Hawaii

We've officially moved now. I don't know how long it will take for our stuff to get here, but our car should be here soon. We've been living in a hotel room for the past week and a half, but we just signed the lease on a nice two-bedroom townhouse on Aliamanu Military Reservation. It's got a screened-in lanai! The Army is even lending us furniture until ours gets here.
Edie's growing like a weed. She just barely fits sideways in her pack-and-play now, as opposed to before when that's how she'd normally sleep. She's been working very hard on putting her pacifier into her mouth on her own, but her experiments usually result in frustration and fussing.
I'm still in new intern orientation, which means mostly short hours and lots of days off. Carl and I have been enjoying exploring the island. We've been to the big Ala Moana Shopping Center several times, and we drove up to a beach on the western shore near Kahe Point earlier this week. There are pictures on Carl's Flickr account of Edie being cute in our little sun shelter on the beach: http://flickr.com/photos/cburgers/ (Please ignore the picture of me being fat.)

So much has happened!

It's been a long time since I wrote anything here. We've been so busy with graduation and moving, not to mention taking care of you! You're over six weeks old now and getting prettier every day. You've earned yourself a new nickname: Hippo. It started out because of a hand-me-down outfit you have with a hippo on it and the words "'Lil Hippo." Your Grandma Diane disapproved of calling a little girl a hippo, so we joked about it and the name stuck. (You're hungry like a hippo and can open your mouth very WIDE.) Since then, so many coincidences have kept the nickname alive:
1. Your chart at the pediatrician's in Little Rock had a hippo stamp on it.
2. Aunt Becky gave us a "Happy Hippo Play Gym."
3. Jeff and Lisa Miller gave you a purple hippo piggy-bank.
4. The Shackletts gave you a hippo teething toy.
5. Your daddy had already bought a book called Hippos Go Berserk!, and I had read it to you before you were born. It makes you smile when we start to read it now.

You're smiling quite a bit now and making lots of other funny faces. You try to roll over, and your daddy claims you've succeeded (back to front) once. Your major project right now is learning how to put your pacifier in your mouth by yourself after it's fallen out. It's great to watch you try and try, and think and think. Eventually your daddy or I have to put it in for you, but you're getting better at it all the time!

You took the move to Hawaii very well and have been to the beach a few times now. You're not keen on hats, so we keep you in a big sun shelter that's like half a tent. I mostly hang out with you in there, too, as I don't want to get sunburned either. We'll be moving into our new place on Wednesday, and you'll have your own room! Don't worry, though -- we'll keep you in our room for a little while longer. I don't want to be too far away, as you still wake up hungry two or three times in the night.

Your daddy has posted pictures of you and the family and the beach and other things on this website: http://flickr.com/photos/cburgers/