Exersaucer 1.0

My grandmother has this cute little baby rocker as a decoration in her house (all of her grandkids were too big to use it by the time she got it). She thinks it's about 80 years old-- maybe older. Cate is just the right size though.
I call it exersaucer 1.0...not all of the fancy bells and whistles of today's stationary entertainers, but it still gets the job done.
We went down to my grandmother's house after dinner at Habits so she could put a new zipper on a jacket for me. Cate loved Habits too! Apparently she was just in a loving, good mood.
Cate also drank her last bottle of thawed breastmilk tonight...so now we are really, REALLY, done nursing, even though I haven't fed her in a month or pumped in almost 2. She's getting so big!

So big in fact, that Eric and I are going to leave her for a few days this summer to go celebrate our fifth anniversary. We were initially thinking somewhere Caribbean or a cruise (which I realize is also Caribbean), but I'm not quite ready to leave Cate for the full week. And I want to make a trip to the Caribbean really count. So we decided on Santa Barbara. I'm already dreaming of waking up every morning for 4 mornings here.

Why Santa Barbara? I lived in Los Angeles for most of the summer of 2003 working with a gifted kids' program. And I fell in love with the west coast (but not so in love that I'd want to live there-- the traffic is HORRIBLE). Two years later, Eric and I went out there for vacation and our friend, Ryan, took us up to Santa Barbara and Solvang, where we visited 3 vineyards and enjoyed some yummy wine tasting (think the movie "Sideways"). We only spent a day there and I've been wanting to go back. When thinking about how we wanted to celebrate our anniversary, we knew we wanted a beach, but also some other fun stuff to do. We started out investing L.A. and San Diego, but stumbled upon The Canary in Santa Barbara during our search. After reading reviews and talking to Ryan, who was familiar with the popularity of one of the sister resorts in L.A., we decided this was it for us. So we're going to take a surf lesson while we're there and do a wine tasting tour by bike (which is right up our alley). I think we're going to splurge on some in-room massages too and then spend the rest of our time exploring the town and hanging out at the beach.

Don't worry, we're taking Cate on a different vacation this summer-- to Hilton Head. I am excited to go back there now that we have her.

Now I just need it to be summer. :-)

~Melody :-)