Back from Florida

Walt and Devon just got back from her 2nd trip to Florida to visit his parents. It must have created some great father-daughter bonding, because now she only wants Daddy to hold her and read stories to her. Usually Walt is chopped liver, so he's probably enjoying the turnaround!

She had a fun but occasionally traumatic trip to Florida. They went to the ocean (after slathering on copious amounts of sunscreen, of course), and I thought she'd love the warm ocean water. But apparently she was pretty afraid of the waves and only after a while warmed up to it. But then she really started to have fun. I think it was hard for her to adjust to the heat, too, since it was sweltering there. One of my friends at work, Avinash, mentioned that this is a problem for his kids too. His wife is originally from Hong Kong and he's from India, and each time they visit either country his kids have a lot of trouble with the heat.

One unfortunate habit Devon acquired in Florida is that she doesn't want to sleep in her own bed anymore. We were pretty rigorous about having her sleep in her crib (both because we wanted to have our bed to ourselves and because she is really tosses and turns -- including kicking -- at night), but she was afraid to sleep by herself in Florida and brought that home last night. She woke up at 11pm last night and wouldn't go back to sleep, so we finally brought her in our bed to sleep. But not only was she tossing and turning but she was also up half the night (not having adjusted to the time change, I'm sure), so neither Walt nor I got much sleep at all!

But she seems more adjusted this morning and despite avoiding me after I clipped her nails (a scene that was accompanied by screaming, kicking and hitting), she warmed up to me after a little while and even let me read her a story. So hopefully in the next couple of days we'll be back on the usual schedule and Walt and I will be able to regain our bed.

A note about this photo: as you probably guessed, it's not from Florida at all, but I love it so much that I just had to post it. It was taken by our friend Jon Payne, who dropped out of the tech world and started life again as a photographer, much to everyone's benefit. He's fabulously talented (and also took the photos from our wedding, which I thought were terrific), and this photo has so much life that I couldn't resist posting it...