A visit with Mamaw and a trip to the zoo!

I'm horribly behind in posting about our lives, and we've done so many fun things recently! I'm going to try to get caught up, although I may post things in a kind of random order for a while.

The first week in August, Estella and Cordelia were two weeks old. Adelaida was making a huge adjustment to life as a big sister, and Dale was going back to work. I was still not getting around very well after my c-section and seemed like I was nursing almost constantly -- and nursing was still pretty painful. The constant nursing continued through the night, so I wasn't getting a whole lot of sleep -- and neither was Dale, who was up almost all night changing the babies' diapers and soothing one baby while I nursed the other. It was into this crazy household that Mamaw came for a visit.

What a great help she was! With the constant nursing and little sleep, I was having a really hard time doing even simple things like unloading the dishwasher and helping Adelaida use the toilet, not to mention the more time-consuming tasks like making dinner and going grocery shopping. Having Charlotte around enabled me to survive and even enjoy Dale's first week back at work after the babies were born. In fact, I was feeling so good while she was here that Charlotte and I took all three girls to the zoo one morning!

We had a wonderful time -- between the two of us, we were able to push the stroller, hold one baby part of the time, hold Adelaida's hand, and enjoy seeing some amazing animals. We saw tigers and seals and peacocks and kangaroos, and Adelaida was brave enough to let Mamaw hold her while she fed the giraffe!

After a long lunch for all five of us, Adelaida fed the ducks on the way out of the zoo. She had a handful of duck food pellets, which she put down on the edge of the duck pond. She picked up the pellets one by one, threw each one to the ducks, and laughed after each pellet was thrown. This was about a one-minute process for each duck food pellet, and there were a lot of duck food pellets! I thought we'd never finish feeding the ducks, but fortunately some other kids came up to Adelaida's stash of duck food and tried to take them from her, which encouraged her to throw them a little faster so that the boys wouldn't take her duck food.

When all the duck food pellets were finally gone, we walked toward the entrance and realized that we'd overstayed Adelaida's "happy time" by about ten minutes. We had a rather unpleasant walk to the car, which included me carrying a screaming toddler through the parking lot while Charlotte pushed the stroller. Adelaida took a really long nap that afternoon!

All in all, we had a great time with Charlotte visiting, both at our house and on our trip to the zoo!