I am behind on the blogs, so here are the pictures from our first weekend in Yosemite with little Anouk and my mom a few weeks ago. We rented a house with our friends Ed and Adriana, and I had planned to hike to Vernal and Nevada Falls on Friday hoping to avoid the crowds...... A lot more people were having similar thoughts :-( In addition, it was about 90 degrees in the Valley, making the hike pretty strenuous. The waterfalls were beautiful though, and my mom enjoyed the scenery: this is us in front of Yosemite Falls, and me with Vernal Falls in the background.
The last part to Vernal Falls seemed a little slippery, so we backtracked and hiked up to Clark Point, with amazing views of Nevada Falls, where we had to change Anouk's diaper with a beautiful backdrop:
The next day, we went up to the high country on Tioga Road to avoid the crowds. We hiked up to May Lake with Ed and Adriana, and had beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and the wildlife (marmot) along the way.
We made it to the lake, and with Mt. Hoffmann in the background and snow on the ground, it made for a beautiful lunch spot.
We hiked around the lake through some snow fields to look at the waterfalls coming down from the top of the mountain.
We also stopped at an overlook with views of the Sierras:
Pictures of Anouk will come later......... :-)
The grandparents are clearly enjoying Anouk and she seems to have a good time with them. She grew quite a bit in the last couple of weeks and she started 'talking' (we are just not sure which language she is actually talking in...).
Grandma had knitted a hat for the 'cold' winters in San Francisco (or maybe more for our trips to Tahoe), but Anouk still needs some time to grow before this one will fit. Meanwhile grandma and mom are knitting more stuff (baby clothes are great to knit, because of their fairly small size, they go super fast).
We also met up with Shannon who had visited Europe with us in 2007. Shannon was thrilled to see that Anouk's hair looks kind of reddish and gave us a little preview of how Anouk might look once her hair grows longer.
For my mom's birthday, we went to Wine Country and enjoyed great weather, nice company and good wine.
The next change of grandparents is coming up again as the Dutch grandmother decided to come back and help us out for close to another two months. She will be surprised to see how much Anouk has changed since she left four weeks ago...
