We are learning Spanish around here. The whole family. Well, Sarah is still working on learning English, but she’ll probably pick up some too. I totally used Google Translate for that title sentence, so if it’s wrong, blame Google. :)

I studied Spanish for several years in high school, and I actually got to a point where I could read and write it pretty well. I never could speak or understand it nearly as well, and I’ve since forgotten most of what I learned. But as I study, it is coming back to me. I think it’s still in there somewhere.

I’ve been wanting to brush up for several years, but now I have a new motivation: Anna wants to learn. And why not? We can learn anything we want to, right? Learning a second language as a family sounds like a great idea to me.

So at the dinner table, we’re going through a little e-book that introduces some very basic common words and phrases. I’ve bookmarked some websites that have free video/audio lessons. We have a couple of Spanish-speaking friends who would love to help us out. So that will get us started. And for myself, since I’d like to progress at a faster rate? I’ve pulled out my old high school textbooks—which were an old edition even back then, dated 1984—and have started going through them. I know learning from books will not create fluency, but it should help build enough vocabulary to converse a little. And I’m a visual learner; hearing it is necessary, but I HAVE to see it as well to get it cemented in my brain.

Well, ¡hasta luego!

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… because that’s where the book bags were sitting after our trip to the library. That’s where the girls just plopped down and started looking at them. My, how these girls love books! And I’m so glad! We have a lot of good times reading together.

Anna is reading picture books and easy readers very well on her own. We read plenty of them to her as well, of couse. I’m about to start reading aloud some chapter books to her. Sarah still loves board books, but more and more she is reaching for “real” books to look at and be read to her. She’s pretty good about sitting through the whole thing, although sometimes it’s hard to get through it because she is so excitedly pointing out things on every page! But that’s wonderful as well.

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Sarah turned 2 today! We celebrated with a family outing to two of our favorite places—The Wonder Place and Chick-fil-A. It went well and we all had a good time. We love this little girl of ours!

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I imagine there comes a point in the life of every mother of a girl when she feels the urge to sew a dress for her daughter. And I suppose that every mother of more than one daughter wishes to put them in matching dresses at some point. While mine are still too young to balk at the idea of matching or at my sense of style (or lack thereof), I decided I’d better get on it.

Due to my self-imposed limitation of sewing only straight lines and right angles, I bought 2 matching t-shirts and made gathered skirts to attach to them, naturally turning what should have been a 2-hour project into an all-day affair. That is what I do best, after all.

They came out looking like dresses, so we’ll call this a success. Anna loves hers, and even though Sarah is in an “I’m going to freak out about trying on new clothes” phase, she got used to it, so I’ll take that as a compliment. :)

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Anna started 4-year-old preschool yesterday! She’s grown so much since last year!

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This morning I took Sarah to her first “Mother Goose on the Loose” story time at the library! It’s a fun time designed specifically for babies and toddlers with lots of motion songs, rhymes, props, etc. I started taking Anna when she was about 11 months old, and it became a weekly thing until she was 3 (by which time we had transitioned to regular story time). I planned to do the same with Sarah, but as parents of two or more know, each child is different! Sarah has been a much more independent, hands-on, “put me down and let me get into that” kind of kid, and I felt that it would be a frustrating rather than an enjoyable experience for us. Until recently, she has played quite happily in the children’s play area while Anna has gone to the regular story time. But about three weeks ago, she started wanting to go in too, and she has actually made it through! So we decided to give Mother Goose a try today. Anna went too and brought her favorite baby doll do to the motions with.

Mother Goose has a lot of repetition. There are some things that change weekly, but the pattern stays the same, and a large part of the content is the same. Children learn what to expect next. Sarah is really getting into routines lately, and she’s becoming more and more particular about doing things a certain way. I think (and hope) she’ll really get into this and enjoy it! It’s amazing what the children learn when they go consistently.

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… and finally playing outside some! Whew! Fall is here, right? Ok, maybe not. But it’s possible to imagine it is when we can step outside in the evening and the temperature and humidity are not both still 98 half an hour before bedtime.

Here are the girls playing outside tonight on the tire swing and sandbox:

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We took our two kiddos plus one cousin to the zoo yesterday, while we’re having a respite from the 100+ degree heat for a few days. I think we haven’t been since right before Sarah was born. Anna thinks we went once with Sarah in the stroller, and her memory is amazing and she’s usually right about these things; I just have no memory or photographic evidence of it. So we’re not sure.

In any case, it was the first zoo trip that Sarah was aware of and able to enjoy. And she did, mostly (aside from a melt-down when we left the playground area before she was ready). She loves making animal noises, and most things said either “woof woof” or “neigh!”. It was really sweet to see her recognize that something was an animal, even if she didn’t know what it was, and assign it some random sound. We did get her to roar like a lion, though. That’s her newest thing, and it just cracks her up.

I’m afraid I only took pictures one place. Sarah liked the penguins, and the penguins liked Sarah:

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I’m on a children’s literature kick. After reading the book Honey for a Child’s Heart, which I highly recommend to anyone with children, I am newly inspired to fill our home and our lives with good children’s books. I tend to go overboard with my inspirations, and I have an overwhelming desire to read every good book out there right now, forgetting that we have a lifetime ahead of us to enjoy them, and also forgetting that I need to cook dinner and do the laundry.

Lately I’ve been wanting to introduce more poetry to the girls, so I checked out Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses with illustrations by Tasha Tudor. (I intend to buy one, but I first wanted to peruse the library’s collection to see which version I liked best).

For a baby gift, Anna was given the CD A Child’s Garden of Songs, which is a selection of Stevenson’s poems put to music. I had planned to read Anna some of the poems from the book this morning. Well, as soon as I explained to her what the book was, she went and got her CD, read the titles off the back, searched for the same poems in the table of contents, found them by flipping through the book to the correct page number, and proceeded to read them aloud to her favorite baby doll, Charity, whom she had retrieved from her room just for this purpose. All by herself. She’s four, for crying out loud! I just stood there watching. Literature, rhyme and meter, art, reading, research skills, counting and number recognition, nurturing role-play—all happening at once. If that’s not education, I don’t know what is.

And I wondered what we’d do all summer while she was out of school.

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