the dolphin

You may remember that my "the revelation" post ended with a "to be continued". I ended it that way so it could be a built-in accountability for me to do something about my revelation. Shortly after writing that post, josh and I spent some time thinking about the situation, and we decided that we'd make a point every weekend to go out to some public place to do something. Just to be around people. Perhaps someone might come across our path that was sent by Someone else.

Today was our first time. We decided to leave this morning to go to a shopping center across town that we had never been before. Upon arriving, we found it to be in a bustling part of the city, with a nice public square close by. We spent a nice chunk of time milling about the square, watching three year-olds take rollerblading classes, watching families out together, being out ourselves. We saw a vendor carrying a colorful bouquet of balloons for sale, so we moseyed over to him and let emma pick out a balloon.

You can see here that she picked out a dolphin. Actually, sometimes she would call him dolphin and sometimes she would call him whale. She really enjoyed having him as her traveling companion over the course of the morning. We finished milling about in the square, and then we went to check out a new supermarket in the vicinity.

As we pushed our way through the crowded aisles, we drew the normal level of attention - people ooohing and aahing at us, sometimes even squealing (if you suffer from self-esteem, just come visit us here and people will go crazy over you!). We browsed through the dry goods, past the baby food aisle...all the while, dolphin was still with us.

Then, somewhere along the dairy wall we noticed emma's gaze looking skyward. There rested her dolphin, up in the rafters of the grocery store. Oh dear. Emma looked at us with sad, earnest eyes.

"Dolphin! Help! Please!" she cried, while frantically doing her sign language at the same time. We were content just to let dolphin go - even though he was a fairly expensive diversion for her - until her urgent pleas for his rescue moved us to action.

Being the compassionate father that he is, Josh went looking for a store worker to explain our problem to. He finally found someone, dragged them over to the scene of the crime, they promised to go get something (we assumed a ladder?) then come back and help him, and then scurried off. Ten minutes later, they still had not returned. Finally, we see the girl returning - but emptyhanded. When she arrived at the dairy case, we realized she had brought not a ladder with her, but the tallest employee she could find. :) Nice thinking.

He tried to reach up and get it (sorry, dude) and realized that wouldn't work. So then he promised to return in a moment. He did return, this time bringing some sort of hook-ish type pole thing and another pole thing to serve as another grabber-type thing. We - and about twenty other curious shoppers - stood by and watched him stretch and reach and try to successfully "hook" dolphin from the rafters for about 10 minutes, until finally dolphin was rescued. I've never seem Emma so happy.


In other news...

the weather the last few days has been really cold, so when we've gone out, we've really had to bundle up our girls. Cold weather clothes make such cute pictures! :) Here's samantha staying warm in our little snugli with her warm winter hat! Fortunately, today was a bit warmer and the next few days should be nice as well.

And here's one more of a sweet moment between mantha and her daddy...