in Chapel Hill.

Sophie enjoyed the toddler area the most, especially the giant duck she could ride and rock on. She did have some trouble getting up onto it, though:


The current exhibit at the museum focused on art. In various ways, it encouraged children to get into art in a very literal way. Here's Sophie as the Mona Lisa:


Here she is skeptical of the hat prop from John Singer Sargent's painting Camp at Lake O’Hara:


And here she is riding a giant chicken from folk artist Clementine Hunter’s Big Chicken: