SIX MONTHS OLD!

Hooray!!!It's official: only six months left on our no-questions-asked return policy. So far, so good, but I'm waiting to see what happens with those ears and that hair before I make my final decision.


No, I'm only kidding. It's character! She's a keeper.

We were a travelin' family in the month of June. We visited our Western Mass fam, our Vermont fam and our O-high-in-the-middle-O fam. Zora flew (in a plane) with no complications, and drove across several states (in short chunks) with her usual protestations. She hates the car. We try to accommodate her by breaking up drives across this great land of ours into two-hour chunks (coinciding with naps, of course), but even that sometimes is too much. Inevitably she stops crying as soon as she hears the e-brake click into place, and by the time I unfold myself from the front seat, she's smiling through the leftover tears.

Some photos.
Asleep in the sunny guest room of our dear Somerville friends, saving up the shouts and accusations for the ride to Vermont.

With the VT Family.
I couldn't get a photo where everyone was looking at the camera. Here R considers her daughter's patchy curls.

Of course she was fine in Vermont and even seemed okay at the outset of our return trip. She didn't disappoint, however, and decided she'd howl and sob from the Massachusetts border to our home in the Ocean State. Good times!

Zora did well on the plane and had a good time visiting Ohio. Wherever she goes there is no shortage of people who want to hold her, and the Buckeye State was no different.

Here we are on the lawn of the beautiful Toledo Art Museum.


Here we are in an enormous and strangely beautiful cemetery in Cleveland. She's being held by her Uncle Joshua.

Here she is in an Akron restaurant that had its own special kind of beauty: a sundae bar and more types of pie than you could shake a stick at. She's being held by Nana.


And here she is on one of the two worst beds I've ever had the misery of trying to sleep on. Incredibly, they were in the same room! Comfort Inn of Akron (the one off of Market Street, right off of 77), you need to step your mattress game up.