School may have started up again the third week of August (3 hours in the afternoon 5 days a week), with private OT and speech therapy three mornings a week and a new dietary regimen to follow, but we have still found time to have lots of fun already this month!
We went to the Colorado State Fair down in Pueblo over Labor Day weekend. We wandered around eating barbecue, ribbon fries and funnel cakes, looking at everything there was to see. This year Nolan was actually brave enough to touch some of the animals! He liked the bunnies a lot, and here he is petting one of the Nubian goats.
We took Nolan on his very first ride at the fair, a bear-shaped tilt-a-whirl that didn’t tilt very much and was surprisingly hard to get whirling. He also explored a fountain for the first time, although he ended up getting trapped inside a circle of jets that stayed up for a long time; we ended up having to rescue a very wet and upset little guy, but we were so proud that he tried it!
Nolan’s favorite part of our trip to the fair was when we let him out of the stroller to run around in the shade by the horse stables. He ran the whole length of the stables, and stopped at the end, right under a horse’s head; the horse leaned down to sniff his hair, and Nolan reached right up and touched the big soft nose hovering over his head. 🙂
But the best part about the stables was not the horses that watched his every move, but the dust under his feet! He loved the way he could shuffle his feet to kick up dust, and did it so enthusiastically that he was filthy by the time we left. 🙂
The next weekend we finally had an opportunity to take Nolan over to the beach at Chatfield Reservoir for some outdoor water exploration. He made a beeline for the water as soon as it came into view, and we hardly had time to get his shoes off before he was in the water. (We did end up leaving his socks on, to protect tender toes from the rough gravel beach; Nolan won’t wear his water shoes!)
It took me a long time to get used to the water temperature, but Nolan charged in up to his chest in no time flat, and alternated between insisting on holding our hands and wanted to walk unassisted in the waves. He splashed his hands, kicked his feet, and particularly got a kick out of being swung forward and backward in the water.
Eventually, Nolan’s energy started to flag and I had had about enough of the rocks in my Crocs, so we bundled up in towels and spent half an hour or more sitting on the beach, enjoying the sunshine and listening to the lapping water. Hard to believe after a day like this that the autumn frost date is creeping up on us!
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